Noli me Tangere - ThePlotMurderer (2024)

Noli me Tangere playlist here.

Jesus saith to her, “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended.”

John 20:17 (KJV)

Jason Carver doesn’t like being touched. It’s not something you would know to look for unless you had a hint…or if you had a tendency to end up places you weren’t supposed to be.

Eddie, of course, had been born into a succession of places-he-wasn’t-supposed-be, and so was privy to a lot more nefarious bullsh*t than he was at all comfortable with, but what was he was supposed to do? It was all very well to say ‘don’t look’, but he hadn’t been blessed with his big brown peepers not to put them to any use. If the universe had been authored by Lovecraft, Eddie supposed he’d be smart to avert his eyes from the unfurling fronds of the Eldritch horror or else abdicate what remained of his humanity.

But the world wasn’t written by Lovecraft. Most of the time, it was a cross between a sh*tty Mills & Boone paperback and one of those brain-dead reading comprehension passages they gave you in school, about the migration patterns of ospreys or how pioneers used to stick their fingers in the rectums of turnips to ward off the giantess Lilith.

That is to say, a healthy mix of dull and trashy.

It just so happened Eddie found himself, more often than not, among the trash. He could, and some no doubt would, be surprised to find the likes of Jason Carver there too, but he was nothing if not an open-minded young searcher. There were rooms for all kinds in his philosophy.

Jason came out to Eddie’s spot, in the woods beyond the high school…what had used to be part and parcel of the schoolyard, before some mundane domestic tragedy (monkey bar accident, bear, roving pervert, take your pick) 30 or 40 years back had seen the place abandoned. And, like most things in these parts, there was no hurry to reclaim the land.

It wasn’t strictly Eddie’s spot. If it were just his secret, that would be pretty damn bad for business, wouldn’t it? Besides prospective potheads and wide-eyed window shoppers, Eddie had discovered enough ripped condoms beneath the old playground structures to conclude this place was shag city…at least, a neighborhood of it, well on the wrong side of the tracks. Lover’s Lake was the respectable makeout spot. That’s where you took your girlfriend for some tasteful “be back by 8:00” nookie-noo. The playground was strictly for one-nighters, flings, and honoring bets.

And Jason Carver, that burnished blonde paragon of farmboy virtue, had “be back by 8:00” written all over that ‘aw, shucks’ smile of his.

So the judicious reader, bearing these details in mind, cannot possibly begrudge our embattled hero his curiosity when confronted with this innate incongruity in the fabric of all he has ever known, of this plain fact of nature that, indeed, none of us are truly without sin and everyone is a giant flaming hypocrite, and isn’t that, really, what America is all about? Aren’t we, in fact, the only nation under the sun self-aware enough to concede we’re all a bunch of fakers at heart? God bless us, truly, everyone.

For five beautiful seconds on that languorous summer afternoon, Eddie entertained the very real supposition that Jason was coming to see him! Imagine. Not too good for him now, was he? Not too freakish for him now. No, no…because Jason Carver is as human as he is, as human as he’s always contended Eddie isn’t. And, in his humanity, he gets tired, he gets weary, he gets holes in the concentration, knots in places he can’t massage, he has problems no amount of clean, honest living can fix.

He gets high.

And, reader, dear, you will surely begrudge our quester’s flights of fancy in these few moments, as he painted wild scenarios in his mind. Would he overcharge Jason? Would he haggle? Haggling was always fun, and a great way to reaffirm that plenty of people were dogsh*t stupid and they didn’t have to repeat senior year, so where did that leave him? Maybe he would pull up a hank of grass and see if Carver swooned when he smelled it?

Maybe he would have Carver get down on his knees and beg for it, like a supplicant before an altar. Maybe he would have Carver explain, in no less than 1,000 words, the psychological benefit he received, if any, from leading his band of mouth-breathing trogs in a war of extermination against one Edward Levi Munson on the dodge ball court?

Maybe he wouldn’t mention anything. Maybe he would just let the moment speak for itself.

Or maybe Jason Carver wasn’t here to see him after all.

Jason gave no indication he heard or saw Eddie at his perch on the overgrown picnic table. He walked along the narrow, weedy trail that led downslope from the school, his head down and his hands in the pockets of his letterman jacket, looking for all the world like an extremely under-practiced criminal.

Eddie watched this shuffling approach with a muted, but active curiosity, leaning forward so that the rough edge of the picnic table dug into his stomach. It was a snug, tight feeling, but he didn’t mind it, for the sake of the show.

A suspicious person might wonder if this was the prelude to a cruel prank. If Carver was coming up here as a blind, if maybe some of his meathead companions were lurking in the bushes, ready to jump out and take Eddie unawares while he was so taken up with their flaxen-haired Trojan horse.

But Eddie had evolved a certain reptilian sense for danger. It was this very intuition that had first clued him into Jason’s approach.

The king-presumptive of Hawkins High was alone…and he wasn’t looking at him. He didn’t even seem to know Eddie was there.

He could’ve looked away here, he knew. Conceded it was none of his business and went about his day. That would have been the graceful thing to do.

When had Jason Carver ever extended him a sliver of grace?

All of this happened in much less time than it takes to write it down. Thinking, after all, is a free action, or else every campaign would end before it had even got started. By the time Eddie had made up his mind not to give himself away or subtly exit stage left, Jason had already stopped. The place he’d chosen was a little downslope from Eddie’s table, down a short incline in the unevenly broken turf. Eddie watched as Carver, hands still in his pockets, looked back the way he’d come, then left, then right, then…

Eddie dropped beneath the table, scrambling so quickly that he hit his head on the edge. The impact throbbed through him, rattling his skull around like a hollow drum.

And maybe he was pretty hollow up there, now that he was actively choosing to make himself privy to whatever this was. What did it matter, really? Carver wasn’t here for him, and Eddie wanted nothing to do with Jason Carver at the best of times. Even if there were some nefarious goings-on afoot, Eddie hadn’t the patience (if, indeed, the imagination in abundance) to devise some way to profit off it.

But Jason had stopped, and Eddie didn’t move, balancing himself on one knee, the underside of the table kissing his tangled hair, which had gotten all in his face in his hurry to drop out of sight. From his new vantage, he could see Jason bracing himself against his palms, sort of propping himself against a stunted tree…one of the skinny, petrified saplings on which the aforementioned two-pump chumps and their nubile adventuresses liked to carve testimonials to their illicit ritual-making.

It was a f*ck tree, to be clear.

So there Jason was, propping himself up against the f*ck tree, pressing his hands over about a generation’s worth of dirty graffiti, with no rhyme or reason that Eddie could see. He planted his feet, splayed out with an athlete’s precision. For all the world, he may have been preparing for a marathon.

And for a time, that’s exactly what Eddie thought was going on. He didn’t move, you see, he didn’t push himself off the tree, he didn’t lower himself down or turn around, he just…stood there, the only movement the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed. He kept his head low, and his body poised in that exact awkward position. Eddie, who had spent most of 10th grade geometry drawing fantastical creatures and fearsome physical acts in the margins of his notebook realized that, ah yes, professor, that’s what an acute angle is. Kudos, Mrs. Petrie, you garrulous old salt. An acute angle is when a body contracts itself into a state of unresolvable tension for no clear benefit. Eddie decided an obtuse angle must then be kind of slu*tty, as a rule.

Yes…he was totally going to graduate this year. Well, next, considering timing.

By and by, a strange thing began to happen. Jason’s breathing, initially knowable only through common sense and rote physical cues, began to become audible to Eddie. Maybe it was the otherwise complete silence of his spot. School was out and, by this time of the afternoon, practices Basket, Base, and Swim were likewise concluded…which was probably why Carver was here in the first place.

Point being, there was no noise but the rustling of the trees and the occasional bird call. They’d become more animated as the day drew nearer its close, though. Eddie found himself hoping Carver’s business would be finished by then, just so he could see, just so he could hear…

The sound had an urgent, almost frightening quality to it. Jason inhaled and exhaled in short, staccato bursts, rapid and oddly controlled.

Of course he was controlled…he was an athlete. They were always shredding their lungs for sport. It was a whole thing.

But if that was the case…why did Carver seem so desperate?

Eddie watched through the thin gap between the underside of the tabletop and the topside of the benchtop as Jason’s breaths shot out of his protesting lungs, ringing out like bullets in the overgrown, under-traveled field. With a sudden, remarkable fluidity, Jason shrugged out of his letterman jacket, the garish green-gold lump sliding off his back to pool around his feet. He’d only had to contract his shoulders to shed the jacket: his hands never once moved from the tree.

The back of Jason’s baby blue polo was stained dark with sweat. Even from his perch on the hill, bent down, with shafts of late afternoon haze separating him from the suffering Golden Boy on the whipping post of his own making, he could see the dark splotch on the soft, expensive fabric. It was that of someone who has been running for miles.

But Jason had walked here, and he hadn’t taken a step since.

Without the jacket, though, Eddie could see better. As he breathed, Jason’s muscles expanded and contracted, the expanse of his lower back, down toward his middle, seeming to bear most of his exertions.

Which was a weird thing, wasn’t it? A very intentionally weird thing…someone like Jason Carver, who played basketball and football and would probably have gone in for water polo if they lived in a nicer zip code, should know better than to breathe like that, as if he were taking air directly through his…

“Come on…” Jason was talking, the words so sudden and unexpected that Eddie flinched despite himself, worrying for a moment that Carver’s Spidey senses had tingled, alerting him to the voyeur up the way, “Come on, come on…”

He was talking to himself, though, uttering short, frustrated phrases through what had to be pretty damn clenched teeth. Eddie tried to imagine that cool, taunting, perfectly symmetrical, perfectly pleasant face looking anything but composed and confident. He imagined Jason’s face red as the back of his neck seemed from here, shining with sweat of the kind staining his shirt. The look in those crisp, aloof blue eyes that never hesitated to stare down that aquiline nose at you to pronounce judgment, not even with words, but with an easy curl of the lips and a derisive flare of the nostrils. An expression that communicated you weren’t beneath his notice, exactly, but the act of noticing you was offensive enough to his sensibilities that he was willing to take it personally.

Eddie had never so badly wanted to see Jason Carver’s face.

“Come on! Come on, God, come on…”

He wasn’t addressing the tree, Eddie knew, not the dozens of etchings left by phantom hands in this time and in years before. As far as Jason knew, he was alone. The only person in these parts who needed to ‘come on’ was himself.

His breathing was like a blood pressure pump at a doctor’s office, rhythmic yet somewhat ragged. Eddie could imagine vinyl fabric straining in and out, rapid and mechanical and unrelenting, getting tighter and tighter…

“God!” the divine appeal was high and strangely feminine, almost falsetto in its register. Here, Eddie had figured Carver for a healthy mezzosoprano. The world truly was constantly revealing itself anew to the seeker who knew what to look for.

As Jason cried out the name of his nameless God, his shoulders, which had been bunched tight as a coiled spring, splayed out. Eddie could see the outline of lean muscles spread out beneath his sweat-ruined shirt. He leaned forward…he got any acuter, he and the tree would have to file joint tax returns. His brow must have been pressed smack up against the scarred old bark. One hand finally lifted from the wooden post, vanishing behind…or before…that neat blonde head. Eddie imagined Carver wiping his face with his knuckles.

The next thing Jason said was so soft Eddie was willing to believe he’d imagined it, if not for the fact that not even his imagination was wild enough to put those words in Jason Carver’s mouth.

“I’m sorry.”

He panted a little more, evidently undergoing some strain to recollect himself. But it was clear the moment of his greatest exertion was past him. Eddie watched and watched and watched as Jason brushed his hair from his face, picked his jacket up from the ground, began to turn and, just when Eddie was sure the jig was up and he was about to end up like one of those choad jocks who spied on Greek goddesses skinny dipping, Jason bent down to pick up his jacket, which he slung over one shoulder with a resigned sigh.

He looked lingeringly at the tree once more, his expression inscrutable and, with a short puff of air, slouched back the way he’d come, up the path and out of sight. Eddie watched him until his back (green-clad again) straightened up, his shoulders squaring, his head lifting high and cool and confident, as easily as if a switch had been pulled.

Or a cork pulled out.

Eddie stayed under the table for a few moments, idly curling a lock of hair around his finger, watching the shadows lengthen across the ground, replaying the afternoon’s entertainment in his head, just to reaffirm that it had happened, that he had seen it and, in fact, that it was exactly what it looked like.

“Well,” he remarked eventually, “sh*t.”

“What’s that, boy?” Uncle Wayne asked in his customary world-weary fashion, “Hamburger Helper?”

“Sound more depressed, young man,” Eddie said lightly, using the edge of his spatula to scrape the bottom of the skillet, which wouldn’t keep the underside of tonight’s gruel from burning, but would give it that nice semi-burnt taste that made you remember you were alive, “There’s famine in Ethiopia, yanno. Don’t you watch the MTV?”

Wayne snorted, “Smirk all ya like, but you’ll feel a type of way when they getcha for aiding and abetting my cardiac arrest.”

“At which point, I inherit the Munson Manse,” he gestured broadly at their modest environs with one arm, turning the gas off with the other, “Caught me.”

Wayne issued a dry coughing sound in the back of his throat, which was his way of indicating something was funny. He proceeded to dig into his Hamburger Helper with gusto, which Eddie had long ago decided made him a good sport rather than suicidal.

Eddie ate his own dinner standing. If Wayne were predisposed to the narbo side of the narbo-legit spectrum, he’d probably make a stink about this, but they were working people in this family, and a meal was a meal no matter how you conducted yourself.

Anyway, Eddie was the cook, so he got to make his own manners.

“How’s the plant?” Eddie asked between bites. Wayne lifted his shiny bald pate, chewing methodically, “Layoffs in the wind.”

“Anyone we know?”

“Not me,” which conceded the only guy at the plant Eddie could be bugged to care about was Wayne himself.

“Hell yeah.”

Wayne shrugged, which seemed to be a type of agreement.

“You keeping busy?”

Eddie licked his lips, which Wayne would hopefully not take as an answer, “You know how it is. Business has a way of finding me.”

“Regular magnet for it, ain’t ya?” there was, as always, a co*cktail of reproach and respect in his uncle’s voice. Eddie figured that was as good as he could ever hope for. If he were ever responsible for somebody, well…besides the extraordinary failing that would project onto the entirety of civilization…he supposed he’d want them to be respectable too, even as he couldn’t begrudge the unique ways his charge contrived to support the household.

They were, after all, working people.

“Long as you look out for yourself,” Wayne continued, his flinty gray eyes lifting to meet Eddie’s, “Dangerous world.”

“Oh, you know me, unc,” Eddie assured him, “I walk the path of the divinely favored.”

Wayne snorted. It was very unladylike.

Eddie lay in bed, scratching tunes out of his guitar with a meandering languor. He had a sort of game, of taking songs from the squarest place he could think of…say, the Great American Songbook…and making them metal.

After hours, there were unspoken understandings about volume. Wayne kept a very strict sleeping schedule to be up at the first clenched asscrack of dawn to report to the plant, so Eddie’s midnight sessions were entirely unplugged.

He saw it as good practice. More than loudness, more than words, performing was all about attitude. Without attitude, without spirit…you might as well hang up your six string and sell insurance.

Tonight, he was in something of a revival mood.

“This little light of mine…” he plucked the chords out with a halting precision, letting one thrum through the murky quiet of his room and not touching the next until it had just faded away, “I’m gonna let it shine…”

Outside, the Forest Hills trailer park was quiet, the only sound the peevish barking of Columbo, Mrs. McGarth’s terrier, who was a four-legged terrorist perpetually aggrieved at the insult of living to his grand 13 years.

This made him a very metal pooch, of course, but dammit, he was annoying. Eddie wondered that other people must’ve thought the same of him, and decided there was a kind of justice in that, sort of.

“Let it shine…” he puffed some hair away from his face, shifting himself upright in bed. The scraping of the sheets beneath him seemed so much louder in the quiet.

Unthinkingly, Eddie hitched in a gulp of breath, focusing as well as he could make himself on those muscles in his chest…no, beneath his chest, his hips, and…

His eyes widened at the sudden tautness there, as he pulled into himself. He exhaled, a smirk tilting his lips as he did.

“Let it shine, let it shine…”

Jason Carver, he thought, returning to his hymn, you dirty dog.

These days, Corroded Coffin assembled for practice at Gareth’s garage, which was kind of infantilizing and possibly very sad, but he was the only one of them with a garage, which was great for his self-esteem, given his comparative youth and relative newness to the Merry Munson Menagerie, which is what Eddie would have called his band if it were 1972 and they had a guy who could play the dulcimer.

Gareth’s Mom made a bitching macaroni salad too, and Eddie wasn’t too proud not to acknowledge this.

Gareth, sadly, was not up to the standard his mother had set.

“Can we play that part back again?” he asked, leaning so far out of his seat that he might’ve faceplanted into his drums.

Greg, who played bass and liked nothing more than martyring himself on this fact, sneered silently.

“I just want to hear how Lars does it…” Gareth pointed to the boom box precariously balanced on his father’s toolbox, where the cassette copy of Ride the Lightning they’d been passing around for the last year was enduring far too much abuse for an album of its relative youth.

“You’re not gonna get it like Lars gets it by listening to it over and over,” said Jeff patiently. Gareth, wounded, got that kicked dog expression he affected so marvelously, “Well, just because you can play everything by ear…”

“Thank you, I think?”

“…I’m trying to learn here, okay? And if I’m gonna learn, I need practice a-and time and…” he leaned further, practically pelvic thrusting against the drum set, “Eddie?”

Eddie regarded this peculiar display bemusedly, his guitar hanging limply off his shoulders.

Pelvis, a little light bulb flickered on over his head, Eur-ee-ka.

“Can you cream your pants without jerking it?”

Gareth blinked, “Wh-what?”

For the record, Eddie hadn’t been thinking aloud. It wasn’t so much a slip of the tongue that he’d asked that, but that he hadn’t been paying any attention to the latest iteration of this argument and, after all, it was a more interesting question than ‘Can this intrepid 17-year-old become as like Lars Ulrich through faith alone?’ Which, mind you, Eddie was hardly agnostic about it himself, but some people needed to find their own path to God.

“Can you come without touching yourself?” Eddie reiterated the question in more scientific language.

“That’s disgusting,” said Jeff.

“Is this world-building?” interjected Greg, “It sounds like a world-building question.”

“What, for DND?” asked Gareth, “You can do that in DND?”

“You can do anything in DND,” Eddie answered automatically, as Greg said, “But you shouldn’t.”

“Okay, well, I can, because I’m the DM, because I have the monster manual and the Book of Marvelous Magic, hot off the f*cking presses…”

(Addendum: Eddie liked to imagine he was the first person in human history who could say he’d bought a DND rulebook with weed money. The times, brothers and sisters, they are a’changin’.)

“…so if I want to explore fantastical biological impossibilities, then that is well in my prerogative,” he spread his arms, “It wasn’t a rhetorical question, questers.”

There was a silence. Jeff sort of rolled his eyes, like Eddie was having an episode, which maybe he was, but that wasn’t the point.

“I mean, if you had telekinesis, you probably could…”

“No, Greg!” Eddie snapped, “No telekinesis! No supernatural abilities whatsoever. Could you, as a human being…”

“Why would you want to?”

Eddie looked at Gareth, which was less stressful than looking at Greg, but not by much, “I know this is asking you to unlearn some important truisms, Gareth, but let us assume for the purposes of this experiment that playing human isn’t for rubes and narcs…”

“No, no, I got that part,” said Gareth, who Eddie had admittedly been very harsh about his original desire to play a human cleric, not so much for fantastical racism reasons, but because if you’re gonna be a druid, Jesus, at least be a half-elf, come on, really, he was trying to help here…

“I just mean…why would you want to…” Gareth looked around awkwardly, as if afraid Mrs. Gareth would emerge any minute with Kool-Aid and sandwiches.

“Jerk it,” offered Greg helpfully.

“masturbat*,” Gareth stage-whispered, “Without, you know…”

“Jerking it?” Greg continued.

Eddie twitched his lips around, “…that’s a very good question,” and, without quite realizing it, he smiled, “It’s got to have a pretty damn good answer, huh?”

His loyal disciples regarded this pronouncement dubiously, and all looked somewhat relieved when Eddie turned back to the driveway and resumed tuning his guitar, “Okay, so from the top, and we will not be playing anything back. You aren’t following Hetfield’s lead, baby boys, you’re following mine, and if you can’t keep up with me, I’d have chucked ya on sight…okay, and a-one, a-two, a-one-two-three-four…”

Jason didn’t return to the f*ck tree that afternoon. Still, Eddie wasn’t without patronage.

“No summer break for you, Munson?” his visitant co*cked an eyebrow, his customary sh*t-eating smirk briefly brightening his perpetually sour features.

“Aw, you caught me right on time,” Eddie didn’t lower his feet from the top of the picnic table, “I was just getting out my ‘Gone fishing’ sign.”

Billy Hargrove snorted, a low half-laugh in the back of his throat, “Well, I almost didn’t show, Munson, but then I thought of you going hungry all through these bugsh*t hot months without all those backwoods drips to palm your crabgrass off on, and…”

“You’ve always been a charitable son-of-a-son,” Eddie winked, “Mullet Theresa.”

For half a second, there were even odds whether or not Billy would take a swing at this. His sly, overly-intelligent (what they called ‘cunning’ in books, which seemed like a period euphemism for ‘wise-ass’) eyes narrowed as he bared his straight, white teeth…and laughed, with a low exasperation.

Funny duck, that Hargrove.

“So, do I get a loyalty discount or what?” Billy asked, propping one cowboy-booted foot on the tabletop, inches away from Eddie’s leisurely propped Docs, “Going out of my way like this?”

“For the record, Billy-Boy, I keep summer hours. It’d be commercial suicide not to. People, as you know, get high in the summer, there being sh*t-all else to do. During these dog days, I keep a mobile base of operations.”

“That cute slang for your living room?”

“It’s not a mobile trailer, Billy, or else I’d have gone over the rainbow four wisdom teeth ago.”

“…not even 15%?” Billy continued tetchily.

“Fallen on hard times, have we?”

“f*ck you,” he cussed casually, sitting on the edge of the table, half his denim-clad derrière hanging off the side. In his new position, he perfectly blocked the westward-lilting sun, which fanned out around his sun-bleached column of hair, giving him the impression of one of those white trash picture prints of Episcopalian Jesus they sold at truck stops and county fairs.

Thinking of Jesus got Eddie thinking of Jason, which got him thinking of the f*ck tree Billy was blocking. He figured that, if Carver did come back today, after all, Billy wouldn’t be as eager to engage in scientific observations.

’Twas a sorry, solitary life he led, alas.

“Not that it’s any of your gol-damned business…” Billy continued casually.

“…or that I asked…” said Eddie sportingly.

“…I’m earning a paycheck this summer.”

“Not moseying in on my territory, I hope, Bill? I’ve always said, one of these days, some coastal hi-roller will come along and put me right out on my pert little behind…”

Billy snorted, “Don’t lose sleep, Munson. I’m lifeguarding at the pool.”

“You truly have become a pillar of our little community, Billy. I am so honored to furnish your self-destructive tendencies.”

“No discount?”

“You’re gainfully employed, Mr. Graduate,” Eddie sank his teeth into the word.

“Oh, is that what this is?” Billy smiled, almost genuinely, like he thought it was really funny, “You’re jealous.”

“Just pondering what divides a burnout with a diploma from one without a diploma.”

“Try two extra credits, courtesy of the great state of California.”

“So it’s a communist plot, natch.”

Billy leaned down toward Eddie, reducing the distance between them to a hair’s breadth, “I’m no burnout, Munson.”

Eddie stroked his chin ponderously, smirking cattily, “Well, I know that. You’re as burned out as I am,” he shrugged, “Actually, Hargrove, between you and me…” he thumbed Billy’s nose to emphasize the uncomfortable closeness Billy had imposed on them; to his credit, Billy scowled, but didn’t flinch, “You’re my great big hope for the future of the human race.”

“And I can’t even get a measly dime discount.”

“Because if a dude can chuck balls into baskets while knowing all the chords for Fade to Black, while doing keg stands, while getting high, while being CPR certified…” he grinned chummily, “Then truly mankind is only a generation or two away from shucking the shackles of societal stratification once and for all.”

Billy blinked at this, the ghost of a smile on his lips twitching spasmodically, “Keep this up, Munson, and I might just think you’re flirting with me.”

“That’s adorable, Billy, but I’m saving myself for another.”

This proved to be too much for either of them and they laughed, Billy with an exasperated roll of his eyes as he turned away from Eddie, lowering himself to the bench at the opposite end of the table from him.

“My usual, Munson,” he reached into his pocket for a clump of bills, “Count the change, if it makes you feel better…”

“Oh, don’t wad your balls so tight, Bill, I’ll shave off a couple of dollars.”

Billy paused, smirking slyly, “Because of my great service to the human race?”

“What do you know about Jason Carver?”

Billy regarded this bemusedly, “…what?”

“Jason Carver. You know him, right?”

“Do you?”

Eddie thought of that contemptuous sneer, the easy roll of his eyes, the curl of his lip as he muttered, ‘Freak’ in passing, before seamlessly melting into a herd of matching greenbacks, safe with the pack.

“…not to speak to. But I figure, since you’re on the same team, you’ve gotta know something…”

“Which means, I’d better know something if I want my 15% off?”

“Did I say 15%?”

“Good point. Might be I heard 50.”

“You’re a regular terrorist.”

“It’s in the fine print on my diploma.”

Eddie grinned as he lifted his middle finger in salute. Billy mimicked the gesture, thwacking Eddie’s finger with his, “He’s a preppy prick.”

“Carver?”

“Mind you, the whole team’s preppy pricks, except maybe Hagan…”

“Oh yeah, he’s a real prize citizen, man…”

“Who do you hang out with again?”

“To each his own. You were saying, about all the pricks?”

“The whole team’s a f*cking cult of personality, like…I dunno, Stalin or something…”

“Is Steve Harrington Stalin in this scenario?”

Billy gestured with one hand as if to communicate he didn’t write the rules, “But Harrington’s human as everyone else, and he isn’t even that good. It’s just the rest of them suck so hard, and when you’ve known the same guys since Pee-Wee Athletics, you get into the habit, and the guy that’s good then can’t not be good now, or else what does that make you?”

“Better?”

“But you can’t let that happen, because that’s a f*cking violation of the world order…”

“Naturally.”

“…so everyone sets their paces by the guy that was the best when they were all 10-years-old…”

“Steve ‘The Hair’ Stalin, yes.”

“And he drags them down, but nobody gives a sh*t, because they’re scared sh*tless of change.”

Eddie allowed this pronouncement to marinate in silence for a bit before prompting, “But Carver?”

“A sh*t-weasel.”

“Worse than Harrington?”

“f*ck, Munson, don’t make me defend Harrington’s honor.”

“But…?”

Billy let out a short puff of air, “Harrington’s a fake, fraud, and phony, but he’s got a knack.”

“A heart beating in the center of the proverbial Tootsie Pop?”

“He’s not forcing anyone to hang off his every word,” Billy shrugged, “Time to time, I think he’d sooner they didn’t.”

“Heavy is the Hair that wears the crown.”

“Carver’s got as much personality as a dollar store digestive.”

“McVitie’s?”

Billy blinked, “…sure, Munson. Why do you give a sh*t?”

“A guy can’t be interested in human nature?”

“Then you picked a piss-poor guinea pig.”

“You offering?”

“60%.”

“55%, if you stop asking,” flicking open the ratty cigar box he kept his wares in, Eddie began parceling out Billy’s regular ration, “Anyway, Bill, I’m working on a theory…”

“Extra credit?”

“When the eggheads see it, they’ll catapult me right past college, put me in charge of a whole ding-dang department.”

“You’ll be the Isaac Newton of the Clown Seminar, I tell you what.”

“I think…” he neatly tied the neck on a bag, flicking it with one finger so it revolved into a greenish-bronze blur before Billy’s vaguely interested eyes, “Everyone’s got a little something more under the hood than we give them credit for. Me, you…”

“Jason Carver?” Billy rolled his eyes, “Sure, I bet he’s a real case study, that one.”

“Oh, he is,” Eddie assured him, “I know that already.”

Billy knit his brows together, “What’d you know?”

Eddie flashed his best sh*t-eating grin, “I don’t know.”

“But you just said…”

“Oh, I know something. But I don’t know what.”

Billy co*cked his head to the side, “You are so full of sh*t.”

“It’s the dollar store digestives.”

“Can I have my pot, thanks?”

“Don’t smoke and drive,” he tossed the bag to Billy, who caught it in one lazy hand as he pushed his ill-assorted lump of cash across the table to him with his other. Eddie began to count through it, “Hey, this isn’t…”

“That’s 70% off,” Billy swept to his feet, “For my cooperation.”

“It was 50% for your cooperation,” said Eddie, “Actually, it was 15%!”

“The rest is so I keep my mouth shut when Carver turns up in a cornfield in a couple months with his head shaved, talking about how kind the Venusians were to him.”

Eddie smirked despite himself, “You’re projecting nefarious intentions onto me, Billy. I’m really a very harmless fellow.”

Billy touched two fingers to his brow in a casual, mutually deprecating salute, “Good luck experimenting, Munson. Stay in school.”

“Catapult, Hargrove!” Eddie reminded him as he went, “When I’m through, I’ll be the school.”

Billy said something like ‘rock on’ in a desultory, afterthought type of way, and was soon swallowed by the trees. Eddie thumbed through the crumpled bills of his much-reduced commission, running his tongue over his teeth.

“No personality…” he repeated Billy’s words back, rubbing at a particularly greasy spot on Honest Abe’s forehead with his thumb.

Funnily enough, not too long ago, he’d have been inclined to agree with Billy. But he supposed that wouldn’t have been true even then, before he’d had the misfortune and/or good luck to witness Carver’s little excursion to the carving tree to carve a bit out of himself, at great effort.

Everyone’s got a personality, after all, even boring turd-heads. “Boring”, after all, was a personality trait, as was “disgusting” or “stupid” or “total narbo”. Jason Carver, with his plasticine grin and flat stare, had a personality too…it just didn’t declare itself as easily as some people…as Eddie’s, as Billy’s, as Steve Harrington’s, even.

And that was something too, wasn’t it, taken with what Eddie knew now? It hadn’t always been easy for Eddie to, in the words of his felt-and-velvet compadres on Sesame Street many a year ago, “be himself”. “Being yourself” was a f*cking bitch and a half, and a lot of the time, it didn’t seem worth the trouble. For a while, when he’d been very little, being himself had seemed a dangerous, exhausting prospect. Much safer to just go away inside himself, to muzzle away his outbursts, to still his impulsive fidgets (it was a miracle his fingernails had recovered), to be as ordinary and unnoticeable as he could.

Not, of course, that that made any difference, really. Because people can always tell when someone is different, even if they’re going out of their way to hide it. So, really, when Little Eddie spent so much energy hiding inside himself…he was just wasting everyone’s time. Easier to just do your own thing and let the chips fall where they may.

He’d learned that nifty little maxim around, oh, eight or so. Jason Carver was a late bloomer.

The thought brought a giggle out of him.

“God,” he pocketed Billy’s pittance, “I’m such a sh*thead.”

It was a good feeling, to know your place in the world.

So Jason Carver had a girlfriend, which certainly threw a wrench into Eddie’s percolating hypothesis. This seemed like something he should already know and, indeed, none of the other guys seemed surprised when Carver and his coterie of jockey towheads crowded into Sal’s, belching and braying and being generally most uncouth…but hold! For, while Eddie was fully prepared to write off this puerile juvenilia as regular, habitual behavior for this subspecies, he was not expecting…

“Is that Chrissy Cunningham?”

Behold, the top dog has taken a bitch.

Wait, derogatory, even if zoologically correct. Chrissy Cunningham was, by all reports, a Very Nice Young Lady, which Eddie knew to be true since she didn’t travel in the same circles he did. Further, she’d never been connected to any of those rumors about him eating garbage or sacrificing squirrels to the Evil One/Kali the Destroyer/Skeletor/Whichever-Flavor-the-Moral-Panic-Has-This-Month.

