Woo hoo, yay, new chapter, claps for me, wow, so writer, what finished, such accomplishments!1!1!

Sorry, had to get that out. Excuse.

It's been, like, forever since I wrote something, mostly because I've been really preoccupied with my tumblr (haha yaya i started a new one and im trying to keep the feed up kmskmskms) and also writing stuff that I'm going to integrate in later *smirk*. Only I know what the future holds for Pressure Points.

Okay, well, here's a chapter where stuff actually happens! Yay.

Plz review if you're reading this. It means the world.

-Ya boi tommy

Ps, I'm going to camp over summer holiday, so if you guys could make this last chapter count, I would really appreciate it. I'm going to be absent for a while, and would love to find some love from the readers. Cheers!

October 10th, 1961

Dear Chris,

Sorry it's been nearly a month since I answered your last letter. It's been a while. School has been really stressful; it's like the college courses, but only everyone's in it so it's ten times harder to accommodate for everyone.

A lot of stuff happened around here. I got hit in the head with a baseball, I got an article written about me in the paper, I got in a fist fright (yes, me, in a fist fight. Which we won) and I made the baseball team. So I guess you could say that a lot has changed.

Fall has barely even started and I'm still waiting for summer when I can maybepossibly come to Castle Rock if I keep my grades up and pray that my dad is in a good mood when I bring it up. He hasn't been in such a mood lately, though, because I got a C+ on a science quiz and now he has to send me to the school counselor. Our agreement at the beginning of the year (apparently) was that if I got any lower than a B I'd have to set up weekly meeting with her, because I convinced him to let me not go but I'm guessing things are different. Everything is different. I'll admit, maybe I need it, but I honestly don't feel too keen on going to see the shitty middle school counselor to talk about mom and Denny. It's like I spent so long covering their memories up and I really don't want to dig them up again. I can pass on the pity game for a while. Most people at school already know about mom, despite my efforts to hide it.

I also found out that Gavin is gay. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that, but it doesn't seem too impossibly weird because…

Gordie flipped himself over on his bed, facing the ceiling. Fuck this. He was never going to finish it if he got onto the topic of Gavin and his gayness. He scribbled over the last sentences, biting his lip before proceeding to the next topic.

So Molli. She's hot. I'll be honest, I never thought that Chris Chambers would ever get a girlfriend, but here it is. What's she like? What does she like doing and stuff, I don't know. Also, how are your new replacement friends? I expect that you're still hanging out with the rest of our dork friends, right? Please don't leave them. I'm nearly 100% sure that if you did, Teddy would flip and eat Vern.

But Molli looks like a cool chick. Just watch your back, alright? As your friend, I am obliged to watch it for you, but as I'm in a completely different state right now, so I can't exactly do that…

Is your dad back yet? I remember you said he was gone and didn't come back. Hope everything is alright…

I miss home so much. I wish I was there instead of here, hiding your letters under my mattress…Life is fucking hell, but we've all got our devils and our angels and I guess we just have to go through life like that. I swear, right when I hit 18, I'm going home. Promise.

Happy fall!

Your friend,

Gordie Lachance

Excuses, excuses, and more excuses. He knew that nearly half of that was a lie. He didn't really have that much stress on him. It was really just him not doing any of his work and freaking out at the last minute. Moreover, his workload in school had noting to do with Chris and his letters to him. He had plenty of free time in which he could be writing to his best friend, but he was still tender after Chris dropped the Molli Bomb and everything blew up and fell apart inside. It had taken him a while to recover from it; precisely three baseball game rotations, two quizzes, one test and two study sessions with Caspar to haul ass to the typewriter and finally speak to Christopher Chambers.

"Gordie, have you seen my wallet!?" Mr. Lachance yelled suddenly, wrenching Gordie from his thoughts. He sat up groggily, blood rushing to his head quickly and making his vision blur.

"What!?" He called back, walking to the door.

"Did you take my wallet?" His father repeated. Gordie rolled his eyes.

