The Saturday Boy

by David Fleming

So I told her. Then I told her about what happened—about Budgie and the notes he’d passed me and that it was impossible for me to love Violet because I barely even knew her. All I knew for sure was that she used a pencil with a heart-shaped eraser and every Friday she smelled like apples. That was it.

  “Ms. Dickson didn’t mention Budgie,” Mom said.

  “See, it’s not my fault!”

  “Derek, just because it’s not your fault doesn’t mean you’re not at fault,” Mom said. “What you did today was very dangerous. Do you understand why?”

  I looked at the floor and thought for a second.

  “I guess maybe I could have slipped and hit my head,” I said.

  “No,” Mom said. “Well, yes, that’s part of it. You could have hit your head, but more importantly, nobody would have known you were hurt and needed help. Does that make sense?”

  I nodded.

  “I promised Ms. Dickson and Mr. Howard I would talk to you about this but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some repercussions at school tomorrow.”

  “What, like drums?”

  “Drums?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Percussion. That’s like drums, right?”

  Mom smiled.

  “Yes, percussion is like drums but I said repercussions, which are like consequences.”

  I would have preferred drums. Drums were way better than consequences.

  “And as far as that—as far as Budgie goes… just try to be the bigger person, okay? Try to ignore him?”

  I told her I would but that trying to ignore Budgie was like trying to ignore a flaming elephant. Mom smiled again and laughed a little through her nose. I smiled, too, and that’s how I knew we were going to be okay.

  “I’m sorry about today, Mom,” I said. “I’ll do better.”

  “I know you will, Piggy-pig,” she said. She roughed up my hair, which was totally dry now.

  I picked up the Chocolate Ka-Blam after all and went up to my bedroom and lay on my bed and ate it. Then I got out some paper and a pen.

  Dear Dad,

  Today Ms. Dickson picked me out of the whole class to be in a play with the middle school drama club. It’s called a chrismas carol and it has ghosts in it. I think all plays should have ghosts. Violet is in it to. Maybe we will get to be ghosts. Also I got in trouble today for throwing something at Budgie. Last night on Zeroman doctor Mayhem was going to posion the water supply with Serum Z that would turn everyone into zombies but Zeroman flew in and fot him and destroyed the serum. It was cool. When you come home we can watch it together.

  Love

  derek

  5

  A COUPLE OF DAYS went by and nothing much happened. Then one morning I missed the bus and Mom had to drive me to school and when I got to the classroom everybody was crowded around Budgie.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Barely O’Donahue.

  “Budgie climbed the tree!”

  There wasn’t a kid in school who didn’t know about the tree. It had silver bark and purply, reddish leaves and was a hundred feet tall. Maybe even two hundred. It was off limits because one time a kid fell out and broke his neck and turned into a vegetable but sometimes kids climbed it anyway when no one was looking.

  “He even carved his name on the top branch with a knife!”

  “No he didn’t,” I said.

  “Yes he did!”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way,” Barely O’Donahue said. “Curds and way.”

  Then Ms. Dickson told us all to sit down and I tried to listen to what she was saying but I kept thinking about Budgie and the tree and how I didn’t believe any of it because Budgie had about as much natural climbing ability as a walrus no matter what Barely O’Donahue said.

  I looked around at Budgie. He was sitting at his desk looking more puffed up than usual. I bet he hadn’t climbed the tree at all. I bet he was giving Barely O’Donahue candy or cookies just to say he did. I was also pretty sure he didn’t carve his name on any branch. As far as I knew he didn’t even have a pocketknife.

  Budgie found me on the monkey bars during recess. Barely O’Donahue and a couple other kids were with him.

  “Barely says you don’t believe I climbed the tree,” he said.

  I looked down from the monkey bars at him. Barley seemed even smaller from up there.

  “So?”

  “So do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Do you believe I climbed the tree?”

