WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO CHECK?!

“Anything?!” comes Eddie’s weaseling voice as Richie bends himself at the hip, taking every bridge on every sink in his hands for balance and earning a grossed-out scoff. Even checks the dishes of them for good measure; thinks of washing his own socks in his momma’s sink when he was six years old and had gone pelting barefoot through a stack of dog shit.

He looks over his shoulder with a face like a bug’s. “Nada.”

Richie makes a lurch for the trash, undershirt sleeves tickling his wrists and thus immediately getting smothered in somebody’s greek-theme lunchtime extravaganza, although it’s only Eddie who notices it. Half because Richie never notices these things - he’d butt-scooch his way across an already-gushing volcano without thinking of it twice, most probably - but mostly ‘cause he’s just seen a familiar snatch of orange. Bugs Bunny’s overwashed, polyester teeth and an easy-tug drawstring.

“Oh - ‘ang...hang -“

“It’s there? It’s in the trash?!”

Richie whips up his own, soiled gym bag over his head like he’s carrying a trophy, repeating “it’s in the trash!” in his boxing match announcer voice as feta cheese comes dousing over his head. “One for you, one for you, one for you!”

Eddie takes both legs of his skate-pants in different pinching thumbs, snort cutting only a little bit through his disgust. “Gee, thanks. Stink’ll probably scare off the bears at this rate.”

“The bears. That’s a funny code.”

“No code about it,” Eddie rattles on, pushing him up onto his tiptoes to swipe over Richie’s dirty bangs. The air is a little too concentrated for a second - colors blip too hard, too high. Richie bows away anxiously and Eddie’s whirling too hard to notice it.

“The bears and the beavers and all that other shit, Richie! We’ll probably have to rescue them or something. Think I’d be good at that.”

Richie goes a little pale in self-pity as his eyes travel to the two, peeling toilet stalls and then back to Eddie’s approving ones. Quite the whingin’-Sinjin, and he always was that way. His mom had said in front of Eddie while they were all eating potato salad on the patio this one time that he sounded like an old cow when he was whinging, and he’d flushed so hard his ears half-popped. Worth it for Eddie’s snort, though; torture would be worth it for that.

Richie can’t believe this is what he is thinking of with his face blinking under a meter back from stale pee.

“If someone flushed it, Richie...it’s gonna be batshit. My fists are gonna be batshit. Not sucking it all up for another-“

“There’s nothing here, you coconut.”

There’s a sound like flour sifting behind his shoulder; Eddie’s angry, jumpy whirling has come to an abrupt halt. “It’s not?”

When Richie’s face comes rocketing ‘round the top his long-sleeve to look at him, it is blushing. Neither of them have really registered it. Neither of them are ready to.

“Nuh uh.”

“Then what are you gonna try now?!”

Richie peacocks his way over to the windows, holding the hem of his gym shorts in determination. Usually getting dressed was the last thing on his great, glowing list of favorites; just below ‘showers’ and ‘hamstring-stretches’, contrasted in curly purple ink by ‘deeply picking nose’. The flips and zips and buttons were all a bunch more confusing than you‘d think. And yet, here he is with his dirt-eaten loafers, owl perched on the radiator and his round, badgering shoulders hanging out of the disused boy’s’ bathroom window; here he is right over the outdoor dumpster and the hedgerows, desperate for a pair of pants to fumble with the catch on.

“Please tell me it’s there.”

His hands gingerly thumb the dumpster lids, brush through a little bit of leaf, but by now it’s already three quarters out of the question. His bellybutton zoinks on the window-latch coming back in and his tongue gags out in pain - “aye - ! I hope you’re sitting down, Eddie - there’s nothing.”

A growl of frustration bounces off the tiles, and lands somewhere in the bottom of Richie’s throbbing tummy. Funny.

(Cute).

Richie itches at where his head’s gone a little bit sunburned under his hair and takes on this funny, half-bent-double pose he does when he’s being made to stand up in front of class. Translates to ever so slightly pressured and completely unsure. “Well, I mean...like, at least we have clothes?” He says hopefully. “If we actually went to the locker room...”

Eddie’s tongue forks between his bottom and top sets of teeth, which are slightly yellow but incredibly straight, and leaves it there. Doesn’t seem to be so much fight left in him. He’s had to leave school, like, three times over the last few weeks, now that it’s getting all hot out. His mom says it’s sunstroke and she wheels her tombstone-coloured car right up to the school gates, and whenever Eddie gives him a customary flip of the bird out of his window Richie will try like a philosopher to name this look. ‘Cause it doesn’t really look so ill at all; it’s more just kind of grumpy.

Chronic brat disease, Richie notes somewhere behind his eyebrows, to tease with later. That’ll get him good.

“I guess it, yeah,” Eddie says distantly, before finding Richie’s eyes again with his own looking surprisingly awake. Yoyo. “My mom will just go on a manhunt for my other ones is all. Or she’ll report it on the phone and then this’ll happen every gym. Ga-gh.”

The last little hiss of the tongue blips out Richie’s balance for a second and his butt hits the green of the wall-tiles. “I - well, it won’t even matter.”

“Eloquent. It definitely will.”

Richie shakes his head, reminding himself this is a moment where you smile. He’s not all that good at smiling, even though he’s really good at thinking, talking happy. Just an extra frill he threw out when he was tiny, probably, so he could focus on all the more important things (Looney Tunes and Scooby Do and Garfield. And Rita Hayworth’s hair). Just now feels important enough to at least try a little bit at it, and so he has the right crook of his lip twitch and the voice in the curl of it tell Eddie, “she won’t be able to find us tonight, weasel. Hasn’t got our super-spooky map.”