All this to say that Chrissy seemed pretty alright, for a cheerleader whose mother ran the Parents League like a secret police unit.

Greg looked over his shoulder, a french fry dangling out of his mouth like a cigarette, and issued forth a mucusy noise in the back of his throat.

“That wasn’t very respectful,” Eddie chided. Greg scowled, “I meant that’s her,” he cleared his throat prodigiously, “And so what?”

Eddie watched as Jason loped up to the counter to make his order, looping one arm around Chrissy’s hair-thin waist. She silently, naturally, leaned into him as he moved, her head lolling on his shoulder. It was such a perfect, fluid motion that it seemed paradoxically rehearsed and biologically immutable, like morning bird calls and praying mantis’s spousal cannibalism. A silent signal to the world of something ancient, unwritten, and as natural as nature. There was no secrecy here.

There was nothing to be secretive about.

“She dating Carver, or what?”

Greg made another delightsome noise, “You didn’t know?”

“No, Gregory, I have not been keeping up with the latest off the Tiger Beat. I’ve been busy honing my musical craft, refining the art of tabletop adventuring, and generally keeping you amused.”

“That’s me,” said Greg flatly, “Captain Chuckles.”

“Why do you care who Cunningham’s dating?” Jeff asked the infuriatingly good question. Eddie ought to take a page out of Carver’s book and surround himself with morons. But maybe it was a testament to his superiority that he attracted thinking individuals. After all, an evolved egalitarian with high ideals would fear nothing from surrounding himself with intelligent, free-thinking people. A dictator would surround himself with yes-men and sycophants, the kind of people that went with whoever was the biggest kid in the sandbox…

The biggest King on the court.

And, talking of animal behaviors, was it really a voluntary choice? Or was there just some invisible switch that went off in the heads of a certain type of person, signaling the way the winds were blowing?

Steve Harrington hadn’t graduated Hawkins High with an honorary crown on his head, after all. Something, somewhere, had shifted, even if nobody could be pressed to say exactly what it was. An involuntary coronation and an equally (one must assume) voluntary usurpation.

Unless, of course, Steve had abdicated his role as king, but it’s stupid to abdicate from a role that doesn’t officially exist.

Had Jason Carver chosen to be “elected” King, and all the trappings that came with it? To ask Billy, who was irresponsible, venal, and kind of a sad*st but, for all that, had a good sense about people most of the time…Carver was all air. There was nothing in him one way or the other.

He was the kind of person you could just…project things on.

Eddie, who had spent the better part of his life ensuring he made a strong impression on his fellow man, wondered what that must be like.

“So he’s human after all,” intoned Greg with a leery sneer.

“No sh*t,” said Eddie flatly, still thinking of Carver.

“Never would’ve figured you for the Molly Ringwald type.”

“…eh?” Eddie looked at him sharply.

“Molly Ringwald,” said Greg, like he was stupid or something, “16 Candles.”

“I know who she is!” Eddie snapped.

“She has nice legs,” said Gareth, only to shrink into his flannel at their eyes on him, “…I think.”

“You’re all perverts,” said Eddie, “In a just society, you would be castrated and forced to watch wild birds eat your man bits.”

Gareth turned very green and averted his eyes. Greg, undeterred, resumed his meal with gusto.

Jeff watched as Jason and his little pack crowded around a booth across Sal’s from them. Jason, the picture of a gentleman, stepped aside so Chrissy could slide in ahead of him, at the same time putting his other hand out to keep away one of his acolytes.

Eddie, no gifted lip-reader, still thought he could make out some smirky communication between Carver and his teammate: “Remember your manners, bud?”

The chastised mouth-breather, a mop-haired farmboy type in a baseball cap that made him look younger than he must be, lifted his hands in a gesture of jokey surrender. Jason flicked the brim of his cap with one hand as he slid in after his girlfriend.

This must be what Jane Goodall felt like all the time.

“You’re not really into Chrissy Cunningham, are you?” asked Jeff, “Because, just saying…”

“She’s out of your league,” said Greg.

“Out of our league,” offered Gareth helpfully.

“She’s in the Olympics and you’re on the neighborhood team they put together to keep kids off the streets.”

“Well,” Eddie observed automatically, “There goes the neighborhood.”

He supposed he ought to provide some clarification before his Hellions (copyright trademark 1985, Eddie the Banished, all rights reserved) ran away with this idea that he was sweet on Chrissy Cunningham. But that would require him to elaborate on the real reasons for his preoccupation with Jason Carver’s romantic exploits…

…some things would have to stay secret for now. For his own good.

Though whether he meant his own good, or Jason Carver’s…not even Eddie could say.

Jason met his eyes once, as he settled down into his booth. The easy, prim smile on his face darkened at once, morphing into a perfect, irritated grimace.

“What’re you looking at, Freak?” as usual, there wasn’t much basso in the insult. Unusually, though, Eddie had other things to compare it to…he thought of the broken hitch in Jason’s voice as he’d plead to somebody…to himself, maybe…to “Come on, come on…” up against that much-abused tree behind the school.

Jason’s words had an immediate paralyzing effect on their mutual cults of personality. Eddie was aware of his guys freezing behind him…Gareth was probably clutching his grandmother’s St. Christopher’s medal beneath his shirt (in a town as whitebread WASP as Hawkins, being Catholic was entry-level metal, and not at all disqualifying) while Greg was no doubt planning to grow winged feet and dash while the getting was good.

Jason’s cronies all adopted various baboonish signifiers of aggression which was, as you can imagine, reader, pretty cute. Chrissy, God bless her, smiled patiently at Jason and gave Eddie a wave.

Eddie waved back, “Good practice, fellas?” he never looked away from Jason, “Work up a healthy sweat?”

There was a gamesome few moments where Jason’s buddies attempted to assess the exact strain of mockery they were being dealt here. A leanly built Black kid (this would be Eddie’s third consecutive set of 12th grade peers; he had plenty of time to get acquainted) frowned, noting “It’s the off-season,” with admirable sincerity.

“Well,” Eddie beamed, locking eyes with Jason, “Good on you anyway. Keeping in shape. I’m impressed as I am intimidated.”

Jason narrowed his eyes, “f*ck off, Munson,” and looked away, crisis seemingly averted. Eddie heard Gareth let out a thoroughly undignified sigh of relief behind him, but he couldn’t be bothered to take notice.

Under his gaze, Jason had turned brilliantly, guiltily, fire engine red, right to the gills.

Jeff and Greg beat hasty retreats after lunch, which was hardly surprising. Greg said something to the effect of Eddie having a death wish, which was fine by him, but he had joined a DND club, not some Jim Jones cover act, to which Jeff had noted the Kool-Aid wasn’t even that good, to which Gareth had been all “Ha, ha, you guys” and then didn’t leave with them for some reason.

“Eddie!” he squeaked, hovering in the parking lot while Eddie was rifling through his jacket for the sorry remains of his latest carton of cigarettes, “Um.”

Eddie, successfully retrieving his necessary narcotic, scrutinized Gareth from under a fringe of hair that had come into his eyes, “Um, Gareth?”

“Um…” he looked the way the others had gone, like making sure they weren’t spying or something.

“If you’re trying to bum a cigarette off me, you can just ask, man. Though, I will say, I’m very disappointed in you. You’re supposed to be a responsible young man, and I have been hanging all my hopes for the future on your sturdy shoulders.”

Gareth rolled his shoulder blades experimentally, “No, um, I mean…it’s fine. I mean…” he was a nice rosy shade; the tone was far less offensive on his face than Jason’s. Maybe it was Jason’s lighter hair, or the green jacket, that created a more obnoxious, Christmas-card arrangement.

Maybe he was being too much of an asshole. Gareth was as much of a model citizen as Eddie would allow himself to be seen associating with, and Eddie had a sort of vain notion he looked up to him, which was bugsh*t insane, but he wasn’t going to tell him not to. Like he hated himself or something.

“I don’t want to smoke,” Gareth continued.

“Oh,” Eddie blinked, “Well, that’s good,” he struggled with his lighter, burnt his thumb (“Jesus sh*t, every time…this is why we smoke, Gareth, so we don’t spaz out and burn ourselves trying to smoke. The hippies called it the ‘Great Mandela’, big ol’ circle, it never begins and it never ends and…there we go, finally…”) and, after his first drag, “What’s shakin’?”

“I just wanted to tell you…I found out.”

Eddie observed him through the silky, smoky veil he was weaving, “…huh?”

“I found out,” Gareth repeated, the corners of his lips beginning to turn up, like he was expecting a pat on the head or something.

“That,” said Eddie, guarded as you please, “Is a very ominous statement.”

This seemed to confuse Gareth, who co*cked his head to the side, “…should I not have?”

“Gareth, buddy, this is a lot of homeless words in desperate need of a noun over their heads.”

“But it’s not a noun.”

“Of course it’s not.”

“It’s a question.”

“No, I have the question, Gareth, you’re supposed to have the answer.”

“I do! I mean…to your question,” he frowned, “That you asked,” and then this delightful scamp had the gumption to smile patiently, as if Eddie had just gone a little fuzzy in the noggin and he was being very graceful not nagging him to the point of understanding.

“My question…” Eddie repeated, “That I asked.”

“You know…” Gareth shifted from foot to foot, reaching under his flannel with all the furtive head-darting of a back-alley crack peddler, “That day. During practice,” his hand reemerged from his shirt and proceeded to retrieve a weathered paperback, which he held out with the air of an evangelist presenting a tract.

Eddie frowned, reading the title slowly, as if to affirm to himself it was real, “Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex,” he moved his eyes up to Gareth, still pleased as punch, before continuing, “Civilized, Life-Enhancing Advice on Sexuality from the Creator of Radio’s ‘Sexually Speaking’.”

Accepting the book from Gareth, he tapped the picture printed on the front cover: a middle-aged blonde woman with a phone pressed to her ear, grinning with matronly pleasantness at her perspective reader, “Dr. Ruth, I presume?”

Gareth nodded, “You don’t know her?”

“My Medicaid only covers so much.”

“She’s on the radio,” Gareth explained, “My, um…my Mom listens to her. Sometimes.”

Eddie thought of pleasant Mrs. Gareth kicking her feet up after a long day of sandwiches, Kool-Aid, and General Hospital to listen to radio’s very own Sexually Speaking, brought to you by Palmolive, the dish-washing soap that softens your hands…

This thought triggered another, and Eddie looked up at Gareth, “Oh…my question, yeah. About…about creaming yourself…”

An elderly couple debauching from their station wagon did a double take. Eddie waved with Dr. Ruth’s book. They continued on, the old man muttering something unfavorable about long-hair music, which Eddie didn’t think they were still calling it.

Then again, this was clearly set to be a Learning Day.

“Gareth, not that I don’t appreciate you raiding your mother’s bookcase…”

“Oh, no, that’s from the library,” he tapped the little sticker on the spine as if to confirm it, “Librarian looked at me like I’d gone crazy.”

“She should be happy the youth are reading,” Eddie said evenly, “Gareth, not that I don’t appreciate it, but did you ever consider I was maybe asking that question rhetorically?”

“You said you weren’t,” Gareth pointed out matter-of-factly, and Eddie considered this one lost, “I guess the other guys thought you were being stupid, like you do sometimes…”

“Oh, sure,” said Eddie vaguely.

“And to be honest, I wasn’t sure if you were just saying something crazy to stop me asking to play the set back, but then I started wondering, because it’s a weird question, right…”

“It is at that.”

“And I thought for a bit that you were doing some kind of mind trick, like the old guy in the Karate Kid…”

“Wax on, wax off?”

“But I don’t think you think that far ahead.”

“You thought right.”

“So you must’ve had, like, a real reason to ask it. Like, a personal one…” and, here, he looked away again, which was almost precious, that he was talking to him, about this, and still getting self-conscious.

“It’s not personal,” Eddie assured him, “Well, it is for someone. But I was, you might say, asking for a friend.”

“Friend?” Gareth smirked which, on his round, boyish face, was an almost unpalatably mischievous expression. Without another word, he seemed to be acknowledging Eddie didn’t have very many friends to ask about.

“The world’s full of friends we haven’t made yet,” Eddie granted, tucking the Guide to Good Sex under one arm, ensuring the grinning sex guru was facing into his armpit.

Gareth co*cked an eyebrow, “That’s one way to make a friend.”

“Gareth,” Eddie clapped him on the shoulder, “You’re alright.”

“Chapter 8,” Gareth added, “To be honest, I was surprised it was even possible.”

“More and more, my friend,” Eddie took a light step backward, “I’m convinced anything’s possible, if you’re creative enough.”

“You’re up to something.”

This observation, volunteered by Wayne apropos of nothing, caught Eddie off guard. He looked across the kitchen at where his uncle was sitting, idly readjusting the messy bun he kept his hair tied in.

“Chili’s not poisoned, unc.”

“Last thing you need is my debt,” Wayne observed, chewing dinner with his usual mechanical panache.

“Dad’s debt,” Eddie amended, “To be fair.”

“That doesn’t make it any nicer on me,” Wayne acknowledged, “Might be I should have shunted it onto you when you turned 18, just to be proper about it…”

“But you’re such a kind fellow…”’

“And you’re such a slam-bang cook,” Wayne looked at him, his eyes twinkling in that way he had of permitting a smile without tiring his lips, “Anyway, you don’t have to tell me a damn thing, I suppose, long as you’re not in any trouble.”

“I’m never in trouble,” Eddie pointed out, “I skirt trouble’s outer limits. The Trouble DMZ, as it were.”

“The things you get up to,” Wayne made a tittering sound in the back of his throat, “Look, Ed, I’ve long since given up trying to understand how you get your kicks…”

“So have I. It’s much easier to just let the id do the talkin’.”

“…and might be, it ain’t very responsible of me, given you’re about 20…”

Eddie let out a desultory cheer at this fact.

“…and still in school.”

“Which is better than dropping out.”

“…but for all that, you’ve kept that shaggy head of yours out of the back of cop cars longer than your Dad ever did. You keep a clean house, you cook, and you earn your keep…in your own way,” those laugh lines at the corners of his eye deepened even, again, as his face didn’t seem to change, “Whatever that may be.”

Eddie flashed a peace sign, winking flagrantly.

“I won’t be winning any parenting awards,” Wayne summed up.

“Oh, you’re fine.”

“You would say that.”

Eddie shrugged, “Trust me, Wayne, I am doing fine, with a capital F.”

“Good letter, that,” he blinked, “But you are up to something.”

“Aren’t I always?”

“I s’pose it won’t be healthy for me to ask what it is.”

“What, like if a bunch of old school hoods are gonna show up with tommy guns and ventilate the trailer?”

Wayne, who had lived many years with Frank Munson, didn’t seem to find this amusing.

“It’s fine, unc.”

“With a capital F.”

“I’m not in any trouble. Honestly, it’s not even anything dramatic.”

Wayne’s expression communicated such a condition was impossible for anything Eddie got himself mixed up in, and he couldn’t even dispute this, so he just continued.

“Would it ease your mind to know I’m only being tight-lipped to protect a friend’s privacy?”

The tines of Wayne’s fork scraped absently against the bottom of the plate, “A friend?”

“I have a few.”

“A few you have.”

This could very easily have come off mean, but it wasn’t as though Wayne was wrong. Eddie shrugged, “It’s really his business, and…well, I try to be the soul of discretion in all my dealings.”

Wayne blinked his heavily-lidded eyes, seeming to weigh the merits of continuing this conversation. At length, he let out a short sigh, “As long as you keep your hands clean.”

“Well, Uncle Wayne,” Eddie smiled breezily, “That’s the whole point.”

He lay up in bed for a good chunk of the night, perusing the scholarly discourses of the venerable Dr. Ruth, of Sexually Speaking. Eddie, whose reading habits consisted mainly of Conan paperbacks and dozens of suspiciously similar derivatives, had expected to fall asleep somewhere after the tired housewife was provided with an entry-level definition of ‘penetration’.

Imagine his surprise, then, when Dr. Ruth’s Good to Good Sex proved to be pretty okay. Better even, he might wager, than certain D-rate Tolkien rip-offs currently collecting dust on his bookshelf. It wasn’t, he would be quick to point out, what you might call a ‘p*rn book’. Further, there were no awkward diagrams or grainy, poorly reproduced photos of inexperienced models demonstrating positions at a Holiday Inn.

At the same time, it wasn’t ponderous. While the word ‘genitals’ occurred every few pages, the good doctor took a conversational attitude to her subject matter. It very much had the effect of a gossip with the lady in the next chair at the manicurist.

Not that Eddie had ever had the pleasure. To that end, he hadn’t really had much of anything to do with women or the things they talked about. Maybe that was part of the reason Dr. Ruth…who was apparently a ‘sex therapist’, which was apparently a thing people could be, like, you could go to school for it and people would pay you and everything…wrote books and went on the radio and TV and whatever else. Men and women did everything about sex but talk about it.

A couple of times in the book, she talked about the ‘Sexual Revolution’, that grand and glorious moment sometime between The Day the Music Died and Woodstock, when women burned their bras and started getting on birth control. Eddie had his own unique relationship with this period, being that he was one of the births that was supposed to be controlled.

His mother had volunteered this trivia to him, the way she volunteered a whole heavenly host of information his tender ears probably shouldn’t have been open to. Eddie figured he’d gotten that habit of hers: the irrepressible urge to talk-talk-talk and to hell with the consequences, tempered maybe with a touch of his father’s precise instinct for self-preservation.

“It was really such a surprise,” she’d told him, as she yanked weeds out of the struggling flowerbed beneath the window of their old house, tossing them lightly for Eddie, who’d been trying valiantly to chain-link them together, to catch.

“I didn’t want to have a baby, and if you asked me then, I’d say I never wanted one, and I did everything I could to keep from having one…” here, she tweaked his nose, “It’s a lucky thing you’re such a rebel.”

It wasn’t a very motherly thing to say, probably, but Eddie had never understood it to be anything less than affectionate. After all, you needed a helluva lot of honesty in you to say a thing like that to your kid, and shouldn’t all parents be honest with their kids?

They weren’t, of course. Parents kept things bottled up. They withheld things from their children, because they were “too young to understand”, which Eddie always figured to be pretty damn rich, since it presumed some unknowable day at the cusp of maturity…

(…panting in the hazy shadows of the high summer afternoon, struggling to keep the reins on rapidly fraying breaths, clenching every muscle in the expectation of a stubborn, forbidden, deadly release…)

…when understanding did come. When children became adults and suddenly all the mysteries went away. Pretty apocalyptic damn thinking, Eddie always thought. No wonder people went nuts for Hal Lindsey and the rest of those chinless yahoos, preaching always of the day the divine nuke would come down and set the world to rights, delivering understanding whether you wanted it or not.

Enter Dr. Ruth, and the other sex therapists, though as far as Eddie knew, she was the only one with a radio show and a casual bookstore paperback. Because adults don’t know everything. Some of them spend so long in ignorance or misunderstanding, either imposed on them or chosen willingly, that they reach some point in their lives, blink, and realize (for example) nobody ever told them about the physical and emotional benefits of external lubrication (see Chapter 5).

Mothers spent so much time telling their kids what to eat, where to go, what not to touch, what to say and how to say it, that whole chunks of their own adulthood escaped them in whirlwinds of whitewashing and Lysol disinfectant. They change one diaper and suddenly their lives are half over and they’ve forgotten what it is to feel something for themselves, to feel good, not for the sake of their children or even their husband, but for something deep and unknowable inside them, that they may have wondered about as children, and forgotten over years and years of being promised “You’ll understand it when you’re older.”

Good for Gareth’s Mom, that she got to listen to the sex doctor on the radio. Eddie hoped her life was richer for it. His mother, that liberated woman who’d brought Eddie into the world entirely by accident and quickly decided not to regret it, hadn’t ever listened to Dr. Ruth on the radio. There hadn’t been a Dr. Ruth, duh, but even if there had, Eddie doubted she’d have listened to her.

Reading through Dr. Ruth’s discourses on intimacy, on partners, on trust and pleasure and all the ways you could go about getting it, Eddie imagined that willowy woman with her mane of chestnut hair, rocketing through the too-small confines of his childhood. On her bad days, messily emptying and refilling cupboards, shoving trays of cookies and big aluminum bundt pans into the oven with reckless abandon and watching intently through the glass pane on the oven door, to catch her work before it could burn…scalding herself, crying, laughing, and cursing her own stupidity. And on her good days, sitting on the porch and strumming her beat-up guitar, softly singing snatches of Bob Dylan in a low, honey-sweet voice, working her way through verses as if she were dredging them from her memory in real time, from another life, before the man she loved had bit off more than he could chew, before the pill didn’t do what it was paid to do, before she’d traded her denims for aprons, back when the world was music and color, incense and patchouli and soft grass under bare feet. The world in the palm of her hand, and a glorious new future on her horizon, where they made love, not war. A slate of unwritten rules and unknowable secrets, and no fear accompanying them, because it’s just part of life, not knowing all life’s answers.

She never would’ve read a book to help her unravel the mysteries of her own body.

Eddie was pretty sure Jason Carver’s mother wouldn’t be caught dead with this book either.

Imagine that. He had something in common with Jason.

The thought brought a smirk to Eddie’s lips.

Gareth had marked his place well. Eddie would have to thank him, if he didn’t think Gareth would melt into a mortified puddle at the slightest acknowledgment of his service.

Long story short: (Weary campaigners bemoan: “Too late!”; aggrieved DM points out they know what they signed up for, and anyway, they aren’t bringing snacks, are they?) it was possible to achieve climax without touching yourself.

Eddie hadn’t set out to have this proved. He had, after all, seen it in action, unless he’d been wrong the whole time and Jason was just engaging in an unconventional Aerobicize set. He’d been more curious about the method which, as it happened, wasn’t very intuitive and was recommended “for women”, “though men can experience a similar release by following the same steps”.

Eddie had gone into this assuming the book was written for chicks anyway…or, well, women. It was hard to imagine teen girls using this as their entryway to the wonders of sex. Still, what an odd experience, learning that men could do this, if they wanted, but it wasn’t for them. If he were a 44-year-old housewife, he’d feel like he’d just been given a state secret. Finally, something to hold over the old man, etc.

“Kegels are good exercise for your pelvis,” Dr. Ruth informed him with gentle patience, “Try them alone, or with a partner. You may be surprised how seeing your partner ‘help himself’, helps you.”

“Exercise,” he repeated the word skeptically, running his tongue over his teeth, thinking of that bruise-black sweat stain on Jason’s back, “Jocks, man…what can you do?”

And it was work too; the good doctor wasn’t just exaggerating for the benefit of sedentary housewives. The routine detailed, again without the benefit of pictures…though Eddie couldn’t see any visual aid being of much help here…a sort of stop-and-start muscular contraction not entirely unlike the process of giving birth, which maybe explained why it was primarily a Chick Thing, and did nothing to elucidate why a dude would consider it for even a second.

But Eddie had his theories.

He set the book aside, using his guitar pick as a marker. If it hadn’t been a library book, he would’ve just tented it, spine up, to keep his place. But he’d plowed through enough dime-job fantasy novels as a kid to appreciate the value of leaving one of those fragile pulpy exit ramps intact for the next person who needs it.

Far be it from him to rob the frustrated wives and mothers of Hawkins of much-needed educational resources.

He lay on top of the covers, looking up at the featureless expanse of the ceiling, feeling the coarse fabric of the sheets beneath his palms and the soles of his feet. Pursing his lips in an expression of concentration, he tautened his muscles.

The first time he’d tried, he’d focused more on the breathing, as he’d seen Jason do. Now, with more (he had to assume) understanding, he focused on the one spot, down around what Dr. Ruth helpfully called the pelvic floor, which was a weird name and not at all what Eddie would’ve chosen if he were DM’ing Intro to Human Sexuality.

All this being said, he contracted the muscles around Mount Genitalia, the highest point on Pleasure Plateau, and then released them.

It wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t remotely sexy either. Still, Eddie figured he might as well get into the practice. Readjusting himself on the bed, he attempted a faster clip of these contractions, working to control his breathing so he didn’t end up completely spent.

Not that he saw any way of working himself up the way Jason had, standing upright, under the hot sun, in a public place. In the murky privacy of his room, there was nothing stopping him from working at it all night until he got that prize 30 - 40 seconds of bliss.

All he got, though, was tired. There wasn’t anything remotely nice about it and, if anything, it just made him kind of sore in all the wrong places. Being a woman had to suck. If there were still any significant women in his life, he would’ve made sure to tell them. Hell, he might still walk into U.S. Government (Take 3) in September and tell that desiccated crone Ms. Haverford as much. She’d been widowed since the Triassic, and if she’d had to resort to this humiliation just to remember the brief wonder of the human body in extremis, no wonder she was such a humorless bag.

But, of course, this wasn’t the only way for a chick to get off either. The damn thing was the last option in its chapter, following several better options Eddie knew about (by reputation) and a few he never would’ve considered and that Dr. Ruth ought to receive some kind of prize for putting into print, like the folk stenographers who wrote down ancient lullabies, fairy tales, and gumbo recipes for the first time hundreds of years ago.

Why would someone do this to themselves? Why go to all the trouble? Especially when your hands were, well, handy?

More to the point, why would someone do this when they were conventionally attractive, the big man on campus, and had the loving affection of a beautiful cheerleader with the legs of a ballerina?

At the moment of his apostasy that day at the tree, Eddie had heard Jason croak out a brittle apology to nobody.

Yes…he had his own theories.

Safe to say, he wasn’t the only one lying alone in his room tonight, straining against himself to work his way up a too-steep slope.

The difference was, at any time, Eddie could stop. He could turn around and go to sleep or, if he got a little turquoise in the testes, work out his knots the old-fashioned way, like an unread Philistine without access to sex self-help literature.

But, goddammit, he was invested now. If Jason Carver could do this…if he felt he needed to, this person who didn’t need anything he didn’t already have, then why couldn’t he? What made Eddie so defective?

Why couldn’t he hold out?

His thoughts wandered, the way they tend to do on long nights when you can’t get to sleep. He pointedly avoided letting them circle back to his mother…that would be weird, and he was proud not to count Freudian complexes among his many emotional difficulties.

Still, even as her face didn’t hover to the front of his thoughts, her voice found its way into his ears, warbling her way through those dusty Dylan tunes that had first given him a taste for music, long before he knew anything about guitar solos and decibels and head-banging.

If he weren’t so doggedly focused on the task at hand (or, more appropriately, the handless task), Eddie might concoct a mental thesis about old Bob’s role as a precursor figure to metal, as the original rock ’n roller poet, straddling the great big wall dividing this rinky-dink century. His mother wasn’t a metalhead…she was an overgrown hippie who’d been waylaid into domesticity.

But metalheads, hippies, punks and bluesmen…they’re all disaffected shards off society’s diamond, aren’t they? They just catch the light in different ways, refracting it back with their own unique dimensions: loud, soft, psychedelic, angry, sad…but always malcontent, always looking for the missing something that’ll set the gaudy jewel to rights.

“Any day now…” his mother sang to him across the gulf of time as his protesting muscles pulled in and out, “Any day now…”

He was asleep before the first chorus and, to add insult to injury, woke up four hours later having to pee.

“I shall be released…”

He returned the Guide to Good Sex to Gareth at the soonest opportunity.

“Thanks for the loan, bud,” Eddie said lightly, tossing the book for him to catch. Gareth, no quick study he, grasped wildly at the air and the paperback clanged sadly off a cymbal. Gareth, rattling off apologies like wards against the evil eye, scrambled around the floor of his garage to pick it up.

“You can dial it down, Gar,” Eddie folded his arms, looking out to the driveway, “If the other yokels roll up, you can tell ’em it’s your Mom’s…”

“Yeah, that’d go over great,” he let out this self-deprecating laugh; another of those occasional slips of fortitude that suggested he was going places, once he got his head screwed on straight.

Not that Eddie had any illusions about going anywhere himself, but it would be nice pretending he had something like a successor lined up. Odds are, Gareth would only need to be a senior once, too, which made for a much healthier time in office. Cheers for democracy.

Or tyranny, given he was just petty enough to not want to hand the keys of his bandit kingdom to Greg.

“You know what I’ve learned?” Eddie took on the affected manner of a sage mentor on the cusp of a teachable moment.

Gareth blinked, “…is this a trick question?”

“Well, besides the hands-free stuff.”

Gareth was a nice rosy hue; how healthy for him.

“I’ve learned that people are very embarrassed about some pretty basic sh*t.”

Gareth turned the GGS around in one hand, looking for a minute like he was about to press Dr. Ruth’s smiling face to his breast to conceal her from the ravening eyes of the public. Perhaps considering Eddie’s statement, however, he compromised by holding the book loosely off to the side, the ecstatic visage of the venerable sex therapist bumping up against his thigh.

“What, like…sex?”

“Which is a pretty weird thing to be embarrassed about, right? We all have it.”

“Do we?”

“Well, we all can have it.”

Gareth looked relieved and Eddie found himself wondering about the psychological impact of his carefully cultivated public persona. He’d never set out to make himself look ‘cool’, and nobody thought he was cool either. Some people might look up to him, in a vague way, as somebody who wasn’t weighed down by the lodestone of adolescent social mores in the madhouse of Midwestern Americana. At the risk of sounding overtly modest, he’d never meant to be a figurehead of teen nonconformity. The whole point of not conforming was avoiding figureheads. He wasn’t Moses, coming down from the mountain to melt the golden calf of high school hierarchy. No more than he supposed people like Steve Harrington or, more graspingly, Jason Carver, set out to become idols in their own right.

Some things just happened.

The point being…did Gareth think Eddie was having lots of sex?

What a weird thought. He was sure Jeff and Greg didn’t have any such notions…Jeff being relatively worldly, and Greg being possessed of reptilian contempt for everyone he came in contact with. They looked at Eddie and knew exactly what he was: a loser, like the rest of them. Loud, brash, a bit of a peaco*ck…but master of nothing but their own little huddle.

That is to say…not someone who was getting it, on the regular or on the sly.

“I guess we can,” Gareth said awkwardly, “Well, I’m…glad it helped.”

“Purely academic, Gar,” Eddie clarified, feeling he ought to do something, just in case the poor guy did think Eddie was some kind of casanova.

He didn’t mind being the High Priest of Hellfire, king of the misfits, whatever.
But somehow, to have anybody look up to him as someone educated or experienced in, well, adult matters…

It made him feel fake. An impostor.

At the same time, he wasn’t about to declare he was a virgin in the middle of Gareth’s garage, with Mrs. Gareth only precious feet away, no doubt mixing a nice pitcher of Kool-Aid while her General Hospital gave her the good news in the background.

“Research, huh?” Gareth co*cked an eyebrow, not quite meeting his eye.

“Just…trying to figure out what makes some people tick.”

Gareth bit his lip, thumbing his way through the pages in mute appraisal, “…and you found out people were embarrassed?”

“For a start,” he shrugged, “I’m working on a few other theories.”

“More worldbuilding?” Gareth’s puckish, cheeky sneer brought an involuntary belch of laughter from Eddie. He clapped him on the back, “Tell you what, Gar…when I write the thesis, you’ll get a research credit.”

‘Research’ was the picnic table. ‘Stakeout’ might’ve been the better word, but that implied something criminal was going on, and Eddie wasn’t about to give Carver credit for being that interesting, no matter what he thought he was doing.

Then again, there wasn’t really much to stake out. Days went by, and nobody came by the table. It was kind of a drag, and Eddie began to wonder if maybe he was being weird.

Well, he was, but that was hardly news. The real concern was if he was being weird in a way harmful to his own interests? He kept practices up with the band well enough, performed his DM duties with his usual thankless grace, and his customer base had hardly withered now that everyone was out of school with nothing to do.

Still, like clockwork, he found himself turning up at his spot, on the ridge above the gnarly f*ck-tree, during the waning afternoon.

