go west ( reddie )

chapter twelve

Sometimes, Eddie thinks that he might never be able to escape Derry. There's a string around his wrist, tied so tightly it can't be undone, and the other end is in the sewers, a pretty bow on the crooked finger of a clown. He thinks this and then he thinks, no, it's his mother who is keeping him there, and then he thinks, no, it's himself. He needs to go back and tie knots. He needs to go back and untangle himself from whatever that place did to him, so he can continue on without it. Parallel lines. And anyway, Bill has asked him to come back, so he is.

He leaves on a bright dry morning. He will fly from San Francisco to Philadelphia to Bangor and then it's just a short drive on to Derry. The airport is steel blue and loud and Richie is at his side, jittery and wired. He'd insisted on carrying Eddie's suitcase, a shiny new thing on wheels, and he takes great delight in jumping it over curbs and skidding it around corners. Eddie has a headache already. He doesn't want to do this. He resists the urge to touch Richie's wrist, to check for a string there too.

While he lines up for check-in, Richie waits at the automatic doors, by the luggage trolleys. Eddie watches him as he scuffs his shoes across the grey and green carpet, kicks at the suitcase, balances on his toes. He has a pair of sunglasses resting on his head, in his hair, yellow-lensed and ugly and always a breath away from falling. Eddie curls his fingers into his palms and turns back to the queue. It won't be for long. They won't be apart for long. He smiles at the airport staff and gives them all the right answers to their questions and shakes his head when he's asked if he has any baggage to check and when he's given his boarding pass, he resists the almost overwhelming urge to stuff it in his mouth and run, screaming, for the doors.

Richie is fucking around on one of the trolleys when Eddie crosses the terminal back to him. He takes a run up and then hops onto the back, gliding across the carpet with his arms spread. When he notices Eddie watching, he skids to a stop and turns around and glides back, eyes closed, expression blissful. Eddie wants to trip him up. Eddie wants to tackle him to the ground and kiss him until he's gasping.

"Hey," says Richie, far enough away that he has to raise his voice. "Hey, so instead of doing this, you wanna just drive back? I'll come with you, the whole trip again, like before but backwards."

Eddie stops the trolley with the toe of his shoe as it threatens to drift past him. "Fuck no," he says.

"We can go up this time," says Richie. "To whatever the fuck's up there. Wyoming? Fucking Idaho, like the song, like the movie -"

"Not in a million years, sunshine," interrupts Eddie, brushing his knuckles across the back of Richie's hand. "Sorry."

They stay together for as long as they can, in the food court of the domestic terminal. Eddie gets burnt coffee and a stale cherry danish and he tickles the inside of Richie's elbow under the table and watches people drift around them. There are tiny kids with their own suitcases, pink and yellow and blue, and they drag them around the airport with far more gravity than their own parents, who have done this all before. Eddie had been five years old the last time he was in an airport or on a plane. He doesn't remember it, but he must have been. He and his mum moved to Derry then, both of them grief-stricken and dazed, and Eddie would have been clinging to her hand, the way he always did back then, like he was stuck there. He doesn't know if he had a suitcase of his own, but his mum would have been using the one that's back at Bev's apartment now. Robin's egg blue with yellow daisies.

Richie rips open a packet of sugar, pulling Eddie out of his head, and he pours the sugar out on their table, adds another packet, and cuts it all into lines with an old library card.

"Dare you to snort it," he says, tapping the edge of the card against the table.

"If you snort enough shit you can burn a hole through your septum," says Eddie. He licks his finger, presses it against the grains of sugar, and then licks the sugar from his skin. Richie tracks the movement with his eyes and then he knocks his sunglasses down over his glasses and huffs out a laugh, blowing the sugar across the table.