Read Online Not-Just-Anybody Family by Betsy Byars - Free Book Online

bring everything everybody wanted.
    Even when she looked directly at him during the terrible talk, and he knew, knew deep in his bones, that it was he who was not going to get the bicycle, he still could not sleep from excitement.
    This was different. It was the opposite of excitement. They did a lot of opposites in school. The teacher would say, “The opposite of day is—”
    “Night!” Junior would cry.
    “The opposite of lost is—”
    “Found!”
    Junior had never missed a single one. Sometimes he was a little bit slower than the rest of the class, but he had never missed one.
    This was impossible, though, he thought. He went over it again. “The opposite of excitement is—”
    There was only one answer: “Lying in the hospital with hurt legs.”
    And his legs did hurt. They had not hurt much during the day, and they had stopped hurting entirely when he had held Ralphie’s artificial leg and worked the knee. He had even for one brief moment wanted a leg exactly like the one on his lap.
    Now, however, his legs were making up for lost time. They hurt a lot.
    He realized suddenly how much he loved the sounds of his own house. He missed them. Mud drinking loudly out of the toilet, Pap grinding his teeth, the wind chimes they had given their mom for her birthday clicking musically on the porch below, the occasional chinaberry dropping on the tin roof.
    He felt so miserable that he reached for the buzzer beside his pillow. “Use this, Junior, if you need anything,” the nurse had told him, but he never had. Ralphie spent a lot of time ringing his buzzer, demanding Cokes and candy over the intercom as if he were the president of the hospital. When the nurses ignored him, he pressed the buzzer and made terrible gagging noises or pretended to be choking.
    Now Junior looked at his buzzer. He pressed the button. A voice on the intercom said, “Yes?”
    “It’s me—Junior,” he answered miserably.
    “Speak up, please.”
    “It’s me—Junior.”
    “What’s wrong, Junior?”
    “I don’t feel good.”
    “Do your legs hurt?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’ll bring you an aspirin.”
    “Thank you,” he said politely. It was hard not to be polite to a voice coming from the wall.
    But when the nurse arrived with the paper cup and the pill, he was crying too hard to swallow. “I want Maggie,” he wailed. “I want Pap. I want Vern. I want my mommmmmmm!”
    “Will you shut him up?” Ralphie said, flipping over in disgust. “Where does he think he is—at a hog-calling contest?”
    The nurse wrapped her arms around Junior and hugged him. He tried to pretend they were has mom’s arms, but it didn’t work. Still, he was glad to have arms of any sort around him. “Tomorrow, you know what you’re going to do?” the nurse asked kindly.
    He shook his head against her.
    “You’re going to get up and sit in a wheelchair and you can go down to the TV room, and you can roll up and down the hall, and the play lady comes with games and books and you can pick anything you want.”
    “Is that true?” Junior asked.
    “Big deal,” Ralphie sneered.
    “Go to sleep, Ralphie. You—”
    Ralphie clutched his throat. “I swallowed my harmonica.”
    “Come on, Ralphie, it’s too late at night for that kind of foolishness.”
    “I swallowed my harmonica, I tell you! I’m not kidding! I really swallowed my harmonica! Where is it if I didn’t swallow it?”
    He began to pull at his pajamas, frantically searching the wrinkles. He tore his pajama top open and shook it. He lifted his pillow.
    The nurse crossed to Ralphie’s bed. “Let’s take a look. It probably fell down in your covers.” She pulled them back and searched among the wrinkled sheets. “Roll over.” She ran her hands under him.
    “He did have it in his mouth,” Junior said helpfully. “It blew a note every time he breathed out.”
    “Ralphie, it looks like you’d have better sense than to go to sleep with a harmonica in your mouth. If I have to send you