One night, Bill showed up at your window just after nine. He tapped lightly on the glass, holding something in his hand — a thick, spiral-bound notebook, its cover black and unmarked.

You let him in, the autumn air following him in a rush.

“This is it,” he said simply, climbing through. “The journal. We’re g-gonna write down everything. E-every detail we can remember about the others… about the summer after seventh grade… about It.”

You sat cross-legged on your bed while Bill dropped into the desk chair, spinning the notebook so it faced you both. For a while, neither of you spoke. The weight of what you were doing — putting in writing the things no one else seemed to remember — felt heavier than you’d expected.

Finally, you picked up the pen. “We start with the Barrens,” you said.

The words came easier than you thought they would. You wrote about the smell of damp earth, the way sunlight filtered through the trees, the cold rush of water over bare feet. Bill chimed in, adding details you’d missed: how Eddie used to tap his inhaler against his knee, the way Richie’s voice would carry like it was trying to compete with the crickets.

For two hours, you filled pages. And with each line, a strange, prickling unease grew at the base of your neck.

It wasn’t until you flipped back to the first page that you noticed something was wrong.

Your handwriting — the careful, slanted letters you’d been writing with all your life — looked different. Almost… unfamiliar. The loops were tighter. The lines sharper.

Bill noticed too. His stutter caught in his throat as he ran his finger over the ink. “It looks… older,” he murmured. “Like someone else wrote it. S-someone who knows the story already.”

You tried to laugh it off, but your stomach felt tight. “Maybe I was just writing fast.”

But later, when you closed the journal for the night, you caught sight of the very last line you’d written without even remembering doing it.

Don’t let them see you writing this.

Bill saw it too. His hand brushed yours, a grounding touch in the quiet room. “We keep going,” he said firmly. “We f-figure it out before it figures us out.”

And in the uneasy silence that followed, you realized the worst part — you didn’t remember writing that sentence at all.