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NOT LONG LATER, they arrived at the cliffside above the quarry waterhole. She speculated that the others had been there before, as they all seemed to know where they were heading. There was a small clearing beside the lip, where the shrubs had began to thin out and leave space for them to be able to jump. Romy had sat herself down on the earthy ground and unlaced her shoe, pulling it off and popping her socks inside safely. The grass on the soles of her feet was scratchy and she felt the urge to itch them as she tried to avoid stones studding her feet when she walked.
When she skipped up to join the others, something inside her stomach made her feel guilty for nicking her friend's lighter, and abandoning her for the day. In retrospect, Cindy had been one of the nicest people when it came to Romy — though the quipping and mega-bitchiness only put stock into the brunette's distaste for the other girl, Romilda Yves had been a loner for a hell of a long time before Cindy Horowitz entered the picture. Initially, it had been a little while after the car accident when she'd first been asked to sit at their lunch table. Have you ever considered going blonde? Cindy had asked her, and she'd shaken her head. For the whole of that summer, she'd felt like Sandy from Grease.
The blonde Horowitz had no filter, and could cross the line every so often, such as then, but she wasn't totally and utterly horrible as an entirety, even if she kinda did make the brunette want to drown in her morning oatmeal; Romy speculated that a reputation to uphold influenced her to be the way she was, because when she was alone, she could be borderline empathetic, sympathetic, and even kind, sometimes. Besides, the Yves brunette didn't know many people who had it easy at home. That wasn't to say that everyone had it hard, but Cindy, for one, knew to tread carefully around those topics.
Between the fact that her father had been rummaging through her underwear draw and happened to stumble upon a packet of half-empty cigarettes, and that most of the adults in Derry were very one-dimensional and acted in strange ways. Or, well, that's what Romy saw from the outside. Lacking both parents seemed to give her a clearer mind, not harbouring the seemingly loving cushioning that so often came with parenthood.
She removed her heart-shaped sunglasses and folded the arms, slipping them in her back pocket and making a note not to sit down, otherwise they'd break. Monica had won them in the arcade one time, after using her last couple of pennies to try and reach the jackpot. Less than caring, she'd been too dejected to keep them for her own, and had passed them off to Romy, who, Cindy said, suited them well.
"I don't know guys," Eddie paced around in anxious loops after barely peeping over the edge of the lip, his arms folded tightly across his chest, inhaler clutched in his fist, "The water looks really murky down there. Imagine what you could contract if you swallowed a mouthful of that," the upward inflection in his voice made it seem like a question.
"You could contract anything from anywhere, Eddie," Romy said, imagining that all these thoughts had been planted into him by his overprotective mother, she strolled across the plain, "Even ..." she feigned a gasp little, as if she had found dirt on Stan's collar. She squinted, and her eyebrows pinched together, "Here!"
