It

and she was immediately furious with herself (and him) for feeling that way. So she smiled at him.
‘How are we feeling today, Eddie?’
That was the right response. Someone — some foolish candy-striper, or perhaps even that incompetent and antagonistic nurse from the day before — had been carrying tales. Someone.
‘How are we feeling?’ she asked again when he didn’t respond. She thought he hadn’t heard her. She’d never read in any of her medical literature of a broken bone affecting the sense of hearing, but she supposed it was possible, anything was possible.
Eddie still didn’t respond.
She came farther into the room, hating the tentative, almost timid feeling inside her, distrusting it because she had never felt tentative or timid around Eddie before. She felt anger as well, although that was still nascent. What right did he have to make her feel that way, after all she had done for him, after all she had sacrificed for him?
‘I’ve talked to Dr Handor, and he assures me that you’re going to be perfectly all right,’ Sonia said briskly, sitting down in the straight-backed wooden chair by the bed. ‘Of course if
there’s the slightest problem, we’ll go to see a specialist in Portland. In Boston, if that’s what it takes.’ She smiled, as if conferring a great favor. Eddie did not smile back. And still he did not reply.
‘Eddie, are you hearing me?’
‘You sent my friends away,’ he repeated.
‘Yes,’ she said, dropping the pretense, and said no more. Two could play at that game. She simply looked back at him.
But a strange thing happened; a terrible thing, really. Eddie’s eyes seemed to . . . to grow, somehow. The flecks of gray in them seemed actually to be moving, like racing stormclouds. She became aware suddenly that he was not ‘in a snit,’ or ‘having a poopie,’ or any of those things. He was furious with her . . . and Sonia was suddenly scared, because something more than her son seemed to be in this room. She dropped her eyes and fumbled her purse open. She began searching for a Kleenex.
‘Yes, I sent them away,’ she said, and found that her voice was strong enough and steady enough . . . as long as she wasn’t looking at him. ‘You’ve been seriously injured, Eddie. You don’t need any visitors right now except for your own ma, and you don’t need visitors like that, ever. If it hadn’t been for them, you’d be home watching the TV right now, or building your soapbox racer in the garage.’
It was Eddie’s dream to build a soapbox racer and take it to Bangor. If he won there, he would be awarded an all-expenses-paid trip to Akron, Ohio, for the National Soapbox Derby. Sonia was perfectly willing to allow him this dream as long as it seemed to her that completion of the racer, which was made out of orange crates and the wheels from a Choo-Choo Flyer wagon, was just that — a dream. She certainly had no intention of letting Eddie risk his life in such a dangerous contraption, not in Derry, not in Bangor, and certainly not in Akron, which (Eddie had informed her) would mean riding in an airplane as well as making a suicidal run down a steep hill in a wheeled orange crate with no brakes. But, as her own mother had often said, what a person didn’t know couldn’t hurt him (her mother had also been fond of saying ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil,’ but when it came to the recollection of aphorisms Sonia, like most people, could be remarkably selective).
‘My friends didn’t break my arm,’ Eddie said in that same flat voice. ‘I told Dr Handor last night and I told Mr Nell when he came in this morning. Henry Bowers broke my arm. Some other kids were with him, but Henry did it. If I’d been with my friends, it never would have happened. It happened because I was alone.’
This made Sonia think of Mrs Van Prett’s comment about how it was safer to have friends, and that brought the rage back like a tiger. She snapped her head up. ‘That doesn’t matter and you know it! What do you think, Eddie? That your ma fell off a haytruck yesterday? Is that what you think? I know well enough why the Bowers boy broke your arm. That Paddy cop was at our house, too. That big boy broke your arm because you and your «friends» crossed him somehow. Now do you think that would have happened if you’d listened to me and stayed away from them in the first place?’
‘No — I think that something even worse might have happened,’ Eddie said.
‘Eddie, you don’t mean that.’
‘I mean it,’ he said, and she felt that power coming off him, coming out of him, in waves. ‘Bill and the rest of my friends will be back, Ma. That’s something I know. And when they come, you’re not going to stop them. You’re not going to say a word to them. They’re my friends, and you’re not going to steal my friends just because you’re scared of being