Sonia found that she had exhausted Derry's limited reservoirs of sympathy. The Junior League stopped paying for Eddie's treatments and quietly adopted a resolution requiring the treasurer to reimburse medical providers rather than disbursing funds directly to parents. Dr. Baynes and Mr. Keene were growing noticeably brusque when they reassured her that Eddie was not in any serious danger, and Dr. Tozier ostentatiously directed his debriefs of Eddie's dentist visits to the boy instead of his mother. Instead of asking after Eddie's health or praising her bravery, the other mothers suddenly became intensely interested in lettuce or brussels sprouts when Sonia passed by them in the grocery store. Their husbands never asked if she needed a ride into Bangor for Eddie's appointments anymore, and their sons were no longer dispatched to help out with her yardwork. This at least had an upside. Eddie wanted to spend more time away from the house the older he got, but she could always come up with chores that had to be completed before he left, and the chores would always have to be redone to her satisfaction, and it would almost always be near dark by the time he was finished.

On many occasions, Eddie grew inpatient and snuck off without gaining permission. When he returned he had to be punished of course – with the liberal application of whatever implement was most handy to whatever part of his body could be held still, followed by a grounding. It pained Sonia to see her Eddie-bear crying, but at least he was paying attention to her. For it was the attention she missed the most. Frank had been utterly besotted with her from the day he met her until the day he died. It was like a drug to her, and after his death she was desperate for a fix. For a while after the pity of the townsfolk had sustained her, but now that was fading like the last patches of snow in a Maine Spring.

It was Geraldo Rivera that gave her an idea for how to get the attention back. He'd been running a series of reports on a frightening new disease. The first sign in many victims was lesions on the face, and then a series of bizarre infections gradually breaking down the body until 80 percent of them were dead within two years. Of course, it primarily affected male homosexuals and heroin addicts, and Eddie was an eight-year-old boy. But there was that gay couple on West Broadway, in a house that Eddie walked by on his way to and from Bill's.

One night early in the summer, Eddie came home from Bill's after dark. Instead of the usual wooden spoon, Sonia disciplined him with the buckle end of his own belt. By the next week, he had developed a nice set of bruises on his face. To a doctor in New York or San Francisco, they wouldn't have looked anything like Kaposi's sarcoma, but they were close enough for Derry. Dr. Baynes confessed that he had never seen a case like this before, and referred her to the Public Health Department, which sent off to Atlanta for a blood test. It would take several weeks to get the final results. In the meantime, Eddie was sternly warned not to play with any of his friends, lest he infect them, and it was suggested that Sonia wear surgical gloves to minimize the risk to herself.

The legal proceedings didn't need to wait for the test results, so the gay couple on West Broadway was arrested on charges of interfering with a minor, and Eddie was taken to the police station to give a statement to Chief Bowers, not a man noted for having a way with children.

"So, Eddie, your mother tells me you were sodomized by those men. I need you to tell me how they did it."

"What's somdomized?" Eddie had gathered from his mother's hysterical interactions with Dr. Baynes and the health department that the men on West Broadway had done something horrible to him, and that was how he'd contracted the disease he was now dying from, but he was still unclear about what exactly it was, especially since he couldn't recall either of the men saying a word to him in his entire life.

"It means they had sex with you."

Eddie was aware that it was possible for two men to have sex with each other, thanks to Richie, but Richie had also told him that doing so was strictly illegal, punished by several years in prison with men who'd make Officer Bowers' son Henry look like a cream puff. He naturally assumed that this was an interrogation preparatory to his arrest, and panicked.

"No, please. I swear officer. I never did sex with them!"

"Your mother said you came back late from Bill Denbrough's and you were upset. It wasn't because of those men?"

Eddie decided that telling the truth was the only way to minimize the trouble he was in. "I lied! I told my mom I was going to Bill's house, but I was playing in the park with Richie and Bill and Stan. I never even went by West Broadway."

The veracity of Eddie's story was confirmed with a quick phone call to the Toziers' residence. He got a thorough chewing out from Officer Bowers for wasting his time, and the worst beating of his life up to that point from his mother for making a fool of her, and every child in Derry except Richie and Greta Keene was told not to play with him that summer lest they get AIDS and die, but he didn't go to jail and the test eventually came back negative. The gay couple on West Broadway were released for lack of evidence, and returned home to find that someone had spray-painted slurs all over their house. When the doorbell rang about seven o'clock, they were sure that it was someone coming to murder them, but when they opened the door they saw only a ham-and-spinach quiche left on their doorstep and bright red Porsche speeding off down the street.