If this was a scientific pursuit, he was going about it completely in the wrong way. A real scientist would be more disciplined, take into account he was observing a living thing with variable behaviors. There was no reason to believe Jason would show up at 5:00 PM or 5:30 or even close to 6:00, just because that was around when he’d shown up last time. A scientist would have put up a trail camera so he wouldn’t have to cool his heels in the dirt all day.

But that would defeat the purpose. Eddie wasn’t studying the mating habits of wolves or chimpanzees or even sexually repressed basketball players. He wasn’t after dusty videotape to scrutinize in a sterile laboratory.

He just wanted to see what Jason would do next. And whenever he came around to the word ‘why’…

Well, that way lay danger.

Eddie was not in the habit of examining his own motives. In every area but the game table, he was a creature of impulse, dictated by the whims of fleeting instants. His imagination was a whirling gun barrel, spraying his cerebral cortex or his medulla oblongata or whichever one dictated basic, life-sustaining duties like eating, sleeping, and trips to the sh*tter with notions that became plans that became schemes that became memories and then faded into oblivion. Often, he acted on a part of these notions, long enough for his fingers to brush some meaning, to derive a fraction of whatever gratification he’d thought he could get out of the enterprise when it had first flitted into his mind. But the big picture…whatever ghost of a motive he’d have formed during his initial rapid-fire marathon through the plot’s life cycle…would always be hopelessly out of reach by then.

At which point, there was nothing left but to search out the next shiny object.

Eddie didn’t like to think of what was bringing him to this spot, what had compelled him to think aloud in front of Gareth and the others, what had kept him lying awake into the wee hours of the morning flipping through a housewife’s primer for slightly-less-dull sex. Sometimes it felt like cruelty…like he was looking for proof of something, some documentary evidence to wield like a cudgel.

But he wasn’t a cruel person. He may not be especially good, and nobody was going to nominate him for sainthood, but Eddie didn’t get any particular glee out of being nasty…

…he didn’t think. Other people might draw their conclusions, that he was an antisocial devil worshiper who hated Elvis and apple pie, but Elvis was an indispensable bridge between Black rock and White pop, and without him there’d be no Metallica, so how could he hold that shambolic junkie any ill will?

And everybody liked pie.

And everyone slept and ate and navigated their way to the sh*tter, maybe not with as much finality as the King, but all the same…

And everyone got a little frustrated sometimes. Got that feeling deep in the pits of themselves, beneath all their childhood etiquette lessons and Sunday school sermons, beneath every parental scold about being struck blind, and every schoolyard rumor about so-and-so with the unsightly wart and the dirty allegations scrawled on dirtier bathroom walls.

Everyone aches. And then it’s just a matter of figuring out what to do about it.

And maybe that’s all it was. Maybe Eddie was just struck by bold, tangible evidence of Jason Carver’s humanity.

Or maybe he was a sick, voyeuristic pervert. He was willing to keep an open mind, like a good scientist.

So he fell asleep at his post, like a paradigm sh*tty scientist. He was aware first of a heavy, stale feeling in his mouth, and a gross stickiness, where sweat had mingled with drool to make a stale plaster on his prone face.

This delightful observation was followed by the crunch of footsteps on the littered ground, so sharp and sudden in the darkness that it may have occurred right at his ear.

Biting back a gasp, Eddie raised his head and looked into the perfect pitch black, stopping just short of ramming his knee into the underside of the table…a neat save. He wasn’t alone, no, but he was still anonymous.

The footsteps were near, but not as close as he’d feared in the split second of his waking. In the next instant, he’d placed the noises: down the ridge, right at the tree.

Hitching his breath, Eddie leaned forward, squinting into the shadows and catching the suggestion of neat yellow hair…a body with its back to him, a few precious feet away.

He was late, but he was here.

Eddie watched in a strange state of tension, suddenly hyper-aware of every strand of hair on his head, every inch of skin on his lanky frame…the cinch of his belt around his waist and the cool cling of his Hellfire shirt against his back. He felt suddenly too heavy, too cumbersome, too…here.

As Jason breathed those strange, ragged breaths that had lived in Eddie’s thoughts for days, all he could think was You’ve f*cked up, buddy-boy, you’ve screwed the pooch, you shouldn’t be here, kiddo-diddo, Jason’s comin’ for ya, you’re doomed, doomed, and God won’t take any mercy on your inverted little soul…

He felt this weird sensation of almost visceral exaltation, like he wasn’t sure whether to throw up or pass out or start singing gibberish, just speaking in tongues like he was at some tent revival.

All he knew for sure was that he couldn’t leave. He’d flown too close to the sun on this one, gone too far on this crazy train, and the conductor wasn’t in the habit of handing out refunds.

Jason’s breathing filled the night around him: an invisible diaphragm closing in around Eddie, pinning him in place at every side. His heart was in his mouth, and he could almost swear Jason’s breath was in his lungs, that’s how suffused the world seemed to be: just Jason and Eddie, an uninvited guest trapped…and not even against his own will…in a prison of Jason’s own making.

A prison that couldn’t have been designed for anyone but Jason himself.

“Come on…” those same tattered pleas Eddie had heard him hiss that first day, low and plaintive, like a child’s whines, “Come on, please, dammit…”

Eddie winced, forgetting for a moment that Jason was only cursing at himself. Or, more accurately, he was cursing the fickle, stubbornly physical part of him that had brought him here against his will, to this dark, dirty, depressing place and, now that it had him right where it wanted him, refused to give.

Eddie hadn’t had any luck bending his muscles to his will, and he’d been trying in the comfort of his own room. But he hadn’t had to do it, not then and not that way. There was nobody and nothing forcing him…certainly not his own psyche, which had enough hobbies as it was.

There was nothing pleasant about what Carver was doing to himself. There was no lusty adolescence, no shame-faced glee about this. This was a mission, a chore, a task…it was something he was being subjected to, almost against his will.

Eddie’s mouth had gone very dry. He was suddenly aware of every inch of the splintery tabletop beneath his palms; of the crickets chorusing around them like an invisible choir; of Jason’s keening, almost doglike whimpers, alternately sounding like an athlete’s exhausted wheezes and a child’s sobs.

And, somewhere in all this, utterly unrooted in this place, in this time, in the scene unfurling right across from him, the thought occurred to Eddie: I need a goddamn cigarette.

And, reader, a cigarette is just what he got. For about two seconds, it was a perfectly normal, almost comforting routine as he reached into his jeans and filched one from the carton, just as easy as back in Gareth’s driveway. There was no reason to hesitate, nothing to mull over. Just a frenzied unease all over his nerve endings and the primeval instinct that he just needed to light up, buddy, really, it isn’t so big a deal, and then this whole thing wouldn’t be so f*cked up and there’d be nothing to feel bad about because there was nothing, he hadn’t done anything, wasn’t doing anything, he’s just an observer, an uninterested observer, and he’d bite the nose off the first person who told him different, that’d really show some people, maybe they’d all decide he’d gone rabid and somebody would shoot him and that was just the kind of ending he’d set himself up for wasn’t it doing things like this, not that he was doing anything he wasn’t it was finefinefine…

He lit his smoke and, in the flash of flame, saw Jason whirl around with a cry.

Oh, Eddie thought, and then, Right, and finally, sh*t.

The clicking of his lighter had been loud as a whip-crack in the torpid, almost trance-like quiet of the night. It would’ve gotten Jason’s attention even without the bright orange glow…which didn’t help a hell of a lot either.

If he were anywhere else…say, watching this from the sidelines, a spectator to his spectating…there’d be something kinda funny about the way Jason spun around, almost falling over and catching himself on the tree. His hair had gotten all disheveled, and his face was flushed and shining. The look in his eyes, though…the frustrations of his futile exertions melting in real time into a frenzied, almost hysterical terror…

Eddie clicked his lighter shut, feeling those eyes bearing into his.

There was an electric, oil-thick silence. Eddie felt like a squirrel or some other neurotic rodent, taking desperate, deluded comfort in the notion that, if he stayed as still and quiet as possible, the big bad wolf would prowl on, utterly ignorant of his presence.

Jason Carver was no wolf. Hawkins Tigers all the way, ra-ra, etc.

“Hello?” this first call was brittle and barely audible, choked with a childish fear of Jason’s own, like he was nursing his own hopes that maybe somehow Eddie hadn’t seen him, that Eddie had never been there, that it was all a huge misunderstanding and they could go their separate ways and never think of this again.

Nice as that notion was, Jason was evidently unconvinced of it.

“Are you there?” this time more aggressively…there was some blood in the emotional tremor jostling his vowels; he was remembering to be angry, “I saw you! You can’t hide. I saw…”

A crunch as Jason took a step, away from the tree and toward the table.

He doesn’t know it’s me, Eddie told himself stupidly, desperately, He saw you for, what, a second? And he was surprised! It doesn’t have to be you; it could be anybody. It’s not over, you’re not f*cked. There’s a way out, goddammit, just…

Another step closer, and Eddie bolted like a televangelist on Tax Day. Again, he hit his shin against the table in his haste to get away and had to bite back the profanity that came to his lips.

Jason called something behind him, something short and angry. He didn’t hear his name…please, don’t let him know, pleasepleaseplease.

He didn’t understand it, he didn’t understand any of it, he didn’t even understand himself. He just knew he had to get away, put enough distance between himself and Carver and the consequences of his own actions as possible.

He sprinted out of the trees, through the deserted playground, across the road, and didn’t stop until he’d reached the chain link fence at the edge of a neighborhood basketball court. The sight of the hoops, eerie and skeletal in the murky glow of failing streetlights, turned his stomach. Eddie tasted bile at the back of his throat and braced himself against the fence, looping his fingers through the metal mesh as he struggled not to puke, not out of any care for his own dignity, but from that same animal irrationality that had dogged him since he’d clicked his lighter on, that had perhaps been steadily asserting itself more and more ever since he first saw Jason shuck his letter-jacket chainmail at the base of that much-abused tree…like if he puked and marked his territory, Carver would be able to track him better, as if Jason didn’t already know who he was and where he lived and as if he didn’t get his jollies sneering at him any day of the week, even when he didn’t have any real reason.

But now…now, Eddie had given him a reason.

With great, labored breaths, Eddie struggled to gather himself. Not even meaning too, he tightened the muscles of his midsection as he inhaled, unclenching as he exhaled.

It didn’t feel good at all…but it did feel better.

Wayne was waiting up when Eddie got home. He looked up at the sound of the door opening, only slightly readjusting himself in his La-Z Boy. He’d evidently taken advantage of the quiet evening to play some of his records for a change: the whole trailer was awash in the syrupy, sleepy twang of graying country boppers.

“Late night?” Wayne asked in a world-weary tone that indicated they both knew the answer but that wasn’t really the question was it, young man?

“Fell asleep,” Eddie answered automatically, closing the door behind him.

“Whipped up some Rice-a-Roni,” and Jesus God, didn’t the place smell like it.

“Sounds delicious,” Eddie claimed, his guts still a roil.

“Got me thinking one thing, I’ll tell you what,” Wayne continued as if he hadn’t said anything, “Damn lucky thing for me you’re still around.”

Into which comment there seemed to be packed the nearest to “Where were you?” they were going to approach tonight. “Where were you?” and “I was worried, but I know you don’t want to hear it” and, if you strained a bit, “I don’t want anything happening to you.”

But Wayne wasn’t the kind of man who said these things aloud, no more than Eddie was the sort of guy who invited those statements.

“Yeah,” Eddie answered in a rushed, distracted voice, breezing right past his uncle and the shadow of his care, “Real blessed.”

He shut himself in his room and dropped onto his bed, feeling like he’d run across the desert at high noon.

He was used to feeling stupid, to feeling like he’d crossed an invisible line…more often than not, he relished crossing those lines, just for the catharsis of seeing people get so surprised when the thing they’d christened a freak did something freakish.

Feeling stupid was fine…feeling dirty, that was different.

He lay where he’d dropped, face buried in a much-depressed pillow, feeling his heart hammering against his ribs and thinking of Jason’s face: exultation to surprise to terror to fury in a second.

In the next room, Wayne’s old man music bleated on its rootin’-tootin’ progress. Good ol’ Whisperin’ Bill Anderson, whisperin’ no more, hard as a hammer against the insides of Eddie’s skull.

“Dig that ditch, boy, fill it up/I’m wanting you to understand…”

He let out a long, labored sigh, right into the musty sourness of his unwashed sheets, thinking it might not be so bad if he just knocked himself out, ruptured a blood vessel, just died in his sleep so he wouldn’t have to go out in the morning with eyes on the back of his head, looking out for snipers in the shrubbery, same as always but this time…this time…because he’d done something.

So much for Martyr Munson. He’d call ahead to the fine uniforms at Indiana State Prison to save him a cell next to his Dad if he thought he’d live to see the bars.

“The only way to straighten out a guy like you/Is to get a little dirt on his hands…”

He was not made a victim of mob, vigilante, or cosmic justice the next day. Or the next or, even, the one after that.

He avoided the picnic table, though, just in case. If his associates noticed anything unusual about his behavior, they didn’t say anything.

Jeff wrote a new song. Greg tried to add a bass solo. Gareth wanted to hear it played back.

Life went on. Eddie went almost a whole week without thinking of basketball, swapping The Guide to Good Sex with the one for dungeon masters, and only ever working out his pelvic floor during bathroom trips.

His summer of sexual skullduggery had been preempted as a public service. Eddie would have to give the censors this one.

But then…the pool.

Eddie, being a creature of the night and also irrepressibly Polish, avoided the pool as a matter of principle. He’d never even learned to swim, and he couldn’t even pull the old ‘we was po’” card. His folks had taken him out to Sattler’s Quarry to show him the ropes, and Eddie had thrown a fit so hard spectators suspected attempted patricide. For all Eddie knew, the memory still brought a warm, ornery smile to Frank Munson’s lips in his cell.

Still, in a Midwestern tarpit like Hawkins, the community pool was practically a society symposium during the summer months. And, like the symposiums of ancient days, it was crawling with hedonistic suckers eager to burn their drachmas on mood-altering substances.

Eddie conducted his business from a shabby deck chair he was probably supposed to pay for, but that nobody seemed to care enough about to police.

Apathy: truly one of the wonders of our evolution as a human race. How could Eddie have ever been so screwed up to take an active interest in the lives of others? What a sucker. No wonder he was still in high school.

Much easier to just sit on his uncomfortably sticky plastic perch, taking money from people who thought him little more than a slightly unnerving carnival sideshow.

Still…there was a certain kind of smarminess to these poolside dealings he just never felt at his haunt behind the high school. Something about the crowd around him…splashing kids and suntanning housewives and sweaty seniors marinating in their sunscreen…made the whole thing feel more explicit. Not so much the odds somebody would see…the old truism held forth, about being invisible in a crowd, thanks again, apathetic human condition. But doing this kind of thing…dealing dope, whatever…in public felt…portentous? That was a word, maybe?

It felt portentous, sure. It felt like calling forward to many more summers, and other seasons too, by this pool and in the park and in any number of parking lots. It felt like a tacit acknowledgment that this would be the rest of his life.

And Eddie, who felt no shame for doing what he could to get by, nonetheless didn’t want to look too hard at what he was getting by into.

Almost 20, and 20 didn’t even mean what it was supposed to. 20 meant getting a bitch of a burn on the back of his neck so he could supplement the grocery money this month, so he could get away from the books he was supposed to have all read up for September…

…so he didn’t have to think about the kind of trouble he got up to when he wasn’t selling weed to pleebs.

Alas, in the grand heroic tradition, the more the hero avoids the call of his own destiny, the louder that old nag gets. Eddie was just winding up a transaction to a gawky ’bout-ta-be sophom*ore who would’ve smoked fresh-mown crabgrass if Eddie hadn’t been such a man of the people…

“Now, don’t you go blowing that all in one place,” Eddie was just telling his customer, “This stuff doesn’t grow on trees,” he winked and the kid furrowed his brow in an expression of overwrought perplexity.

“…because it’s a weed, right?”

Eddie blinked, “Sure. Because it’s a weed. I did an irony. How funny.”

“That’s not what ‘irony’ is,” he sort of sniffed the bag, like held it up to his face and crunched it against his nostrils the way an old lady might assess the firmness of a cantaloupe at the grocery store.

Eddie decided he would, in fact, blow it all in one place and consequently plunge 40,000 leagues into the dead zone, but he wasn’t anybody’s therapist.

Dr. Ed’s Guide to Good Trips, he thought, inexplicably, imagining a glossy paperback bearing his grinning visage, his hair all permed like a matron’s and a phone cord coquettishly coiled around one of his beringed fingers.

Nice work if you could get it. If you could stomach it. If you could survive the…

He cast his eyes across the pool and found Jason Carver there.

Was this irony? He ought to ask the amateur pothead he was sealing the deal with. Eddie was prepared to be surprised.

Jason was dressed for the pool, attiring himself in typical yacht club garb, which was always rich (Pardonnez ze punz, messieurs et mesdames, but ve get a leetle zilly ven ze doodee ve have made refuzes to flush, iz eet not so? Alors!) since the nearest yacht in Hawkins was the paint-and-plaster affair presiding over Hole 7 at the mini-golf course. So-clad, in peachy pink canvas shorts and a chambray work shirt so pale it was almost white, he assisted his leggy-reddy girlfriend into a deck chair close enough to the water for a spontaneous dip but far enough away to be safe from chlorinated splashings.

Chrissy Cunningham was pretty as ever, her hair tied up in a high ponytail that left just enough for an attractive sweep down toward her eyes. She wore a bright blue bathing suit, with a gingham skirt tied over the bottom piece, presumably to preserve some modesty, though it only made the elegant lines of those alabaster legs more noticeable.

More to the point, her color scheme perfectly complemented her boyfriend’s.

It was a perfect tableau, thought Eddie, who had never used the word ‘tableau’ before in his life. They were, that is, a perfect couple. You could almost feel the warm, confident assurance of their union across the water, fierce as any number of UV rays, and just as dangerous to the sensitive creatures of the netherworld, who had ventured this way to collect their disreputable currency, fully aware that this was no welcome country for their sort.

Watching Jason help his girl into her seat and smile that high-wattage grin at whatever sweet nonsense she was whispering into his ear, there was no indication this was the same person who’d slouched, with the guilty bearing of a too-young thief, in the overgrown weeds behind the school he was supposed to be next in line to lord over, to exorcise nameless demons of frustration, of lust…of want.

Eddie, already sweltering in his jeans and a seasonably inappropriate long-sleeved shirt, felt the air go stale in his lungs. Even now, in public, with no sordid scene to gawk at, he felt like a trespasser, tainted by dint of his own ill-gotten knowledge. He’d bitten the apple off that high maintenance tree and found it mealy, sour, and full of worms.

Sorry, bub…no refunds.

All of this couldn’t have lasted more than a couple of seconds. The sophom*ore was still sniffing his recent purchase, as if trying to pregame via psychological suggestion. Rationally, Eddie knew the smart thing to do would be to look away, to pretend he’d never noticed, to conclude his business, get up and get the hell away before it was too late, to remember that none of this would’ve happened in the first place if he hadn’t been such a hopeless frickin’-frackin’ lookie-loo…

A second’s hesitation, and a second too late. Jason straightened up (the muscles of his legs were lean and well-toned…Of course they would be, Eddie thought hysterically, He keeps such a dedicated workout regime), one hand still lightly positioned on Chrissy’s shoulder, the corners of his mouth still warm with the traces of a smile…

And he raised his head and saw Eddie, staring at him.

The smile faded.

Eddie, improvising wildly, lifted one hand and twiddled his fingers in a wave.

Jason said something Eddie couldn’t hear over the general chorus of human merriment, probably, “Munson!” if “Munson” were a type of profanity, which given the family’s run of luck these last 200 or so years, maybe it was.

Chrissy, balancing a pair of pink-rimmed shades on her brow, gave Jason a curious look, and then followed his attention to Eddie, whereupon she graduated to ‘concerned’, reaching out a hand to lay on Jason’s arm…

Too late.

Jason pulled away before Chrissy could so much as touch him, moving forward as if to come around the pool…

Eddie had seen enough. He sprang to his feet, knocking over the deck chair, and his customer in the bargain (“Hey! Are there cops? You see a cop? Is that it? A cop…”) and ran for it. His ankle caught in the plastic snare of the upturned chair legs, but he pulled it free at some cost to the already terminal hem of his jeans. People were staring now, but he couldn’t take any heart in the promise of witnesses. Jason could drown him in the pool, and they would declare Eddie had perished despite Carver’s heroic attempts at CPR.

But it was fine, fine, really, because he had a head start, he was all the way on the other side of the…

A tremendous splash behind him, backed up by the squeals of protesting swimmers.

“Oh sh*t…” Eddie breathed, not wasting the time to turn around.

But it was as it appeared. Jason had taken the middle way, diving right into the pool and swimming across instead of running around.

This was not about to be a peace negotiation.

“Munson!” he called again, feet on concrete again as the masses scattered like birds at his advance.

Eddie wasn’t watching where he was going anymore. He’d probably dive off a cliff if it presented a speedy exit, if Carver wasn’t driven to the point of self-destruction in his determination to revenge his indignity on him.

Unfortunately, there were no cliffs handy. Hawkins remained as flat as it was beige and, whatever the pretensions of the Loch Nora crowd, they didn’t maintain the type of public pool with dips, falls, and whirlpools.

Actually, this pool was such a cheap slab of cement that the soulless chain-link fence was barely six feet from the water on this side, which fact Eddie was roughly forced to confront when he came up against it, shaking the whole thing on its creaky moorings.

“Aw, fricky-f*ck-sh*ttin-christin…” he probably could’ve riffed on this subject for a couple more verses if Jason hadn’t caught up to him, grabbing him roughly by the shoulders with cold, starkly wet hands and whirling him around as easily as if he were a stick figure.

Sticks, stones, pelvic floors, he thought hysterically, imagining the whole of his figure just crumpling into splintery detritus until there was nothing left but his pelvic floor which, despite his recent acquaintance with the entity, figured in his mind as a kind of silver disc, the size and shape of a vinyl record, supported on the bead-small tip of a needle, always a half second away from tipping, one way or the other, into oblivion.

Jason tightened his grip on Eddie’s shoulders, a muscle working in his neck, his eyes blazing as he spoke through gritted teeth, “You wanna say something to me, Munson?”

Eddie was thinking too quickly to make any sense. This must be what the prophets of ancient days felt like: a thousand contradictory, nonsensical notions flitting through his head at a manic clip, each and every one inconsequential on its own, but frightening enough in their totality that they’d have to mean something to somebody, and nothing good to most people.

Certainly, not to the inquisitor of the moment, never mind the small audience gathering around to watch the impending ritual dismemberment.

Finally, he cleared his throat and, his mouth dry as sawdust, formed an answer to Jason’s question: “…greetings.”

“You think this is funny?” Jason shook him once, briefly, his hands were soaking through Eddie’s shirt, chilling the skin there.

“Jason!” somebody…Chrissy?…called from close quarters, “Jason, what…”

“I don’t like being made fun of,” Jason spoke over his girlfriend, as easily as if she wasn’t there, “So if there’s something you think you have to say, you’d better just say it straight out.”

This was probably a leading statement, and it invited a whole host of speculation as to what exactly Jason thought was going on here, but Eddie didn’t really have time to psychoanalyze his presumptive rival, nor was in he any presence of mind to peruse his mental Monster Manuel for tips and tricks gleaned over the last several days of pondering ol’ J.C’s motives.

So, at length, feeling the hot staleness of Jason’s breath (distinct, sour-sweet odor of New co*ke, distinctly different from its precursor species, yet near enough to pass muster in all but the closest quarters) and the cold slickness of his hands on him and the hushed anticipation of staring eyes against them both, Eddie answered, haltingly, “…are you sure about that?”

Jason pulled back, not all the way, but enough for Eddie, at least, to notice. His face paled and his eyes widened. Even over the nervous hum of their audience, Eddie could hear him catch his breath, sounding vulgarly close to his desperate hitching against the f*ck-tree below his picnic table.

There was a single fevered moment of unknowing, where Eddie couldn’t be sure if he’d pacified the hostile or flashed a big red sheet in his face. As it turned out, however, fate intervened, in the form of a bleached-blonde guardian spirit, heralding himself with the clarion of trumpets.

‘Trumpets’, in this case, being an obnoxiously keen whistle, followed by a bored, drawling, “For sh*t’s sake.”

Billy Hargrove, lifeguard on duty, padded his way along to them, his whistle bouncing carelessly off his pectoral shelf with such obnoxiously eye-catching rhythm it couldn’t possibly be unrehearsed. It certainly had a way with the crowd, whose attention was redirected to the bronzino lightning rod who’d insinuated himself into the current entertainment.

“Hands to yourselves, kiddies,” Billy said dispassionately, his expression unreadable behind his sunglasses, “It’s on the sign at the entrance, in the fine print between ‘NO SPLASHING’ and ‘NO SPITTING’.”

“He…” Jason began, but stopped, “Billy…” his tone took on a certain petulant puckishness as he appealed to his former teammate, “It was…he…”

“If you’re gonna say ‘he started it’, Carver,” Billy sank his teeth into the surname, for no other reason Eddie could imagine than that Jason had presumptively used Billy’s given name, “I had the distinct pleasure of watching you doggie paddle your way across my pool like somebody had left a pile of crisp, clean, tax-free bills on the other side,” he cast Eddie a disparaging look, “Word to the wise, you’re being shortchanged.”

“He’s right,” offered Eddie, “I’m virtually worthless.”

“Now, I didn’t sign on to this job to play babysitter,” Billy continued in a world-weary, businesslike manner, “But I did figure maybe I’d have to save some three-year-old from drowning, give the Heimlich to an excited old broad who’d had too many hot dogs before taking a dip…you know, typical small town hero baggage. I was not looking to break up schoolyard piss-fits. There’s nothing heroic about that and, frankly, I feel kind of like a killjoy for robbing my public of their bloodsport, but…” he spread his arms wide (a few ladies in the crowd leaned forward, presumably to take in whatever this gesture was doing to Billy’s wingspan), “The noble office of Kerly County Parks and Recreation expects me to keep any blood from being spilled on this hallowed ground, and I expect to earn my money like an honest citizen, so if you’re going to kill each other, do it out on the fairgrounds like self-respecting white trash.”

Jason curdled like spoiled milk. Eddie had to assume it was the ‘white trash’ thing. White trash didn’t wear pink shorts and chambray work shirts. They did, however, beat up guys at swimming pools, and they absolutely engaged in carnal acts of pleasure in the great outdoors, and therein lay one of the great internal contradictions of Hawkins, Indiana.

Jason unhanded him as if he were radioactive. Eddie, who’d been roughed up plenty of times by preps, punks, and pharisees of all kinds couldn’t recall ever being dropped like he was radioactive.

Jason dropped his hands to his sides, fidgeting with the cuffs of his shirt as he did, “I’m not done with you.”

“Add me to the list, then.”

Jason’s eyes blazed and he motioned as if to lunge, but Billy’s eyes hovered over his shades, and he stopped.

“Seriously, Carver, I think I speak for everyone when I say you’d have a better time just unclenching.”

Later, Eddie would ponder the wisdom of this statement. In the moment, though, with his heart still racing from the giddy ‘Am I really getting away with this?’ of it all, the prevailing feeling in his mind was “He started it.”

It didn’t have to be a fight. He didn’t want a fight. For what it was worth, he almost never did, but when a fight came to this door…well, he wasn’t gonna lay down and take it on the chin, was he? That was the Wayne way and, well as it had served him, Eddie was every bit his father’s son.

Jason gritted his teeth and stepped back, turning on his heel and sulking away. Chrissy hovered in his wake, looking lingeringly at Eddie, her mouth working as if to muster up some kind of apology.

Eddie felt a pang of pity. She really did seem like a nice girl, and she was in the minority of girls around this place who didn’t treat him like he had leprosy, gonorrhea, and an ovation’s worth of claps all rolled into one. It was weird that she was decent…and old-fashioned…enough to feel she had to apologize on behalf of her man. It was 1985, for chrissakes: a woman had just almost been Vice President, 525 electoral votes notwithstanding.

So he just smiled at her, gave her a little thumbs’ up…no hard feelings. It wasn’t her fault Jason was so tightly wadded.

…right? If anything, she was a ready-made solution to that problem.

Unless she wasn’t up for it, but then…

No. It didn’t click. If Chrissy was holding out between the sheets, Jason might be frustrated, but he wouldn’t be embarrassed. Maybe Eddie was oversimplifying it, going out of his way to make this a drama of two: Jason on the inside, and Eddie on the fringe, looking in.

Whatever the truth may be, Chrissy gave one of those sweet, soft smiles and demurred as gracefully as one could under the circ*mstances.

With Jason gone, the plebeians quickly lost interest in the drama…Eddie distinctly heard some kid go “Oh, man!” and imagined money changing hands.

Billy, unamused, waved a dismissive arm at the crowd, “Alright, folks, fun’s over. You want to see bloodsports, I’ve got it on good authority they have dog fights at the Hideout. It’s a crime, but that’s America. Spay your pets and neuter your husbands, but whatever you do, don’t do it at my pool…”

The bored, sonorous dismissal had its intended effect, and the crowd recessed, returning to the water or their chairs. A few…mostly Billy’s female admirers…lingered to pore over the lifeguard admiringly, in evident approval of his command of his domain.

“Your pool?” Eddie co*cked an eyebrow. Billy looked at him, expression unchanging, “From 9:00 - 5:00, Tuesdays and Thursdays. I split the bill with Heather Holloway on the weekends, but she knows the score.”

“‘Disgusted public servant’ is a great look on you, Hargrove…”

“Save it, Munson.”

“…seriously, I think Karen Wheeler over there was one whistle away from forgetting the sanctity of her marriage.”

Billy’s indifferent visage cracked long enough for him to look over his shoulder to where Mrs. Wheeler’s platinum perm was peeking out over the top of a Soap Opera Digest (that new ’do could give covergirl “Melody Thomas Scott”, whoever that was, a run for her money), “What’d you know about women, Munson?”

“More and more every day,” Eddie replied easily, “I’ve been doing some reading.”

“Those dungeon books are racier than I thought.”

“While that may be, I do have other interests.”

“Flipping through Mr. America’s diary, huh?” there was a note of vague humor in his voice: that satisfied, almost predatory smile on his face, the kind that made Eddie glad he was on Billy’s side, or at least near enough to the median not to be a target.

“Now, who do you take me for, Billy?”

“The guy who asked me about Jason Carver out of the blue-balls nowhere last week.”

“Touché.”

“What’re you doing, Munson?” Billy asked it with his usual air of self-superior detachment, but his eyes glinted over the tops of his shades and Eddie liked to think he wasn’t so deluded as to be imagining something like human interest there.

“That’s a very philosophical question to be asking in your swim trunks.”

“Carver may be all bark, but he can yap loud enough to bring some mean biters to bail him out…” he co*cked his head to the side, “And I won’t always be there to call the dogs off.”

“Why, Billy…” Eddie grinned, that giddy dizziness still hanging over him like a warm, gauzy shroud, “It almost sounds like you give half a rat’s tail.”

Billy ran his tongue over his teeth, “Don’t jack yourself off too hard, Munson…”

“What an expression.”

“…it just so happens I’m very attached to that 40% discount.”

“That wasn’t a lifetime deal.”

“Given I just saved your life…”

“Exaggeration.”

“Quality of life means something, Munson. And we both know you weren’t built for wheelchair living.”

“Yeah, with my luck they’d stick one of those bags to me and I’d never be able to piss unassisted again…” he co*cked an eyebrow, “So 30%?”

“35.”

“Sold to the lifeguard of my dreams,” he bowed graciously. Billy rolled his eyes, “Seriously, though…what are you doing to him?”

Eddie regarded him vaguely, imagining for just a second throwing caution to the wind and taking on a new ally. Billy wasn’t the most steadfast of potential companions, of course, but there was something about him all the same. He was just as much in Eddie’s world to talk to him but removed enough from it to maintain some healthy skepticism of his various flights, fancies, and fanaticisms.

In the end, though…nothing doing. This wasn’t about Eddie and Billy…when push came to shove, this had all begun because Eddie had discovered something he shouldn’t have.

