Rain was pouring down, flooding the streets surrounding the school and making little rivers on either side of the road. I rubbed at my glasses, cleaning them before pulling my hood over my head and stepping out into the rain to get my bike. The other kids from band were either running to their nearby houses or hurrying to their parents' parked cars nearby. I tightened my grip on the trumpet case and biked past the car line, knowing how far the house was and Mrs. Li had told the band that it was only going to rain more before nightfall.

It was Mom's fault that I was in band in the first place. She had thought that it would be good for me to have my own hobbie outside of hanging out with Richie. But Richie hadn't been forced to join the school band; he had been left alone to hang out with the others while I had to stay behind after school to badly play a trumpet. I rebelled by being really bad at the trumpet.

If I really thought hard about what Richie could be doing now, I could tell that whatever it was, he was annoyed. Some raindrops fell from the edge of my hood and onto my thick glasses, and I rubbed furiously at the glasses for a moment, trying to rid the fat droplets from the glass.

The thick glasses were too big for my head and ended up slipping off my face, clattering to the pavement below. "Aw, shit." I grumbled, breaking hard and sending waves of puddle water across the road.

The world had been blurry with my glasses thanks to the rain, but now everything was a blur of gray from the road and puddles and dark green from the trees on either side of the road. The water in the street made finding my glasses even harder, and I squinted against the raindrops trying to drip into my eyes and bent down to get closer to the puddle, trying to find where the damn glasses fell.

Leave it to me to lose my glasses riding home. As long as they hadn't fallen down the drain, I should be fine.

I finally found the blurred outline of glasses and grabbed them, sliding the sopping wet glasses onto my already cold and wet face. The moment the world came back into focus, I saw feet standing just outside of my reach. I stared at the feet, if I could even call them that.

They were bare and slimy with hard greenish gray scales morphing into doughy white flesh. I slowly looked up to see the webbed and clawed hands, the scales taking over the torso and arms and the face...

I screamed shrilly and leapt backwards, tripping over my own feet in the puddle and nearly losing my glasses again. "Fuck, shit, fuck, shit!" I screamed, scrambling to my bike as the fish man started to stumble after me. The bike nearly tipped over due to imbalance several times, but I managed to pedal away from the fish man. The fish man's fleshy feet slapped against the wet pavement and I heard it gurgling loudly, furiously. I pedaled faster as my heart pounded painfully against my chest.

When I got to the end of the street, I risked a glance over my shoulder to see the fish man, if he was still close behind me. But he wasn't there anymore.

Instead, there was a completely dry clown with bright orange hair, grinning hungrily at me. The clown raised its hand at me and waved, wiggling it's fingers one by one.

"Nope." I said, pedaling away faster. The rain beat down against my face like needles and my glasses got so wet and foggy that I could barely see, but I let them be. There was no way I was going to risk losing these fucking things again. By the time I made it back home, I was soaked to the bone, my legs were shaking, and I felt as blind as a bat in the daylight.

The living room was quiet when I got inside, shaking and covered with water and mud. I was slowly removing my trumpet, backpack, and raincoat from my back when-

"Boo!"

I screamed, my heart pounding so hard it actually hurt. Richie's laughter came from around the corner and I looked over to see him doubled over and pretending to wipe a tear from his eye.

"Oh shit, you screamed like a girl." Richie finally said after laughing for a longer time than necessary.

"I am a girl, you dickhead." I snapped, throwing the wet and muddy raincoat at his face. He wasn't able to dodge in time and got slapped in the face with the raincoat. I shakily took my glasses off and dried them against the dry shirt that had been protected by the raincoat. "Don't be fucking rude." I grumbled as more of an afterthought.

"Whatever." Richie said, hanging the dripping raincoat on the coat rack. "I could tell you were already scared. You have to do a solo or something? I've heard you play; it sounds like a goose getting fucking strangled."

I kicked my shoes off and set them beside the rest of the shoes that live beside the front door. I thought about the way the scales and flesh had met and the long face coated with green scales and bulging gray eyes set on the sides of its head…

The memory of the clown wiggly its fingers at me caused violent shudders to go down my spine and looked back to Richie. "I thought I saw something. On the way home. It was probably nothing."

Richie blinked, his eyes magnified thanks to his own pair of thick glasses. He knew I was lying. If he had known I was scared before, surely he had felt just how scared. I pushed past him and went into the kitchen, wanting to forget the fish man and clown.

