There were three guns that Beverly's father kept in the apartment, and she knew where each one of them was. Sometimes she ran through them like a checklist. It was a little like an adventurous survival game—if she counted them, spied them nestled in their resting places, she knew all was as it should be and that everyone was safe.

Sometimes she wished her father didn't have any guns—for some reason she couldn't quite put her finger on, or perhaps didn't want to, a feeling deep in her gut told her this was the perfect storm for a lurking, unilluminated something to go terribly wrong. But this was Derry. Every grown-up she knew had guns—Chief Bowers, Principal McGuffrey, Mr. Keene—and Alvin Marsh did too.

Three of them. One, two, three.

The hunting rifle, he kept propped in the hall closet just inside the front door. He didn't actually hunt—his back and knees weren't too good, thanks to all the heavy buckets he had to lug back and forth all day as a janitor—but it had been his father's before him and Beverly assumed, though he never spoke about it, that it had sentimental value. It didn't look like anything special—the metal was red with rust and the stock was scarred and dull—but when she brushed her hand down the side, she could feel the family history of it. Decades of fingerprints, seared into the rough wood surface thanks to oil and grease and chilly autumn rain.

She knew this gun wasn't loaded—the barrel was so corroded that you could barely see down it to the other end anyway. Still, she liked to check on it regardless. If her father came around the corner unexpectedly, she could always say that she was going for the vacuum or getting something from the pocket of her coat.

He'd believe that. He wasn't yet so convinced that everything she said to him was a lie.

The second gun was even older and rustier than the first, and it was only this one that Bev sometimes thought of as beautiful. It was an antique, a revolver from the turn of the century. Her father had ammo for this one—he kept it in a little box beside the gun in the second drawer down in the kitchen, and sometimes let her turn the bullets over in her hands, feeling the weight of them—but it still wasn't too scary, because it could only get off a few shots at a time. It made her think of the founding fathers, or maybe of Bonnie and Clyde. This was a weapon, not for angry old men, but for heroes and pioneers.

The real gun—the one that Alvin liked to hold and polish, even if he had never shot it as far as she could tell—he kept in a shoebox under his bed. It was a '76 Beretta—he'd bought it new, just a few weeks after she was born. When he first showed it to her, after he'd stormed off from an argument and she'd scrambled to beg for forgiveness, that's what he'd said: "Bevvy, this gun is exactly as old as you are. Isn't that something?"

The only thing was, he never said why he bought it. To protect her? Bev knew that most people didn't celebrate the miracle of new life with deadly firearms that could take it just as fast.

This one was the hardest for her to put eyes on, because she wasn't supposed to go in his room without him right beside her, and also because she didn't want to. The space was a strange cross between a hoarder's nest and a shrine to her dead mother, dim lights and musty smells and bedding that hadn't been changed in several years at least. His sheets were gray and stained, and looked like the kind of place where terrible, unspeakable things might happen.

But this was the gun that was cleaned and loaded, the gun that he could reach for first, and so sometimes, when her father was out, she couldn't stop herself from having a curious look.

Step one: Listen for the front door to shut. Stay in your room for fifteen or twenty minutes, to make sure he's really gone.

Step two: Look out the window. Identify any movements, all passers-by.

Step three: Push open his bedroom door. Slip inside. Close it—but don't latch it—behind you.

Step four: Lift the oily bedskirt, just enough to lift the lid on the box.

Step five: Inspect the gun.

Step six: Retreat.

She pulled it off flawlessly, like a dance. In one moment, out the next, the final phase of the game, the ritual that helped her sleep at night. That was, at least, until the day she heard heavy footsteps in the hallway behind her. She let the bedskirt drop, fell heavily back on her tailbone, tried to steady her breathing.

The guiltier you look, the guiltier you are.

The door creaked open, and she was met with a silent stare. She sat on her hands, shoulders hunched, and waited.

"What are you doing in here, Bevvy?" her father asked finally. His voice was slow and deep in the back of his throat, practically choking out in his effort to appear calm. His face, when she dared to look at it, was eerily blank. Immediately she clocked an explosion brewing: he was the gasoline, more than enough of it to sear flesh and melt bone, and she was holding the match.

Carefully, carefully.

Unfortunately, he was well-practiced in the art of throwing himself at the match so she didn't have to do a damn thing.

"What are you doing down there, under the bed?"

Bev thought of all the things she couldn't say: Oh, I'm just looking at your gun. I want to make sure you aren't carrying your gun. I want to make sure you haven't moved your gun. She thought of these things, she thought of what his response might be, and she reached under the bed and yanked out what she decided in a flash of clarity would be her best possible alibi.

Her mother's sewing kit.

"Nothing, Daddy," she said in her most soothing voice. You're not guilty. "I was just looking for this."

Alvin blinked at the wicker basket, nearly overflowing with sun-faded pincushions and fraying spools of thread. He reached out, as if he was going to touch it, to take it from her. But halfway there he stopped, squinting at Beverly, at the basket, as if he couldn't quite figure the two of them out.

"Your mother loved to sew," he said after a long moment of silence, and he finally swallowed down the last of his rage. Bev knew in that moment that she was in the clear. "She never had much time, she got home from the restaurant so late, but she was always so creative with the patterns." He paused, scratched the back of his head. "I never realized you had an interest in that."

And here's the thing: she didn't.

She wore dresses because her father said it was better to hide the shape of her thighs, that he would rather pay for something with flowing skirts than pants—but she had already learned to stay away from most really girly things thanks to the other girls in her class. She had just bought her first bra last year, and already the names came so fast and so furious that they were almost unbearable: slut, skank, whore. She didn't wear makeup, she pulled back her hair. She only did the dishes out of necessity, because her father refused, and did her best to be seen roller blading and frequenting slasher movies and buying ugly rock tapes, just to prove she was different than what they said. She didn't babysit, and she didn't tutor—she got her money like the irresponsible boys, shoving her hand behind the couch cushions and sucking up on the rare occasions sympathetic relatives came to visit.

So, needless to say, something like sewing was the last thing she wanted to get caught showing interest in.

But of course, the actual last thing she had an interest in was a black eye from being pistol-whipped or, worse, a bullet in her skull. So she set her jaw and hiked the massive basket into her lap and said, "Yup. I lost a button on my shirt today. I was going to put a new one on."

"You know what?" her father said, extending a rough hand to help her up from the ground. His eyes followed her hands down her body as she brushed herself off. Then he picked up the basket at her feet, pressed it into her hands, and guided her toward the door with his fingertips on the small of her back. "You can keep it. Maybe it'll help you be more like your mother in other ways, too."

"Thank you, Daddy," she said, brushing her fingers gently along his cheek, and then she hightailed it to her room. She fell against her door as she closed it, caught in the place between laughing and crying where all you can do is stare blankly at the wall.

The gun was there. Her father didn't suspect anything. And now, to top it all off, she had a sewing kit. Her mother's.

Too bad she didn't have anything she wanted to do with it.