facade. | BILL DENBROUGH

CHAPTER TWO

AFTER enduring several, mind-numbing hours of Greta's nasally voice and her loud bubble gum smacking, Winnie was more than happy to finally leave the ice cream shop and head back home.

Though not without a promise to Greta that the two would have a sleepover soon. The brown-haired girl sighed to herself, already knowing that her entire summer was going to be spent dodging both the Bowers gang and Greta's posse. Maybe she should just stay inside the whole time and pray they forgot about her eventually.

As Winnie rode through the streets of Derry on her bike, affectionately nicknamed Goldie, she couldn't help but think back to what had happened after school today with the Losers' Club. This was going to be the first summer that she didn't spend with them, and the thought alone left an empty feeling in her chest. No more bantering with Richie, trying to outwit each other. No more stealing Eddie's inhaler and jokingly taking a puff. No more pestering Stan while he tried to bird watch. And no more making paper boats with Bill, laughing until the two were breathless.

Winnie quickly pushed those thoughts away though. You're doing this for their own good, for their own safety, for them. Don't forget that.

Besides, she had nobody to blame but herself for what had happened. She made her decision, and she couldn't take it back now. Not after everything she'd seen that fateful night. She couldn't. She wouldn't.

A deafening crash brought her out of her thoughts and she quickly stopped Goldie, her bike skidding to a halt and nearly causing her to hit the pavement. With quick breathing, Winnie whipped her head around, frantically searching for the source of the loud noise. She was still on the west side of town, barely halfway to her house on east Broadway where most of the well-off residents of Derry resided. Thus, the majority of the homes on this street were still small with unkempt yards and chipped paint. Any one of them could be the cause of the sounds.

She heard another bang, this time much louder and her gaze finally landed on the source of the commotion: the decaying house across the street. Her eyes widened as she realized where she was, a green street sign embedded with the words 'Neibolt Street', staring back at her. The abandoned house on Neibolt had always given her the creeps, not just because drug addicts and homeless people liked to squat there, but because it had always had some sort of mysterious lure to it.

Winnie remembered when she was seven, riding home with Bill after spending the day with him at the quarry. She hadn't been paying attention to the road, too engrossed in her conversation with the brown-haired boy, when she nearly crashed into the mangled, wire fence that surrounded the old property. It was the first and last time she'd ever been on the lawn of that house, the weeds crawling up the broken sidewalk and tickling her ankles from where she'd fallen. But instead of grabbing Goldie and following Bill home, something had drawn her deeper into the yard, like an invisible magnet that only seemed to affect her.