Not-Just-Anybody Family Read Online Free Page A

go on That’s Incredible .”
    “I wasn’t playing rooster. I was trying to fly.”
    “Did you?”
    “Not farrrrr.”
    “How far? Ten feet? Twenty?”
    The distance was so short, Junior could measure it with his hands. He showed the boy a distance of about three feet, then he let his hands drop to his sides.
    He wiped his tears on his bed sheet. “Where are we?” he asked the boy.
    “Alderson General Hospital, fourth floor.”
    Junior looked at the boy with grudging admiration. Here was someone who obviously knew a thing or two about hospitals.
    “How did I get here?”
    “They brought you down from the operating room last night, eleven o’clock. It woke me up. You were moaning. Oh, no, no, noooooooooo . Like that. The nurse said you broke both your legs, but she didn’t say how.”
    “The barn.”
    Pity crept into Junior’s voice. He wondered if he would ever again be able to say the word barn without wanting to weep.
    “Don’t you remember anything?”
    Junior shook his head.
    “They must have knocked you out. Or did they just go ahead and set your legs while you were awake?”
    “I don’t remember.”
    “Well, you’d remember if they’d knocked you out. You know how they do it? The doctor takes a great big hammer and he hides it behind his back and then he says, ‘Look over there! Quick! What’s that?’ And when you look, he brings out the hammer and hits you over the head.”
    “That’s not true,” Junior said.
    “Yes, it is. You know what they did to me?”
    “No.”
    “They cut my head open and filled it with marbles. You can hear them rolling around when I shake my head.”
    “That’s not true.”
    “Prove it,” the boy said.
    Junior was too busy going over his own memories to worry about the boy’s marbles. To himself he said, I was up on the barn and the police drove in the yard—I remember that, and I was hiding from them on the roof—I remember that, and I slipped .
    To the boy he added, “If I had been able to go off the roof the way I’d planned, sort of launch myself, I could have escaped over the trees, but they got me all mixed up.” Again sorrow made his voice quiver. “It was the police that made me fall.”
    “You probably wouldn’t have flown anyway. People have not had a lot of luck with homemade wings. I saw a whole show that was nothing but people trying to fly—one man had a bicycle with wings on it and he pedaled it right off a cliff. Another man went off a bridge. You were probably lucky just to break two legs.”
    “That’s all I’ve got.” More pity.
    “You’ve got other bones, though—hipbones, jawbones, backbones.”
    It reminded Junior of a song they sang in first grade: “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dryyyyy bones.” He never had liked that song.
    “You know what they do to you if you break your jawbone, don’t you?”
    “No.”
    “Wire your mouth shut so you can’t eat for a month.”
    “That’s not—”
    A cart rolled by the door. Junior, startled, broke off his sentence to swing his head around. “What was that?”
    “When they take you to surgery, they put you on one of those carts.”
    “I’m not getting on a cart,” Junior said instantly. “No matter what happens, no matter what they say, I’m not getting on any cart.”
    “If you won’t get on the cart, then they bring the hammer in the room and hit you over the head right here. They did it to that boy that was in that bed right over there. I saw them. They had to hit him twice. One time he put his hand up to protect his head, and they hit him on the hand. He took his hand down, and they hit him on the head so hard, his eyes popped out.”
    “That’s not t—”
    Again Junior didn’t get to finish what he was saying, because the nurse came in. He seemed to get smaller as he realized she was coming to his bed.
    “Good morning.”
    The nurse handed Junior a tiny paper cup. He muttered “Thank you” before he saw there was a pink pill in it. Junior looked at it with