Read Online Kevin Kling's Holiday Inn by Kevin Kling - Free Book Online Page A

smell through his white cotton shirt. Mom hums along with the radio. My brother and sister are at home waiting to surprise me with a party. I am the chosen one. The car moves toward home, and I hum along with my mother, “I go out walkin’, After midnight.”
    “Enough,” says the tiny perfect manchild, and the beating stops.
    Later Gary tells me, “Beware The Little Prince.”
    I say, “He told me I’d better stay in line, that he can make the nurses give me extra shots.”
    “No, he can’t do that, but he can make it worse in here. Just ignore him. He’ll stop after you’re not new anymore.”
    I don’t plan on being here that long.
    “And,” he said, “don’t sing, the next time they pound you.”
    “Was I singing?”
    “Yes. They would’ve stopped sooner, but the singing made them mad.”
    It’s the same when my brother hits me. Never sing or laugh when someone is beating you. For some reason it just makes matters worse.
    “Why is he called The Little Prince?”
    “That’s what the nurses call him. They always say, ‘Whatever you say, Your Highness,’ and, ‘Mustn’t upset The Little Prince.’”
    I know even though someone is called a Prince, he doesn’t necessarily act that way. My friend Kent Neil Winchester, who lives kitty-corner from our house, has a dog named King, and it doesn’t act like any King I’ve ever heard of.
    The nurses are all excited, not for themselves, for us. The Shrine Circus is in town. We aren’t allowed to go, but the parade will pass through the courtyard of the hospital. The nurses tell us how lucky we are. We scramble to the windows as we hear the bands down the street, the face of a crippled child pressed in every pane. The parade circles below in the courtyard. Doctors and nurses and some older kids are in the yard below, waving to the floats. Gary’s bed is pulled up next to the window but he’s flat on his back and can’t see.
    “What’s happening?”
    With my face pressed against the window, I can see head tops of band members and clowns and soldiers. They looked like toys below. I yell at them to “Look up here,” but I we’re too high up, and the windows won’t open. I stop yelling because other kids look at me like I am stupid. Gary seems more excited than anyone and he can’t even see.
    “What else?”
    I tell Gary everything I see, but a parade looks very different from the sixth floor of a hospital, so I do some inventing with details from parades I’ve seen in the Little Golden Books version of Toby Tyler .
    There are elephants, I tell him, and a giant, and monkeys, and a bearded lady. Then I begin to invent my own story. I know that if I’m walking down the street and a man pulls over in a car, maybe a hairy man with bad teeth, and he smiles and says he’s my Uncle Carl and to get in the car, I should scream and run away. But if “Uncle Carl” pulls over in a story, I can get in and go with him no matter where that is, and in fact the story is usually better when I do get in. Gary laughs at the part where the lion breaks loose and runs rampant through the crowd, ripping the hospital staff to shreds and knocking over a lantern that sets the hospital in flames. The intent was for drama, but a laugh is a laugh in a hospital, and you take them when you can.
    A little later some clowns visit us and scare the younger kids, but I have learned not to fear clowns. We have cake, and the clowns leave, laughing and honking.
    It’s very calm then, after the clowns leave. We are all sitting quietly around a little picnic table in the playroom, silently awaiting orders. Even The Little Prince Charmin seems compassionate in this stillness. Then it dawns on all of us at once. We are unsupervised. The nurses have left with the clowns, and there is no one watching us. In the brand-new stillness that comes with knowing we can do whatever we want to, one of the kids picks up some leftover cake and throws it into the eye of another kid. The kid with cake