Sometimes I think about Beverly Marsh.
We know so much about her at thirteen (or eleven) and forty (or thirty-eight). we know the worst moments of her life - unseen blood on her father's clean clothes, a boy with a switchblade and cherry bombs in his pockets, her husband and a belt, the side room in a chinese restaurant. we know the best moments too - january embers, laughing in an underground hideout, the cool waters of the quarry, the side room in a chinese restaurant. but what of the moments in between?
Picture Beverly at 15, shaking a little in the knees, that summer already a half remembered dream. She remembers the Losers in glimpses; the flash of sun off Richie's glasses, the clatter of pills in Eddie's fanny pack, Bill's lips against hers and Ben holding her hand, the sound of Stan's screams and Mike's panicked breath in her ear. She barely dreams about the weight of a frying pan in her hand, the solid clunk of it hitting the back of her father's head, of sticking a spike through her father's eye (that wasn't real, it wasn't, it wasn't--)
She looks over her shoulder in the hallways for bullies who are long-dead. Every time she steps into a stall in the school bathroom, she smells a phantom waft of garbage. Sometimes she runs home like she's being chased, but there's never anyone behind her.
Picture Beverly at eighteen, with Derry as nothing more than the name of a distant town she barely remembered. With the Losers and the Bowers gang nothing more than shadows in her memory, and It reduced to a sharp-toothed smile in her darkest nightmares. Beverly standing on the edge of an adulthood she can't yet picture and a childhood half-remembered.
When they smoke out of their window on their first night rooming together, Kay leans heavily against Beverly's arm. She puts on a silly voice and waves her cigarette in front of her. "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette had oughta," she quotes in a bad imitation of the Beverly Hillbillies. It makes Beverly giggle but tugs at some long forgotten part of her memory, of a boy and his Voices.
Picture Beverly at twenty-five, her childhood an empty blur of fear and pain, with one bright summer of warmth. She still reaches for people who aren't there, sometimes, still trails off like she's waiting for someone else to finish a joke. Sometimes, the news will report on a crime, usually involving a child, and she'll listen a little more closely.
She likes to blast music when she's cleaning, so she can only clean when Tom's not home. Their new apartment is too big for two people, but it's cold. It's built for hosting, for falling all over each other and laughing until your sides ache and your cheeks hurt. She goes to a comedy show and gets the strangest urge to shout out, "Beep, Beep!" after the comedian makes a particularly off-color joke. For a while, she reads the latest Denbrough novel every time one comes out; she doesn't like horror much, but something about them compels her. (She stops when Tom tells her to stop reading trash.)
Picture years of feeling wrong. Years of knowing something is missing but having no idea what it is. A empty space in her heart and in her mind and no memory of how it got there. Almost three decades of feeling a little off-kilter and out of step, chasing a feeling she couldn't name.
And then, one day, she gets a phone call.