Three can keep a secret, if one is dead.

So he shrugged, the damp imprint of Jason’s hands clinging to him through his shirt, “Nothing at all, Billy-Boy. Our Jason is doing it all to himself.”

He came to the picnic table that afternoon, not for any practical reason, but because he had a feeling that he would find someone there waiting for him, and it was better to walk to the fated placed with head held high than to run and hide from the inevitable.

“Just what I get,” he announced himself wearily, “Forgetting the Gone Fishin’ sign.”

Jason had been pacing beside the table, his hands deep in the pockets of his letterman jacket, which he had changed back into (jeans too, no less) despite the heat of the day. At Eddie’s greeting, he stopped mid-turn, his face set into a stony, fearsome scowl. Wordlessly, he advanced…

“Hey!” Eddie protested, whirling to his left to avoid Jason’s right just before it could connect, “Now, wait…”

Silent, Jason aimed a gut punch, which Eddie ducked, scrambling on hands and knees toward the table, “Look, Jason…”

Jason reached for the collar of Eddie’s shirt, which Eddie yanked away at the last second, vaulting over the table (“Awsh*tagain!” as he rammed his knee again), dropping to the ground and, seeing Jason lifting one leg out of his peripheral vision, dropping to the dirt and sliding like Willie Mays back under the table…

Jason grabbed his ankle. Eddie squealed in undignified fashion, and sort of kicked Jason in the head, whatever. Jason let out a muffled curse, Eddie emerged from under the table in time to see Jason, one hand pressed to his lip, look up at him over the other side.

“Ach!” Eddie yelped, dropping back below the table. Jason copied, looking at him from the opposite side.

“God, you’re fast.”

They went through a couple more iterations of this vaudeville farce bit, popping up and getting below their respective sides of the table before Eddie tired of playing chicken and, on the way down, gasped, “sh*t, the cops!”

Remarkably, this worked, and Jason looked over his shoulder, giving Eddie enough time to dash down the ridge…

“Munson!” Carver was fast, though, and plenty motivated. He caught up with him before long, grabbing his arm…

Eddie dug his heels in the ground, reaching behind him and catching the lapel of Jason’s letterman jacket. Jason twisted in Eddie’s not-particularly-tensile grip like a fish on the line, and for a few moments Eddie’s world was green felt and white imitation leather: the livery of Hawkins’ bold young Knights of the Gelded Tiger. At some point, Jason shrugged out of the jacket and, in that same fluid movement, threw himself, newly unencumbered, against Eddie. His back came up, hard, against something thin and rough…a tree, he thought wildly and then, realizing where he was in proximity to the table…

That tree.

Jason had him pinned by the arms. Without the unnecessary bulk of his jacket, he seemed paradoxically larger. Maybe it was because his clothes…that periwinkle and pink polo his jacket had been covering…seemed so small on him. It wasn’t like he was a particularly big guy…actually, he was kind of short for a basketball player, but maybe his position wasn’t one of the ones that needed to be tall. Tommy Hagan was pretty tiny; actually, he was built sort of like a pre-teen girl, and if he hadn’t so successfully attached himself to Steve Harrington in ancient times, he probably would’ve been marooned on the same Rock of Solitude as Eddie, except Eddie doubted Tommy knew how to do ability rolls, so he might have been even worse off.

None of this was important, except that Jason’s bronzed, leanly muscled arms were gripping Eddie, his knee placed inches away from Eddie’s own bread basket, as if prepared to drive right into his soft spot if he even thought about moving. Jason’s expression was hot and hateful, his face that same scary fire engine red it had been the last time they’d been in these parts. That sense of furious, directionless frustration had come back in full force…

Except Eddie wagered Jason finally had something to direct his frustrations toward.

“Give me one reason I shouldn’t kill you right now,” his voice shook with barely restrained rage. Though he was barely taller than Eddie (shorter, if you counted the hair and Eddie’s unfortunate developmental quirk of going about on tippy-toes) and not particularly buff, Eddie felt this odd, primal flash of fear. He’d gotten his ass kicked his fair share of times…if they awarded medals for valor in the face of juvenile shock troops, Ronnie Reagan would have to give him a nice shiny bauble to display in the shadowbox next to Wayne’s Silver Star.

But this was different. Psychologically, it felt different. There were no witnesses here, no gawking crowd eager to see the freak get his comeuppance for his freakish ways. No audience, nobody to perform for…and Jason had nothing to prove to anybody. This was personal in a way Eddie had learned most bullying (if one liked to call it ‘bullying’; Eddie didn’t…it felt like kids’ stuff to still call it that and, as trapped as he seemed to be in his childhood, conceding that he still had bullies was a step too far) just wasn’t.

Reader, he giggled.

Jason co*cked his head to the side, his brow furrowing perplexedly, “Something funny?”

“Yes,” Eddie answered, “I mean no! No, it’s not…” he shook his head, dislodging a leaf which must’ve gotten caught in his hair at some point during their little Benny Hill chase, “Blech…sorry, sorry…” the leaf had fallen into his face and almost into his mouth. Jason, disgusted, swatted it away, his fingertips lightly brushing Eddie’s face as he did.

“Thanks,” Eddie said automatically. Jason withdrew his hand, looking briefly at it as if afraid it had come away diseased.

“I should kill you,” Jason continued, “I should break your stupid pigeon neck…stop laughing…”

“I’m not!” Eddie laughed, alas, his eyes watering, “I’m really not. It’s…it’s not laughing. None of this is funny, Jason, believe me, it’s just…nervous reaction.”

“Oh, you’re nervous?”

“As you can imagine.”

“You should be!”

“Thank you for that.”

“I don’t know what you thought you were doing. I don’t know what kind of sick, perverted sh*t…” he really sank his teeth into the profanity there, with all the venomous punch of someone who doesn’t do very much cussing and so must make every instance a four-star event, “…gets you going and, honestly, I don’t want to know.”

“Good philosophy.”

“What’d you want, huh?” he demanded, “Money? Couple of bucks in an unmarked envelope so you can buy some action figures…”

“They’re called miniatures, first of all…”

“You thought, maybe, you’d have a better time of it this year if you had something to hold over my head…”

“Jace, buddy…”

“I’m not your buddy.”

“…you’re giving me too much credit,” he smiled lazily, “I don’t think that far ahead. It’s a wonder of the world when I figure out the dinner menu before 3:00.”

Jason’s grip didn’t loosen, but his face relaxed, even if by a few degrees, “…so what?”

“So, you and me, J. C…” he shrugged, catching Jason off guard as he readjusted his grip on his arms, “We’re just victims of circ*mstance. Two lost boys in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Jason didn’t say anything to this at first, just sizing Eddie up with something like disgusted disbelief. In the treetops, a bird made a ‘whoop-whoop’ noise: one of those low, baying hoots that punctuated long summer afternoons with mournful question marks.

“You really expect me to believe that?”

“I mean, what’s the alternative, right?” Eddie pointed out, “That I followed you here…to my spot, mind you…”

“Your spot?”

“Oh, come on, like you don’t know where Hawkins’ premiere one-stop-shop for mood altering substances is? I serve all kinds, so it’s got to have come up in some locker room gossip sesh or other…” he paused, “But I guess you don’t hang around much around the lockers, huh?”

Jason’s grip tightened and Eddie leaned back, “It’s cool! Neither do I.”

“You were here,” Jason insisted, “That night, under the table…”

“With my Camels in their sheath,” Eddie intoned, “I’m the part that’s underneath, I heard everything…” at Jason’s blank expression, he elaborated, “Oh, it’s, like, from a musical. The dude that did West Side Story. They did it on TV when I was a kid for, like, the bicentennial, and my Mom had it on tape…”

“No, I know what it is.”

“You do?”

Jason evidently didn’t want to linger on this topic too long, “Not just that night. Before. The other day. You were there.”

Eddie thought of bursting into another Sondheim chorus, the kind of thing which would get him crucified by the guys (or, well, Greg) but which might have a pacifying effect on the well-heeled Jason, certainly more than an acapella version of For Whom the Bell Tolls. But somewhere between banging his knee on the table and Jason’s charmingly sincere naiveté about choosing Eddie’s main haunt as the site of his one-on-one time, he decided to be truthful in this. Not that law and order counted much with the letter-jacket crowd, who floated above many of society’s laws, and made their own to suit them as needed…

But Jason Carver wasn’t just another letter jacket, no more than Billy Hargrove had ever been. Billy, Eddie could win over with favors, with jokes, with a common understanding of the difference between metals ‘power’ and ‘hair’. But Eddie decided he could win Jason over too, enough to get out of this situation with all his teeth. It would take a different touch…

…in a manner of speaking.

So he answered, in a resigned, ‘Oopsy-daisy’ cadence, “You got me,” and, because he couldn’t resist, “I was hidden all the time, it was easier to climb, I was younger th…”

“I knew it!” Jason spat, “That day, at Sal’s, when you looked at me like that, like you knew something…”

“Okay, full disclosure, that was an accident.”

“You went back,” said Jason, “You saw me once…fine, it was an accident, whatever. But you came back, after dark, and you waited, and you hid, and then you lit a stupid…” with a sudden dart of motion, Jason reached out, groping around in Eddie’s jeans pocket. Eddie yelped like he’d been scalded, “Hey, hey, watch it…” squirming around desperately, but ultimately unable to keep Jason from fishing out his cigarette carton.

“You lit a cigarette,” Jason finished, out of breath, waving the mostly empty case before Eddie’s eyes, “Knowing I would hear, that I would see, because you…you sick, pervert freak…wanted me to know you were there.”

Eddie looked at the box, then back to Jason, then answered manfully, “No I didn’t.”

“What?”

“Believe it or not, I just really wanted a cigarette. I know, it’s a bad habit, and something tells me you’re not very compassionate about habits…”

“Go to hell.”

“I mean, probably.”

“You want me to believe you didn’t do that to mess with me?”

“Why would I?” Eddie challenged, “Because I’m a pervert?”

Jason was quiet, breathing heavily through his nose. Eddie, aware of his heart racing in what suddenly seemed too-small confines (Was this what jocks felt like all the time? No wonder they were so frustrated…), struggled to gather words, “Look, if I was a pervert, why would I interrupt the show? Right? Why wouldn’t I just sit quietly and enjoy my front row seats to the hands-free hootenanny?”

“Shut up.”

“Maybe, Jason, I’m one of those sympathetic suckers who cover their eyes when the stand-up comic starts bombing right out the gate, or when the amp shorts out a second into the first set…been there, done that; I can tell you, it isn’t fun… Maybe, Jason, my poor little heart couldn’t take seeing you struggle your way through the night’s entertainment…”

Jason crushed the Camel carton in his fist. It crunched in on it itself with a noise like a bulldozer. A bird took flight from a nearby, less defiled tree. As Jason’s fingers closed around the box, the last, solitary cigarette dropped pathetically from out of the bottom. Unthinking (or, well, thinking about nothing but how Melvald’s jacked all the prices since the new mall opened up), Eddie reached out with one hand to catch the cigarette, which landed neatly between two fingers…

Which brushed the front of Jason’s jeans. Before Eddie had even realized what happened, Jason let out a gasp as though scalded, reeling backward on the balls of his feet. Eddie drew back, dropping the cig for all his trouble.

“Oh, hey, man…” he could hear the blood roaring in his ears, could almost see the rest of the party around the table gawking in oafish horror, silently communicating “Did he really just do that?” as they took wagers on how f*cked that sanctimonious show-off Edward the Banished was this time.

Pretty f*cked, Eddie thought, looking at Jason’s red, shocked face and thinking no saving throw in the world could help him now.

“I’m sorry,” he tried, tripping over his words, “Really, Jason, I didn’t mean…I just…smokes are expensive, you know? Well, you probably don’t know that, but they are, and…”

At which point, Jason sank to his knees in the dirt and screamed.

“Jesus!” Eddie yelped and went ignored. He didn’t even process that, in order to execute this dramatic drop, Jason had of course let him go. The whole thing had happened so fast, had come out of nowhere…as if a switch had been flipped, turning Jason’s anger inside out, to this strange, unfiltered…

Despair?

And it wasn’t so much a scream, even as it did prompt whichever birds were still spying on them (Eddie must be a horrible influence) to fly off. The noise Jason made as he sank, slowly at first and then picking up speed once his knees had dipped below about 90 degrees, (How’d you like me now, Mrs. Petrie? … Yeah, I’m pretty grossed out too.) was less a scream and more a low, ragged moan. Not angry, but…sad. Every shredded utterance from Jason’s straining throat seemed reluctant, hateful, and dejected. Once he’d gotten to his knees, the sound faded to a croak, and then a whimper. His hands, palm-down in the dirt, formed fists, and he breathed, in and out, as if he’d just come out from under water, his breaths choked and clogged with…

Tears.

“Jason…” Eddie began awkwardly, pretty certain this was absolutely the wrong thing to do, that he should just hold his peace and exit stage right while this headcase was distracted, “Um, Jason, are you…”

He reached out, tentatively, to put his hand on his shoulder, but Jason swatted him away, not even looking up as he ordered, “Don’t…touch me.”

Eddie withdrew his hand, opening and closing it rapidly, startled by the sudden vehemence of Jason’s command.

“…okay,” he said at length, in a suffused, smothered voice, as though speaking through a wad of cotton. He looked back down the length of the overgrown, narrow path that led back to the schoolyard and, beyond it, civilization. Probably, the smart thing to do would be to hotfoot it now, just take the opportunity while Jason was distracted or overwhelmed or offering up his accounting to his god or whatever exactly this ritual was.

His feet didn’t move. Dammit, it wasn’t even fun anymore; it never had been fun, really, but fascinating, and it was still fascinating, in the way a triple-car pile-up was fascinating, or a two-headed calf, or a…

He was running out of adjectives, similes, and metaphors, which was pretty grim, since Eddie had the surest feeling he was trapped in a super on-the-nose allegory for something. There was probably a real self-satisfied interwar Englishman smoking a pipe at a typewriter somewhere, doing absolutely profane things to the keys as he sketched out his elaborate analog of the human condition for the high school students of latter decades to fall asleep to.

“…what do you want?”

Jason’s question brought Eddie out of his reverie. He blinked sharply, at first not sure if he hadn’t imagined Jason speaking, considering he wasn’t supposed to touch him and all. You’d think that would mean he wasn’t supposed to exist here, now, or maybe anywhere else.

Unsure what to do and feeling absurdly like he’d been put on the spot with a pop quiz, Eddie returned the question, “…um. What do you want?”

Jason made this weird, choked sobbing-laughing sound. Eddie began to angle his neck down, the better to see if he was actually crying, but stopped himself at the last minute.

“A hundred,” Jason said finally, his voice cracking between ‘hun’ and ‘dread’ in just the kind of way that would’ve been casus belli for his green-jacket contemporaries to turn some offending pubescent underclassman into a stain on the gym floor.

Eddie hadn’t been an underclassman in a while, though; Jason’s green jacket was lying in the dirt; and the gym was closed for the summer.

“A hundred…” Eddie began, “What? Virgins?”

This was only half a joke. At this rate, nothing Jason said would surprise him and, hysterically, weirdly, treacherously, he had this odd desire to make Carver laugh. Strange enough in itself, sure…you’d think, fair reader, that our hero would be delighted at making the gallant knight, that false paladin of the so-called purer faith, crumple into a fit of tears. Surely, he’d entertained similar fantasies about a succession of smug, arrogant jocks-in-ardor in his time…

There was plenty of ardor to be found here. And the smug Carver had been brought, quite literally, to his knees by his own too-human tendency toward it. It felt like a parody, or some sort of skit, like that old Candid Camera show…that any minute the hidden film crew would burst out and declare he’d just been made a fool of on national television.

But Jason Carver wasn’t that creative. Eddie didn’t need to know him well to know that.

“Dollars,” Jason looked at him with rheumy distaste, his eyes shining with a sort of valorous sense of martyrly persecution entirely at odds with the petulant vibrato underlying his words, “A hundred dollars.”

“For what?”

“For you. To…keep quiet.”

Eddie let this sink in. Another swallow, or perhaps the same one, did the whoop-de-whoop thing again, which was inappropriately whimsical, all things considered.

“You want to pay me?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t need the money.”

Eddie winced despite himself. Jason’s way of reminding him, down and debased as he was, that he could still stick the needle in.

There’s nothing to feel bad about, some yap-happy shoulder-top devil hissed into his ear, He’s a self-important dickhe*d, and you’re dirt on the underside of his Sperry’s.

$100 wasn’t nothing either. At the same time, though…

He drew his lower lip in, “That would make me a blackmailer.”

“Oh, and you’re too good for it, huh?” Jason tried to put some bite in it, Eddie could tell, but his voice was shredded and tired. He had $100, sure, but he was powerless all the same.

Eddie, acknowledging this, somehow didn’t feel empowered. What a rip.

“So…what?” he began eventually, “You’re gonna write me a check, or something?”

“You have a bank account?”

“What do you think?”

Jason scoffed or sighed or sobbed again, it was hard to tell, “Just…cash.”

“Great idea. Off the books,” he took a step back, shoving his hands into his pockets with a determinedly careless attitude, “What was that you said before…couple of bills, unmarked envelope?”

Jason blinked balefully.

“I’d like it in twenties,” Eddie continued, “If that’s doable. More convenient that way.”

“Convenient,” Jason repeated, his eyes hollow and empty, like he was wounded and trying to wound Eddie back, for wounding him, which made no sense, couldn’t he see that, this wasn’t Eddie’s idea, none of this was, he’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time…

And he’d come back. And he’d watched. And one way or another, he knew something he shouldn’t.

“Tomorrow,” Jason got to his feet, a little shakily at first as he got up on one leg, but digging his heels in as he drew up to his full height.

“Same place?” Eddie rapped his knuckles against the tree, over a spot where some over-optimistic freckle-faced dingus had once upon a time carved Tommy + Carol inside the deflated trapezoid of his heart.

Some people had no shame. Lucky bastards.

“Same time,” Jason agreed, not meeting his eyes.

“I’d shake your hand, Jason, but I wouldn’t want to do an anathema.”

Jason glared at him, his eyes red and wet and frightening for a reason Eddie couldn’t place. It didn’t feel like he was in any immediate danger, that Jason was going to sock him or anything. And Jason didn’t have a magnetic enough cult of personality to start a smear campaign…at least not anything worse than the ones that had clung to Eddie his whole life.

Eddie supposed, if anything, the worst thing Jason could do would be to himself. Maybe he was already doing it.

“Here,” he picked the letterman jacket up from the ground, tossing it lightly to Jason, who caught it on one arm, looking at Eddie with some mild stupefaction, either that Eddie had managed the throw or that he’d thought to do it in the first place.

“That thing’s…what? Wool and leather? Must be a bitch and a half to keep clean.”

Jason regarded the jacket mutely, loosely slinging it over one shoulder as he started up the path. He was almost out of sight before he offered a belated answer: “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

And he was gone. Eddie was alone in his own domain.

The bird whoop-de-whooped again. It sounded like an accusation.

He made it home in time for dinner, at least.

“What word from the forge?” Eddie asked conversationally as he stirred a pot of chili…gloopy and mysterious, his specialty…on the stove.

Wayne shrugged noncommittally, not looking up from the day’s edition of the Herald, “Herb Gunderson got laid off.”

Laid, Eddie emblazoned the word in bronze across the forefront of his brain and suppressed a belly laugh, “That sucks.”

“Eh, he’s a piker. Slept most of his shifts through, left the rest of us to cover him.”

“Pays to be honest.”

Wayne chuckled, “I’m not getting a raise, am I?”

Eddie looked over his shoulder to catch his uncle’s half-smile, “That sounds almost like an endorsem*nt of a nefarious heathen lifestyle, unc.”

“I leave the endorsem*nts to the politicians. I work for a living.”

“The family curse,” he began ladling chili out, setting Wayne’s bowl before him, “But I guess there’s something to say for honest living.”

Wayne co*cked a caterpillar eyebrow at him, “You come by that notion on one of your late nights?”

“Like most things, by accident,” he resumed his habitual pose against the counter, eating his hot gruel without much relish, “I mean, I like to think I’m honest.”

“Too honest, maybe.”

Eddie quirked his lips to the side, “I was expecting a hearty laugh of disbelief, but okay.”

“More’n one way to be honest,” Wayne acknowledged, “It’s not just telling the truth.”

“No, but it probably helps.”

Wayne sniffed dismissively, “Your father was honest enough, in his way.”

“Why, ’cause he plead guilty?”

“That shyster lawyer would’ve gotten him double life, if he’d gone on the way he was,” further digestive accompaniment, “When I said your Pop was honest, it ain’t on account that he never told lies or any other little George Washington song’n dance.”

“Yeah,” Eddie agreed dreamily, “He once told me the lights kept going off to keep us safe from UFO air raids.”

“He was honest because he didn’t waste any of his time, or anyone else’s, dressing himself up like anything he wasn’t. He was the way he was…the good and the bad, warts and all or however you want to say it. He had nothing to hide, or at least nothing he thought he ought to.”

Eddie turned this over for a bit, thinking of garrulous Frank Munson, who’d never meant to be a father and who, like his sainted mother, had trusted in the Sexual Revolution and its convenient science fiction pharmaceuticals. Frank Munson, who was barely a kid himself…and not one of the precocious kiddy geniuses either, but a problem child who stuck roman candles in the birthday cake and replaced the tape of the National Anthem on the school PA with the best of Tiny Tim.

That wasn’t a guy ready to be a father…and Eddie supposed he’d been honest about it. In none of Eddie’s memories of him were any impressions of him ‘acting’ fatherly. No fishing trips or fireside talks. He hadn’t taken Eddie for his first haircut…presumably, because Frank would’ve thought it hypocritical to insist on something he’d been putting off since about the Kennedy assassination. There were no games of catch, no sneaking him a beer on the sly or any of the other things guys were supposed to do with their fathers.

But he wasn’t absent either, and Eddie had learned things from him. How to hotwire cars, yes, and that didn’t exactly rate on the ‘good’ end of the alignment chart, but he’d be hard pressed to call it ‘evil’ either. His father sure as sh*t had never learned to play catch, but he knew engines. It would’ve been dishonest to pretend otherwise.

“Mom was honest too,” Eddie said eventually.

Wayne nodded sagely but didn’t say anything else. Eddie guessed he didn’t really think too hard about what he was saying, that Eddie came from honest people…not necessarily the kind of people who wouldn’t tell a lie, but the kind incapable of lying to themselves, of dressing themselves up anyway but the way they were.

He was the son of a larcenous burnout and a mentally unbalanced hippie: his inheritance was never going to be anything less than six feet of exposed nerves.

“Kind of a sh*t deal,” he said finally.

Wayne made another of his throaty little noises, which Eddie understood to communicate several paragraphs on how the Munsons couldn’t really expect anything less.

It was an evolutionary shortfall, surely. Born-and-bred suckerism. If you couldn’t opt in to hide some uncomfortable, inconvenient things about yourself, you were fair prey to the predators of the world’s playground. The letter-jacketed, pressed-denim pack animals, the boogie-woogie bourgeoisie, the captains of khaki, the sultans of status quo, the many who derived their power from picking on…and picking apart…the few.

The many who, when left alone, unshielded but also unwatched by their many fellows, still indulged, however desperately and hatefully, in the things that (they thought) made them different.

So maybe they got a bum end of the stick too. Cruel world.

“This swill’ll be the death of me,” Wayne scraped the bottom off his bowl.

“I could always switch to salads,” Eddie suggested distractedly.

“Eh,” Wayne shrugged, “That’ll kill me slower, but I’d be sorrier for it.”

He kept thinking of his mother, and Eddie didn’t really want to know what Dr. Ruth would make of that.

Lying in bed, over the covers, hyper aware of the cool air on his skin and the starchy roughness of the sheets beneath his bare thighs, his mind kept tending back to the picnic table, to the tree, to Jason Carver’s harsh, desperate order: “Don’t touch me!”

And so, eager for any detour away from that tired old junction, he kept pivoting to that pernicious Broadway earworm.

Carver had looked at him like he was crazy, which Eddie supposed he was, but even he’d been surprised at the way that melody had crept back into his head after going unthought of for almost 10 long, motherless years.

He didn’t like musicals. Obviously. He liked music, which was his mother’s fault, for catching him plucking at the strings of her old flat-top acoustic and sitting down beside him to show him what all the strings were called, and the difference between the sounds they made.

“I can show you to play a song. Would you like that?”

Eddie supposed he must’ve said yes. She’d never been one to twist his arm. Still, he didn’t remember saying yes or no. Just his mother taking him gently by the wrist and moving his fingers along the fretboard to indicate where to strum as she sang one of her simple little folk ditties…Michael, row your boat ashore, whoop-dee-doo-ya, and isn’t that Jordan River so deep and wide? Good thing there’s milk and honey on the other side, but man, wouldn’t a cigarette be sweet too, after all our trouble?

He remembered that, or at least the melody, and the feeling of the strings and his mother’s soft voice singing the by now very familiar words.

He had fewer memories of the Sondheim musical she’d taped years later. It was a meandering slog of a production, with densely written songs and what Eddie guessed was avant garde staging. Nothing like West Side Story. Eddie supposed Sondheim must be experimenting, and that was his right. Like Dylan going electric or Metallica going part-acoustic.

But that one super-long song, with its ceaseless bongo drumline…it must’ve made some impression, to still be floating in his memory all these years later.

There was an old man, Eddie remembered, singing about himself, as a kid, climbing up into a tree to listen in on some important Japanese peace treaty talks or something. Weird thing to make a musical about, but to each their own.

“I was younger then… I was good at climbing trees.”

At which point, he’s joined by the child version of himself, who does climb the tree, that Eddie supposes must be a metaphorical tree or part of a dream world or a hallucination or who really cares, it’s a play, you can get away with stuff all the time there because nobody goes into it looking to be fooled.

And the old dude and the young dude start sniping at each other over their memory of what really happened.

“If it happened, I was there…”

“…I see everything.”

But they…he…don’t remember things the same way from both ends.

“Some of them have gold on their coats…”

“One of them has gold. He was younger then…”

It’s maybe not the subtlest message, but you don’t go to Broadway for the soft touch. It had that much in common with metal, at least.

But Eddie supposed if there was any reason at all why the tune had appeared so suddenly back in his head after all these years, it was the superficially flimsy connection between ‘fake tree’ and ‘f*ck tree’.

“The day is incomplete/Without someone in a tree/Nothing happened there.”

If a jock climaxes in a forest, and nobody is around to hear it, does he make a sound?

He heard those strained, shamed breaths, syncing them in his mind to that dreamy, trance-inducing bongo beat, and turned onto his side.

There was a big difference, obviously, between the singing Japanese kid in the tree and Edward the Banished nicking his shin on the edge of the table…the kid had never gone for a cigarette. Those samurai negotiators never knew there was just an ordinary, harmless scamp just out of their sight, watching history happen.

If Jason hadn’t seen Eddie…if he hadn’t had a living, breathing person to be scared of, rather than a big amorphous blob of interchangeable judges…what, then?

He’d keep going, probably. Keep shuffling to the tree to do his penance against the ignorant epigraphs of last year’s love stories.

So it was a good thing, wasn’t it, that he’d seen Eddie. Because now something could happen, something could change, something…

He turned onto his other side, feeling the legs of his shorts rub against each other. Absently, Eddie readjusted the waistband and let out a low sigh. His hand hovered there, and he felt this odd, detached feeling.

It seemed such a little thing…well, in a manner of speaking, ha-ha, and don’t tell your friends.

At any rate, nothing to make a huge fuss about. Guys get frustrated, don’t they? They get tired, or they get lonely, or they just plain get bored. Some of them have girlfriends but, no matter what the movin’ pictures and the glossy covers tried to push, most of them don’t.

Nothing to it. Hell, if it was anything else, it was a good sleeping aid.

Eddie’s fingers brushed the cotton of his shorts, stopping just short of the pernicious peninsula.

He wasn’t in the mood. He hadn’t been in the mood for a while, come to think of it. Not, and he would have to leave this for the likes of Doctors Freud and Ruth to decipher, since he’d first seen Jason working himself into a sweat under the unforgiving, sticky afternoon sun.

It was easy, wasn’t it? There was nothing wrong with that, or there shouldn’t be. Life was hard enough, why be harder on yourself, especially when it came to getting yourself hard. Heh. He was such a comedian.

He was such a loser.

He was someone who’d fallen clear out of his tree, and right into history. Careful what you wish for.

“I’m a fragment of the day/If I weren’t who’s to say/Things would happen here the way/That they happened here…”

Starcourt Mall was a breeding ground for preps, bimbettes, and narbos of all shapes, sizes and generational cohorts, but the corporate megalith had brought a Sam Goody within the Hawkins town limits, so it wasn’t all bad.

“Fricking finally!” Greg chortled, very satisfied with himself, hoisting the jewel case high, “Hell Awaits,” he wiggled the case back and forth, the better to display the lurid, admittedly pretty sick, album art.

“What’s that?” asked Jeff, “The new Slayer?”

Greg growled in a self-satisfied manner in response.

“I don’t like any of that thrash sh*t,” said Jeff, “You can’t hear any of the vocals and all the records are over-produced.”

“You would say that…”

“Uh, Eddie?”

“Mm?” he looked away from the record sleeves he was idly thumbing through, “Gareth.”

“Looking for something?” he eyed Eddie’s perusing fingers and Eddie shrugged.

“Just doing some mental math…” he co*cked his head to the side.

“Math?”

“A hundred bucks would buy a lot of records,” he mused distractedly.

“You have a hundred bucks?”

“Well, you know me, Gar, I’m a businessman. And the fact of the matter is, I’m about to come into some money.”

“Oh,” Gareth considered, “…you’re not selling crack, are you?”

Eddie lifted his eyes, “That’s whack.”

Gareth laughed nervously, getting all rosy around the edges in that charming way of his, “Right.”

“But, to keep your mind at ease, I’m not diversifying my portfolio that much. This is just a…” he bit his lip, “A one-time payment.”

“You do somebody a favor?”

“That’s what he thinks.”

Gareth frowned, “…so you didn’t?”

“Oh, I’m not a crook, Gareth. If I’m gonna get the money, I’ll do the job. I’m just not so sure it is a favor to do it.”

Gareth folded his arms, propping the heel of his scuffed-up motorcycle boot against the base of a record rack, “…like selling people drugs?”

Eddie gave him a look, “You aren’t trying to trigger a moral crisis in me, are you, Gar-Bear?”

“Sorry.”

“Eh,” Eddie shrugged, “People are gonna smoke pot anyway, and someone’s gonna line their pockets from it, this being a market economy and that.”

“Whatever that means.”

“Whatever that means,” Eddie agreed, “I guess lately, I’ve been thinking a little too much for comfort what people think of me.”

“You?” Gareth co*cked an eyebrow.

“I know. I try to avoid it as much as possible because the answer’s usually pretty obvious. But there’s people and…people.”

“That’s the same word.”

“With different emphases,” he waved his fingers back and forth to impress the fact of the italics onto Gareth, who didn’t seem to get it, but oh well, “I mean, people are gonna think whatever they want about me, and that’s fine, because I’ve got nothing to hide. Let them point and laugh and tell their children ghost stories, blah-de-blah…but people, like…individual people…”

“You mean a person?”

“Yes, a single people…” he considered, briefly wondering why he was even talking to Gareth about this and deciding the answer was probably too sad to contemplate, “…they come along and they have whatever ideas about you…or me, whatever…and, from these ideas, I guess they draw conclusions and then they made judgments and then they decide things about you…”

“But…isn’t that fine?”

“Gareth, beloved, dearheart, squire of my soul, why the Christ would that be fine?”

He had snapped perhaps a bit too loudly. Greg and Jeff turned to look at them from down the aisle. Eddie waved his hand dismissively and Greg snorted in derision as he returned to arguing with Jeff about what did and didn’t constitute ‘progressive rock’ and whether or not it was good or bad.

Gareth, by now his familiar fuchsia, stammered, “B-b-because…well, it’d be fine because you said…and you said this, Eddie, you just did…that you’ve got nothing to hide.”

