But Hugh Priest had a bottle of beer in the fork of his legs, Hank Williams, jr was on the radio singing "High and Pressurized," and it was all just a little too comfy for anything so radical as beating the shit out of a little kid on Tuesday afternoon.
"You want to keep your eyes open," he said, taking a pull from the neck of his bottle and looking at Brian balefully, "because next time I won't bother to stop. I'll just run you down in the road.
Make you squeak, little buddy."
He put the truck in gear and drove off. Brian felt an insane (and mercifully brief) urge to scream Well I'll be butched! after him. He waited until the orange road-crew truck had turned off onto Linden Street and then went on his way. The daydream about Miss Ratcliffe, alas, was spoiled for the day. Hugh Priest had let in reality again.
Miss Ratcliffe hadn't had a fight with her fiance, Lester Pratt; she was still wearing her small diamond engagement ring and was still driving his blue Mustang while she waited for her own car to come back from the shop.
Brian had seen Miss Ratcliffe and Mr. Pratt only last evening, stapling those DICE AND THE DEVIL posters to the telephone poles on Lower Main Street along with a bunch of other people.
They had been singing hymns. The only thing was, the Catholics went around as soon as they were done and took them down again.
It was pretty funny in a way... but if he had been bigger, Brian would have tried his best to protect any posters Miss Ratcliffe put up with her hallowed hands.
Brian thought of her dark blue eyes, her long dancer's legs, and felt the same glum amazement he always felt when he realized that, come January, she intended to change Sally Ratcliffe, which was lovely, to Sally Pratt, which sounded to Brian like a fat lady falling down a short hard flight of stairs.
Well, he thought, fetching the other curb and starting slowly down Main Street, maybe she'll change her mind. It's not impossible. Or maybe Lester Pratt will get in a car accident or come down with a brain tumor or something like that. It might even turn out that he's a dope addict. Miss Ratcliffe would never marry a dope addict.
Such thoughts offered Brian a bizarre sort of comfort, but they did not change the fact that Hugh Priest had aborted the daydream just short of its apogee (kissing Miss Ratcliffe and actually touching her right breast while they were in the Tunnel of Love at the fair).
It was a pretty wild idea anyway, an eleven-year-old kid taking a teacher to the County Fair. Miss Ratcliffe was pretty, but she was also old. She had told the speech kids once that she would be twenty-four in November.
So Brian carefully re-folded his daydream along its creases, as a man will carefully fold a well-read and much-valued document, and tucked it on the shelf at the back of his mind where it belonged.
He prepared to mount his bike and pedal the rest of the way home.
But he was passing the new shop at just that moment, and the sign in the doorway caught his eye. Something about it had changed.
He stopped his bike and looked at it.
GRAND OPENING OCTOBER 9TH-BRING YOUR FRIENDS!
at the top was gone. It had been replaced by a small square sign, red letters on a white background.
OPEN
it said, and
OPEN
was all it said. Brian stood with his bike between his legs, looking at this, and his heart began to beat a little faster.
You're not going in there, are you? he asked himself. I mean, if it really is opening a day early, you're not going in there, right?
Why not? he answered himself.
Well... because the window's still soaped over. The shade on the door's still drawn. You go in there, anything could happen to you.
Anything.
Sure. Like the guy who runs it is Norman Bates or something, he dresses up in his mother's clothes and stabs his customers.
Right.
Well, forget it, the timid part of his mind said, although that part sounded as if it already knew it had lost. There's something funny about it.
But then Brian thought of telling his mother. just saying nonchalantly, "By the way, Ma, you know that new store, Needful Things?
Well, it opened a day early. I went in and took a look around."
She'd push the mute button on the remote control in a hurry then, you better believe it! She'd want to hear all about it!
This thought was too much for Brian. He put down his bike's kickstand and passed slowly into the shade of the awning-it felt at least ten degrees cooler beneath its canopy-and approached the door of Needful Things.
As he put his hand on the big old-fashioned brass doorknob, it occurred to him that the sign must be a mistake. It had probably been sitting there, just inside the door, for tomorrow, and someone had put it up by accident. He couldn't hear a single sound from behind the drawn shade; the place had a deserted feel.
But since he had come this far, he tried the knob... and it turned easily under his hand. The latch clicked back and the door of Needful Things swung open.
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