"No!" He replied snappishly, opening up the door and looking to his dad across the hallway, who was sitting, as usual, at little round kitchen table, submersed in a pile of letters and papers and taxes and work. His glasses were shoved carelessly into his mess of salt-and-pepper bed-head hair, a hand resting hard on his temples in exasperation. Gordie gave him a placid look of annoyance. "I don't have your wallet. Why would I take it?" He said this in a cold, icy tone, but he wasn't particularly in the mood for his dad's petty money problems.

"I don't know, I just…" Mr. Lachance paused, moving his head slightly to peer into Gordie's room behind him. He placed his glasses on the bridge of his nose. "Gordie, your room is a mess. It's probably in there."

"Dad, it's more likely in the fridge than in my room." Gordie reasoned under his breath. Still, Mr. Lachance proceeded to rise from his chair and enter Gordie's room uninvited. Gordie leaned on the doorframe, his arms folded.

"You could ask to come inside, you know…" He muttered. His father glared at him.

"I've had enough of your attitude, Gordon. Just let me look."

Gordie rolled his eyes into the back of his head, swinging out of his bedroom and into the kitchen. Presently, the phone rang, blaring noise into his left ear. Gordie waited a few rings to see if Mr. Lachance would emerge from inside his room to pick up the ringing telephone, but he didn't.

"No, it's fine. I'll just talk to your fucking co workers myself like a secretary. No big deal…" He muttered to himself, reaching out for the phone. Hesitating just enough to let out a long drawn, loud sigh that his father would hopefully hear, he closed his fingers numbly around the handset, pushing the receiver to his ear.

"Lachance residence." He said dryly. "Wanna talk to my dad, or…"

"Hey Gordie." A voice said timidly from the other end of the line. Gordie relaxed slightly.

"Oh, Gavin." He cringed at the sound of his voice. To be perfectly honest, he wasn't in the mood to talk to anybody in that moment, including Gavin, and it obviously showed in his tone.

Gavin, who was a master of reading voices and faces, caught onto this vibe. However, instead of taking it to heart, he hesitated in his words.

"Um…Gosh, you should awful." He admitted bluntly. Gordie pressed down on the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger to keep him newfound raging headache at bay. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah, fine…" He mumbled. "Totally fine. I'm just…tired."

"Tired…" Gavin scoffed, disbelieving. "Right." If Gordie could, he would glare at him. Obviously, Gavin picked up on this as well and hastened to the point. "Um, well, I actually called to ask if you…" He trailed off, sighing deeply. Even Gordie, who was terrible with people and skip-reading emotions like books, could sense there was something he was debating saying; something possibly controversial or probably annoying, and the two of them knew it. Gordie waited, his nail tapping on the back of the phone in bleak impatience as he stared at his bedroom door. His dad was taking an awful long time in there…

"Well, I was just wondering if you had…if you had the math homework from yesterday." Gavin sighed in defeat. This was obviously not what he was originally going to say, but Gordie was completely fine with reading off a couple of math problems as opposed to dealing with whatever problems this kid had to throw at him. "I think I lost my bag, and I know you've always got your backpack with-"

"Gav, I've got it." Gordie muttered reassuringly into the phone, telling him subconsciously that whatever he got out of saying, it didn't really matter and he could just shut up and save himself a lot of over thinking and possible embarrassment via word fumbling. Gordie could almost feel the relief tumble from the phone.

"Right." Gavin breathed as Gordie dropped the phone, letting it dangle down the wall by it's cord as he jogged to retrieve his backpack. After a few minutes of rummaging, he finally picked out the crumpled sheet of terrifyingly complicated algebra problems and ran quickly across the scratched wood floors to the phone. He grabbed the receiver, saving it from the embrace of gravity, and pressed it to his ear, setting the homework out on the table and smoothing away the crease. He gave it a quick once-over to insure he didn't mess up.

"Okay, I'm here." He said breathily. "It's that sheet with the twenty problems, right?"

"Gordon!" Mr. Lachance yelled suddenly from Gordie's room. Gordie rolled his eyes so hard his head hurt, putting his head in his hands. He pushed the transceiver away from his mouth.

"What!?" He demanded.

"Yeah, that's the one." Gavin's voice said through the phone, but Gordie was only half listening.

"Gordon, get in here!" His dad called, his voice stern and solid. Gordie winced. What now?