“Oh,” Eddie paused, “Right,” he folded his arms, “Well, that makes it worse, doesn’t it?”

“…what?”

“Well, I’ve got nothing to hide. It’s all out there. So if someone’s gonna draw conclusions, he sure as sh*t has no excuse not to draw the right ones, doesn’t he?”

They killed a good chunk of time in the record store and, in the end, left with only two purchases: Greg with his Slayer album and Eddie, after much navel gazing, with a much-neglected Dylan record: one of those loopy Jesus croons from his born-again Christian phase a few years back. His mother would’ve flipped if she’d lived to see the day, but Eddie was pretty sure good ol’ Bob had just been feeling his way through a mid-life crisis. If that synth-strangled single that had been making the FM rounds lately was anything to go by, he’d joined the ’80s with the rest of them by now.

He was almost certain the Jesus album (decorated with a supremely kitsch oil painting of the hand of God reaching down from heaven to barely graze the fingertips of the Saved!, after whom the album was presumably titled) would be at least as bad as Dylan’s contemporary pop music, but he couldn’t shake the feeling he would learn something from it. Not necessarily to Save! his soul, but to give him some understanding of…others.

And maybe it was a waste of his time to want to understand in the first place, but let it never be said that Eddie Munson wasn’t a curious, open-minded type of fellow.

“Uh…just a sec, guys,” Gareth spoke as if he were interrupting, and he looked right down to his shoes when they all turned to look at him.

“What, do you need to pee or something?” asked Greg.

“Shut up,” said Jeff boredly.

“I…” Gareth gestured vainly, “I just…” his throat was working and he suddenly seemed very interested in the display window of the Gap, “Felt like some ice cream.”

Greg snorted again. Eddie made a mental note to send angry bees to attack his warlock’s nose next session, or die trying.

“Gareth, it is absolutely precious that you ask for permission,” said Eddie, “But now that you said something, I have the bitch of a craving for some rocky road, so…”

“Oh, sure, I’ll get you some.”

A conspiracy afoot!

He was getting sick of these things but, sh*t, he must be an addict.

“That’s nice of you offer, Gar, but I like to get a lay of the land, myself,” Eddie explained, putting himself in the crosshairs for no other reason but that he must be a masoch*st or something, “See if maybe they’ve got some freaky-deaky flavor combos…”

“‘Flavor combos’?”

“Yes, Jeff, the combination of flavors. Or, hell, probably I’ll get there and I’ll want them to make a real disgusting ice cream orgy.”

“Oh heavens,” said Greg flatly.

“Like, mixing cherry with peanut butter and making them put those little jellybeans on it. It’d be so disgusting, and to make you, my dear disciple, the one I love best…”

Gareth, evidently no slacker at Bible school, eyed the record sticking out of the bag, but Eddie continued, untrammeled.

“…order my abomination of choice would be cruel,” he smiled, “So I will go with you and order ice cream.”

There was a weighty silence. Finally, Greg pointed, like the old man of the mountain, “Sbarro’s,” and Sbarro’s he went. Jeff followed in due course, not with any particular enthusiasm, and cast a look over his shoulder at Eddie that could best be described as exasperatedly confused.

Gareth had already started off across the food court. Eddie, readjusting his Sam Goody bag (his Saved! Sack, if you will) on his shoulder, hurried abreast with him.

“You know, I wasn’t feeling ice cream, but now that you’ve brought it up, it’s all I can think about. Isn’t that crazy?”

Gareth looked at him out of the corner of his eye, “Nuts.”

“Much better than sprinkles, yeah. What are sprinkles anyway, right? Little candy suppositories, and they don’t even taste like…oh, sorry, was that gross? It’s gross, right…”

“Eddie,” Gareth interrupted, speaking through maybe a hairline gap between his teeth, “Look…”

“Are you not going for ice cream?”

“What?”

Eddie co*cked an eyebrow, “Look, tell me it isn’t my business…”

“Can I?”

“Well, it’s not.”

“I mean, I know that, but…” he scratched the back of his neck, looking distractedly at a little kid riding one of those solitary carousel horses in front of the Waldenbooks, “Look, you can keep a secret, right?”

“As well as you’ve kept mine.”

Gareth looked at him, confused, before a small dint of understanding alighted on his lips, “You mean your world-building?”

“It’s more like ‘world-renovating’, now that I think about it, but yes.”

“Just…” Gareth twisted his hands together, “Okay, yeah, maybe…” these three aborted starts abandoned, he began a completely different sentence in a tone of forced composure, “Maybe it’ll help if you’re there.”

“Full disclosure, I’ve found that is rarely the case, but I’m invested despite myself.”

“But you have to promise…”

“We talking pinkie or blood oath?”

“…you can’t tell the others. You can’t tell anybody. It would ruin everything.”

“Oh, secrets,” Eddie rolled his eyes flagrantly, “Gareth, must I tell you again how dangerous secrets are?”

“You’ve never said that.”

“Not in so many words, but I’ve been leading by example, haven’t I?”

Gareth, sensibly, didn’t have anything to say to this. Eddie continued, in grand, editorial fashion, “Seriously, man, it’s become kind of an obsession with me. And I know how that sounds, and you know how I get, but the more I think about it, the more it just hits me that secrets are just really bad for your health, right? And, yeah, sure, maybe they’re bad, like, morally or whatever, but who gives a sh*t about morals? I’m talking purely selfish, personal health reasons. Because keeping secrets makes people real frickin’ miserable. I’ve seen it myself, in the course of my field research, and believe me, it ain’t pretty. It’s like not sleeping, not eating, and not sh*tting, all rolled into one ultra-constipated package…”

“Well, well, if it isn’t my favorite customer,” the girl at the ice cream register looked up from the crossword she was halfheartedly penciling in, revealing an angular, lightly freckled, and familiar face beneath her dainty, Anything Goes sailor cap.

“Uh, hi, Robin,” Gareth’s coloring could no longer strictly be described as ‘red’. There was green mixed into those gills too, which Eddie supposed was entirely down to his presence. He would have the presence of mind to feel bad about this, if he hadn’t been seized by an admittedly sophom*oric glee. Grinning like a Cheshire cat with a casserole dish full of canaries, he leaned against the shop front doorframe, “Buckley,” he touched two fingers to his brow in a cheeky salute, “Ahoy.”

“Aw, sorry, Gary,” Robin drawled, “Strict no pets policy. You’ll have to leash the dog outside.”

Gareth let out a rheumatic series of wheezy laughs and Eddie felt a mildly hysterical (the funny kind, he thought, but who even knew anymore; it’d been a real marathon of a week) pity.

“I’ve got all my shots,” he declared, holding his hands in mock surrender, “And I’ve even been deloused.”

Robin Buckley eyed Eddie’s hair dubiously, “Does the vet still have two hands?”

“He’s got ’em, alright; but using ’em…”

“My usual, Robin,” Gareth spoke over Eddie with an admirable punch in his register, closing the distance between doorway and counter. There was something vaguely precious about him ordering ice cream like he was a longshoreman wandering into the pub after a 14-hour shift, but Eddie couldn’t knock it.

Robin, for her part, sighed laboriously, setting down the stubby pencil she’d been doing her puzzle in, “Would you believe I’m on break?”

“Oh,” Gareth paused, “I’m sorry. I saw…”

“Not your fault. Nobody wants to work anymore…” she looked over her shoulder and, cupping her hand around her mouth, bellowed, “PARTY’S OVER, PRINCESS!”

An indistinct voice hollered, as if from miles away, “I’m washing my hands!”

“Don’t announce it!”

“Seven-letter word meaning an ‘allurer or enticer to evil’?” Eddie leaned over to read Robin’s crossword.

“How’d you spell your last name, again?” asked Robin.

“Six letters, no dice. Try ‘tempter.’”

“Ooh, not bad,” Robin intoned, looking at Gareth, “Does he know any other tricks?”

Gareth, looking a little tetched, answered, “I lose track.”

A door slammed somewhere behind the counter and Robin’s relief half fell/half pirouetted out of what was presumably the bathroom with an absurdly dancerly grace only heightened by the skimpy sailor suit.

“I’m here! Sorry about that. It’s that the…the flusher, it just…it doesn’t flush all the…” King Steve “the Hair” Harrington, formerly of Hawkins High School, currently, apparently, of Scoops Ahoy Franchise Location XYZ, Starcourt Mall, Hawkins, Indiana, looked up and realized they had customers.

“Why,” Eddie said delightedly, “Your Majesty.”

Harrington’s waxy smile became very fixed, “…Munson.”

“Or should I say ‘Hello, sailor’?”

“That’s so original, Munson. It’s hilarious. It’s definitely not something I hear every day.”

“You should swoon a bit more,” said Robin, “The girls, when they do it, there’s always some swooning.”

“How nauseating,” said Eddie politely.

“Oh, yeah, it’s the pits.”

“Are you his manager?” asked Eddie, “Please tell me he answers to you.”

“He does,” said Gareth, not with any particular venom, but with a rote satisfaction at knowing the answer.

“Oh, that’s just fantastic.”

“Yeah, man, it’s a real fun-fair for everyone. We’re all having a great time. Do you want ice cream or something, or…”

“There’s a new world comin’…” Eddie launched into song, “It’s just around the bend/There’s a new world comin’/This one’s comin’ to an end…”

“Hilarious, Munson. Side-splitting. I know, it’s so funny when someone has a job…”

“Don’t buy that blue collar blue boy sob story for a second,” said Robin, “You should see him when we get girls in here. I didn’t know what ‘preening’ meant before this month, I swear…”

“Oh, hey, cheer up, Steve,” Eddie deployed his name with an unearned and undue familiarity, “I’m not knocking it or anything. You know, I’m a working gent myself…”

“And no taxes to pay. Pretty smooth deal, right?”

“He doesn’t have it that much better than us,” Robin fetched an ice cream scooper as if from thin air and tossed it to Steve, who caught it with an admittedly admirable finesse that both stuck a thorn in and justified Eddie’s glee at needling Hawkins High’s most recent Big Cheese, “We’ve got the same union benefits.”

“You guys don’t have a union?” Gareth asked with a sort of cow-eyed wonder that Eddie couldn’t tell whether it was genuine or a desperate attempt to redirect Robin’s attention onto him.

And he felt bad. He probably shouldn’t have hitched his wagon to the poor guy. Gareth was a sensitive soul, as has been noted in the logs of this campaign, and if he was nursing some secret torch for the sorbet slinger from the brass section, that was his business.

Maybe he had a problem. Well, he did have a problem, several…but maybe one of them was a hopeless impulse to pursue other people’s secret, intimate shames.

“Oh, man, let me tell you about the conditions aboard the S.S. Scoops,” Robin intoned, “Which…they won’t tell you upfront, but I’ll be happy to inform you…is a slave ship…”

“Rocky road,” Eddie propped his chin up on his hand, looking back at Steve, the better to cast the veil of secrecy over Gareth’s courtship, “With jellybeans.”

“Nice,” Steve grimaced.

“One retail worker to another, Your Grace…the customer is always right.”

“Yeah, yeah, save it. I hear it enough from people half your size,” he got to work.

“Ah…” Eddie sighed languorously, lounging against the counter, “How the mighty have fallen, eh?”

Steve co*cked an eyebrow, “Try cooling off a bit, won’t ya? This is a family establishment.”

Eddie snorted, “I derive no pleasure from this, Steve, I assure you.”

“That’s swell, man.”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve been very deliberately avoiding vicarious pleasure lately.”

“Is this a game you do? You just wander around town and look for people to be weird to?”

“Not intentionally, but I’ll admit I’ve got kind of a knack for it,” he shrugged, “So…why ice cream?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“If you have a serious answer. I mean, you did graduate, despite sleeping through every single English class for nine straight months…”

“If it makes you feel better, Munson, I’m surprised I got the diploma too.”

“No hard feelings,” Eddie shrugged, “Now, Billy-Boy Hargrove…I reserve the right to be prickly about him…”

Steve snorted, “What do you know about Billy?”

“About as much as you,” Eddie granted, “Nonzero chance I pay for this ice cream with a grubby bill he tendered to me once upon a time for services rendered.”

Steve laughed incredulously, “Is that you getting him on that crack cocaine?”

“Hey, I am the Merchant of Mellow, baby,” Eddie held his hands up, “If it wasn’t for me, we’d have a real menace to society on our hands.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Steve gracelessly dashed a fistful of jellybeans atop Eddie’s gluttonous confection.

“If it’s any comfort to you, Steve, since I’m sure one of your high moral character must no doubt be kept up awake at night wondering what will become of the various village idiots in your domain, I fully expect this to be my year,” he nodded toward Gareth, “Gar-bear over there is my last threshold. I can’t possibly associate with anybody littler or I’ll start feeling self-conscious.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself,” said Steve idly.

“For your sake, I will not interrogate that statement,” he retrieved his wallet and a wad of bills…probably not Billy’s, as a matter of fact, considering that ruinous ‘discount’, but oh well, “I guess I’m just tickled.”

“What, by the sailor suit?”

“Oh, not that, Steve, just…” he shrugged, “I continue to be amazed by the infinite breadth of scope in every individual human being.”

Steve blinked, “…sure, man. That’s $2.75.”

“That’s highway robbery,” Eddie informed him, pushing the money across the counter as Steve mirrored the gesture with the ice cream.

“Take it up with my manager.”

“Oh, I would, but she looks busy,” he looked down the way, to where Gareth was still chatting Robin up. He’d said something to make her laugh and she had lifted her head back, bright coral lips squealing, “Oh, shut up!”

“You know he comes in here every day?” Steve nodded his head toward Gareth, as if there was anybody else he could be talking about.

“That much dairy can’t be good for him.”

“I feel kinda bad, you know,”

“‘Bad’ like ‘jealous’, or ‘bad’ like ‘oh, boo’?”

Steve frowned, “Who?”

“Boo,” he pointed, “You.”

“I wouldn’t wish Robin on anybody.”

“Ooh, I’ll tell her you said…”

“I mean,” Steve interrupted, “She’s one of those hard to gets.”

“A vestal virgin, huh?”

Steve made a noise like a kicked seagull. Robin looked down the counter, “Cover your mouth,” and then returned her attention to Gareth.

Steve cleared his throat, “No, just…she doesn’t flirt. I mean, I’d tell your friend he’s wasting his time, but I don’t know him like that, so…”

“Oh,” Eddie nodded, “You are jealous,” he beamed over Steve’s stammering indignity, “That’s so beautifully human.”

“Just take your ice cream, Munson.”

“Gladly,” he hoisted the little plastic spoon like a scepter and made as if to tweak Steve’s nose with it, “Your health, my liege.”

Thinking of Steve as ex-king got him thinking of Jason, and Billy’s low dismissal of him as a pretender, a follower. A fake emulating better fakes. Steve certainly had never really been ‘king’ of anything. Actually, now that Eddie thought about it, he was pretty sure they only ever called him ‘King Steve’ because he could do keg stands, and that was more of a barbarian skill than anything else…nothing noble, graceful, or dashing about winning a frat house endurance test.

It felt like it ought to be some big turning point, like he’d just crested some evolutionary epoch, but the fun thing about being in high school for the entire life cycle of an aquarium fish (and change) was that that stuff wasn’t really surprising. For all intents and purposes, Eddie had known life before everybody decided Steve Harrington was something special; there had been other Steve Harringtons, of brilliant smile and amorphous face…though, possibly, Stevo had the market cornered on the hair, Eddie would give him that.

Everything was fake! And Eddie must be really bad at this whole nonconformist shtick he was supposed to be championing, because the thought kind of depressed him. If everything was fake and everyone was fake and nobody was really ‘honest’ because they were all pretending to be what everyone else had spontaneously already decided they were…then what was anyone, really? If Steve Harrington wasn’t the Keg King of Hawkins High, was he the ice scream slinger in the periwinkle short-shorts? If Billy Hargrove wasn’t a dumb, delinquent burnout, was he a tetchy, but halfway principled lifeguard with a taste for mood stabilizing substances?

If Jason Carver wasn’t an ornery, hyper-defensive bully, was he the guy who tortured himself to the point of near hysteria just for a few stolen seconds of guilty release?

When everyone’s doing such a damn good job roleplaying, there isn’t much but busywork for the DM to do, huh?

“Is that any good?” asked Steve dubiously.

Eddie smiled gummily, delighting in in Steve’s aghast grimace, “Heavenly.”

“Which, for you, is good?”

“Hee-hee, ho-ho, giggle-snort, Steve: a devil-worship joke. How positively rich. I’ll have you know…” seized with a sudden desire to be a real sh*t, compounded with his glee at the realization providence had guided him to props for a perfect bit, Eddie reached into his Sam Goody bag and retrieved his new vinyl, “I have been Saved!”

Steve blinked blankly, “…um.”

“Dude, is that Bob Dylan?” Robin had just been detaching herself from Gareth (read into this what you might; Eddie sure as hell hadn’t been paying attention which was, of course, only the respectful thing to do), “Born again Bob, no less.”

“Thought you were into that hard rock stuff,” said Steve, “Like, uh, punk or whatever…”

“Punk is a different thing,” offered Gareth.

“Very different,” agreed Eddie, “You’re lucky you’re in friendly company, or you’d be being measured for a cross about now.”

“Wow. Okay.”

“Don’t tell me you’re converting, Munson?” Robin asked gleefully, “I mean, after that much high school, I’d probably start thinking things over too…”

“Haven’t you heard?” Steve asked, brightening up, “This is gonna be his year.”

“My interest is strictly academic,” said Eddie.

“I think he just bought it on impulse,” said Gareth.

“Which is the only way to buy records, but also not the point,” he turned the record sleeve over, watching the play of Scoops Ahoy’s violent fluorescent bulbs on the violently kitsch album art, “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the God machine.”

“You wanna call your entourage?” Robin asked Steve loudly, “Don’t tell me you aren’t hiding one of Curlicue’s walkies under that hat. Tell them to bring their friends, if there are any…”

Eddie skated right past this remark without analyzing it, “Or, more accurately, what motivates the God machine’s floor crew.”

Steve and Robin looked at each other uncertainly. Gareth leaned against the wall, arms folded and an odd half-smile playing on his lips. Eddie decided if Gareth had any hard feelings about his one-on-one time with the Scoop Siren being upended, he’d decided to table them for at least a little while.

“What, like God’s janitor?” asked Steve.

“Sure. Why not? Because if God, whoever He-She-They-It is-are, is a machine that…powers the world, that makes the people who believe in God the maintenance crew. Because someone has to do all the believing, or else there is no God.”

“But no,” said Steve, “God doesn’t need people to believe in Him.”

“She-They-It,” corrected Robin, “Suck it, Hagee.”

“Huh?”

“But doesn’t God need us to believe? Isn’t that the entire point? Like, your Dad, right…”

“Huh?”

“He’s, like, a big deal guy.”

“He owns a business,” said Robin in a tone which indicated she’d heard more than enough on the topic for a couple of lifetimes.

Steve cleared his throat awkwardly, “…He owns a paper company. And he’s not God,” followed by a downright charming self-deprecating chuckle that seemed to communicate they were all luckier for that.

Eddie could almost begin to understand why girls lost their dignity for this idiot on a regular basis. Nevertheless…

“So your Dad, the paper magnate…the paper company is his domain.”

“I guess.”

“But he can’t run it himself.”

“Try telling him that.”

“Divine hubris, sure, great point, different lesson, so we’ll table it for now,” Eddie made a sweeping gesture with his arms, scattering the spoon from his now empty cup across the store (“An act of God,” observed Robin, with healthy distaste), “But whether he likes it or not, he needs people to make his domain function. Someone has to clean the toilets and buy ink for the printer and…chop the trees for the paper…”

“I think he outsources that one.”

“Maybe it’s a polytheistic system,” said Robin; the word didn’t seem to mean anything to Steve. Eddie, tired of his metaphor being so roundly abused, bullied on.

“He needs people to do the work to keep things going. They do this…why?”

Steve smiled, so either he was beginning to enjoy this, or he thought Eddie was charmingly stupid, or maybe one notion was married to the other, “Well, Munson, he pays them.”

“Yes!” Eddie pointed, “Yes, he does. And they believe he will…”

“Yeah, or else they’ll call his bluff and unionize.”

“Does the bargaining power of the proletariat come into this, Eddie,” asked Robin, “Are you planning to kill God?”

“Wait, wait, we’ll get to that, okay…”

“Ooh.”

“They believe in him,” Eddie continued pointedly, “And so they do what he wants, what he needs them to do, in order to sell his toilet paper.”

“Copy paper,” said Steve, “And napkins. Paper towels too, but not toilet paper. That’s a different…”

“If they stop believing in him, then nothing happens. No paper gets made and then the world ends.”

“Well, to hear him talk about it…”

“And that’s how religion works.”

There was a brief silence. Robin blinked, arms folded before her on the counter like a student valiantly trying not to doze off in class, “So Steve’s Dad is like God in this equation?” she looked Steve over, “Better stay away from sharp pointy objects.”

“Wow. Nice. Thanks. Are you guys done or…”

“But it’s not the same,” Gareth spoke over Steve, looking at Eddie with what he thought might be genuine interest, which was as heartening as it was terrifying (for more on our hero’s concerns about being a role model for the young adventurers of tomorrow, see elsewhere in this campaign log), “The people at the paper company, they do get paid. With money. But…religious people…they pray and maybe they go to church or whatever, and they do all the work they have to do…” he co*cked his head to the side, “But whatever payment they get…they don’t see it. Like, it’s not real the same way that money is.”

“And that’s the real kick in the bongos, ain’t it, Gar?” Eddie shrugged, “God needs people to believe in Him. These people do the work of believing. Because God isn’t necessarily something you can engage with one-on-one, they spend lots of time thinking up ways to do their work or, let’s be real, listening to other people…”

“Like the Pope,” said Robin, pointing as if she’d just recognized a character actor on TV.

“There are no Catholics in Hawkins, but yes. Like the Pope or the Ayatollah or…”

“Or Jerry Falwell!” offered Robin. At Eddie’s questioning glance, she sighed self-deprecatingly and recited, “E-pis-co-pal…Episcopalian,” to the tune of “YMCA”, complete with poorly defined charade-adjacent acrobatics.

“And these people tell them what to do with their belief. Maybe you donate to the poor or maybe you go to church or maybe you sing some horrible jingle on afternoon TV while some dweeb plays the worst honky-tonk this side of the Mississippi…”

“Or you blow up something.”

They all turned to look blankly at Steve, who had spoken. He shrugged, “I mean…right? That happens. What? You’re talking about it.”

“This is fun,” said Robin, “You two should drop by everyday. Or until I get sick of you.”

Gareth got all embarrassing again and Eddie, to spare him, rounded on Steve, “Yes, okay, exactly, Steve: religious people can do all kinds of things to prove how good they are at being religious people, up to and including blowing themselves up. And they do all these things happily and unquestioningly, because they believe so strongly that God wants them to do it, and that God will pay them, somehow, in some way, for being such good employees. So it doesn’t matter what they do to themselves, because it’ll all be worth it, someday, when they receive their heavenly promotion from the toilet paper plant in the sky.”

“He doesn’t make toilet paper,” attempted Steve again, either about God or his father or both, though Eddie supposed if you wanted to get philosophical about it, he was at least half wrong in either respect.

“And so, the thing that’s got me thinking lately is…why? Because it’s one thing to believe in something and to do things…even make little sacrifices…because of your belief. But when people start torturing themselves because of what they believe…when they start twisting themselves into knots…what do they get out of it?”

There was a silence. Steve and Robin looked at each other.

“…you are tipping us, right?” Robin asked at length.

He did, in fact, leave Robin a dollar. Steve had legitimately pouted at this, which made the whole thing worth it. Still, Eddie couldn’t help but look at Gareth as they crossed the food court and feel a pang of pity.

“So…sorry if I peed on your parade.”

“Huh?” Gareth looked at him sharply, “What? No. What do you mean? I…”

“I’m usually not that much of a busybody, I swear. It’s just I’ve been really keyed up lately, and once I start, there’s no stopping…”

“It’s fine,” Gareth answered with a stiff, almost childlike reticence. Eddie decided then and there that if he were to be struck by a meteorite, hit by a bus, murdered by a vengeful Jason Carver out by the f*ck tree (somehow, not as alarming as the meteorite theory, since the space rock at least came with some pedigree) or even graduated next June, he’d be quite content passing the keys to his Devilish domain to his shaggy-haired drummer who believed in his heart of hearts that he could learn hyper-complicated solos entirely by ear.

“I mean,” Eddie continued experimentally, “’tween you and me, she thinks you’re funny.”

“You think so?” Gareth looked at him sharply and then, manfully clearing his throat as if to dispel the notion of investment, added, “I don’t know. I think she’s just, like…humoring me.”

“Which is a good start!” Eddie ventured, “I mean, she’s not spitting in your face, so…” he nudged him in the side, “Charisma buff in the wild. I see more and more wonders of nature every day.”

“We had the same history class,” he continued, seeming to ease into the topic somewhat, “Last year. She’s really, um…”

“Hot?”

“Pretty.”

“Right, sorry, very disrespectful of me.”

“I mean, I guess she’s hot too,” he scratched the back of his neck, “And she doesn’t have lots of friends, I don’t think.”

“What, fewer people to warn her off you?”

Gareth chuckled self-deprecatingly, “I mean…no. Maybe. Just…she’s kind of a loser,” he winced as he said it.

“Oh, like you,” at Gareth’s look, Eddie added, “And I. And us.”

“Except she’s pretty and funny and she’s good at talking to people…”

“…and listening, evidently.”

“So even if she is, like, supposed to be a loser…like, if that’s what everyone else says she is…”

“She still seems out of your league?”

Gareth shrugged, “It’s stupid, I know. Anyway, she spends eight hours a day making sundaes with Steve Harrington, so…”

“What? Skipper on the Good Ship Soft Serve?” he scoffed, “I wouldn’t worry about him.”

Gareth gave him a look, “Yeah. Well, you’d say that.”

This sounded quaintly sassy. Eddie leered, “I do say that, yes.”

“I mean…” he shrugged, stopping as the food court opened up before them. Jeff and Greg were sitting at a table some strategic distance from the Sbarro’s counter, arguing with each other. Eddie couldn’t possibly imagine it was still about thrash metal, but the boys were little crusaders at heart, and inexhaustible when they wanted to be.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Gareth continued.

“I try not to take things very much in the first place,” said Eddie, “The cost of living and all that.”

“Heh,” Gareth conceded before continuing, “You know you could be cool, if you wanted to be.”

Eddie wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting Gareth to say and, even if it had been something in this vein, not in so many words. He readjusted his Saved! sack on his shoulder, sizing Gareth up, “Could I, now?”

“Um…” Gareth blinked, “Yes. I mean…” he added quickly, as if to stave off Eddie getting the wrong idea, which Eddie didn’t know if he had or not yet, “You are cool. That’s the whole point. You’re cool, but you aren’t…with the cool people.”

Eddie was quiet, “Is this about your self-esteem? Because I don’t think I’m the right person to talk to about that…”

“Self-esteem? Sure. No, but…it’s not like I feel bad about it or anything. It’s just…something I noticed. You…” he let out a breathy, nervy little laugh, “You just do things.”

“That is a regrettably accurate assessment, yes.”

“You can just go up to people like Steve Harrington, and you can speak their language, or you make them speak yours. And you can just…hold them.”

“Prisoner?”

“You keep them talking to you. You make them…” his mouth formed soundless words as he evidently struggled for the right way to put whatever this was going to be, “You make them listen. And…they like you.”

“No, they don’t,” he answered immediately, reflexively, “Trust me on that one, Gar. I pin them down and I do my thing, but I can’t make them like it.”

“But see, I don’t think that’s true. I think they do, but it’s just weird because…they don’t go into it wanting to like you. But you’re relentless…”

“I am that.”

“You really could,” Gareth continued, like he was tapping into some great unspoken truth, “You could be…” he laughed, at himself maybe, “You could be one of them, Eddie. If you wanted to.”

Eddie considered this, deciding. if nothing else, this was a happier alternative to Gareth being sour with him for interrupting his five minutes with his favorite ice cream courier. But he wasn’t much in the habit of being analyzed like this. That is, he was sure he did get this treatment on a regular basis, but not to his face.

And he thought of Steve Harrington’s clueless smile as he confided that Robin Buckley had no interest in him, like he was roping Eddie into some sort of secret. Billy Hargrove surveying him over his sunglasses as he spared him from an ass-kicking for the sake, he insisted, of his loyalty discount and nothing more.

He thought of Jason Carver crying impotently into the dirt and demanding to know what Eddie would take for his silence.

“Well, there’s the rub, my apprentice, my padawan, my squire dear…” he wrapped an arm around Gareth’s shoulder, pulling him flush against him, “I don’t want to be. Not my scene.”

“So what…you’re just tooling around with them?” Gareth asked, “Because you can?”

“Pfft,” he shook his head, “Waste of time, energy, and have you ever known me to think so far ahead away from the game board?”

“So…” Gareth prompted, “You’re not humoring them?”

“Well, if they decide to be humored, that’s up to them. But honestly, I think we’re all shortchanging ourselves with these labels. Jock/nerd, prep/freak, thrash/power, sinner/saint… I mean, we put ourselves into these little tribes when, really, we’re all made of the same dusty, mortal bones.”

“Which is your way of saying…”

“We’re not so different,” Eddie shrugged, “And that probably should be an uplifting moral lesson, but then you think of how miserable people are because they’re afraid they are different, and it loops back around to being sad.”

“So what…” Gareth smiled, “You’re pushing for equality?”

“I am pushing, Gareth…as I enter the 14th grade…” he patted his shoulder lightly, “For freedom.”

“From…”

“Oh,” he stared up into the fluorescent lights in an overwrought expression of thoughtfulness, “Everything. Ourselves, first of all.”

“Ourselves?”

“Yeah. We’re pretty goddamn sh*tty to us, aren’t we?”

He reported to the appointed place only five minutes late of the appointed time.

“Sorry, sorry!” he announced preemptively, slowing from ‘insane sprint’ to ‘leisurely, super-composed jog’ as he crested the ridge to the picnic table, “I was killing time at the mall, yanno, and the boys wanted ice cream and then one thing led to another and we were discussing religion, politics, and our mothers. You know how it is when they’re that age.”

Jason, predictably, wasn’t in any mood for a conversation. From the look of it, he’d been sitting, hunched up, at the table for a while. The day was sticky and overcast, the pristine skies of the last few days given way to the stale muckiness that typically marked Hawkins summers. Consequently, Jason’s brow was shiny nearly to the point of pearlescence. He’d brought his letterman jacket, Eddie saw, but must have shed it at some point. It was lumped messily on the table, the faux-leather cuff of one sleeve brushing Jason’s propped-up elbow.

At Eddie’s approach, Jason raised his head, speaking in a somewhat hoarse voice that must not have gotten much use lately, “Starting to think you wouldn’t come.”

“Eh, last I checked that was more of a you problem…”

Jason stiffened or, rather, tensed. Oh, that one wasn’t so good either.

He was pissed off.

“What, you thought it’d be fun to keep me waiting?”

“Well, you’re used to it, so…”

Jason began to stand, and Eddie held his hands up, “I’m sorry! Sorry, seriously. But if you give me an opening, I’m gonna fill…”

“Look, there are other ways to keep you from talking. I’m doing the nice one.”

“Right, yeah, because you can rip my tongue out and make it into cat food. I got the message.”

Except, as has been previously recorded in the annals of this campaign, Jason was patently not that kind of adventurer. To that point, Eddie still wasn’t sure what kind of adventurer he was, but if he was going to beat the living tar out of Eddie, it would’ve already happened. This business here…Jason sweltering in hostile territory, worrying a literal unmarked envelope in one hand…

This was not someone naturally inclined to violence, no matter how much he himself may wish it.

“Just take it,” Jason pushed the envelope across the table. The paper made a strange scraping sound against the rough wood, which lent an extra veneer of unreality to the proceedings.

No birds today. It must be too muggy for them.

Eddie eyed the envelope, “100 smackers, huh?”