  More kids were coming over. They quit playing tag. They stopped playing four square and crackabout and wall ball. I don’t know why I said what I said next. Maybe it was because Budgie was surrounded by kids who thought he was some kind of hero when he hadn’t done anything except lie to them and that didn’t seem right. Maybe I thought I could get away with it because there were so many people around. Or maybe the words just popped into my head and they came out before I could stop them.

  “Dude, I don’t believe you could climb any tree.”

  Some of the kids laughed including Barely O’Donahue. Budgie didn’t laugh. His face went red instead.

  “What did you just say?”

  “He said he didn’t believe you could climb any tree,” said Barely O’Donahue.

  “I heard him.”

  “You know, because you’re fat.”

  “Shut up!”

  Now just about everyone was laughing. Budgie’s face got redder—almost purple.

  “Are you saying you could do better?” he asked.

  Budgie stood below the monkey bars waiting for me to answer. I looked around at the kids. They were waiting for an answer, too. There was really only one thing I could say so I said it.

  “Yeah.”

  The kids in the crowd all started talking between each other and Budgie stood there with his arms crossed and a mean grin on his face. My mouth went dry all of a sudden. What if he hadn’t made the whole thing up?

  “After school,” he said. “At the tree.”

  Then he turned around and walked away and Barely O’Donahue and a couple of other kids followed him. The kids who were left walked away, too. They started playing four square and crackabout and wall ball again. I was all alone on top of the monkey bars wondering if I hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of my life.

  * * *

  Normally I couldn’t wait for the day to be over. Normally I’d be counting down the minutes until the bell. Today was not a normal day. Today I actually wished the clock would slow down. Sally passed me a note and I opened it even though I knew I shouldn’t have. At first I thought Budgie’s drawing was of a weasel falling off a burning flagpole, then I realized it wasn’t a burning flagpole at all. It was a tree. And if the burning flagpole was a tree, that meant I was the weasel.

  I wanted to turn around and scream at him that nobody believed he’d climbed the stupid tree anyway and that I didn’t have to prove anything to him or anybody else and that nobody liked him or cared about what he said, including Barely O’Donahue, who probably only hung around because he was short and afraid of being picked on. Instead I crumpled up the note and put it in my desk, which is what I should have done in the first place.

  The clock kept ticking. The bell would ring soon and the day would end and I’d have to climb the tree and I wasn’t very good at climbing trees. But just because I wasn’t that good at it didn’t mean I was scared to. Budgie would soon find out that Derek Lamb was no chicken. Plus about a thousand people heard me say I’d do it.

  * * *

  “All right, Lamb, up you go.”

  Me, Budgie, Barely O’Donahue, and a few kids from recess were all standing at the bottom of the tree looking up. I could see part of the sky and some clouds through the branches. They seemed very far away.

  “What branch?” I asked.

  “What what branch?” said Budgie.

  “What branch did you carve your name on?”

  Budgie glanced at Barely O’Donahue, who shrugged and shook his head.
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br />   “You know—the top one,” said Budgie.

  “There’s more than one branch at the top.”

  “Quit stalling!”

  I wasn’t stalling. How could Budgie expect me to climb higher than he did if he couldn’t even remember which branch he carved his name on? I know that if it was me I’d totally remember. If it was me I would’ve hung a flag and claimed the tree for Derekland.

  “Go on, Captain Saturday, get up there!” said Budgie.

  “Yeah, go on!” said Barely O’Donahue. “Whatcha waiting for?”

  “What’s the matter, Lamb? Chicken?”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

  “Dude, you sound like that dog food commercial.”

  “What?”

  Now I was stalling. I figured the longer I put it off, the more likely we’d get caught and I wouldn’t have to do it at all.

  “You know—the Hungry Pup commercial? With that song?”

  “I know that one!” said Barely O’Donahue.

  “If your pup is up and sniffin’ in the kitchen,” I sang, with Barely O’Donahue and a couple of the other kids joining in. “Hungry Pup’s got rice, lamb, and chicken!”

  “What are you doing?” asked Budgie angrily.

  “What?” answered Barely O’Donahue. “It’s a commercial.”