Ever since we were little, Richie and I could tell what the other was feeling, if we tried hard enough. It was how I could tell he was annoyed and how he knew I had been scared. Once a couple of years ago, Richie had been beaten up by a group of older boys, and I had felt the ache of where Richie had been punched for days after it happened.

But Richie must've decided that it wasn't worth it to push the issue. He punched my arm roughly. "Hey, Bill wants to go to the Barrens tomorrow after school. He thinks he knows where Georgie ended up."

I stopped in the kitchen and blinked at Richie. "Okay, I don't have band. Is it a good idea to keep looking for Georgie? I mean, it's been like eight months."

"I know." Richie said, shifting his feet. "But try telling that to Bill. Stan thinks Bill will figure it out by eighth grade."

"What does Bill want to do in the Barrens?" I asked.

"Gee, I don't fucking know, Beck." Richie snarked, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. "Bill's been looking for Georgie every weekend since...it happened. We're going to the Barrens to either see a dirty as fuck and smelly Georgie who's been living in the sewers this whole time, or a-"

Richie cut himself off, looking uncomfortable. Even with no one else here, he still doesn't want to picture Georgie being dead. I nodded, understanding. To distract him, I opened the fridge and grabbed a loose Coca Cola can and threw it at Richie. He let out a high pitched yelp but managed to catch it right in front of his face.

"Where's Mom?" I asked. Dad would still be at work, but Mom worked part time at Freese's and today wasn't her day to go in.

"She went to meet some of her PTA friends." Richie said, cracking the cola open and taking a long chug of it. "Probably going to get drunk as fuck and come home talking about headaches."

I reached up and pinched the bridge of my nose. In a lofty and tired voice, I drawled, "I can't cook dinner tonight. My head feels like it's splitting open."

Richie slumped against the kitchen counter, pretending to feel faint. "Everyone, please stop talking so loudly!" Richie continued in the same lofty and tired voice. I chuckled at his impression; it was better than mine. This just encouraged him and Richie got even more dramatic, nearly tripping over himself and exclaiming about how his head hurt and how he needed more wine to make the headache go away.

This was how Richie and I best operated. Nothing couldn't be made fun of or laughed away, not a fish man or clown that may or may not have even been there, or Mom getting drunk with her friends and coming home to push everyone away.

Richie fell off the counter, knocking his half empty cola can and spilling the brown soda all over the kitchen floor. "Great job, dickhead." I said, reaching out to help Richie back to his feet. Richie let me help him up and helped me mop up the soda.

The rain that had been horrible yesterday was gone by the next morning. I left my trumpet home, it was the last day of school and no more band practice until school started back up again in September.

The teachers tried their damnedest to try and teach us something before summer, but it was a losing fight. I shared two classes with Eddie Kaspbrak, and we spent the entire time sitting in the back of the classroom flicking rubber bands at each other. At some point, Eddie accidentally sent one right into my face, the rubber band barely being blocked by my glasses.

"Oh shit!" Eddie exclaimed, his face going bright red. "You're okay, right? Your glasses stopped that, right?"

From a few seats away, Gretta Keane snickered loudly, two of her friends mimicking her. "What a loser." Gretta didn't even pretend to whisper.

I turned back to Eddie. "I'm fine, Eddie. Glasses took most of the hit."

"Slut!" Gretta pretended to cough loudly.

I spun in my desk back towards Gretta. "Learn some better insults, you wet sock. You can't call everyone losers and sluts; it gets boring. I'd say get creative, but it'd be a waste seeing as you only have one brain cell!"

Eddie chuckled into his hands while Gretta glared hard at me. The bell for the final class of the day rang shrilly and Eddie and I hurried out of the class to avoid her. Best to get away before Gretta could string together a proper insult that wasn't overused as hell.

"See you after school!" Eddie called out, heading into his final class that he shared with Richie and Bill Denbrough. I waved bye to him and went into the Pre Algebra classroom where I found Stanley Uris.

Out of the friends Richie and I had made over the years, Stanley was the one we'd known the longest. Richie and I had met him on the first day of kindergarten, and while Richie and I had tried to spend the whole day speaking in unison to scare the teacher, Stanley had sat at our table and watched us blankly before snorting quietly with laughter.

When the bell finally rang, everyone sprang up and rushing for the doors. I grabbed Stanley by the hand and pulled him through the hall, weaving around the other kids who were just too slow for us. By the time we caught up to the rest of our friends, they were discussing Stan's upcoming bar mitzvah.

"Hey guys," Stan said cheerfully and instantly the other three began raining down questions.