Jason co*cked an eyebrow as if to silently demand whether Eddie was questioning his sincerity.

Eddie sighed, sitting on the bench and eying the envelope. The paper was just translucent enough that he could make out ol’ Ben Franklin’s dinner platter face.

“So, it’s a religious thing,” Eddie said at last, “Right?”

Jason did a double take, “…what?”

“It’s just that I’ve been wondering about it…”

“Wondering?”

“Yeah, I’m naturally curious, and I know what you’re gonna say about curiosity and cats, but the way I see it, what’s the use of having nine lives in savings if you don’t make any investments…”

“Investments?”

Eddie leaned forward, letting the Sam Goody bag lightly slide from his shoulder to the bench beside him. Jason’s attention flickered rapidly to the record sleeve poking out from the bag and he gawked in an unseemly manner, “Is that gospel music?”

“Bob Dylan’s,” Eddie agreed, “One of them. Remember, he went Cuckoo for Christ a while back? I’m not sure if he still is, though. Maybe it was just a phase. Funny how that works, isn’t it? Kids carve pentagrams into their desks and do bitchin’ guitar solos about the Black Mass and everyone decides it’s some degenerative teenage fad, but a grown man reads the Late, Great Planet Earth and nobody tries to have him committed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Dude, I don’t know,” Eddie spread his arms wide, “What about my question? I’m not gonna judge you or anything…I was just curious.”

“Yeah,” said Jason derisively, “You said.”

Eddie shrugged. Jason was gripping the opposite end of the table, his knuckles white against the wood.

“I heard you,” he added casually. At Jason’s sharp look, he continued, “The first time. You said ‘I’m sorry’.”

Jason drew in breath.

“And there was nobody else there…that you knew of, at least. So I wondered…‘Who is he apologizing to?’ At first, I thought maybe you were apologizing to your girlfriend…”

Jason lowered himself onto the bench opposite Eddie, one hand pressed to his brow.

“…but obviously, the lovely Chrissy wasn’t there, and you don’t seem like the kind of guy who wastes breath talking to himself, so…” he shrugged, “You had to be talking to someone who was listening.”

Jason didn’t say anything for a while. Eddie watched his fingers knead his brow, the sweat-damp tips of his hair sticking up at odd ends.

In the parlance of his sagacious old uncle, the air was thick as pea soup, and Eddie sure as hell wasn’t doing much to loosen it.

“It’s a sin,” Jason’s fingers had left sore, red marks on his flushed face.

“Jerking it?”

Jason gave him a look, “…self-gratification.”

“Right. Jerking it.”

“Yeah, I get it. This is all really funny to you.”

“Trust me, J.C…this is about as funny as a wake from where I’m standing.”

“Sure. You were just crouched up here playing Peeping Tom, all deadly serious, taking notes for Scientific American like I was crapping out conjoined twins.”

“Well, Dr. Ruth does say the exercises are good prep for expecting mothers…”

“You told a doctor?”

“No! Nononono…” he laughed despite himself, “She’s made up. I mean, she’s real, but she’s not my doctor. She’s on the radio,” he paused, “I read her book.”

“That’s sick.”

“Look, I get it sounds that way, Jason, but you have to believe, if you weren’t so gosh-danged committed to the ritual, I wouldn’t have been interested. But I’m a guy who appreciates dedication…”

“Is that why you’ve been in high school since Ford was president?”

“Excuse me. I started in the Carter years.”

Jason let out a short, humorless laugh.

“I just figured anybody so committed to his bit had to have a good reason and, despite what the gossip rags say, I’m only human…” he began idly twisting a lock of hair around his finger, tracing the trajectory of a buzzing fly with his eye.

Jason noticed the bug too, “Well, you have your answer.”

“No I don’t,” quickly and matter-of-factly as a child, “I mean, sure, ‘it’s a sin’, but you’re doing it anyway…which isn’t the surprising part. People do sins all the time and then they’re sorry for them. I think that’s the whole point. But you picked a pretty ungratifying way to do your self-gratification, bud. And so…”

“Jesus.”

“Eddie, actually, but I acknowledge the resemblance.”

Jason pressed his hands together…less prayerful and more penitential, like he was hoping the avenging crusader would spare his lowered head when he came riding by on his flaming chariot, like in Revelations or Mad Max.

“It’s not supposed to count if you don’t use your hands.”

The fly landed on the table, rubbing its little feelers together. Maybe he was praying too. Did flies have religion? They only lived about a week, so Eddie couldn’t imagine they’d ever find the time.

You had to have lots of idle hours to come up with a religious code, never mind one with exploitable loopholes.

“…really?” Eddie asked, the word coming out in a higher register than he’d intended.

“Really,” said Jason hollowly.

“Who says? The Bible?”

Jason sighed heavily, “No. Not the Bible,” he was digging his fingers into his forearm and Eddie couldn’t tell if he was just that nervous or that compelled to hurt himself.

f*ck it. He wished this sh*t was funny.

“Bible camp.”

Eddie blinked, “…pardon?”

The muscles of Jason’s throat had tightened, “Bible. Camp,” the skin of his arm was pinched a ghastly, drained white by his grip, “It’s…”

“Yeah, I know. I know what it is,” Eddie answered quickly, as much to spare himself as Jason, “It’s in the title. Gonna say, though, I thought those things were just, like, all-day hacky sack tournaments and acoustic guitar singalongs. You learn something new every…”

“They didn’t teach it to us, idiot,” he sort of choked on the word ‘idiot’ and averted his eyes, like he was scared Eddie would wash his mouth out with soap or something.

Yeah, this guy was as much an apex predator as he was a crusader knight.

“You never been to summer camp?”

Eddie seized his opportunity, “We was po’.”

“Well, at camp, people…talk about things.”

“Like f*cking?”

Jason reddened, “And at…Bible camp they talk about…”

“How to get away with self-gratification without being smote by the heavenly bolt?”

Jason’s nostrils flared briefly, and Eddie had enough sense of his own precarious situation to wonder if casual blasphemy would be the thing that finally pushed Carver over the level.

Finally, Jason said, “You aren’t supposed to spill it.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“What, do you want to take a minute? Maybe find a pen so you can take notes? Do a nice big term paper on Jason Carver’s onanism to finally catapult yourself out of 12th grade…”

“Onanism? That’s, what, like jacking off?”

“Shut up,” Jason uncrossed his arms; his nails had left startling red gouges in the skin, “…yes. There was this guy, in the Bible, and his name was Onan…”

“Odin? That’s metal.”

“Onan,” he over-emphasized the syllables, which made this Old Testament dude sound like he was from Star Trek or something, “Onan’s brother died and, because he was dead and he never…consummated his marriage, Onan had to marry his widow and…finish the job.”

“That’s in the Bible?”

“But Onan didn’t go through with it. He…got with her and, at the last minute he…” his lips curled into an expression of perfect mortification, “He spilled on the ground.”

“So…he pulled out?”

“He pulled out.”

“And, what, God killed him over that?”

Jason gave a strained nod of the head. Eddie laughed, felt bad about laughing, tried to swallow his laughter, and let out a painful hacking cough instead.

“Yeah, alright, it’s very stupid. I’m stupid. Everyone who believes it is stupid. Don’t you worship the devil?”

Eddie eventually recovered enough of his voice to answer, “You say that I do,” he co*cked an eyebrow, “Geddit? That’s…that one’s from the Bible, right, it’s…”

“Yeah, I get it.”

“But I don’t,” Eddie answered, “St. Onan…”

“He wasn’t a saint.”

“Oh, right, yeah, I guess you forfeit that once you get smote… Onan, then, he wasn’t gratifying himself. The way you say it, he wasn’t having fun at all. So…”

“That’s not the point! It’s not about having fun.”

“Obviously not, from the way you do it.”

Jason looked at him sharply and, for half a moment, his teeth were all bared, like a growling dog and Eddie knew he was supposed to be scared for his own pagan immortal soul, but all he really felt was this overriding, hollow pity. And maybe Jason could see that, or feel it, because he visibly deflated, turning on the bench so his back was propped up against the table.

Eddie chewed his lip in rumination, worrying his rings against his chin. Finally, with certain undisguised reluctance, he managed a “Sorry.”

Jason made a little huffy sound that would’ve been less distressing if it sounded as petulant as Jason no doubt wanted to be.

“God killed him, in the story,” Jason continued, not pausing to let Eddie wonder how much of the traditionally accepted definition of the word ‘story’ he was packing into its deployment here, “Because he wasted his seed.”

“His seed.”

“His cum.”

“His spunk.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m shut.”

“That’s what makes it…wrong,” Jason continued, still not turning around to face him, “That’s what makes it a sin, because he didn’t…”

“He didn’t come where he was supposed to?”

“So, in…Bible Camp, people would…”

“Would get like people get when they’re confined in close quarters and it’s hot as Hades outside, and one thing leads to another…”

“People would just talk. About ways to…get around it. And…some people decided it didn’t count as onanism if you didn’t…” Eddie heard a crunch of dirt as Jason dug his heels into the ground. A fly was buzzing somewhere: the same one or another or possibly even a whole horde: a monotonous, electrically charged drone humming through the hot, soupy air.

Eddie leaned forward, over the table, coming about abreast with Jason’s profile, “If you didn’t touch anything.”

Jason looked at him, “That way, it’s just…an exercise. If you get…worked up enough, you just work it off, and it doesn’t count because…”

“Because you’re not having any fun?”

“It’s not supposed to be fun. It’s…” Jason began to raise his voice but stopped, with some effort, “It’s not supposed to happen at all.”

Eddie watched a trickle of sweat make its stop-and-start descent down Jason’s face. He seemed so tiny, really, this close up, and he was again confronted with the fact that he was small for a basketball player. Maybe he and Tommy Hagan played the same position?

Maybe he was thinking about the wrong things. Maybe it was stupid of him to be thinking at all, about any of this to begin with

The drop of sweat plopped down on the tabletop. Jason hadn’t moved once to wipe his face.

“So I guess Chrissy doesn’t know about this?” Eddie preemptively flinched as he asked, but any fight Jason had had in him had long since dissipated into the fetid atmosphere. He just glared, “I guess she never thought about asking.”

“Who would?” Eddie smiled. Jason’s lips twitched, and Eddie briefly thought he’d get a laugh out of him, but no dice.

“I guess that’s your big plan, right?”

“My plan?” Eddie repeated.

“Tell Chrissy what a f*cked-up, repressed freak she’s dating, all goth Sir Galahad, and then she’s so grateful for your chivalry that she lets you sweep her off her feet and then it’s happily ever after?”

Eddie considered this briefly, “Well…I’m not a goth, first of all. That’s a totally different thing. It would be like if I called you a Catholic. There might be some overlap, but wars have been fought over the fine print.”

Jason surveyed him dispassionately, “And second of all?”

“I’m not after your girlfriend,” Eddie felt like a real pluperfect asshole saying it too, like Flock of Seagulls was supposed to be hovering somewhere on the other side of the insect horde, playing their fluty-fruity synthesizers in accompaniment of this moment of youthful vulnerability.

“Don’t get me wrong, man, I’m sure Chrissy’s a real nice girl, but she’s not my type. I’m, you might have heard, something of a bad influence.”

Jason nodded, smiling grudgingly, “Yeah, you’re pretty disgusting.”

“And I’ve added years to my life by not pretending to be anything else.”

“Pretending,” Jason repeated, “There are some things people don’t need to know.”

“Sure,” Eddie granted, “But you’re not keeping mum to Chrissy to protect her fee-fees, are you?”

“You’re gonna lecture me about my girlfriend? Tell me, Munson, when was your last date?”

“In general, or should I count out paid gigs?”

They both looked askance at the envelope on the table.

“You don’t want the money,” said Jason curtly, “Don’t take it.”

“Oh, I’m not that principled, Jason, don’t you worry about that,” said Eddie, “A dude offers me a hundred bucks, I’m not gonna take a vow of poverty.”

Jason rolled his eyes flagrantly, which Eddie decided he was more than entitled to do.

“It’s just,” he continued, “I’m a businessman. I like to work for my money.”

“I’m not giving it to you for nothing,” said Jason warningly.

“Right, yeah, you’re giving it to me so I don’t tell anybody about how your religious guilt’s got you doing kegels in the woods instead of touching your girlfriend…”

Jason rounded on him, “Munson, I will knock every tooth out of your sick, grinning mouth…”

“No, you won’t,” said Eddie flatly, “Frankly, Jace, I don’t think you can, even if you want to.”

Jason balked, averting his eyes. One hand went to his hip, which he must’ve bumped into the edge of the table when he turned on him so sharply. Eddie continued, not with any particular relish, but with the matter-of-fact resignation he believed Jason himself had assigned to his own ordeal.

“I think, Jason, that you’re a live wire cut down to an itty-bitty nub by an electrician who slept through trade school. I think being a teeny-tiny wire with too much charge on too little copper has burned you right out. I think, Jason, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but all those stubborn, angry little sparks are really having a negative effect on your daily life…”

“Shut up.”

“I think you feel like a real prize son of a bitch, paying $100 of what I’m sure is your Daddy’s cash to the local sh*tgibbon freak to protect your dirty little secret makes you less-than-happy with yourself…”

“Munson, I swear to God…”

“You can’t. There’s a commandment about it.”

Jason let out an angry cry and reached out with one arm to close the already narrow distance between them. Eddie leaned back instinctively, but it turned out he needn’t have bothered. Jason had stopped, his fingers splayed out, just inches away. He just sort of hovered there, breathing raggedly, his hand slowly closing into a fist which, shaking, he brought down toward the table…

Eddie snatched the envelope away before Jason’s fist could press down onto it, “I won’t take your hush money, Jason. Not my style.”

“Because you’re an honest businessman, right.”

“Ask around. I offer the most generous rates in town. But getting paid to do nothing…” he shook his head, “And really, Jason, it sticks in my craw that you thought I’d go for that anyway. Really makes me wonder what people say about me, which is usually something I just take for granted. Guess I’m more sensitive than I thought.”

“So…what?” Jason eyed the envelope in his hand, “You’re gonna rob me instead?”

“I’m hardly that desperate. Nope, Jason, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking…soul searching, if you will…and I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to help you.”

He wasn’t really sure the effect he’d expected this pronouncement to have. To be honest, he’d avoided thinking too hard about it since those long, arid tossings and turnings last night. A good DM must always think on his feet, ready to anticipate any curveballs his players have for him, and to have curveballs of his own ready, just to keep them ever on their toes.

So maybe he’d just come up with this whole thing as part of a demented, desperate gambit to make his own life more interesting. And maybe that was the safer explanation than the alternative, which was…well…

“…what?” Jason whispered the word, looking at Eddie like he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or aim another punch that would probably stop shorter than the last one.

“I want to help you,” Eddie repeated, plainly as if he understood it himself, not that Jason seemed to be buying it.

“Yeah, I heard. Why?”

Eddie let out an aggrieved sigh, “Maybe, Jason, because, despite your very damnedest efforts to the contrary, I’ve gotten attached to you.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“Takes one to know one, don’t it?” Eddie co*cked an eyebrow, “You could say, Jason, that I have, against my will, become overly aware that you’re as human as I am and, unable to scrub that truth from my brain, I’ve decided the very best thing to do is make you aware of the same fact.”

Jason was quiet for a while. His face was shining with sweat. Eddie, who could surely be no different at this point and felt it, wiped the back of his hand across his face, partly hoping Jason would monkey-see monkey-do it.

He must be made of stronger stuff. The poor bastard.

“So…what?” Jason prompted, “You feel sorry for me?”

“God forbid,” Eddie answered at once.

“And what do you even want to do? Because it sounds like you’re whoring yourself out, Munson, and…”

“And it’s disgusting and you’ll kill me and do-re-me-fa-so-la-te-do?” Eddie smiled tightly, “Jason, if you won’t go to third base with your girlfriend, why would I think you’d change your standards for me?”

Jason grimaced, twisting his hands together, “So?”

“So,” Eddie shrugged, “I’ve been doing some reading.”

“Oh, right, Dr. Ruth.”

“Dr. Ruth, yes. And her scholarship, compounded by my extensive personal knowledge of what we practitioners call ‘advanced placement pretend’, has given me a unique perspective on ways to solve your little hands-off maintenance issues…”

“Munson, if you put a hand on me…”

“No, I’m pretty sure that breaks a whole new set of rules. Am I right?” he didn’t wait for a response and nodded, satisfied, “I’m right. Look, you can take it or leave it, Jason, but I can assure you, if I’m known for anything, it’s my creativity.”

Jason’s fingers fidgeted in the grooves of the table, “So $100 to…”

“To loosen you up a little.”

“And you think that’s better than taking money to be quiet?”

“We’re working people in my family. Some of us work a little too hard. Ask my Dad: he’s up for parole in a coupla years.”

“For prostitution?”

“Stealing car radios. This particular business model is a Munson first,” Eddie paused, “Look, if it helps, I have some pragmatic motives of my own.”

“Besides the money?”

“Eh,” he waved his hand dismissively, “I can make twice that on a slow afternoon by the pool,” he readjusted himself in his seat, “It occurs to me, Jason, even if it hasn’t hit you yet, that you’re about to come into a position of significant influence.”

Jason looked at him blankly, “…huh?”

“Steve’s gone; Billy’s gone; poor, damn, dumb Tommy’s gone…and now you get to step into their shoes.”

Jason let out with a derisive, strangulated laugh, “Yeah. Right.”

“Do you deny you’re what the social scientists call ‘popular’?”

Jason rolled his eyes, “Yeah, regular big man on campus, that’s me.”

“I didn’t make the rules, J.C. The fact is, you’re in a superior and, some might argue, enviable position. With great power, there is supposed to come great responsibility, you may have heard…”

“What is this? You want me to be nice to you?”

“I want you to lead by example, Jason,” Eddie smiled placidly, “With what we may call ‘Christian charity’, if you and I didn’t know any better.”

“So you want me to convince other people to be nice to you.”

“I want you to lead by example,” he repeated, “The fact is, I don’t really care…my time under those harsh fluorescent lights is drawing to a close at long last…and so is yours. You and me, we’re almost free,” he cracked a smile at the deployment of the over-cutesy rhyme, “And we have just enough time to leave things a little better than we found them. Not for you and me, but for all the jocks and freaks to come in our wake…” he hesitated, “In a manner of speaking.”

Jason looked at him quietly. The insectoid chorus continued unabated, suppressive in its ceaselessness.

“I think you’ve got the wrong idea about me,” said Jason finally, not meeting his eyes.

“Oh, I’ve figured that one out,” said Eddie, “Pretty sure I’m not the only one.”

Jason shook his head, running his tongue over his teeth, “I’m so tired. All the time.”

Eddie had an instinctive quip at the ready, to the effect of it being hot as hell and what can you expect, but something told him he should just let Jason finish here, that this was no doubt the first time Jason had ever spoken this much about this thing with anybody, and if his goal was really, as he’d decided sometime between his sleepless night over the covers and two minutes ago, to bring peace between their two warring high school houses, he should do his part in the name of friendly relations.

So he said nothing and let Jason go on, his voice attaining a strange, partly hysterical yet oddly constrained pitch, “And I get so angry…like every little thing sets me off. And Chrissy…she can tell. She’s not stupid. She’s probably gonna be valedictorian or salu…solutit…”

“The other one,” Eddie offered, Jason’s momentary verbal lapse a nice notch in the growing list of evidence in support of his humanity.

“She knows something’s wrong. That I’m edgy or…whatever. And she probably thinks it’s because of her, because whenever she…whenever we…”

“Whenever your chastity belt threatens to loosen a notch?”

“I don’t know how much more I can keep it up,” and there was something so bluntly resigned about it; he’d skirted right around being piteous and pathetic, instead sounding like he was just reading from a farmer’s almanac, “Or if it’s even fair to. Maybe I should let you tell everybody. Take it out of my hands. Just get it over with.”

“Well, that’s the thing, Jason,” Eddie said languidly, “I think you’ve got the wrong idea about me.”

Jason bowed his head, “$100, huh?”

“If you feel I’m worth more, by all means…”

“When?” he met his eyes, and Eddie could detect a wild, barely restrained mania, a haste to seize the opportunity before one or the other of them came to their senses and retracted or reneged.

A sensible person would be wary of one R or another, but Eddie was pretty sure wild horses couldn’t drag him away at this point. He’d invested too much, and not just in a fourth-rate Dylan record.

“What about tomorrow?” Eddie suggested.

“Same time?”

“Same place.”

Jason eyed the envelope, “How do I know you won’t just take the cash?”

Eddie smirked, “Got change for a hundred?”

Jason snatched the envelope from his outstretched hand. Rooting around in the pocket of the jacket he’d left on the table, he did some sleight of hand, producing a crumpled-up $50 bill, “Half in advance.”

Eddie accepted the bill, “And half on completion,” adding a salacious wink because, well, would you be able to resist?

Jason grimaced, “I guess I’ll see you then.”

“In the jingle jangle mornin’,” Eddie hoisted his Saved! sack high, swinging one leg out over the bench as he got to his feet, “I’ll come followin’ you.”

Jason’s knuckles ground into the tabletop. Eddie decided he’d decide it was funny on the other end of it.

He beat Wayne home this time, which Eddie counted as doubly impressive, since he’d squeezed in a grocery run on the way back.

“Hail, hail, silverbeard,” Eddie greeted casually, “Dinner’s on the thingy.”

Wayne made one of his throaty affirmative sounds and sauntered over to the kitchen counter, “Salad.”

“With walnuts,” Eddie enunciated, “And grapes.”

Wayne gave him a look, “Your way of callin’ me fat?”

“I thought you were tired of me aiding and abetting your cardiac arrest?”

Wayne neither confirmed nor denied this statement, but held up the bowl, “Not that tired.”

“Don’t nod it ’till you tried it,” Eddie singsonged.

Wayne ate in customary silence for a short stretch, “Bit fancy for you, innit? Grapes.”

“Might just be I’ve gotten into some money.”

“Gotten into some trouble?”

“No,” said Eddie, “Money.”

Wayne gave him one of those no-nonsense looks, “Long as you know what you’re doing.”

“Oh, I’ve got that down,” Eddie nodded, crunching new greens like some kind of enlightened millionaire, “I, Uncle Wayne, am on a quest.”

“To save my colon?”

“To make this world a better place,” he grinned, “One troubled body at a time.”

Wayne chewed for much longer than really ought to be necessary for a Waldorf salad (the value of whose constituent parts probably explained why America had embraced diabetes as its sponsor), “Guess I should consider myself saved.”

Eddie decided to just imagine the exclamation point.

It turned out that being Saved! was less of a production than is put about in the popular press.

It wasn’t a bad album, per se, if you were into that newer variety of churchy music scored by middle-aged white rock musicians in a flailing attempt to appeal to the counterculture of about 30 years ago. Eddie kept the record spinning on his mother’s own turntable, thinking of her long-ago willowy form hanging her washing on the line while the nasal voice of her generation’s popularly approved Messiah sang about the ceremonies of the horsem*n along Desolation Row.

Eddie was convinced Wayne could hear Saved! just as clearly as the more typical Metallica and Black Sabbath fare, but he didn’t make any fuss about it if so.

Eddie wondered if Wayne thought he was converting and felt a brief flare of defensiveness, that he should run next door in his underwear and announce that, no, he was still culturally Jewish and practically of the Devil’s party.

But it probably didn’t matter. It wasn’t really about God, was it? It was, sort of, about being Saved!, though the definition of the term, like the identities of the Saved! and their Saviors!, was up in the air at present.

He was restless, that was all…hyper, keyed-up, wired. Why not? He’d basically signed up to do some practical sex education for a preppy wannabe country clubber, and him having no experience outside a single Dr. Ruth book.

Maybe it wasn’t his business.

“You don’t say?” he told himself hatefully, turning fitfully onto one side.

It wasn’t his business. That wasn’t news. The whole thing was an accident of circ*mstances. He and Jason had fumbled confusedly into the same taboo swamp, and Eddie had had the bright idea of lifting them both out of the quicksand (Freshman DM’ing! Quicksand! Two-week penalty for unoriginality!) when the smart thing to do would be to take off, every man for himself.

He’d spent a good chunk of that $50 on grapes, like an asshole. What else was he gonna do? Buy more cigarettes? Head all the way out to the game store in East Bedford to pick up molds for his miniatures?

He was gonna spend the money on himself, obviously. He wasn’t a sucker. But to spend it on him, on things he’d like…that felt wrong.

Jason sincerely thought he was going to blackmail him. Why shouldn’t he? Most people probably would, if they were in Eddie’s place. It wasn’t like Jason was winning any model citizen awards, and people who didn’t have a bone to pick with him probably wanted to take him down a peg.

Eddie had wanted to take him down a peg. Not even a week ago, when he’d been just another face in the green-jacketed horde.

But it’s never that easy. Jason Carver didn’t kick puppies or spit on old ladies. He wasn’t one of those guys who snuck into the girls’ locker room for peep shows…hell, Eddie was sure the word ‘areola’ would be enough to send the poor bastard to the emergency room.

He wasn’t harmless…but he wasn’t nearly as dangerous as he was supposed to be.

And maybe…f*ck, f*ck, dammit, sh*t, Eddie…maybe he could be Saved!

He kneaded the dry, onionskin fabric of his well-worn pillowcase between restless fingers, listening as the record looped back around to the beginning, Bob’s mellow, over-serious warble crackling back into the darkened room.

“How many times/Have you heard someone say/If I had his money/I’d do things my way…”

He was deluded. Self-important. Developing messianic delusions as he entered his ripe old 20s. Like Joan of Arc or Charles Manson or Lenin or Lennon...

Why should he Save! anyone? Why should anyone want to be Saved! by him? And what would happen, really, if it worked? If he helped Jason, was he really going to buy a better future for anybody? Pave the roads of tomorrow with new hope? Lay the foundation for a more equal high school existence for generations of freaks, geeks, burnouts, and outcasts?

Maybe he was just reaching, out of desperate, grasping hope. Maybe he was trying to make this his year before it even started. Preparing for the world after him while he was still in it.

Maybe, sure…but what was so wrong with that? What was the alternative at this point? He knew Jason’s secret; he wasn’t gonna give it away and he wasn’t gonna hold it over his head.

And Jason Carver was completely in his power.

Impossible things were already happening, signs and wonders unfolding before his eyes.

Dylan had never wanted to be a messiah either. Smart guy…you don’t need a high school diploma to know what they do to messiahs.

Eddie flipped over, onto his back, looking up at the ceiling and imagining, quite involuntarily, Jason in the same position, suffering his own restless sleep, tinged by his own long frustrations, the invisible scars of the torture of self-denial.

If Eddie had a beautiful girlfriend…if Eddie had a Chrissy Cunningham…he would let her do whatever she wanted to him.

Wouldn’t he?

He thought of Gareth, back in the driveway outside his house, looking at him like he was some great arbiter of wisdom, like Dr. Ruth couldn’t possibly have taught him anything he didn’t already know.

He didn’t need to be up on his Bible study to know what happened to false prophets either…and he sure as hell didn’t need to know what happened to guys who set themselves up for a fall.

But that was it, wasn’t it? He didn’t have much farther to fall. He wasn’t coming (pardon) from any place of wisdom. Whatever anybody else thought or told themselves, he was just an ordinary mortal, and he was as much a mystery to himself as he must be to the Jasons and the Gareths and the googly-eyed Steve Harringtons of the world.

Not a messiah, then. Just someone trying to Save! others and, selfishly, to Save! himself in the bargain.

“But little they know/That it’s so hard to find/One man in ten/With a satisfied mind…”

The next day forgot to dawn. The heavy clouds that had gathered yesterday had darkened in the night, and a gloomy, soupy grayness persisted even after what was supposed to be sunrise.

The atmosphere was no less suppressive. It had to be 90 degrees in the perpetual shade, never mind the sun going AWOL. Just stepping out the door was like being slapped in the face with a sodden rag, which didn’t exactly set the most sensuous tone for the day.

Then again, if there’d ever been a point of no return, Eddie had hop-scotched right over it a while back. Nothing for it but to stick to the path he’d burned out for himself, and hope the soggy air was enough to keep away the brush fires.

Adding to the disorienting sense of unreality, Hawkins was virtually deserted this morning. Eddie wandered from Forest Hills, the well-worn soles of his sneakers plodding in a sleepy rhythm off the concrete. A couple of cars passed, kicking up brief gusts of cool air. A single bird called and was drowned out by the perennial bug buzz.

There were many hours to go yet. The practical thing to do would be to get ready.

And afterward…?

Eddie stopped at a crosswalk, watching the red hand of the signal light flicker in quickening pulses. Down the road, an old lady pushing a handcart gave him a suspicious glance. That wasn’t surprising, and Eddie was used to it…long hair, ripped jeans, the ‘h’ word on his shirt, and probably she could smell cigarettes even from that distance.

After all, he had nothing to hide.

He conducted his business in as businesslike a manner as a businessman of his caliber could be expected to conduct business. Luckily for him, Joyce Byers was clerking at Melvald’s this morning, and she’d always been a lady of discretion.

Well, before today.

“How’s your uncle?” she asked conversationally as she rang Eddie up.

“Single and ready to mingle, my good lady, and you know I can always put in a good word…”

“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…” she rattled off the mono-syllabic false laughs in a bouncy, yet ominously hollow cadence (HA-huh-HA-huh-huh).

“I know it can be difficult to lower your standards, Mrs. B, but I can assure you, he’s really quite a catch…”

“I bet the girls over at the Gap don’t have to put up with this.”

“Probably not,” said Eddie, “But they don’t have a union either.”

Joyce looked at him dubiously, “Neither do I.”

“Ooh, good point. Still, you’re much too personable for the Gap. Or for anywhere in the mall.”

“Thank you, I think,” she dropped Eddie’s wares into a square paper bag with a gracelessness so perfunctory it looped back around to legitimately impressive, “The Gap girls don’t ask questions either.”

“Yeah, I think they learn not to do the ‘who are you wearing’ thing on the first day. Wouldn’t want to make the customers self-conscious.”

Joyce smiled knowingly, eying the bag, “Arts and crafts project?”

Eddie winked, looping his fingers through the paper bag’s thin, corded hoops, “Self-improvement, Mrs. Byers.”

“Home improvement?” she co*cked an eyebrow, visibly fishing.

“They do say that our bodies are temples.”

“You don’t live in a temple.”

“Mrs. B, I’ve never known you to be so curious.”

“I know, it’s a really nasty habit I’m getting. I think I’m losing my mind.”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s not that bad…”

“You’re not kidnapping anybody, are you?” she asked this lightly, like it was a joke, but her eyes stayed fixed on him all the same.

Eddie co*cked his eyebrow, “Now, my good woman, you know as well as I do that we don’t have anybody worth kidnapping in our humble town.”

Joyce laughed briefly, “I take it you don’t want a receipt?”

“I take it you’re wondering whether you should call the cops?”

“Well, it’s been such a slow morning…” she wrinkled her nose up, “And Chief Hopper would be very cranky.”

“Surely, if you thought I was up to any real trouble, you’d have sounded the alarm by now?”

Joyce shrugged, “I must be going crazy,” she stepped back, “Just behave, huh?”

“I’d hate to take advantage of your good faith, Mrs. Byers.”

She snorted in gloriously unladylike fashion. Eddie decided it wasn’t so long ago when she’d been a long-haired, chain-smoking troublemaker, marching against everyone’s worse assumptions.

Nice to be given the benefit of the doubt. Nice to be believed in, even if he hadn’t earned it.

But he wasn’t doing anything bad, really. He sure as hell wasn’t doing anything he hadn’t been asked to do.

Eddie stepped out onto the sidewalk and felt the muggy air strike him like a soggy truncheon.

Hours yet to go.

The harsh, chemical scent of the swimming pool had a strangely neutralizing effect on the clotted air. Eddie, no life scientist he, hadn’t expected this reaction, and so hadn’t been motivated by it when he set his course.

What was motivating him, however…

“No smoking, Munson,” the bored greeting, immediately following the short, harsh bleat of the whistle, “There’s a sign.”

