Free Taking Care of Terrific by Lois Lowry

sight as they shuffled off. Even our own bag lady was gone.
    Hawk drew out the last note like a sigh and put his saxophone down. "They didn't collect their pay," he said in amazement.
    Tom Terrific jumped down from his bench and asked happily, knowing the answer, "Was I a good Head Honcho?" and I assured him that he was the best.
    I left the signs for Hawk, who said he would take them to his car. Then I HUP-two-three-foured Tom Terrific home.
    It was a great feeling to win a war. I was beginning to think that it might be fun to start another.

Chapter 11
    After something works out well, you want to talk about it to someone. During the school year, I spend half of every Saturday on the phone talking to Trina and Emily, my two best friends, about the school dances, plays, and concerts that are held on Friday nights. Or if nothing was held at school, we talk about whatever movie we went to the night before.
    You just need to relive things, especially if they made you feel good. But there was no one I could talk to about the Great Root Beer Popsicle Strike.
    The bag ladies had all dissolved like ghosts fading into the background of a late night movie.
    Hawk? He had loped off, same as always, to his battered car, into which he loaded the signs and the saxophone. I had no idea where Hawk lived, where he went at night, who he went home to.
    A statue of Edward Everett Hale stands there at the entrance to the Public Garden by the Popside cart, with his bronze overcoat draped around him in chiseled folds. He had watched the whole thing, but his mournful bronze eyes had never changed. Man of Letters he may have been—it says so at the base of his statue—but he sure wasn't much of a conversationalist.
    Head Honcho Tom Terrific and I talked a bit on the way home; but let's face it, terrific though Tom was, he was only four. His main concern on the walk home was in getting his browns reorganized in the Crayola box and in bellowing out "HUP" every fourth step.
    As for his mother, Ms. Cameron? By the time we reached the house on West Cedar Street, Tom Terrific had to change back to his Joshua self: sweet and cherubic, with his hair smoothed down. He affected great delight at the freshly squeezed orange juice his mother had ready, and I concocted a new set of reasons why we had not, again today, drawn pictures of trees.
    "Hey, guess what
we
did this afternoon," I murmured to a poodle tied outside DeLuca's as I walked home. But the poodle yawned, then turned to chew on his own curly hip.
    All of this is an explanation of why, later that evening, I called up Seth Sandroff. My parents (if I had tried to tell
them
about it, they would have
begun immediately to fill out registration forms to send me to summer camp, boarding school, rafting trips on the Snake River, Outward Bound, a cloistered convent) had gone to the theater. Mrs. Kolodny was reading an old issue of
Good Housekeeping
in the kitchen while the dishwasher ran. She had forgotten to add the detergent, but I didn't tell her. I figured the high temperature would kill the germs.
    I left her engrossed in an article, "How to Stay Cheerful During a Difficult Pregnancy," and curled up in the den with a Diet Pepsi and the telephone.
    "You turkey," said Seth after I had described the afternoon, "why didn't you let me arrange for a camera crew? I could have had the whole spot shown on
Heartwarmers
tonight at seven-thirty."
    Heartwarmers,
need I add, is a wretched fifteen-minute TV thing dreamed up by Seth's father, guaranteed to make the audience either weep or barf. A hundred-year-old man with no living relatives celebrates his birthday all alone except for a three-legged dog. Blind triplets are taken to the circus for the first time. All of this is sponsored by a very crunchy cereal with no nutritional value.
    "The viewing audience couldn't have stood it,
Seth," I said. "It would have overwarmed their hearts."
    "Don't underestimate the power of television. You could have been famous,