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THE FRIENDSHIP GROUP SAT IN A LOOSE RING, and Romy folded her legs, waving over at her aunt and her uncle as they passed, a smile less broad as it usually seemed to be. She looked just like her aunt — their hair was of the same cut, dark and chin-length and fashioned around her face with a fringe (Meg's thinned above her eyebrows with age, but Romy's was heavy and caught on her eyelashes).
Ted walked closely against her aunt, his face stern with pain and a lot of his weight pressing onto his cane. Romy expected that they would be wanting to go home sooner or later. Romy supposed they would wrap up and go home soon — she hoped that Meg would let her stick around for the afternoon.
"OK, so, let me get this straight," Richie recollected, pushing his thickly lensed glasses further up his nose as his dark eyebrows pinched together in thought, "Each time, it comes out to eat kids for like, a year. And then what? It goes into hibernation?"
"Maybe it's like," Stanley wrung his hands together thoughtfully, before propping himself up using his hands, where lashes criss-crossed into the heels of his hands, "What do you call it? Scatos? You know, the bugs that come out every seventeen years?" He went on to suggest.
Romilda ripped up blades of grass and laid them like tally lines evenly upon her pale thigh, thinking in passing thoughts to herself — nothing significant. Everything felt so heavy, that she'd pushed it to the back of her mind the relieve herself of the weight. Her legs all nicked from where she'd tried to shave them for the first time.
"My grandfather thinks that this town is cursed," Mike input, and Romy was already inclined to agree with his statement. "He says that all the bad things that happen in this town are because of one thing — an evil thing that feeds off the people of Derry."
"But it can't be one thing, we all saw something different."
"Maybe. Or maybe it knows what scares us most, and that's what we see."
"I-I-I saw a leper," Eddie wrinkled his nose, cringing evident in his body language. She felt instantly bad. Her encounters had been like child's play compared to the others. She felt like she was getting off lighter, "It was like a walking infection. A-and Romy, she saw Freddy Krueger."
She felt blood rush up her neck and across her cheekbones, making the apples of her cheeks red like the fruit. They glanced at her, a silver stud in her ear, a chip in her smile. Her ears stuck out when she tucked her hair behind them. Her nose was naturally reddening from exposure to the sun minus suncream (Eddie scolded her for that). Her mind was static like a TV screen.
"But you didn't, b-because it isn't real," Stan claimed certainly, trying to convince himself more than convince the others. He squinted in the harsh sunlight, "None of this is," he looked to Romy, and she was unsure what to say, "Right? Not Eddie's leper, or Bill seeing Georgie, or the woman I keep seeing."
