The Planet of Junior Brown by Virginia Hamilton

searched his palms. “All I need is an apple or an orange and maybe a roll for breakfast and I don’t need no food again until suppertime.”
    â€œYou think you won’t,” Franklin told him. He had the five dollars deep in his pocket. He wanted to keep it there. “We can’t come back here until nighttime and you going to be sniveling crying for some hot food way before then.”
    â€œI never cried for no food yet,” Nightman said. “I maybe don’t like being in the dark but that’s because I haven’t learned about it. S’nothing scares me about the day … give him back the five dollars.”
    Reluctantly, Franklin pulled out the money. Rather than give it to Buddy, he slapped it down on the table. “There,” he said to Nightman. “I ain’t going to be responsible for your starvation.”
    â€œWhat do I do with the twenty, Nightman,” Buddy said, “and what about the wallet?”
    â€œWell,” Nightman began, “I believe you when you say you going to mail that wallet back to the man. Because I want to believe … because I got no reason not to. And for the twenty, I think you better keep it for the others. I don’t imagine you need it for nothing.”
    How come one boy was so different from another when they both hurt the same? Buddy wondered. “That all right with you?” Buddy asked Franklin.
    Franklin looked around at Nightman, who sat with his legs folded in front of him, a hand on each knee. If Nightman had had a throne, he couldn’t have looked more like a king.
    â€œJust like he say,” Franklin told Buddy.
    Buddy moved away from the boys, placing the rest of the items Franklin had stolen in the file cabinet. Behind the file were metal folding cots slung with canvas. Buddy motioned Nightman away from the wall. Franklin followed. When both boys had moved, Buddy set up the cots. Each cot had its own sleeping bag, which Buddy shook free of dust before spreading it out on a cot.
    Thoughts flew in his head as he worked, making the planet ready for the night of darkness. Is this all there is to it? he wondered. I’m to be a nurse for them and a teacher of lessons, like in Sunday school. I know my Tomorrow Billy was different. I just can’t seem to remember what it was that made him different.
    Buddy left the boys. He blew out the light and stood in the dark a moment. Franklin was on the cot on the outside and little Nightman was against the wall and deep inside his sleeping bag.
    The place was so quiet and the boys so still, no one would ever guess they were there.
    Buddy turned toward the rope ladder when Nightman said sleepily, “Tomorrow, Billy?”
    Buddy grinned in the dark. “Yes,” he said. Then, he climbed up through blackness. Taking his time, he swung the ladder when he was level with the window. He got outside with hardly a sound. Replacing the boards firmly over the window, Buddy enclosed the boys far below in night.
    Outside Buddy found the city of darkness awake and full of action. Buddy wouldn’t have known it any other way. Bouncing on the balls of his feet like a fighter, Buddy made his way to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He ducked in a side entrance to avoid the regulars—the homeless old men and women who waited for a chance to slip in and sleep for a while on a bench. It was getting hard for them to find a place to rest in the terminal, for the night patrol regularly passed through to keep them moving.
    Instinctively Buddy took on the appearance of a traveler. Maybe he was a young soldier going back to Fort Dix over in Jersey. No, he didn’t have a duffel bag or anything. Maybe a student, going across the river after a night in the Village? Buddy decided on some combination of the two. He knew he didn’t need to be clearly one kind or another. He had merely to look as though he had a destination and he knew perfectly how to look like that.
    In