Eddie looked at the lifeguard on his perch, “You do know, don’t you, that blindly obeying signs is how we got the crusades?”

“Blind people can’t read signs, Mahatma,” said Billy flatly.

“It’s a figure of speech,” Eddie grumbled, irritated at being shown up, “Anyway, who’s gonna complain?” he waved his arm demonstratively, indicating the expanse of vacant deck chairs all around the pool.

Billy followed Eddie’s gaze before heaving a sigh and dropping lightly from his perch, sauntering over to Eddie with his hand outstretched.

“Extortionist,” Eddie passed him a Camel.

“Cry to your mother.”

“I’ll stop by yours first,” he cracked a smirk, touching his lighter to Billy’s cigarette, “You know, I’ve been thinking about my mother a lot recently…”

“I can still ban you from this pool, Munson.”

“Like I give a hot turd. It’s the pool.”

Billy took a drag, lowering himself in the adjacent deck chair, “And you’re here anyway.”

“Maybe I like your company.”

Billy grunted derisively, looking out across the water, “I was starting to appreciate the quiet.”

“Thinking of closing shop early?”

“It’s nasty as sh*t out, so…” he eyed the ugly gray morass of the sky.

“So?”

“So,” Billy echoed, “Figures you’d be the only sucker wandering around.”

“Yeah,” Eddie agreed, “I’ve got no idea what’s good for me. It’s a serious problem.”

Billy eyed the Melvald’s bag, down between Eddie’s legs, “How serious are we talking?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“I don’t,” said Billy, “But you keep showing up, so I’ve gotta think you want to tell me.”

Eddie chuckled, turning his cig around between his fingers, “You ever have a religious experience, Hargrove?”

He could feel Billy’s eyes piercing him through his shades, “I don’t do drugs.”

“Wrong. You do them at virtually no cost, thanks to my giving and generous nature.”

“I don’t do the drugs that give people religious experiences.”

“You’ve never had something happen to you that felt…” Eddie waved his free hand around in the air, “Divinely inspired?”

“Like I heard the intro to ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and lost my sh*t?”

“It’s been known to happen.”

Billy exhaled a tongue of smoke, “What? Did Mama Munson appear to you a dream and tell you to change your life around?”

“Nothing nearly so straightforward and lucky you, because she probably would’ve told me not to let myself get taken advantage of by swaggering pirates from the California badlands.”

“Smart lady.”

“Stupid son,” Eddie agreed, “Nah, I haven’t been getting any brainwaves from her.”

Billy’s face asked the unspoken question and he sighed, “My spiritual awakening is a little closer to home.”

“You’re not gonna start speaking in tongues, are you?”

“Depends on the audience,” he cracked a smile, “I dunno.”

“Don’t you?”

“There’s a nonzero chance I might be able to change the status quo in these parts.”

“Oh,” Billy nodded languorously, “So it’s an ego trip.”

“You’re such a cynic.”

“I’ve got an allergy to being converted.”

“So do I,” Eddie granted, “I just think it’s funny. What people do to themselves to…get right with God or whatever. Punishing themselves for stuff they haven’t even done yet and getting so wound up, they take it out on everybody else.”

“Yeah,” said Billy noncommittally, “It’s a real sh*t deal.”

“But if there was someone around with…no particular investment in getting right with God in the same way…someone who, perhaps, marches to the beat of his own drum…”

“Don’t burn down any churches, Munson,” said Billy flatly, “My billfold couldn’t take it.”

“Don’t shed any tears for me, Billy-Boy,” Eddie leaned his head back, “I’m not on any mission of self-destruction.”

“Right, yeah, you’re just making the world better one lost soul at a time.”

“Have a little faith in me,” Eddie chided, “You know I’ve got a go-getter spirit.”

“And it don’t matter where your going gets you.”

Eddie shrugged, “I don’t expect you to understand.”

“But you came to see me anyway?” Billy’s lips parted, showing off those shockingly white, wolfish teeth.

“Maybe I just like the delightful, summery atmosphere of our local community pool?”

Billy laughed: a long, low cackle, smoke eddying around his frizzy, struggling blonde tips. Leaning back in his chair, he propped his head up on one hand, “Just don’t get yourself crucified, yeah?”

“Suckers like me are hard to come by?”

“They’re a f*cking endangered species,” he looked past Eddie, his smile fading a notch, “Or maybe they’re not.”

“Well, this is cozy,” Steve Harrington plodded lightly across the concrete to them, “This a private party, or can I get my laps in?”

“No sailor suit at the pool?” Eddie co*cked an eyebrow, “Gotta say, I’m disappointed at this utter lack of commitment to the theme…”

“That’s adorable, Munson,” Steve said automatically, looking from him to Billy, “You guys know you can’t smoke here?”

“Fully aware,” Billy took a drag as Eddie added, “It’s on the sign, don’t you know.”

Steve smiled with tight-lipped patience, filching in his jeans pocket, “Heads up, Hargrove.”

Before Billy could do more than lift his head, Steve had tossed a small, beige-colored tube at him. This projectile landed square on Billy’s tank-top, about in the ridge between his pectorals. Eddie felt compelled to wolf whistle as Billy swore in a high register, “What the f*ck, Harrington?”

“Ooh, lemme…” Eddie started excitedly, reaching over. Billy scowled, lurching back, but not fast enough for Eddie’s nimble fingers, which snatched the papery cylinder up from his bronzino bosom.

“Watch it, tweaker…”

“‘Tweaker’. That’s very derogatory, Billy. I’ll have you know I was born this defective, no needles required…” he turned the paper tube over to get a peek at the silvery profile of proud old Frankie D. Roosevelt atop the stack inside, “Dimes. Went to a lot of trouble, Steve. You could’ve just sprung for a couple of dollars…”

“Five dollars,” said Steve, “In dimes. Robin counted. She didn’t even have to unwrap them; it was kinda f*cked up.”

“It’s that gleam of childlike wonder in your eyes, Steve,” said Eddie, “That gives me such hope in the endurance and eventual redemption of our fallen human race…ow!” for Billy had snatched the roll of dimes from him, making sure to swat Eddie’s wrist as he did.

“Some religious experience you had, yeah? Stealing dimes. Next you’ll be pissing on street corners and yelling about the end of the world.”

“I didn’t know what they were!” said Eddie, “What’s it for, anyway? Payment for services rendered?”

They both looked at him, patently disgusted, and Eddie had a brief, impish desire to be a real little sh*t and announce there was no need to be ashamed about it, since he was in the same business except, of course, was going for a much more generous rate.

“Max left them,” Steve explained, turning back to Billy, “At Scoops. Her, um…arcade money. I’d have brought them to your place, but I figured…” there was a long, viscerally uncomfortable pause, “I don’t know if she’s, like…supposed to have them.”

Billy flipped the tube around in his hand, “She’s probably not.”

Steve shrugged, “Yeah, I figured. Just…get them to her. I’ll hear it from her if you don’t.”

“Aw, you caught me, Hargrove. I was about to steal a little girl’s dimes to support my life of crime.”

“Hey, every penny counts,” Eddie interjected. They looked back at him, and Eddie had the odd sense that he was intruding on something. Billy sighed, sliding the dimes into the shallow pocket of his lifeguard shorts, “Don’t worry a hair on your head, Harrington. The more time she blows on Pac-Man, the less she has for me.”

Billy’s eyes, partially visible over the tops of his shades, lingered on Steve’s and, for a moment, the scales of artifice seemed to drop away. Billy Hargrove wasn’t about to bust out a ‘thank you’ under any circ*mstance, but Steve seemed to get it anyway, nodding curtly with a tiny, tired smile, like it had been nothing, like he shouldn’t mention it, which of course Billy hadn’t to begin with.

Eddie thought of Steve’s little comment over the counter at Scoops: “What do you know about Billy?” as if he somehow was positioned to know better.

This, evidently, wasn’t as hollow a statement as had originally appeared. What a wonderful world.

This thought idly ping-ponging around in his skull, Eddie punched out another cigarette, “If His Majesty insists on darkening these fallow lands with his shadow, the least he can do is partake of the serf’s humble weed.”

Steve narrowed his eyes, “…that’s just a cigarette. Isn’t it?”

“Do you want to smoke or not?”

Steve shrugged and Eddie lit him up. For all his token protestations, he took a healthy (for certain definitions of the term, surgeon general’s warning, don’t try this at home, if you’re reading this, you’re probably beyond help anyway, adventurer, march on and on and on, etc.) drag, maintaining all the airs of the ‘cool guy’ at a party who wanted to show off how good he was at smoking.

Eddie supposed it had gone over pretty well with general audiences.

Heaving a semi-theatrical satisfied sigh, Steve sank to the ground between their chairs, just plopping, denims first, on the grimy concrete. Presumably feeling their eyes on him, he looked left, then right, at the empty chairs beside each of them, and then shrugged as if to say ‘Oh, well’. As he readjusted himself on the ground, the toe of his sneaker brushed the corner of the Melvald’s bag (the Savings! sack, if you will). co*cking an eyebrow at Eddie, he began to lean over…

“Peepers-weepers, Stevo,” Eddie told him curtly, using his own foot to nudge the bag under his chair.

Steve let out an incredulous laugh, “Pretty small to hide a body in.”

“You’d be surprised.”

Steve blinked, his smile not slipping, “What else is new?”

They sat like this for a little time more, smoking in a companionable silence. Which, objectively, Eddie thought was kind of funny, these guys not quite being his friends. Harrington in particular…he could’ve counted the times he’d spoken to him before this week on one hand and have enough fingers left over for a dirty Eastern European gesture. And Billy…well, he was a customer, and he liked Metallica in a non-obsessive, water-cooler talk kind of way, but their interactions were historically plastered over the understanding of a business transaction being undertaken.

Still, he felt comfortable…or as comfortable as one could be in suppressive, stifling heat under an unforgiving, virtually sunless sky. Eddie became hyper-aware of the ins-and-outs of his breaths between drags, and of the complementary hums of Steve and Billy’s breaths in kind, not quite in sync with his.

“So what’ll you do,” Steve said finally, enunciating each word with a lazy, aimless abandon, “If some family shows up with, like, three kids, and they see their lifeguard kicked back poolside, smoking a cheap cigarette?”

“Rich enough for your blood, Kingo,” Eddie pointed out.

Billy rolled his eyes, “I’ll tell ’em we’re closed.”

“Clever.”

“Nobody’s coming out anyway,” said Billy, indicating the slate sky above them, the heavy cloud cover giving the impression of a vat of boiling oil, the kind your generic fantastical dark lord keeps handy to lower undesirables into, “Bitch of a storm coming.”

Steve squinted up at the sky, as if the better to spot rain drops, “You think so?”

Billy snorted, “You’re a real citizen of the world, Harrington.”

Steve blew a plume of smoke up in Billy’s direction. Billy swatted him lightly about the head, a gesture which had him flinch away with perhaps over-animated zeal.

As usual…more things in heaven and on earth than Eddie would ever have thought to dream up in his philosophy.

“A hard rain,” he said finally, dreamily, “Gonna fall.”

Billy probably rolled his eyes at this, but Eddie felt too heavy and torpid to turn his head to see. Steve, for his part, looked up and over at him, “Oh right. Bob Dylan.”

“A little outside your genre, isn’t it, Munson?” asked Billy.

“Genres are tools of our elite capitalist oppressors,” he paused, “Also, I think I have Mommy issues.”

Steve laughed like Eddie had just said that to be outrageous, which was probably for the best.

“You haven’t heard, Harrington?” prompted Billy, “This distinguished citizen is starting his own religion.”

“Gross exaggeration,” said Eddie automatically.

“Is that what all that talk was, about people hurting themselves at God’s paper company?”

“Spreading the good news already, huh?” intoned Billy.

“It’s not my religion,” said Eddie, “Frankly, I’m turning more agnostic by the day.”

“What’s that, like, Buddhist?”

“But I’m a threepeat senior, alright…”

“Oh, sing a new song,” said Billy lazily. Harrington laughed lightly, making a motion with his hand like he expected Billy to high-five him, but to no avail. Eddie, not wanting him to be left hanging, thwacked the back of Steve’s knuckles with his hand.

“Dick,” Steve groused good-naturedly.

“Oh, it’s just a little skin-to-skin, Steve. People have to chill.”

Steve looked at him like he’d just grown a second head, “Skin-to-skin?”

“You’ve abused yourself much worse on that basketball court, I have no doubt.”

“The way he does it,” Billy affirmed with smug, muted agreement. Steve scoffed in a wearied, long-suffering manner. Eddie briefly considered poking some more at this, given they’d both shared a court with Jason Carver.

But he had a certain sense of his own responsibility. And, anyway, he wasn’t sure he needed to know any more of what Steve or Billy thought of their underclassman teammate. By now, Eddie was prepared to concede anything anyone thought they knew about Jason Carver was next to useless stacked against the genuine article.

Healthy odds that Jason himself didn’t know what the ‘genuine article’ was.

“Hope it holds off,” he said finally, “The storm. I’ve got an appointment.”

“Got souls to save?” Steve asked, facetiously as the topic no doubt deserved.

“It’s a thankless job,” Eddie ground his cigarette out against the unforgiving metal arm rest of his lounge chair, “But someone’s gotta do it.”

“Your halo’s in the mail,” said Billy.

“You know where I live,” he flicked his spent cig into the wastebin and was quite gratified that it actually landed there.

Signs and wonders indeed.

“See you on the flipside, gentlemen,” Eddie hoisted his bag up, letting it slap awkwardly against his side, “It’s been a trip.”

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” said Billy with typical disaffection. Steve made some sort of hollow belly-whooping sound, as if to concede there couldn’t be very much Billy wouldn’t do.

Eddie rolled his eyes, turning on his heel and starting toward the gate which was, despite all evidence to the contrary, not closed and ready to welcome any lonely pilgrims on this sticky, sour, sweltering summer’s afternoon.

He felt eyes on the back of him the entire time and let out an involuntary belch of laughter he could neither explain nor understand.

It wouldn’t have been so bad, really, to spend a few more minutes lying in that chair, just vegging out in the haze, with smoke in his lungs and chlorine in his nostrils.

But he had commitments. Places to go, people to see…and save, too, maybe, if you believed in that song and dance.

Eddie decided he could be a believer for a little while, just to see what happened.

“I’m not late, am I?” Eddie asked casually, moderating his pace as he came to the end of the worn-out path.

Jason was leaning against the picnic table, “I’m early.”

“Better to come early than not to come at…” seeing Jason’s expression, he hoisted his hands up, “Sorry, sorry…couldn’t resist. We can’t all have your ironclad restraint.”

Jason’s lip curled, not into a smile, but there was none of his customary scandalized pretense, like he was trying to convince Eddie he’d have his head for his uncouth conduct, sir, and your own wet nurse won’t recognize ye by the time your fetid face is hoisted ’bove the city gates. He hadn’t worn his jacket at all today. On the face of it, this wasn’t surprising at all…the air was so close today, he could feel every scrap of fabric on him clinging to his skin like it had been steamrolled on.

Still…for Eddie’s money, this was the first time he’d ever seen Jason without his letterman anywhere near at hand. He was standing there in his periwinkle denims and one of his country club polos…a plain white number, of the kind that had a little alligator sewn right over the nipple. Classic New England yacht prince, picked up by a capricious tornado and dumped in the Midwest.

Which poetic simile had the unintended effect of making Jason sound like a victim of circ*mstance instead of somebody who woke up this morning and decided to dress like that. And while Eddie was able to concede several points about Jason being shaped by his terrarium, he wasn’t entirely absent agency, as his creative problem solving skills so plainly demonstrated.

“What’s that?” Jason’s attention had gone to the bag in Eddie’s hand, a shadow flickering across his expression.

“Oh, just some odds and ends,” he paused, “Don’t worry, I’m taking it out of my paycheck.”

The corners of Jason’s lips were twitching. He was gripping his belt with one hand, his fingers rapping spasmodically against the corded brown leather.

“About that…”

“You’re not trying to haggle at this late date, are you, Jace?”

“No,” he interrupted before adding, somewhat peevishly, “Shut up. I…” he looked up and around; Eddie fancied he could see the oily pit of the sky reflected in his over-excited, over-bright eyes, “I was just thinking…$50,” he spoke the sum in a kind of strangulated hush, “It feels kind of…”

“Filthy?”

“Cheap,” he paused, “…considering.”

They looked across at each other, Eddie twisting the straps of the bag around his wrist, feeling the thin cords dig into his wrist, “Don’t look now, Jason, but are you calling me cheap?”

“I’m saying…” he ground his teeth, “If it would be…if it would just be better…” he lowered his voice, “If I paid. More.”

“Better…” Eddie repeated slowly, “For me or for you?”

“Why would it be better for me?”

“Oh, Jason, I don’t pretend to understand how you think,” he paused, “Not for lack of trying.”

“Try again.”

Eddie met his eye, “I dunno, Jason, maybe you’d feel classier if I attached a bigger price tag.”

“You’re not attaching it.”

“Which makes me a charity case and, last I checked, this little exercise isn’t for my benefit.”

“You’re gonna tell me you’re not getting anything out of it?” he looked at him searchingly, and Eddie had the feeling that he was shrinking in the heat, that his clothes weren’t so much sticking to him as scraping him off with them, that his skin was just another flimsy layer of off-the-rack garbage smothering his bones.

“Maybe I’m invested in your self-improvement.”

“Because you’re such a nice guy.”

“About as nice as you are,” he co*cked his head to the side.

“You want me to believe you’d just as soon do this for free?”

“Not strictly, no. I think at that point, an upstanding gentleman like you has to spring for dinner and a movie first.”

Jason looked away and Eddie nodded, “50’s fine.”

“Fine,” Jason repeated, “Should I pay upfront or…”

“Brother, do you want to get fleeced?”

Jason flushed bright crimson, bracing his foot against a table leg, “Sorry,” it didn’t take much flexing of the imagination to deduce Jason didn’t often apologize for things, “I’ve never done this before.”

Eddie let out a short, breathy laugh, “Yeah. Neither have I. That’s why the beginner’s rates.”

Jason’s eyes drifted back to the bag, “So…?”

“Tools of the trade,” he tossed the bag across the short distance. Jason lunged to catch it, a little too athletically…Eddie had the insane impression he was showing off, proving he was still a super macho point shooter forward guardsman or whatever position he played, it was quite a miracle Eddie hadn’t asked anybody yet.

Jason caught the Melvald’s bag in both hands, not fudging his stance up in the slightest, to his credit. Furrowing his brow dubiously, he pried the bag open with two fingers and looked inside.

Eddie, bracing himself for a Production, was not disappointed.

“What the hell is this?”

“They’re for you!”

“They’re ropes!” he held up a whole fistful of the sturdy white cord, which was quite an achievement since it had all been neatly wound around its spool.

“It’s twine, first of all. Let’s not be dramatic.”

“You’re going to tie me up!”

“Well, obviously it sounds f*cked up when you say it like that…”

“Are you crazy?”

“Hey, buddy, I’m not the dude who apologizes to Jesus after wanking it.”

“f*ck you.”

“Are you offering? Because, gotta say, that’s some real character development for you…”

Jason balled a fist and Eddie side-stepped it, “Settle down, J.C. We both know you’re not gonna land one on me. sh*t, you’re so plugged up by now, you’ll burst like the Buffalo Creek Dam the second you get a knuckle on me…”

Jason balked, eyes bright, his fist frozen where he’d left it. Eddie could see his hand shaking and felt another implacable twinge of grotesque pity that really didn’t sit well with him, given the agenda he’d set out for them today.

Helping Jason was one thing. Helping Jason for his own good, and for a broader sense of justice…sure, he could ride that wave for as long as it would take him.

But Eddie didn’t think he could do this if the overriding feeling in him was pity. There was something tawdry in that, though why, exactly, he felt that way, he had no damn idea and if Dr. Ruth had ever written about it, it had probably gone to private press.

“What did you think this was gonna be?” Eddie asked, “Seriously.”

Jason tangled a length of twine around his fingers, passing his tongue thoughtfully over his teeth, “I didn’t,” he said finally, “Think.”

“Well, like I told you…I work for my money. And in the interest of earning my keep, I thought about the task laid before me, as any sensible person would do, and I came to the conclusion that the best thing to do…”

“Would be tying me up?”

“You can’t touch yourself,” he said it bluntly, without affect, scorn, or derision, and the bare fact of the statement spoken aloud had a diminishing effect on Jason, who let the cord fall back into the bag, “That’s right, isn’t it? You probably can’t take a piss without having a religious crisis and begging God to show mercy on your degenerate soul. But, tragically for you, Jason, you’re still a growing boy, with growing pains and growing needs and somehow no aspiring holy man ever bothered to account for the plain fact that the more you tell someone they can’t do something…” he was practically on Jason’s toes now, “The harder it is to resist.”

Jason winced away, tracing his wrist with one hand. The veins of his forearms were strikingly solid, their outlines gleaming with the heady sweat of the day. Eddie could imagine his heart pumping blood to his guilty brain and his hesitant hands and the wretched, forbidden no-man’s land below the belt.

It was altogether a stupid, perfectly avoidable dilemma to put yourself in. That’s what made it so f*cking sad. But Eddie didn’t want to be sad. He didn’t want to pity Jason. Easier to be angry at his obtuseness, the blank, perplexed look in his face, that expression of cast-upon naiveté, as if he was surprised Eddie had thought about this at all, that he certainly never would’ve considered any of it, that even now he was too good, too squeaky-clean, too pure of heart and deed to think about the gnawing, compulsive, all-consuming, directionless urges that crept into his body and stayed there, fermenting and metastasizing under the hot lights of his own shame.

To his credit, Jason didn’t step back, even as Eddie glowered at him in close quarters, “So that’s your solution? Tie me up so I…can’t touch?”

“No matter how tempting,” Eddie nodded, “See, it occurred to me, Jason, that the way you’ve been dealing with your problem just isn’t practical…”

Jason let out a short, bitter bark of laughter.

“You take a lonely act, and you make it lonelier, and you do it in a way that pretty much guarantees you’re stuck torturing yourself for a block of time you could’ve shrunk to a few minutes if you’d just done it the way all the other sicko perverts do. Now, while that speaks to the strength of your convictions, it doesn’t do much for your ability as a problem solver, because all you’re really doing is suffering harder for longer…”

“And what’re you gonna do?’ Jason challenged, “Tie me up and get me off?”

Eddie folded his arms, “Easy-peasey.”

Jason lowered his shoulders, his arms hanging limply at his sides. The bag of twine plopped lightly into the dirt by his feet.

“That…” he was staring at the ground, “That’s not what I…”

“What you meant? What you wanted?”

“You said you would help.”

“This is help!”

“This…” he looked around, evidently at a loss for words. Something rustled in the treetops above them. Far away, there was a low rumble of traffic on the road.

“Look, Jason, I’ve only ever read one book about this stuff and, to be honest, I skimmed a lot of it, but I don’t need to be an expert to know this little problem of yours is only gonna get worse the longer it goes on. You pretty much admitted you can’t even let your girlfriend breathe on you without having a heart attack…”

“That’s a different thing…”

“Right, right, that’s the celibacy before marriage thing, sure. Different thing and, believe me, I’m in no hurry to get you to third base with Chrissy Cunningham in these conditions. I’m not sure your relationship could survive five seconds of lusty glances and an acapella recital of ‘The Sinner’s Prayer’.”

Jason hit him. Despite Eddie’s earlier assertions, the spontaneous act of violence didn’t push him over the edge.

It was a quick, pretty half-hearted punch anyway. Eddie began to move back as he moved forward, and in the end his knuckles just brushed Eddie’s face, like he’d lost his steam halfway through.

“…sorry,” he said finally, brokenly.

Eddie ran his rings down the side of his face, “I’ll live.”

“You’re not wrong,” Jason continued, “I couldn’t…with Chrissy, it’s not…” he furrowed his brow, “It’s not fair.”

“Because you like Chrissy,” said Eddie, “Chrissy is great. Chrissy is, if you don’t mind my saying, a great catch. Chrissy probably would be fine saving it ’til marriage, if you can hold her that far…”

Jason turned his head, worrying the knuckles on the hand he’d attempted to hit him with.

“But that’s not the same, is it? Because Chrissy is a nice girl, sure, but she’s probably gonna have some questions if you ever told her you’ve gotten so plugged up that she can’t even look at you without you desperately conjuring cold showers in your head…”

“Well, obviously!” Jason snapped, “Obviously, I would never tell her any of this. It’s disgusting, Munson. You think I’m proud?”

“Oh, believe me, Carver, if I ever thought you had a grain of pride in you, I don’t anymore,” he assured him softly, “So I gave it a thought. This…thing you’re doing to yourself, it’s hurting you. We’re agreed on that?”

Jason looked at him, that muscle in his throat working, as if in would-be defiance. But Eddie had no fear. Even if he swung again, it was only going to be an impulsive, impotent attempt, over before it began.

He had the brief, insane thought that Jason must hate him for this. That Eddie would feel the same, if their roles were swapped.

But Jason nodded, before Eddie could follow that thought through to its conclusion.

“And you being hurt, that’s gonna hurt those token individuals…whoever they may be…that you harbor legitimate, unfeigned, unpressured affection for…may even be just one person, and that’s just fine…but it would, wouldn’t it? It does?”

Jason’s nostrils flared as he exhaled heavily, “…and?”

“And so…” Eddie prompted, “The best fix would be to stop you hurting yourself, to take some of that load you’ve been putting on off…all while, of course, staying within the brick-dense code of laws you’ve pledged yourself too…that’s fine, by the way. Who am I to quibble with a guy who actually pays attention to his alignment chart? But how do you stop? You’ve tried: it hasn’t worked. Through your immense moral conviction, you, my holy roller friend, have made a one-person job big enough for two…” Eddie co*cked his head to the side, “…and you can’t ask anyone you actually care about to help unburden you. So…” he spread his arms wide, “Happy to be of service.”

Jason looked across at him. There were fresh gouges in his arms, from his nails. Eddie decided once you’ve decided to hate one thing about yourself, it wasn’t that far a jump to hate everything else.

Finally, Jason looked up, speaking in a barely audible whisper, “What do you need me to do?”

And Eddie nodded, shoving his hands in his pockets, “The tree, my good man. And leave the rest to me.”

For all his ballyhooed self-discipline, Jason picked a bitch of a time to get twitchy.

“Careful with that!” he protested screechily.

“You be careful,” Eddie retorted, winding another length of twine about his wrist, “Keep squirming and you’ll hurt something.”

“You’ll hurt something.”

“You’ll have brought it on yourself.”

Jason gave out with one of his little half-laugh invectives, as if he was still trying to suss out how exactly he’d gotten himself into this situation. Eddie would be happy to enlighten him on this point but, to be honest, he wasn’t sure his oral history of this adventure would be much better.

He’d propped Jason up against the f*ck tree, for the simple fact that he was used to it and there was something perversely funny about Eddie getting to deliver stage directions to the effect of, “No, no, put your feet there, your shoulder blades should be right over Tommy and Carol…”

The sky continued darkening as they worked, though it was the first flush of summer and the sun wasn’t supposed to set for some hours more. The world darkened around them, from slate gray to a sort of tinted cobalt.

“Picked a great time for it,” Jason remarked at one point, eyes aimed upward.

“Think of it this way,” Eddie cinched another knot around Jason’s calves, “It gets any darker, maybe the Big Guy won’t see us.”

“Yeah,” Jason chuckled grimly, “Sure,” and then, quite spontaneously, “Where’d you learn to do that, anyway?”

“Eh, I’m mostly making it up as I go. It wasn’t exactly covered in the book…”

“I mean that,” Jason indicated with a jut of his chin, “Tying knots.”

“Oh,” Eddie shrugged, pulling another length to get started festooning Jason’s ankles around the tree trunk, “Learned when I was a kid.”

“Don’t tell me you were a Boy Scout.”

“Is that more or less street cred than ‘Bible camp’?” Eddie challenged, “Anyway, I wasn’t. I’m not even sure they let Jews in.”

“You’re Jewish?”

“I mean, I like bacon with my breakfast as much as any gentile, so I’m about as good a Jew as you’re a Jesus freak,” he tied this next knot. Jason drew in a breath as he flexed his legs, the same way he had with every other cord Eddie had tied, as if he was testing Eddie’s game.

By now, you’d think he’d have learned when Eddie committed to a campaign, he committed to it.

“My Dad taught me,” he continued eventually, “To tie knots and untie ’em.”

“What’s so special about untying knots?”

“Speed,” Eddie smirked, imagining his teeth glinting in the rapidly diminishing light as he stuck his free hand into his jeans pocket and pulled his switchblade, flicking it open to let Jason see the shimmering steel.

“Jesus!”

“Commandment. Also, congrats: I don’t think you pissed yourself there. You really do have immaculate self-control,” he closed the knife, “I’m not gonna knife you, Jason. I’m just gonna cut you loose when we’re finished. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Jason repeated, breathing raggedly.

“Though, you’d have to admit, it would be kinda funny if I went to this much trouble just to tie you up in the woods and stab you to death.”

“Yeah, real hilarious,” his shoulders twitched; Eddie imagined he was trying to wipe the sweat from his brow, but remembering that of course he couldn’t, since his arms were pinned to his sides, “But you wouldn’t. Not your style, right? You’re all about…” he looked around, laughing briefly, “Helping the needy.”

“Let’s not go crazy,” Eddie chided.

“Right,” Jason nodded, “I’ve got the ‘wrong idea’ about you.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” Eddie lifted himself up from his crouch, “I had the wrong idea about you,” he looked his handiwork over, “Feel right? Raise your hand if yes.”

“Can I spit in your face instead?”

“That’s disgusting and sort of kinky. We should save that for another class, shouldn’t we?”

Jason rolled his eyes, “You tied me up nice, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Nicely, actually. Christ, if you’re graduating this year, I’ve got no excuses. Pity you’ll still get the diploma first, stupid fascist alphabet…” he tugged at his knots experimentally and saw that they were good, nodding approval, “Not bad, if I do say so myself.”

He’d tied Jason in four places: above the ankles, above the knees, about the midriff, and below the shoulder blades. Each loop was composed of three lengths of twine, all tied neatly off to the right side.

Eddie had never tied up a person before, but you’d be hard-pressed to believe it to look at these results. Whatever that said about him.

“So…you can’t touch anything,” Eddie declared.

“Want me to try some crunches just to prove it?”

“Nah, you’d just hurt yourself,” closing his switchblade, he slid it back into his pocket. Jason’s eyes followed it there, lingering on Eddie’s hand, maybe attracted by his rings, which twinkled in the dwindling light as if they were actually worth something.

“f*ck all, it’s hot,” Eddie thought aloud, just to say something. Jason made a noncommittal half-verbal grunt in response, his expression somewhat reproachful, which he had every right to be. It was hot and humid and sticky as sh*t, and Jason couldn’t even move to do anything about it. His face had taken on a moonlit luminescence under the thin sheen of sweat beading there, and his polo seemed as good as painted onto him, the white fabric of the short sleeves seeming to peter seamlessly into the slick, lightly furred striations of his forearms.

Eddie’s mouth had suddenly gone quite dry. He cleared his throat, “Second thoughts, J.C.?”

Jason met his eyes, “An hour ago.”

“Good for you, bullying on.”

“If you do end up stabbing me to death, like with some devil sacrifice sh*t…”

“Not my gospel, brother.”

Jason showed his teeth into something like a peevish, tired smile, “What do I do?”

“Hm?”

“Like, what am I supposed to…is there anything you need me to…”

“My dear, my darling, my disciple, my friend…” Eddie pressed his palms against the bark of the tree, his skin scraping against the rough, rude carvings of earlier, less lonely young lovers and lovers-in-waiting, “That’s the whole point. You don’t do anything,” he winked, “And God can’t do a dingle-damned thing to you.”

Jason raised his eyebrows just slightly, “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“Oh well,” Eddie decided, “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, right? Hey, do you want a safe word?”

“A what?”

“It was in the book. You have to scream a word out if things get too intense for you, or whatever.”

“What word?”

