XII

140 3 0
                                    

SEPTEMBER 1989

The clown was gone but his memory was still alive and it was all any of us could think about

Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.

The clown was gone but his memory was still alive and it was all any of us could think about. The Losers' Club had spent the rest of the summer together but things felt different and it felt as though the connection that we had had at the beginning of summer was slowly fading away, even though I didn't want it to. A lot had changed and everyone was dealing with different things, the only thing that happened when I got home was that my mom told me off for not putting the groceries away. She didn't even notice my ripped clothes and blood-stained hair, all she cared about was her groceries and I didn't even complain because her unfazed reaction just meant that I didn't have to make up some crazed story that she wouldn't believe. I just told her that my friend had an emergency and that was why I didn't put the groceries away.

Things were going to keep changing because the Losers' Club was slowly getting smaller and before long, none of us will be around anymore. Beverly was going to be the first member to leave because she was moving in with her aunt, she had finally told someone about her father and was getting away from him which was the best decision to make. I had offered her a room in my house but her argument was that she had to leave Derry otherwise he would find her and try to take her back home. Bill's family were discussing plans to move too because they wanted a fresh start after losing Georgie, they thought that they could manage living in Derry but now decided that it was too much for them. I knew that I would still see Richie, Eddie, Stanley and Ben around school but it wouldn't be the same without the other losers and not to mention that we wouldn't see Mike as much due to him being home-schooled.

So, we were having one last official Losers' Club meeting at the Quarry which would be the last one in a while and I felt slightly emotional when sitting on the logs beside my friends. It had only been a few months but these people meant more to me than anything else in the world and I hated that we were being separated but I knew that everything happened for a reason and maybe one day fate would bring us back together. I sat on the log beside Eddie, he was a lot happier now that he had stood up to his mother and didn't even care that she didn't like me because it didn't stop him from hanging out with me. Then on my other side was Mike, someone that I didn't even know existed until this summer and was now one of my best friends. We were all listening to Bev as she finally had gotten the confidence to tell us about what she saw when Pennywise took her.

"I can only remember parts, I thought I was dead. That's what it felt like. I saw us, all of us together back in the cistern, but we were older, like, our parents' ages."

That was scary enough as it is, thinking about what we were going to be like in the future. But it made me feel less worried when her vision showed us all together because it meant that we were still friends and even if everything else went wrong in our lives; at least we would still have our friends around and that was the main thing. I wondered what I was going to be like when I was my parents' ages, what kind of job I would have, and what kind of house would I live in. Then I thought about whether I would be married or not and if I would have any children. I knew that I wanted children but I didn't know when, maybe once my career had taken off? But there was no rushing into those things, then I wondered about the rest of my friends and who would be the first to get married. I couldn't picture everyone older, more mature and moving on with their lives; to me they would always be the Losers' Club from Derry and that was it.

Under PressureWhere stories live. Discover now