"Are they gonna slice a part of your dick off?" Eddie asked.

"What do they d-do anyway?" Bill asked.

"You don't have much of a dick anyway, Stan, how are they gonna cut more off?" Richie bowled himself right into Bill's shoulder.

Stan rolled his eyes but replied, "At the bar mitzvah, I read from the Torah and suddenly I become a man."

"If it's that's easy, maybe the rest of you should consider doing it." I said.

Eddie pushed me gently at this, just enough to push me ahead of the group and not actually hurt me. But it was enough to get the attention of the group of high schoolers camping out in the hallway.

Henry Bowers and his friends were the meanest group of sixteen year olds in Derry. Every student younger than them were scared shitless and made it their mission to stay the hell away from Bowers and his gang of friends. But Richie, in one of his more dumbass moments, had really pissed Bowers and friends off when they accidentally slipped in some water and Richie loudly mocked them in front of a large group of people. And because Richie was on their radar, so was the rest of our friend group.

Bowers leaned against his locker, sneering at us as we passed. Belch and Vic, seemed to take one look at Richie and instantly began plotting something painful to do later. The one that scared me the most was Patrick Hockstetter. He had looked at me the moment Eddie had pushed me, and now his eyes were gleaming and he was looking at me in a way that made my skin crawl.

Bill reached out and pulled me back into the group as we hurried past them, trying to ignore the stares that they all were giving us. Richie glared right back at them over his shoulder and turned back to us. "Think they'll sign my yearbook?"

We managed to make it outside without attracting any more attention from anymore older kids and Bill led the charge with dumping the binders and notebooks into the trash cans outside. Eddie put his backpack back on, straightening up now that the weight of his books wasn't there anymore.

"So what do you want to do tomorrow?" Eddie asked.

"Training," Richie replied. When Eddie looked confused, Richie explained. "You know, for street fighter."

"That's how you're going to spend your summer? In the arcade?"

"Beats spending it inside your mother." Richie went for a high five from Stan, but Stanley just grabbed Richie's hand and put it back down.

When I had looked over to Stan and Richie's interaction, I spotted two police cars sitting outside of the school. Two cops stood together, leaning against one of the cars and looking bored. The woman standing in front of them was someone I recognized and instantly felt pity for.

Betty Ripsom had been a girl in a couple of my classes, as well as the school band. We hadn't been friends, but we had partnered up on a few assignments and whenever Gretta had been a bitch, Betty and I had gleefully made fun of her. We had never spoken during band practice: I played trumpet and she had played clarinet, but we had always been nice to each other there too.

Now Betty's mom was waiting outside the school, just in case her daughter came out and was alive and well. Betty had been missing for three weeks now, and from what people were saying around town, no one was really expecting to find her alive.

"You think they'll actually find her?" Stan asked, and I jumped slightly, realizing that the boys had followed my gaze and saw Betty's mom too.

Richie scoffed. "Yeah. Covered in maggots and decomposed and shit."

I rounded on my twin. "Shut up, that isn't funny."

"She's not duh-dead." Bill said as firmly as he could. Richie blinked and nodded, looking genuinely sorry for a moment. Bill nodded once and started to walk in the direction of the Barrens, to see if we could all find Georgie.

"The Barrens aren't that bad," Richie said, falling into step beside me. "I always wanted to spend my summer walking around in shitty water."

There was a hard yank on my backpack and I was flung backwards along with Richie. Henry Bowers had just come up and pulled us back so hard we knocked Stan to the ground. I heard a loud burp coming from Belch and scrambled to my feet. Belch and Vic were with Bowers harassing Bill and Eddie, but where was-

"Nice frisbee, flamer." Patrick Hockstetter sneered at Stan. Stanley's yarmulke had fallen off and Hockstetter had grabbed it and thrown it before anyone could react. Hockstetter turned his creepy gaze onto me and I backed up several paces. Hockstetter laughed cruelly and walked away. I waited until he was far enough away before rushing back to Richie and Stanley and helping the two of them up.

"You suh-suh-suck, Bowers!" Bill shouted at the bullies. I nearly let go of Richie helping him back to his feet.

"You say something, b-b-b-Billy?" Bowers did a shitty imitation of Bill's stutter, and for a moment I wished I was brave enough to punch Bowers in the face. Bowers got painfully close to Bill but stopped himself from hitting him. Instead the older boy licked his palm and smeared it down Bill's face. With that, the older boys left, leaving us just brewing with hate after them.

"Wish he'd go missing." Richie said, and no one disagreed.