The TV Kid by Betsy Byars Page A

me! Help!
    His leg jerked again, and he cried out. He put his fists up to his eyes.
    “You have to keep hold of yourself,” his mother had told him once. It was just after her boyfriend Sam had died. Lennie had been sad too. Sam was his favorite of his mother’s boyfriends. Sam had owned a diner and was so big and strong he flattened hamburgers like he was swatting flies. He was always saying, “Hit me, kid, go ahead and hit me hard as you can.”
    Lennie would hit and hit until his arms got tired, but it was like trying to hurt a mattress. Lennie liked it when he couldn’t hurt Sam. It was nice to know that there was one person in the world who could not be hurt no matter what you did.
    And then Sam had died. He died right at the diner while he was shoveling snow off the parking lot. His heart, it turned out, was not as strong as his body.
    Lennie had sat in the last booth with his mom while she warmed her hands around a cup of coffee.
    “You always have to keep hold of yourself,” she said.
    Lennie had a young-looking mother. People were always mistaking her for his sister. Now for the first time she looked old enough to really be his mother.
    She wrapped her arms around herself. “Never let go, Lennie.”
    “I try not to.”
    “No matter what happens.”
    “Will we have to leave the diner?”
    She nodded.
    “But where will we go?”
    “I don’t know, but if we just keep hold of ourselves we’ll be all right.”
    “I’ll try to.”
    Now, as if to keep his word, Lennie hugged himself. One hand was on each shoulder, but his fingers were like icy claws. There was no comfort. He wished for dream arms that would grow long on command and wrap him like soft fleshy hoses.
    Holding himself tighter, he sent out the message again. Somebody, anybody, come.

Chapter Fourteen
    A sound broke through the stillness of the front porch. Lennie couldn’t place the noise at first, but he waited. He held his breath and listened.
    Maybe the sound hadn’t been real, he thought. It was puzzling. It was like the time his mother had taken him to the wax museum in New Orleans. The wax museum had been a substitute treat because they hadn’t been able to find Midget City. “All right,” his mother had said finally, “we’ll just go to the wax museum. You want to see wax people, don’t you?”
    They had gone in, and Lennie had really been surprised at how real the people looked. Lennie could see the pores in their hands. Their eyes looked right at him.
    Still and all, there had been something wrong, something so wrong that Lennie couldn’t really be scared, no matter how hard he tried, not even in the Chamber of Horrors. It just wasn’t real somehow.
    That was the same feeling Lennie had now as he lay on the porch, thinking back on the sound he had heard. He listened. Now he couldn’t hear anything at all.
    It seemed to him that maybe the sound had been a car door slamming, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe it was just because that was what he wanted it to be. He tried to pull himself up on his elbow.
    “Help me,” he called out. “Is anybody there?” He waited. “I’m here on the porch. I’m dying.”
    His hopes went up and down like a pop fly. He sank back to the porch. He didn’t have the strength to hold his head up any more. He called again, but his voice seemed to be no more than a sigh.
    “Somebody help me,” he begged. For a moment his hopes were all mixed up with the wax figures in New Orleans, and he imagined that Napoleon and Huey Long and Flip Wilson were drawing around him.
    Abruptly he turned his head from side to side as if to clear it of a bad dream. He wet his lips. He murmured, “No,” to the wax figures. “No!”
    Then he grew still. He had heard another sound. It was real. Someone had spoken to him.
    “Son?”
    Lennie’s eyes snapped open. He tried to rise again. The big sagging cop was standing at the bottom of the steps, tall as a tree.
    Lennie blinked. He saw the policeman clearly now. Lennie