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MEG SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, surrounded by ribbons of newspaper clippings that showcased bunches of different job opportunities that she'd scrounged from each and every newspaper in Derry. She hadn't been picky about where she'd work, but all these opportunities laid out around her, she felt particularly selective, as she wracked up the rotary phone bill (however, Meg had just recently sold their UHF/VHF TV sets, so that had it pretty much covered).
"Where are you going?" She barked after her niece, who swept out of the door without so much as a word.
"Out," she said curtly, before picking up her bicycle and wheeling it off of the lawn that was overgrown and hadn't been weeded in the longest time. Meg hadn't raced after her like she expected her aunt to, instead, had sat back down in her seat and decided to concentrate on more important things such as calling possible new employers.
She didn't have a watch, but she knew that she was on time. She reached the main street within a ten minutes or so, counting her peddles as she weny. Four-hundered and seventy was what she had reached when she squeezed her brakes a small distance from the movie theatre, drawing to a halt.
Gretta Keene giggled into her palm against a blue Mustang with another girl in a Debby Gibson bowler hat who Romy couldn't identify as anyone she knew. They were both glancing upwards suspiciously, as Belch Huggins ate sausage and pepperoni topped pizza as he lounged in the backseat of the automobile.
She followed the direction of their eyes training upwards towards the NOW SHOWING in block letters on a white panelled board, fitting the aesthetic of circa 1970. At first she was nonplussed, but it didn't take her too long to deduct why they were giggling. Written in drippy reddish paint beneath, was STARRING: beverly THE SLUT marsh !!!
The Yves girl gawked up at the typography, her jaw jutted out and sideways, a deed undoubtedly done by Gretta or Belch or some other bully that was constantly on the tail of the Losers Club. There was an elderly janitor on a stepladder scrubbing away the lettering on the right part of the sign, in a navy jumpsuit with a rag in hand. There was a second vacant stepladder near the left part of the sign, where a bucket full of water sat on the upmost rung.
She climbed up, taking no notice of the fact that the person previously assisting the janitor had taken a cigarette break. The brunette reached the top shortly and pulled the rag out of the bucket and wrung it, staining the cloth red as she scrubbed the three exclamation points away.
By the time they'd finished scrubbing the board clean, she was definitely late. Once she thought about how she could seem like she was standing Richie and Stan up, she rushed down the ladder and picked up her bike as the janitor called a thank-you to her.
She'd never cycled faster than she did then, not afraid that she'd hit a rock and tumble over the front of the handlebars. She looked like a mess, though. There were healing scabs lingering as pulses on her chin, her elbows, and her left knee. They stretched searingly and were very inconvenient.
