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Intro
On the Friday of Labor Day weekend, 1960, Gordie Lechance is playing cards with his friends Chris Chambers and Teddy Duchamp when their friend Vern Tessio runs up and asks if they want to see a dead body. Earlier that morning, he overheard his brother Billy and Charlie Hogan talking about finding Ray Brower—a child of about their age who went missing a few days earlier from a nearby town—near the train tracks not too far from where they live. The four boys plan to follow the train tracks until they find the spot.
Gordie easily secures permission for an alleged campout at Vern’s. His always-neglectful parents have paid even less attention to him in the months since his older brother Dennis tragically died. Later, he will write a short story called “Stud City” inspired in part by Denny’s death. In it, a teenager named Chico struggles to come to terms with the death of his brother (Johnny) and his anger toward his dad (Sam) and stepmother, Virginia, whom he blames for Johnny’s death.
At exactly noon, Gordie and the gang start following the tracks out of town. When they stop to refill their canteens, they have a run-in with city dump manager Milo Pressman and his watchdog, Chopper. They toss coins to determine who will go to buy hamburger for dinner at a nearby convenience store, and they get a sign of bad luck which only Gordie seems able to escape.
Crossing the trestle over the Castle River, a train nearly strikes and kills Vern and Gordie. Afterwards, the boys take a break and Gordie tells them a story about a boy called Lard Ass Hogan who takes revenge on his town by making himself sick during the annual pie-eating contest and setting off a cataclysmic chain reaction of vomiting.
After spending a tense night in the woods, which are full of eerie noises, the boys continue their trek. To cool off, they strip and skinny dip in a beaver pond which is unfortunately full of leeches. As they walk, Chris and Gordie share heart-to-heart conversations in which Chris confesses his fear that he’ll never be able to escape Castle Rock or the bad reputation of his family.
They find Ray Brower’s body midafternoon on the second day, just as a thunderstorm hits. Unfortunately, they arrive just moments before Billy and Charlie return with their gang—Ace Merrill, Eyeball Chambers, and Fuzzy Bracowic—intent on “discovering” the body, too. After a tense standoff, Chris brandishes a pistol stolen from his father’s dresser and scares the older boys away.
Tired and dejected, the boys head for home, walking through the night. None of their parents noticed their absence. An anonymous phone call from Ace Merrill leads authorities to Brower’s body. And over subsequent weeks, Ace and his gang beat up Gordie, Chris, Vern, and Teddy for the crime of standing up to them. After school starts, Teddy and Vern find a new crowd of friends. With arduous work, Chris becomes a good student, graduating from high school and then from college. Vern and Teddy both die early deaths due to their poor choices. Chris dies young, too, in a tragic accident. Only Gordie survives to adulthood, becoming a famous and wealthy writer.
