cliché || reddie ✔️

twenty seven

It's been days of radio silence from the group.

Almost a week of Stanley sitting with Ben and the football team at lunch, almost a week of Bill and Eddie not showing up to lunch at all sometimes, almost a week of Beverly pestering Richie with questions that she thinks he won't be able to answer.

She's partly right on that, he won't be able to answer some of her questions. Like the question to where Eddie and Bill are some lunches, or how Eddie seems to disappear right after the last bell of the day.

One day Beverly caught Bill after school and interrogated him as Richie watched from afar. He looked quite scared when Beverly stood on her toes to get into his face, not in a fighting way, but in a overly-concerned-friend way. When she walked back to Richie, she only had apologizes from the other boy.

Richie knows this whole situation isn't his fault, he knows that. Yet somewhere deep inside still seeps guilt into his every waking thought. It hits deep in his guts when he sees golden curls peaking over most heads in the crowd, or (especially) when he walks into World History to see Eddie sitting at his desk every day.

As Richie sits in his own desk with Mr. Martinez asking questions and picking students to answer, he replays the scene in his head over and over. Stanley's crumbling face, his shaking hands. What Richie could've said and what he didn't. It festers in his mind and only grows as the minutes tick on.

What he could've said, what he didn't.

What he could've said, what he didn't.

Why didn't he say that instead?

Richie's knee bounces quickly from under his desk, so quickly it starts to agitate his desk partner, who shoots him a warning glare. Richie catches onto her stare and offers her an apologetic smile. She doesn't take it.

Richie's eyes haven't made their daily path across the room to Eddie, who's hands are on his desk messing with a pencil. No, instead they're focused on the classroom floors, distant and not all there because his mind is off in a self-destructing path.

The scene restarts. The dialogue begins again. Then, before Richie could process it himself, his skin pricks and he begins to feel extremely claustrophobic. The urge to leave the classroom burns at the soles of his feet, an invisible gravitational rope pulling to him to get under the vast blue skies. He can't be in there anymore, not with Eddie's presence feeling like a fire a few feet away, or Stanley's expressions plastered behind his eyes.

He forces himself to breath in deeply, then it all begins to melt away.

He's becoming overwhelmed with everything and if one more thing is added to his plate, he thinks it might shatter. His mind moves to Beverly. He thinks of her smile and her personality that seemed to rope him in the moment he met her. The wish to just let everything spill out to her burns deep within him, but it's not fair to Stanley. He doesn't deserve to have his secret let out like that. No one does.

So, when World History finishes and Richie watches as Eddie ducks out of the classroom, and when he meets up with Beverly after all his classes, he keeps his lips sealed. Just because his secret was passed around middle school in little whispers and pointed fingers, it doesn't mean Stanley's should either.

They stay sealed even when Beverly is in the passenger seat of his car, a leg pulled up and leaning against the door as she rants about the situation at hand.

"Was it something we did?" She asks, her eyes focused on the road ahead. She seemed to have answered her own question as she quickly shakes her head and falls deeper into her seat. "No. They would've told us."