  “I know it’s a commercial.”

  I looked up at the school building while Budgie and Barely O’Donahue worked things out, hoping we’d be spotted by a teacher or a janitor—somebody, anybody with even the slightest bit of authority who might recognize this as a potential breaking of the rules.

  “What’re you doing now?” said Budgie.

  “Making sure there’s no teachers,” I said. “You wanna get busted?”

  “Just hurry up!”

  I looked up into the tree again and swallowed hard. Three hundred feet. At least.

  Ignoring Budgie, Barely O’Donahue, and the others, I walked around the tree looking for a good place to start. Luckily, the tree had some branches close to the ground and I found a sturdy one and climbed up onto it. From there I found another branch a little farther up. It was narrower than the first one but still wide enough for both feet and I hugged the trunk and pressed my cheek against the bark. My hands were starting to sweat and I hoped that Budgie couldn’t see that my legs were shaking.

  “That branch looks wobbly,” said Budgie. “Are you sure it’ll hold you?”

  “It held you, didn’t it?”

  Some of the kids laughed.

  “What did you just say?”

  “He said, ‘It held you, didn’t it,’” said Barely O’Donahue.

  “I heard him.”

  “You know, because you’re fat.”

  “Shut up!”

  I tried not to listen to Budgie. I tried not to listen to Barely O’Donahue. I’d discovered something I didn’t want to do more than climb the tree and that was fall out of it. My heart was pounding so loud I was pretty sure Budgie could hear it.

  “You suck, Lamb!” he said.

  “Rack of lamb!” said Barely O’Donahue. “Ram-a-lamb-a-ding-dong!”

  I kept going. I’d stopped thinking about it. I was just climbing—grabbing one branch after another, hoisting, pulling myself higher into the tree. I kept an eye out for Budgie’s name even though the higher I got, the more I believed it wasn’t there.

  I got to a place where I could balance pretty good and stopped to catch my breath. My hands hurt. They were dirty and shaky and hard to open. I didn’t know how high up I was but I couldn’t see Budgie anymore because there were too many leaves in the way. Come to think of it, I hadn’t heard him for a while either.

  I did hear something though. It sounded like bus engines.

  “Budgie,” I shouted down, “do you hear the bus?”

  Mom was working a late shift today, which meant my aunt Josie would be at my house, and since her car was still getting fixed it meant if I missed the bus I would have no way of getting home. I couldn’t miss the bus. I just couldn’t.

  “Budgie?”

  My stomach dropped. Budgie wasn’t there anymore, I just knew it.

  And if Budgie wasn’t there, then Barely O’Donahue and the other kids weren’t there either. They were probably in line for the bus already. They might even be on the bus. I pictured them sitting in the way back, yucking it up, giving each other high-fives for ditching me.

  They were a clever bunch for sure.

  I climbed down as fast as I could. My feet slipped on the branches and some of them bent and broke but I hung on. My shirt ripped. Branches poked at me. Leaves swirled around me. My foot got stuck and I unstuck it. I could feel something in my hair—leaves or twigs maybe—and something itching me on my back. I hoped it wasn’t spiders. When I thought I was close enough to the ground to not get hurt, I took a deep breath and flung myself outward.

  As I fell through the air I heard my dad’s voice, recalling the words of his commanding officer from a story he told me about his first day of jump school.

  “Landing is easy. All’s you need to remember are the following three words in the following order.” I pictured my dad’s CO wearing mirrored sunglasses and chewing on a cigar, voice raspy from a lifetime of barking orders. “Feet. Ass. Head.”

  I hit the ground pretty hard but in the correct order, little darts of pain shooting up my legs even though I remembered to bend my knees. I grabbed my bag and my jacket, thankful that Budgie hadn’t thought to hide them or, worse, open my bag and scatter everything around. I ran as fast as I could but when I got to the front of the school building the turnaround was empty. The smell of exhaust hung in the air.