"I'm busy!" He countered quickly.

"Now, Gordie!"

"I said, I'm busy! Give me a minute!" That was the final word. Gordie put the phone back to his face. "Yeah, what."

"That's it." Gavin repeated. "That's the sheet."

"You've got pen and paper?" Gordie asked. Gavin mumbled something in a positive response. "Okay, number one…" Absent mindedly, Gordie began to read off the problems, but only half of his mind was focused. He couldn't possibly stop thinking about what his dad was yelling about. Whatever it was, he felt completely numb and vividly scared, anticipation and the bad kind of adrenaline that made him shiver down to his toes pumping through his veins. Jittery, blindingly insecure in himself and his ability to pull himself together. It was like he was going to crumble onto the ground if someone tried to touch him. He would never let himself admit it, but he was broken down inside, completely falling apart at the seams with only his skin to hold him in. One more thing thrown at him, and he would explode. At the very moment, he was narrowly avoiding walking the school halls like an antisocial zombie with bags under his eyes from lack of sleep because his buzzing brain wouldn't shut up; thoughts of his mess inside, thoughts of his life, thoughts of his broken machine that was himself, thoughts of maybe not being himself at all. Maybe leaving. He wasn't suicidal, but he was so simply torn down. Everyone he loved had left, floated towards the skies and away. When, he wondered, would he cut his tethers and burn his bridges and fly to the clouds as well? Was he depressed? Was he crazy? Definitely crazy, and definitely not happy,that was for sure. u

"Gordie?" A voice called out through the phone. Gordie blinked at the sheet in front of him a few times, disoriented.

"W-w-what. Yeah?" He stammered dumbly.

"You stopped talking." Gavin informed him. Gordie rolled his eyes.

"Right. Sorry. Where was I?" He asked, defeated, after a few seconds.

"Middle of number sixteen." Gavin said.

"Umm, okay…that was two to the sixth power plus…" Gordie rattled off the last of the problems quickly, not quite sure that he wanted it to end. In the moment, Gavin was kind of his little way of procrastinating.

But it didn't last. In a matter of minutes, Gordie had reached the very end of the sheet, and, as a result, began to find it very hard to breathe. However, in all attempts to stay normal for the sake of the boy on the other end of the phone, he took a deep breath, letting it out with a mighty line of air, and bit his lip.

"Is that it?" Gavin asked, his voice distant and hollow. Gordie gulped, his fingers shaking as he folded up the paper.

"Yeah." He muttered. Gavin hesitated, awkwardness heavy in the air.

"Well, uh, thanks for that…" He said slowly.

"No problem." Gordie replied quietly, his chin to his chest as he stared down at his feet, his mind swimming. "See you on Monday."

"Right. See you." Gavin breathed. Gordie waited as the phone clicked into place and the line went dead. Eery, a piercing ringing noise drilling into his brain until he dropped the phone, letting it dangle by the coiled cord, swinging back and forth. He turned an ear tentatively towards his room, searching for any sounds of movement, but he heard none. He shivered, placed the phone back in it's rightful place, and proceeded towards his bedroom. Every step plunking down onto the worn wood felt heavy, dragging his feet until he came to stand in the door frame, gripping his hands inside each other.

It hadn't even begin to cross his mind that he had left the letter on the bed. He looked at his father, sitting across the white, undone duvet cover, his hands gripping the edges of the paper with dismal fury. His folder, ransacked and sad, laid open on the plush carpet, letters strewn across the floor in a disarray of Christopher Chamber's handwriting. It was sickening. Gordie legitimately felt like he was going to puke right there. His throat knotted, his cheeks burned, and his chest grew aflame. How could he be such an idiot?

"I trusted you, Gordon." Mr. Lachance said finally, not looking up from the letter. "I told you once, I told you a thousand times, do not speak to this boy. I took you out of that town to get away from him and still you continue to disobey me."

"Dad, I'm sorry…" Gordie choked out as a last resort, not knowing what else to say. His breath was shaky as he forced out the words. "I really am, I just…he's my best friend in the entire world…and that means a lot to me."

