𝐈𝐓'𝐒 𝐍𝐈𝐂𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐇𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐀 𝐅𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐍𝐃 | ꜱᴛᴀɴʟᴇʏ ᴜʀɪꜱ ¹

𝐅𝐎𝐔𝐑

NOBODY WAS REALLY SURPRISED WHEN IT HAPPENED, NOT REALLY.

On the surface, all the girls in the shower room were shocked, thrilled, ashamed, or simply glad that the Bowers bitch had taken it in the mouth again. Some of them might also have claimed surprise, but of course their claim was untrue. Veronica had been going to school with some of them since the first grade, and this had been building since that time, building slowly and immutably, in accordance with all the laws that govern human nature.

The locker room was filled with shouts, echoes, and the sound of showers splashing on tile. The girls had been playing volleyball in Period One, and their morning sweat was light and eager.

Veronica stood among them stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back, her wet hair completely without color. It rested against her face with dispirited sogginess and she simply stood, head slightly bent, letting the water splat against her flesh and roll off.

She looked the part of the sacrificial goat, the constant butt, believer in left-handed monkey wrenches, perpetual foul-up, and she was. She wished forlornly and constantly that Derry Middle had individual and thus private-showers, like the high school. They stared. They always stared.

Showers turning off one by one, girls stepping out, wearing pastel bathing caps, toweling, spraying deodorant, checking the clock over the door. Bras were hooked, underpants stepped into. Steam hung in the air; the place might have been an Egyptian bathhouse except for the constant rumble of the Jacuzi whirlpool in the corner. Calls and catcalls rebounded with all the snap and flicker of billiard balls after a hard break.

"So Eric said he hated it on me and I—"

"—I'm going with my sister and her husband. He picks his nose, but so does she, so really they're very—"

"—Shower after school and—"

"Too cheap to spend a goddam penny so Greta and I—"

Miss McClintox, their slim gym teacher, stepped in, craned her neck around briefly, and slapped her hands together once, smartly. "What are you waiting for, Veronica? Doom? Bell in five minutes."

Her shorts were blinding white, her legs not too curved but striking in their unobtrusive muscularity. A silver whistle, won in college volleyball competition, hung around her neck.

The girls giggled and Veronica looked up, her eyes slow and dazed from the heat and the steady, pounding roar of the water. "Huh?"

It was a strangely foggy sound, grotesquely apt, and the girls giggled again. Greta Keene had whipped a towel from her hair with the speed of a magician embarking on a wondrous feat and began to comb rapidly. McClintox made an irritated cranking gesture at Veronica and stepped out.

Veronica turned off the shower. It died in a drip and a gurgle. It wasn't until she stepped out that they all saw the blood running down her leg.

"Per-iod!" The catcall came first from Robbie Niedel. It struck the walls, rebounded, and struck again, Greta Keene gasped laughter from her nose and felt an odd, vexing mixture of hate, revulsion, exasperation, and pity.

Veronica just looked so dumb, standing there, not knowing what was going on. God, you'd think she'd never—

"PER-iod!"

It was becoming a chant, an incantation, Someone in the background (perhaps Robbie again, Veronica couldn't tell in the jungle of echoes) was yelling, "Plug it up!" with hoarse, uninhibited abandon.

"PER-iod, PER-iod, PER-iod!"

Veronica stood dumbly in the center of a forming circle, water rolling from her skin in beads. She stood like a patient ox, aware that the joke was on her (as always), dumbly embarrassed, but unsurprised.

Greta felt welling disgust as the first dark drops of menstrual blood struck the tile in dime-sized drops.

"For God's sake, Ronnie, you got your period!" she cried. "Clean yourself up!"

"Ohuh?"

She looked around bovinely. Her hair stuck to her cheeks in a curving helmet shape. There was a cluster of acne on one shoulder. At twelve, the elusive stamp of hurt was already marked clearly in her eyes.

"She thinks they're for lipstick!" Elizabeth Rompter suddenly shouted with cryptic glee, and then burst into a shriek of laughter. Greta remembered the comment later and fitted it into a general picture, but now it was only another senseless sound in the confusion.

Twelve? She was thinking. She must know what's happening, she—

More droplets of blood. Veronica still blinked around at her classmates in slow bewilderment.

Lilly Misner turned around and made mock throwing up.

"'You're bleeding!" Greta yelled suddenly, furiously. "You're bleeding, you big dumbass!"

Veronica looked down at herself.

She shrieked.

The sound was very loud in the humid locker room. A tampon suddenly struck her in the chest and fell with a plop at her feet. A red flower stained the absorbent cotton and spread.

Then the laughter, disgusted, contemptuous, horrified, seemed to rise and bloom into something jagged and ugly, and the girls were bombarding her with tampons and sanitary napkins, some from purses, some from the broken dispenser on the wall.

They flew like snow and the chant became: "Plug it up, plug it up, plug it up, plug it—"

Beverly Marsh was throwing them too, throwing and chanting with the rest, not really sure what she was doing--a charm had occurred to her mind and it glowed there like neon: There's no harm in it really no harm in it really no harm- It was still flashing and glowing, reassuringly, when Veronica suddenly began to howl and back away, flailing her arms and grunting and gobbling.

The girls stopped, realizing that the explosion had finally been reached.

The girls watched her, their eyes shining solemnly. Veronica backed into the side of one of the four large shower compartments and slowly collapsed into a sitting position. Slow, helpless groans jerked out of her. Her eyes rolled with wet
whiteness, like the eyes of a hog in the slaughtering pen.

Greta said slowly, hesitantly: "I think this must be the first time she ever—"

That was when the door pumped open with a flat and hurried bang and Miss McClintox burst in to see what the matter was. Only, when Veronica looked up, it wasn't the gym teacher she knew. It was something different.

"Oh, Veronica," the figure said, the lights flashing bright red. "Come with me."

Veronica continued sobbing into her chest. She was so utterly horrified that she had forgotten that she was reliving some of her worst memories.

"Go away!" she shouted, flinging her hand in the figures direction. "Leave me alone!"

"Come, Veronica."

She looked up, and finally got to see the creature for what it really was.

"Come and float with me, Veronica," It said. "We all float."

Veronicas shouts filled the area, bouncing off of walls and ricocheting against the floors. She prayed that someone would save her from the nightmare she had to relive, but she knew she wouldn't be so lucky.

"HELP!" She screamed.

Someone came rushing through the door. Veronica uncovered her crying eyes to see the gas station owner standing over top of her body in the bathroom. Veronica had only been needing to relieve herself when the day-nightmare overcame her.

But it felt so real. It had to have been real.