The TV Kid by Betsy Byars

everything had stopped moving. The sun wasn’t dropping in the sky. It was still hanging in the sky in exactly the same place. The wind wasn’t blowing. The clouds weren’t moving. The trees were as still as plastic arrangements.
    He closed his eyes. He had lost track of time. He didn’t know how long he had been lying here. It seemed like days. Years. Centuries.
    He felt as if he had been lying here long enough to have been frozen in a glacier or petrified by burning lava. He had been lying here long enough to be preserved and sent to some museum as the main display.
    He would be more popular in the museum than the mummy or the fossilized whale. “Hey, did you guys see the preserved kid?”
    “No, where’s any preserved kid?”
    “Around yonder. He’s ten million years old—the card says so, and he’s got a snake bite on his ankle. You can even see the holes.”
    “Where? Show me.”
    “Come on if you don’t believe me.”
    He would be so popular that they would make a whole educational TV program about him, Lennie thought. They would reconstruct his life, his last day. The show would be called “This Is the Way We Think It Was,” and as the young actor lay stretched out, imitating Lennie’s , pain, imitating Lennie’s dying, the announcer’s voice would say, “Yes, this is the way we think it was, ten million years ago today.”
    Lennie raised his head. The only bit of movement left in the world was his pounding heart. And now even that seemed to be slowly winding down.
    Lennie stretched out flat on the porch. His mind drifted back in time. He thought of a friend he had had in Nashville. Nashville was the only place he and his mom had stayed long enough for Lennie to get a good friend. The other places they had lived, by the time people got used to Lennie and stopped picking on him, right then he and his mom had moved.
    This friend in Nashville was Carl Lee Norton, and he and Lennie used to walk home from school together through an old cow field. They both lived in side-by-side trailers in Pineview Trailer Court. And sometimes when they got tired, they would lie down in the field and just look up at the sky.
    One day as they were lying there in silence, an airplane flew overhead, a small plane, white and red, single engine. Lennie, watching the plane, began to will it to fall from the sky. “Fall! Fall! Fall!” he was saying to himself, not really wanting the plane to fall, just testing his ability to make things happen.
    At that very moment, as Lennie lay there with his brain powers trained on the airplane, Carl Lee sat up and said, “Hey, I bet that’s my uncle.”
    “Where?”
    “Up there in that airplane. You know, Uncle David. It looks like his Cessna.”
    “Oh.”
    Lennie lay back and closed his eyes. He felt weak. He realized he had been willing one of his most admired people, Carl Lee’s Uncle David, the man who had let Lennie sit in the cockpit of his glider and promised to take him up in an airplane— this was the man he had been willing to fall from the sky.
    “I got to go home,” he said after a moment. He got up slowly. The plane was out of sight, hopefully still flying.
    “Me too,” Carl Lee said.
    And the two of them walked toward their trailers with the matching plastic sofas and the plastic sliding doors and the carpets of miracle fibers. As he entered his trailer, Carl Lee called, “I’ll ask Uncle David if we can go up in his Cessna this Sunday.”
    Lennie nodded, but he wasn’t so eager to go up any more. Going up in the airplane was ruined now. Because maybe, just maybe, there would be some other person, in some other field, looking up at the sky, saying, “Fall! Fall! Fall!” to Lennie’s plane. Sure, he, Lennie, didn’t have any power, but maybe somebody else did.
    But now, lying on the porch, dying, he sent out a mental signal to the world. Come! Come! Come! Silently he willed the invisible people with all his might. Anyone within range of my mind, come! Help