Control // It (2017) // Stanley Uris

Nineteen- "You mullet-wearing asshole!"

"No, I love being your personal doorman, really. Could you idiots have taken any longer?" Richie rode his bike around the group while they walked down the street, pushing their bikes in front of them.

"Shut up, Richie." Eddie tried to dismiss his most annoying friend.

"Yeah, shut up, Richie." Stan added.

"Oh okay, trash the trash-mouth, I get it. Hey I wasn't the one scrubbing the bathroom floor and imagining her sink went all Eddie's mom's vagina on halloween!"

"She didn't imagine it." Bill hesitantly spoke, "I s-s-saw something, too."

The group all stopped and stared at Bill as he spoke. The Denbrough boy knitted his eyebrows together, as if he couldn't think of a proper way to describe what he'd seen. His eyes met Mia's and they both slightly cringed, as if they both knew what the other had seen.

"You saw blood, too?" Stan asked.

Bill shook his head, "Not blood." His gaze met the pavement as he continued, "I saw G-g-g-georgie. It seemed so real, I mean, it seemed like him but there was this-"

"The clown." Eddie interrupted Bill, and stared directly at Mia. The two of them had encountered the clown together, after all. "Yeah, we saw him, too."

"We?" Ben wanted clarification.

"Eddie and me." The Bowers girl finally spoke up, not making eye contact with anyone.

Bill looked around the circle and saw that everyone was nodding, agreeing that they'd all seen something strange and out of the ordinary. Stan had seen the woman at the synagogue, Ben had seen a headless boy in the library, Bill had seen Georgie, Eddie had seen a leper, and Mia had seen her own manifestation. They'd all had dangerous and demonic encounters.

"The clown gave me this..." Mia admitted, holding her arm out for everyone to see. The Bowers girl made eye contact with Bill and mouthed the words, 'I'm sorry', to try and apologize for lying to him. The Denbrough boy smiled sadly and nodded, as if to say he understood.

"Wait, can only virgins see this stuff? Is that why I'm not seeing this shit?" Richie tried to crack a joke.

"If it was only virgins, then why can I see it?" Mia whispered to herself, louder than she had planned. As she looked around the group, everyone was staring at her. No one could believe that she'd just said that out loud. "Shit..." Mia chuckled, shifting her weight on her feet.

The sounds of loud yelling rang through the air and into the Losers's ears. Following the source, the group found Belch's car and a bike on the side of the road.

"Oh shit, that's Belch Huggin's car." Eddie exclaimed, trying to change the topic of conversation from Mia's sex life. Eddie honestly didn't really care that Mia had already been with someone. He liked her as a person and he wasn't anywhere near thinking about stuff like that. As a hypochondriac and a kid, he was not ready whatsoever for anything to do with the idea of sex.

"Is no one going to ask about what Mia just said?" Richie threw his arms up into the air.

"Nope." Stanley firmly stated.

"We should probably get out of here." Eddie continued.

Mia smiled to herself. Her two closest friends, aside from Bill, were actually willing to just let a thing like that go. She felt a great deal of respect for the both of them.

"Wait, isn't that the home-schooled kid's bike?" Bill pointed. Mia immediately recognized the bike, with a basket filled with packaged meat on the front. She'd been with her brother the first day of that summer that he'd terrorized the poor boy. She remembered his fear and his innocence.