  I dropped my stuff and sat down on the curb. How could I be so stupid? All I had to do was make it through the day and get on the bus and go home and I couldn’t even do that. Instead I had let Budgie get to me again. I wished I could go back in time and do the day again only this time when Barely O’Donahue said, “Budgie climbed the tree,” I’d say, “Good for him” or “Get bent” or something—anything—other than what I’d actually said. Sometimes I wished I could just take my brain out and put it in a box and bury it.

  I went to wipe my dirty hands on my jeans but they were just as bad if not worse. My shirt was dirty, too. I was scratched in a few places and bleeding. Mom was going to kill me if I ever got home. I could just see Budgie sitting in the back of the bus smiling and thinking he was so clever. Maybe if he smiled wide enough the top of his head would fall off.

  I pictured him on all fours, feeling around for his head and getting all dirty and gross from the bus floor while everyone laughed and pointed at him for a change. Even though it didn’t help me get home at all, picturing Budgie getting exactly what he deserved made me feel a little bit better.

  “Derek?”

  I looked over my shoulder at the lady standing behind me. I almost didn’t recognize her but then I pictured her standing in front of a whiteboard.

  “Ms. Dickson?”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I missed the bus.”

  “Are you waiting for another one? Because there aren’t any.”

  “No, I know, I—”

  “What happened to your shirt?”

  “My what? Nothing.”

  I couldn’t tell her about the tree or I’d get in trouble and the last thing I needed right now was more of that. I was still on half recess for the whole bathroom thing. I tried to brush the bark dust off my shirt but only made it worse.

  “I, um… fell down,” I said, which, in a way, was true. I just didn’t tell her how far I’d fallen.

  Ms. Dickson didn’t say anything. Was that it? I hoped that was it. I put my jacket on and zipped it up all the way. Maybe if she couldn’t see my shirt she’d forget about it.

  “Is someone coming to pick you up?”

  “My aunt Josie doesn’t have a car right now because she was in an accident and it’s being fixed and my mom’s at work.”

&
nbsp; “So no?”

  “No.”

  “What are you going to do then, I wonder.”

  I thought about it for a minute and realized there wasn’t much I could do. Calling Mom was out. Calling Aunt Josie was out, too, because she’d just turn around and call my mom anyway. Walking was out. It was too far. What else was there? Taxi? Jet pack? Hovercycle? I suddenly felt like I might throw up. I looked at Ms. Dickson and shrugged.

  “Come along then,” she said. “I’ll take you home.”

  Ms. Dickson started to walk away toward the parking lot. I must have been hearing things because it had sounded like she said she’d take me home and that couldn’t be right. I didn’t even think that was possible. Budgie said that if teachers get too far away from school they blow up. I watched Ms. Dickson. She seemed okay. I couldn’t hear ticking or anything.

  “For pity’s sake, Derek, stop dawdling!” she said.

  I grabbed my bag and ran after her. The barfy feeling was gone and I felt lighter—like I could fly almost. Budgie’s plan had backfired and I was going home and nobody would have to call anybody and nobody would get in trouble and as I got into the back of Ms. Dickson’s car I swore I’d try to never let Budgie get to me again and this time I meant it.

  Ms. Dickson’s car was kinda like my mom’s only it was clean and didn’t smell like hot dogs. There weren’t any soda cups on the floor or fish cracker crumbs in the seats. I got the feeling that there hadn’t been any kids in Ms. Dickson’s car in a long time.

  “Where do you live?”

  “In a house. Sorry. A white house.”

  “I meant what is your address?”

  I told her but before she started the car she took out her cell phone, handed it to me, and asked me to call home and explain to Aunt Josie what was going on. Aunt Josie listened while I spoke. Then she spoke to Ms. Dickson. When Ms. Dickson was done she started the car and backed out of the parking space. She drove the car for a while and didn’t say anything, which was fine with me. I figured it would be strange talking to her outside the classroom. I mean, I barely had anything to say when I was in the classroom so it wasn’t like I would suddenly have all this stuff to talk about now that I was out of it.