“f*ck if I know. ‘Stop’, I guess. ‘Help, police, murder’…”

“If I wanted you to stop this, Munson, I would’ve said so two knots ago,” his eyes flicked back and forth, to each of Eddie’s hands braced against the tree to either side of him, much the same way he’d propped himself up, once upon who knew how many times before. There was a soft rumble in the distance, like a car backfiring, or a cough of thunder.

“Too late now.”

“That’s the spirit,” Eddie nodded approvingly, looking Jason over, taking in just how small he seemed, tied and prone before him, his clothes practically painted on him by sweat and the pressure of his binds.

In these conditions, it didn’t take a lucky perception roll to see Jason’s body was in no hurry to call a halt to the proceedings, whatever his mind and, presumably, immortal soul had to say about things. Eddie could see him outlined against the pale blue denim of his jeans…what a paperback romance might call his ‘immensity’ or ‘his badge of maleness’.

Eddie, no great judge, couldn’t decide from this one impression how immense or not the immensity was, and if this song-and-dance was how you earned badges of maleness, the He-Man bench must be much shallower than everyone let on.

“So,” he said eventually, surprised by the hoarseness of his own voice.

“So,” Jason repeated.

“I’m gonna…” he began, then lifted his eyes to Jason, “Wait, you haven’t asked.”

“Are you waiting for permission?”

“Well, I figured that was the $50 and all your associated bitching about me being worth more than that…thank you, by the way, so nice…but you didn’t ask what I’m going to do.”

Jason looked at him like he’d gone stupid, “Munson, if it gets any hotter, you’re going to have to peel me off this tree, and…”

“I mean, not that I don’t appreciate your trust in me, but I kind of expected…”

“I can put two and two together, alright?” Jason snapped harshly, “You don’t have to…” he tripped over his words; Eddie saw him wince as the cords binding him dug a little too deeply into his chest, “You don’t have to explain it.”

From which Eddie deduced that, for all his naiveté, Jason had an imagination as active as could be expected from any growing young man in a similar predicament.

Only so many ways to skin a cat…or to relieve an itch.

“Okay,” Eddie nodded, “I’ll just…”

“You’ll just…”

“Making sure, right…”

“I get it, okay? You don’t have to…”

“I won’t touch you,” Eddie spoke over him, “Not more than I need to, and not with my…” he drummed his fingers on the bark, “Not with my hands.”

Jason nodded in quiet understanding.

“As virginal as we can make it,” Eddie continued, “Like bumping into a guy in a checkout line.”

“For how many bumps?” Jason asked with some muted, ill-humor.

Eddie met his eye, “As long as it takes.”

So prepared, he readjusted himself, planting his feet so the toes of his Docs were just barely brushing the tips of Jason’s Air Maxes. His whole body, propped up against the tree, was bent at a precipitous incline toward Jason.

Who’s acute now, Mrs. Petrie?

“You can…close your eyes,” Eddie added, as an afterthought, “If it makes it, um…easier.”

“Easier,” Jason repeated.

“Yanno, to…think of stuff.”

“Stuff?” he sank his teeth into words.

“Yeah, like whatever gets you going, whatever you usually think about…” but he remembered the suffering, frustrated manner of self-abuse Jason had displayed on previous exercises at this spot and thought better of it, “Or something else. If that’s better.”

Jason didn’t say anything to this, but he did close his eyes which, Eddie thought, was for the best, even as a strange, creeping feeling went up and down his arms. Whatever the f*ck ‘spine-tingling’ meant, this must be it. Funny…you wouldn’t be inclined to associate the phrase with the wet heat of a summer afternoon; much likelier to imagine a haunted hayride on Halloween night, all cool and brisk with a chill wind in the air, but the damp humidity had already primed his flesh to crawling a while back, and now the slightest nervous provocation was enough to make him feel five seconds from squirming right out of his regularly scheduled carapace.

Not that he’d wanted Jason to look at him. Performance anxiety, he thought hysterically, way to fritz the mojo, daddy-o, and things of that nature.

But doing it (no, no, not doing it, not like they were little boys afraid of cooties, call it literally anything else…) while Jason had his eyes closed…

This wasn’t dirty. This was so determinedly undirty it was almost impressive. He should write to Dr. Ruth, maybe call into her radio show and let her know about the crazy cool neato trick he devised for defeating adolescent evangelical sexual frustration. They’d have to give him a prize, a parade, a padded cell…the sky’s the limit.

But being undirty by no means made it clean. Not that Eddie had ever been a champion of clean living, but…

Another rumble, close to a low growl. Somewhere, birds were taking wing, looking for shelter.

This was as much privacy as they were ever going to get. And this ritual, even if not dirty…demanded privacy.

Eddie pushed forward, pressing his arms into the tree trunk and angling in, without bending his knees. Jason, eyes closed, nonetheless sensed his approach. His mouth was pressed hard shut, his lips a thin line in a flushed, frozen face. Eddie found himself holding his own breath, weirdly conscious of Jason feeling a blast of it on his face as he got closer…

At the last moment, he pressed himself, his middle, his pelvis, his breadbasket, (etc.) into Jason’s, at the same time holding his chest back, aided by his arms. The moment of contact was brief and, really, for all the build-up, faintly ridiculous. Jason was pliant beneath him, though for the feel of it, he was pretty hard already. He let out a low gasp, pressing his eyes shut further.

Eddie drew back, widening his angle just enough, back to starting position. He thought of asking Jason if that had been alright, if he hadn’t done anything wrong…he was pretty sure he hadn’t hurt him, at least not in the literal definition of the word.

But Eddie didn’t really feel like speaking, and he figured Jason felt the same way.

So he closed in again.

It was, altogether, a pretty mortifying ritual. If Eddie had ever been one to give a damn about appearances, he’d probably be bemoaning how stupid he must look to any idle watchers happening upon this spot and chancing a looksie, as he had not so very long ago.

But there was nobody here, and it was getting darker all the while. Jason remained still and pliant, but not altogether unmoving, despite the surety of his bonds. With each pass Eddie made, pressing themselves together for a few taut, blood-swelled seconds, he squirmed against him, short, keening breaths escaping his clenched lips.

It had to be torture, being so primed and yet unable to touch: a livewire sparking futilely on the sidewalk, only bare inches away from the puddle that’d really give it a chance to go out in a blaze of glory.

Was it really the best thing to do? To encourage this whole thing? It was cheating, anyway, exploiting a loophole. Jason was well right…if God was paying any attention, they weren’t going to get any gold stars for ingenuity, no more than Eddie had ever gotten any credit for studying the reverse ends of old Mr. Yancy’s class papers as he graded during detention, the better to see the imprints left by peoples’ right answers.

A rule breaker was a rule breaker, no matter how creative.

Still, this whole hands-free self-flagellation couldn’t be good for anybody. Wouldn’t it have been smarter to just sit Jason down, get him a dirty magazine, and remind him to watch his grip? Just show him how everybody else did it, as if he didn’t know, and hope the little push was enough for him to drop the idea it was anything worse than what it appeared to be.

But Eddie didn’t know these things for sure. He was as clueless about the intricacies of intimacy as…oh, Gareth, say. He just wasn’t as obvious about it, not from his own intention, but because people liked to make up their own ideas about what made him tick, what got him going.

He knew some things, though, about himself. Things he didn’t know what to do with, no more than he supposed Jason knew what to do with his unceasing, exhausting frustration.

He knew that for as long as he’d known that you didn’t need to be a little kid to have dreams too beautiful to never want to wake from; that for as long as he’d known the feeling of waking up minutes before dawn with a warm, solid stiffness that made the rest of him feel light as air; that there are things in this world so powerful as to defy every sense, to imprint themselves in the brain as powerful enough to ensnare every part of the body, even if you’d only ever seen a picture or heard a story…

Eddie knew how to deal with his own frustrations. He was no stranger to it.

So why, then, had he been unable to so much as brush a finger against his own humble immensity since he’d first caught sight of Jason leaning against this tree? Why did every precipitous movement closer to the lip of his shorts, the warm bed of skin on the inside of his thighs, the brush of hair that dusted his hips make him so wary, so uncertain, so unfamiliar with himself, like he was contemplating touching a stranger in a crowded room?

Not long ago, the cold metal of his rings on the warm stiffness of his co*ck would’ve been a welcome feeling, familiar and pleasant. A thoughtless task, and by no means thankless.

Not anymore. He’d gone without as long…well, as long as Jason Carver. And who even knew why. It wasn’t as though Eddie was afraid of himself, of…feeling himself, of his own capacity for ‘self-gratification’. Given his skill set, lifestyle, and choice of summer activities, it was unlikely he’d be familiar with anyone’s gratification but the kind he could give himself for the foreseeable future.

And as for why…? As if Jason’s fear was contagious, as if it had rubbed off on him somehow, the way all those hysterical columns in Readers Digest and Mother’s Monthly claimed devil worship and DND-centric murder cults spread from one bad seed through otherwise innocent, god-fearing neighborhoods.

But Eddie wasn’t like that. He didn’t believe this stuff. He was trying to help Jason and, by helping him, help their own little god-fearing neighborhood. He was not afraid of sex; he was not afraid of himself…

He couldn’t be.

Jason’s breathing had gotten harsher, more urgent. No surprise: Eddie had quickened his pace without thinking, or maybe because he was thinking too much. Rather than pressing himself into and away from Jason like a metronome, he was pulling in and out with hasty, reckless abandon. He hadn’t been paying attention to his own breathing, but suddenly he was hyper-aware of it: harsh, short gusts, competing with Jason’s own, but unlike Eddie, Jason couldn’t turn his head away from the onslaught.

His eyes were still closed. Eddie couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. He didn’t even know what he was thinking, except that he was over-aware of himself, that his body was hot and hard, everywhere, that his shoulders felt locked into place, and his hair was clinging to the back of his neck, and he was so hard in his jeans that he felt the denim might split and this was the first time, the first time in his stunted, misbegotten, trash fire obstacle course of a life that he’d felt this way this close to another living, breathing person, even if it was cheating, even if it was a loophole…

Who were they fooling? Jason clearly wasn’t…he’d said as much before, that he hadn’t exactly been blanking out on how they were going to approach his problem.

He had to have known this was coming…or, rather, he knew what he’d been getting himself into.

Jason whimpered, high and short. Eddie slowed, only slightly, seized by a sudden brief recollection from the Book of Ruth.

“What?” he asked, surprised at the hoarseness in his own voice, “Did I hurt you or…”

Jason leaned into him. Not very far, given the restraints, but just enough to surprise him. Eddie, caught off guard, lifted his eyes and saw that Jason had opened his.

“You trying to get me black and blue, or what?” he asked languidly. A lock of formerly neat blonde hair had fallen into his eyes and Eddie had a momentary, mad urge to flick it out of the way, just so he could get a better look at him, at whatever wild spark had come into his eyes, at the new set of the lines in his face…

So he could see the letter-jacketed Golden Boy and everything he had done to change him in just a few short minutes.

“Oh,” Eddie nodded, “I see. I’m not gentle enough for you…”

Jason shook his head, “Shut up. It…” his voice dropped, “it’s fine.”

“What was that?”

“It’s good,” the vowels shook on pink, wet lips, “It feels…” if he could look anywhere else, Eddie had no doubt he would, but he was the only thing in Jason’s sights, “It feels good.”

And Eddie, who didn’t know what to do with that besides return honesty with honesty, nodded, “Yeah. Yeah, it does.”

They kept on, Eddie trying his level best to keep some sort of healthy pace. It occurred to him he had no idea how long this could be expected to take, and he had a sudden terror of getting all the way to the last moment and then blanking out, afflicted with a mortifying case of performance anxiety.

He couldn’t even chide himself on the use of the term…it was a performance, wasn’t it? In this medium, the first he’d ever done, of any kind. It felt he ought to have some reservations about that, that there ought to be a little more ceremony involved.

But he’d never been one for ceremonies. And, anyway, if you looked at it a certain way, there was nothing more ceremonial than tying up a virgin and gyrating for it in the woods. Talk about honoring time-worn traditions.

The claps of thunder were closer together now. Eddie could smell a rich, sour-sweet tang in the air, flaring his nostrils unnecessarily.

“I don’t believe it,” Jason spoke, almost coinciding with the thunder, as if he were addressing it, or else hoping it would mask his outburst.

Eddie was half-tempted to pretend he hadn’t heard this, by now so suffused with torpid blood above and below that he didn’t think he could stop these little push-ups for love, money, or the law. Still, Jason must’ve caught his eye in the moment he looked up, because he continued, still in a low, barely audible voice, but purposefully all the same.

“This…I don’t even believe in it. Not really. I don’t…” he gritted his teeth, letting out a short, reedy sigh that Eddie knew in whatever passed for his heart nobody else had ever brought out of him because he’d never let anybody bring it out of him before, “I don’t think I do,” he kind of bucked again, either readjusting himself to be more comfortable or in an active attempt to press closer to Eddie before he could press to him, “It’s just…rules, right? T-to have a good life. Don’t steal stuff and don’t kill people…”

“Good starting point,” Eddie grunted an agreement.

“…respect people, and part of respecting people is respecting yourself, and that’s when it gets…” he laughed bitterly at the word, “Hard. Because you follow along, you do all the right stuff…you don’t smoke, and you don’t drink…”

“You play for the Hawkins Tigers, and you don’t drink?”

“…and you get a girlfriend, and you treat her well, and you don’t let the guys make passes at her, but you don’t make any passes yourself, because you can’t, you have to wait, you have to wait…” more thunder, “And if you feel anything, you can’t do anything to her, and you can’t do anything to yourself, because whatever you do end up doing, it has to be with one person, and just the one, not even yourself, because that’s wrong, that’s a waste, that’s spoiling yourself, it’s only supposed to be…” he spat, as if he’d been about to choke, right onto Eddie’s face. Somehow, Eddie didn’t flinch. Maybe he was too absorbed in the monologue, or maybe he just wasn’t thinking. Jason looked at him, his face unreadable, which seemed to confirm he hadn’t meant to do it, that he’d just worked himself up so much he’d started stifling in his own suppressed juices, which wasn’t exactly a charming thought, but better than several alternatives. Eddie thought they were both pretty far past embarrassment, anyway, and he didn’t really want to hear an apology, if Jason had one in the offing.

He almost took a hand from the tree to wipe his face but remembered…no touching. And he had to play by the rules as well as anyone else, didn’t he?

“So you don’t believe it?” he asked, pushing one way.

“I don’t know,” said Jason, pushing the other, “I want to, and I don’t. Because if it’s real, if it’s all true, then I’m doing it all for a reason, I-I’m…”

“Saving yourself,” Eddie suggested.

“Saving myself!” Jason agreed with a dark, half-crazy laugh as the sky lit up above them in a electric-blue clap of lightning, lurid and unreal as any Metallica album cover. For a solitary, charged second, Jason’s face glowed with phosphorous pearlescence, the lines around his mouth and the veins bulging in his neck appearing like roads on a map, his laughter giving his entire face the aspect of a South American death mask. Eddie thought he’d never seen anything like it and didn’t dare think whether or not he’d like to see it again.

“But if I’m wrong…” Jason continued, composing himself with some significant effort, “If it’s not real…and how do I know it is real, anyway?”

“I think that’s why they call it ‘faith’.”

“Faith, yeah, sure…and there are a million damn people in the world…”

“Close enough…”

“…and they all believe different things, and they all follow different rules, and a lot of them don’t even do a good job of it, and they’re all just fine, aren’t they… So why are my rules any better? What gives them a better case? Who says I’m not doing it all for nothing? Killing myself for nothing…” his face was shining, sweat drops the size of marbles beading like morning dew on his brow and the bridge of his nose, “If I’m wrong, I’ve been throwing my life away.”

This was hardly conducive talk to the action at hand (or, rather, determinedly out of hand), and yet they didn’t slow their rhythm. Jason was practically on top of Eddie, barely separating from him for more than a moment at a time. Eddie thought they were both so charged by now that they’d end up stuck together, and somehow the thought was neither funny nor repulsive.

“Still lots of life left,” Eddie offered with a sort of half-hearted enthusiasm.

“You’d say that,” Jason grunted as thunder crackled around them, “Guy like you, you make your own rules…”

“I think you’ve still got the wrong idea about me.”

“Maybe. Maybe I’m wrong about everything. But you wouldn’t have done this to yourself. You wouldn’t have held back. Nobody could’ve ever forced you… Somebody calls you a freak…”

“Somebody?”

“Me!” Jason cried the word out, “I call you a freak, and you don’t get mad, and you don’t get defensive, and you f*cking own it, because you know what you are and I’m a goddamn hypocrite…oh, God…”

“Easy…” Eddie grunted despite himself, feeling Jason against him so roughly he may have been trying to graduate a few more classes of mortal sin just to get it over with, “sh*t, Jason…”

“I’m a hypocrite…” Jason repeated, “I’m a lying, fake, sick hypocrite, and I’m wasting my life…”

“Stop that,” Eddie might have said, thought he did, but couldn’t actually feel the words on his lips.

“I can’t even say something stupid like I’m as bad as you, because I’m worse! Because I’m pretending. I’m lying to everyone, because I’m scared, because I don’t want anyone to think I’m…” he made this sound in the back of his throat: this strangulated, suffused whimper, and Eddie had this urge to just throw himself against him, force that sound out of him, that piteous, pathetic little moan, make him hear it, make him hear what a low, ordinary, flesh-and-blood human he was, despite every attempt in his life to make him out as something else.

Instead, he just leaned in, practically nose to nose, his lower lip practically brushing Jason’s, “Well? What are you?”

Jason lifted his head, the smooth, shining flank of his neck bared like he was expecting Eddie to sprout fangs, “Like you haven’t been thinking it.”

“Let’s say I haven’t. Let’s say you get to name your own terms, Jason. Let’s say you get to save yourself and I can be your witness.”

Jason met his eyes, “You don’t give a damn about me.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You have no reason to.”

“You don’t know that either.”

“You can ruin my life for this…”

“Why would I want to?”

Jason smiled a broken, shattered smile, “Got the wrong idea, right?”

“It happens to the best of us.”

Jason drew back, his neck throbbing with the force of his pulse, “I’m a freak,” he pushed forward again.

“You think so?” Eddie pushed against.

“I am,” Jason continued, more loudly, “A crazy…” and again, “…repressed…” Eddie could feel his heart beating against his, “…angry…” he could taste the sweat on his lips, though he could’ve sworn he didn’t feel them touch, “…sick…” there was something animal in his voice, something animal in Eddie’s mind, driving out the fear and replacing it with an exultation he’d never known, “Freak!”

They both screamed and the sky roared and in the next half-second Eddie was drenched from above and below. Later, Eddie found he was unable to explain it, both for lack of words and will. The rain came down in unrelenting sheets of blessedly cool water, fresh and clean as a benediction from above, so much, so fast, as if to make up for days of heady, muggy drought. At the same time, Eddie knew a feeling simultaneously familiar and alien as every synapse in his brain seemed to fire at once, every over-clenched muscle unspool, every bit of pent up, gnawing reserve emptied in a hot, unrelenting, oddly merciful staccato sequence.

And Jason, against him, in his own rhapsody, his head thrown up and back as he howled unrestrainedly and unashamedly up into the stormy sky. Eddie felt him emptying against him and figured Jason could feel the same and thought that was pretty gross but also kind of amazing. He thought he’d never been this close to someone before and may not ever be again. It wasn’t losing his virginity…it wasn’t losing anything, really, but gaining, growing in some ancient, arcane wisdom nobody had ever thought to write down.

The next time one of the guys asked what the difference was between “Wisdom” and “Intelligence” on a character sheet, Eddie would tell them: Intelligence is knowledge of things you can be taught; Wisdom is knowledge of things nobody can explain to you.

Lighting flashed over them, illuminating Jason’s face, like stills of a cartoon pulled from their sequence and flipped through at speed. The perfect roundness of his open mouth, the pained ecstasy of his squeezed-shut eyes, the rain fusing his hair to his brow. Nobody had ever seen Jason Carver like this. To be fair, nobody had ever seen Eddie Munson like this either.

Eddie couldn’t be sure how long it lasted…he knew from experience the actual point of release/org*sm/climax/denouement/can’t-miss-season-finale usually was finished in a few seconds, and no doubt the same was true now, but he wasn’t aware of time. Just the emptying and subsequent relaxing of his body; of Jason’s body mirroring his; of Jason’s high, defiant scream misting into the rain with Eddie’s own shout of alarm-turned-relief, as surprise of his own body’s responses to their little ritual melted into simple, primordial contentment.

Eddie’s knees gave way as Jason’s did, and they buckled against each other. Jason let out a short gasp that turned into a cry and the next thing Eddie knew, he’d splashed down on his back in the rapidly muddying earth, Jason on top of him and the lengths of twine he’d so studiously tied him to the f*ck tree with lying around them, hopelessly frayed in a dozen places.

Eddie blinked, trying to get his bearings, shifting a bit against the ground as he looked up at Jason’s perplexed, dripping face, flecked now with drops of mud Eddie had kicked up to him when he fell.

“I-I…” Jason croaked hoarsely, looking about, presumably at the broken cords.

“Must’ve rubbed yourself out,” Eddie said thoughtlessly.

And Jason laughed. It was a surprised, weary burst, high and light like Eddie had never heard. Hearing him, Eddie laughed too, over Jason and a thousand other things at once. Jason rolled off him as he did, making a little splash of his own beside him. The rain had finished his perspiration’s job for him: his polo was painted on him…his nipples were still hard, the little alligator over his heart seeming to have caught a shockingly pert guppy.

Which thought, naturally, only made Eddie laugh harder. They lay there in the muck, virtually cheek to cheek, the rain pelting their already pretty sodden fronts, just laughing madly up at the ink-black sky. He didn’t want to get up…he wasn’t sure he could even if he tried. He felt boneless, empty, utterly unburdened. The rain could pour into his panting mouth and drown him, and he wasn’t sure he’d mind.

Beside him, Jason’s laughter began to subside, “That…that, um…”

Eddie turned to him, grinning rakishly, “Was it good for you as well?” it was a reckless comment, but Jason just gawked at him, goggle-eyed, before bursting into another peal of absurdly juvenile giggles, through which he managed a habitual, “f*ck you.”

“I mean, if you want to get technical…” Eddie quipped.

Jason thwacked him over the side, the heel of his hand coming to rest lightly over Eddie’s heart, a light, easy smile on his face.

Jason touched him, and the dream ended. His eyes, rheumy and soft from his recent exertions, widened as the smile vanished from his face.

Eddie frowned, “…Jason?”

He pulled his hand back, so sharply Eddie could feel his nails scrape against his skin through his shirt, “Sorry,” he said softly.

“Sorry?” Eddie repeated, “What are you…”

But Jason had already lifted himself onto his side, “I’m…I’m all covered, it probably isn’t even any good…”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Here,” Jason drew his hand from his jeans pocket, producing a crumpled bill…the remaining $50, which he pressed into Eddie’s confusedly splayed palm, “Thank you.”

“Jason,” Eddie closed his fingers around the bill, “It’s…look, it’s fine, you don’t…”

“I do,” he began to get up, staggering a bit as he lifted himself up on one knee. Eddie thoughtlessly reached up with his free hand to steady him, but Jason stepped back before he could brush his splotchy, well drenched jeans.

“As promised,” Jason said tersely, determinedly not meeting Eddie’s eyes.

“But…” Eddie began, not even knowing what he meant to say. “But” what? But it wasn’t like you thought and it sure as hell wasn’t what I thought either; but something just happened, didn’t you see it, didn’t you hear it, didn’t you feel it, say you did, say I’m not crazy; but I saved you, didn’t I, and maybe I saved myself, and it’s pretty gauche to charge for such services after all, isn’t it?

“Remember…” Jason said quietly, “Please remember not to…don’t tell…” he may have warbled a few things more, but his words were swallowed by the rain.

“Well, f*ck, Carver, I’m not gonna tell anybody. But…” but-but-but, it made no matter. Eddie looked down at the crumpled bill in his hand and, looking up a second later, saw Jason’s receding figure moving, not up the path past the tree, but up the more treacherous rise, toward the picnic table…where there was no path and, theoretically, less chance of being spotted.

“Jason!” Eddie lifted himself to his knees.

Jason said something but Eddie couldn’t parse it. He staggered upright, his legs protesting as his feet squelched beneath him. His hair hung in heavy, sopping tendrils around his face, going a long way to obscuring his vision, though he could still see the retreating outline of Jason’s stained polo vanishing into the trees.

“Don’t…” he began, stopping himself, “Don’t just…”

He looked down at the sodden $50 in his hand. If he had any principles at all, he’d drop it back into the mud and grind it into pulp.

But he was only human.

Shoving the bill into his pocket, Eddie started up toward the table, “Jason! You can’t just…”

But he could, of course. He was supposed to, wasn’t he? That was, after all, the whole point of the deal: Eddie lends him a helping hand, or equivalent, he gets over his hang-up, and life goes on.

He crested the hill, tripping over a snag in the ground and hitting his shin, hard, against the side of the picnic table. Swallowing a curse, he cried out, “Jason!” pressing a hand to his leg where it had been struck and finding the denim rough as well as damp, from the drenchings it had taken at either side.

“No,” he shook his head, “No, no, no…”

He didn’t even know what he was lamenting. He wasn’t even entirely sure he wanted to bring Jason back. He just knew, as he ran through the sodden, neglected no-man’s land that stretched out beyond his domain, that it couldn’t end like that. That there had to be something else. That, for a few fleeting moments, it had seemed there was something else, some point of discovery, of understanding.

It felt like something had changed, and not just for Jason Carver.

Eddie hadn’t signed up to be changed but, if it had happened, he sure as hell wasn’t going to take it lying down.

He pushed through low-growing brambles and high-growing weeds, his clothes snagging on thistles and bracken, like a demented Snow White. No sign of Jason, no sign of anyone. He may as well have been swallowed by the storm as if he never existed, as if the whole thing had been made up.

Or maybe he’d been dragged down to hell, after all. Maybe Eddie had delivered him to the devil with bells on, and he’d been left behind because nobody had ever expected different from him.

He burst out of the trees, practically tripping headlong into the playground swing set. Yelping a curse, Eddie looped his fingers through the chain links, looking around the park, at the roiling, tar-black pools of mud in the uneven grass, the ominously gleaming steel fixtures of slide and seesaw.

“Jason!” he called out, desperately, hatefully, miserably, feeling wetness on his face and hoping with a type of pride he thought he’d been born without that it was just the rain, “Jason, you can’t do this! You can’t…” but the words died on his tongue.

Jason could do whatever he wanted. That, after all, was the whole point of being Saved!, wasn’t it?

With a directionless, furious cry, Eddie kicked the swing away, running out across the park, no direction in mind, convinced by now that Jason had gotten well away and, more than likely, Eddie would never exchange a word with him again, and that should be fine, it would’ve been fine just a week ago, before Eddie had dared get too close, before he’d had the audacity to get interested…

Before he’d deluded himself into thinking he could save anyone.

His Docs splashed into and out of the mud. His feet were soaking, his hair a horrible tangle. He was tired and sore and the body he’d felt so blessedly wrapped in only a few short moments ago now seemed like a brittle, too-tight cage, unleashed on a dark, alien landscape that held no love for him.

He didn’t see the road ahead of him, didn’t know he was running right into it. All told, if the car had hit him, he probably wouldn’t even have felt it. Just seen the harsh white glare of the headlights, pinning him like the proverbial deer, and heard the visceral screech of tires halting on the asphalt as the car pulled up to a halt. Eddie reflexively threw his arms out, pressing them over the hood of the sleek burgundy BMW, as if this would somehow stop him from being run over if the driver decided to rev up again out of spite.

Eddie stood there in a state of suspended unreality, not sure if he had, in fact, been hit and he was just hallucinating this as a protracted dying epilogue. In time, there was a soft creak of a window being rolled down and a weary, well-coiffed head peered out.

“…Jesus Christ, what happened to you?”

Eddie let out a short sigh, “I had a religious experience, Steve. What does it look like?”

Steve rolled his eyes, leaning his arm out the window, “Like you need a ride,” the click of the locks being undone, “Get in the back.”

Eddie blinked, leaning back from the car. Steve was giving him a dubious, do-gooder half-smile, like this was the most normal thing in the world and he was just being a nice guy.

Which Eddie supposed he might as well take on faith that he was.

Nodding in silent thanks, Eddie went around the side of the car and opened the door.

“Like a bad penny, huh, Munson?” Billy leered from the passenger seat, changed from his lifeguard kit into his usual jeans and tank, “What’re you, obsessed with me or something?”

Presumably in response to his incredulous expression, Steve filled in, “We ditched the pool early.”

“On account of the world ending,” said Billy.

“His Camaro’s f*cked, man,” Steve smiled indulgently, “Forgot to put the roof up. It’s a disaster…”

“And if I just treated my car like a family sedan, I’d be much happier.”

As if to confirm this point, Steve wagged a finger at Eddie, “On the blanket, there, see, you’re gonna drip everywhere.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Eddie huffed, dutifully sinking onto the beach blanket Steve had laid over the backseat. Billy’s ‘family sedan’ crack wasn’t half wrong: the space was littered with odds and ends, comic books and candy wrappers. Eddie spotted a few freshly painted minifigures sitting in a cup holder…

“You play DND?” he asked, mildly alarmed and impressed.

“God no,” Steve scoffed, “It’s the kids.”

“The kids, sure, right,” Eddie muttered as if that answered anything. It was warm in the bimmer, and considerably more comfortable. Shifting in his seat, he allowed himself to relax, even partially.

“Heads up, Munson,” Billy tossed a bandanna over his shoulder. Eddie caught it loosely in one hand and co*cked an eyebrow at Billy, who shrugged, “Clean yourself up a bit,” smiling a vaguely condescending smile that did little to mask the gesture.

“Look at you, Billy-Boy, thinking of my dignity.”

“Someone’s got to.”

“We were gonna roll by Sal’s,” Steve continued conversationally as they got underway again, Eddie wiping mud, sweat and tears from his face with Billy’s bandanna, “I’d kill for a burger. But I can drop you somewhere, if you…”

“A burger sounds good,” Eddie nodded mutely.

“Worked up an appetite, huh?” Billy co*cked an eyebrow, looking at him knowingly. Eddie eyed him skeptically before kneeing the back of his seat, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Billy chuckled in the back of his throat, “That’s you, Munson. A man of mystery.”

They drove in something like silence, the only sound the low hums of the heavy Top 40 synth pop oozing out of Steve’s radio. Eddie gathered from Billy’s repeated grimaces in the radio’s general direction that he didn’t care for it, and imagined Steve swatting Billy’s hand away from the dial more than once.

It was a nice thought. Familiar, though he’d never experienced it and wasn’t even sure it had really happened.

It felt like it could, though. Like, if he stuck around long enough, he’d see it, and be a part of it by being there.

If it happened, I was there…

…I saw everything.

The darkened streets of Hawkins rolled by to either side of them, tongues of electric light crisscrossing the inside of the car, making latticework patterns on their faces. Eddie began to catch his breath, balling up Billy’s bandanna in one hand.

The rain had really done a number on him. With the fingers of one hand, Eddie experimentally poked the denim over his thigh and found that the dark, stiff stain that one might expect to have formed there after this evening had been dissolved by the fresh water.

Wiped clean. Glory, glory.

Eddie lifted his eyes and saw Steve eyeing him in the rearview mirror. Steve gave him a smile, friendly and familiar as if they’d been friends for years.

Eddie, not really sure what else to do, smiled back, leaning back in his seat, kneading the bandanna in his hands as he zoned out to Steve’s tedious pop music.

“I touch you once, I touch you twice, I won't let go at any price…”

Eddie scoffed, shaking his head.

“Something funny?” Steve asked.

“Not yet,” Eddie answered, “But I’ll be ready to laugh at it tomorrow.”

Billy rolled his eyes again, and Steve shrugged with a little bemused smile, and Eddie felt inexplicably, improbably at peace.

“I need you now like I need you then/You always said we’d still be friends someday…”

It wasn’t anything like being Saved!, but goddamn it if it wasn’t a good start.