"Yeah, damn right it does." His father growled under his breath. Gordie cringed. "You know, I spend all my life just trying to protect you, Gordie. I wanted you to peruse interests worth perusing and make friends whose fathers aren't drunks. Make friends with kids who aren't crazy or thieves-"

"He's not a thief!" Gordie yelped suddenly, surprised at his own words. He whipped his eyes in dismay, finding that they were already welling with tears of hatred and dark emotion. "He isn't, okay? So stop thinking that. He tried to return the goddamn milk money, if you really want to know! He's honest to god the best and almost only friend I ever had! I can't just leave something like that!"

"Gordie, now, we're going to have to find out a way to deal with this. We can't go along like an incident such as this didn't happen." Mr. Lachance had dropped the letter and was on his feet now, towering over his son a few feet away, his eyes glowing with vast madness. "I thought bringing you to the city would help you keep grounded, but obviously, that isn't working."

"Oh, hell, what's that supposed to mean?" Gordie spat. His dad inched closer.

"It means that you'd better get your act together or there are going to be serious consequences! I sent you to Huntington's to keep you away from that kind of thing, but if you're in a home with a full time working father and the minimal supervision that I provide, something has to be done about it!"

Gordie shrunk back into himself, most of his confidence flickering and burning out. He didn't dare look his father in the eye, so simply stared at the neckline of his grey tee shirt.

"What are you trying to say here…" Gordie said quietly, suddenly feeling very small and very scared, like a mouse who stumbled through the wrong hole and found himself in the middle of a bloodthirsty cat convention. He gulped.

"I'm saying that I think it would be best if you transferred to school housing." Mr. Lachance said slowly, but firmly. "At least, for now. You need discipline and a well supervised environment. I only blame myself for not watching over you enough to ensure something like this wouldn't happen. It would be better there."

"But-"

However, Mr. Lachance was already pushing past him and walking into the kitchen.

"I'll contact the school tomorrow. I want this to go into action as soon as possible." He said darkly, heading for the kitchen table and sitting down warily to his work again. Gordie just stared, completely dumbfounded. His ears rang. Everything felt numb. What, exactly, had he just been told? Not living with his father? Staying at the school? What in hell would that be like? No matter how much he despised the man, he was still family, and the only remainder of said family that he had left.

He slammed the door to his bedroom behind him. Hard. He could nearly feel the walls vibrate, hear the house shake, but maybe that was just his pounding heart raging angrily in his chest. Get up, say something, don't just go around slamming doors! Gordie waited impatiently behind the door, listening for any signs of discomfort. He wanted his dad to get mad, to yell at him, to get sad, to show any kind of emotion. He hated that look of blank superiority that made him so helpless in his shadow. He wanted to have a reason to fight back, to scream until the neighbors called the goddamn police, because that was how mad he felt in that moment. He wanted to tell his dad how much he despised his values and superficial views on his former friends, how it seemed like it didn't matter what Gordie did so long as he looked like a jock. How his friends could be anybody as long as they came from a respectable background and a rich family, even if the truth was that you didn't have to be respectable to be good. And, in that sense, you didn't have to be good to be respectable; every family had their secrets, so a family that shines with self pride of politician uncles and world-renowned army general grandfathers didn't necessarily have to fruit off a child with any kind of good in his veins. There was a fine line between good and simply doing the right thing as well, and as his father might think that he was doing everything in his mind to make his son's life better, and that he was being a good parent, he wasn't necessarily doing what would be good for Gordie. Inevitably, if Gordie kept his whole life in a little bottle and refused to open it to anyone, one day it would split and break and all his sorrows would come lashing out and reach to strangle him. Everything he spent so long burying carefully and sticking an already dead but slightly pretty looking flower would be resurrected, undug, the flower strewn to the side because you can't just put glitter over a corpse and call it alright. He wanted to scream, he wanted to yell, and he wanted to argue until all of this was thrown out into the open air for his father to finally understand; you couldn't dash glitter over your dying son and call it perfectly alright.

Pps, if anyone saw that creepy update with all the coding, I'm so sorry, I really have like no idea what happened. I tried to add in these emoji things..this is what I get for trying to look kawaii when im trash yayyayayayya okay anways that's all.