David Fleming: The Saturday Boy

“Yes, it was, Piggy, very thoughtful. And I’m sorry.” She poked my belly and tweaked my nose—a thing she used to do when I was little. “I’m sorry it rained on you, and I’m sorry you caught Budgie’s mom in a bad mood when you were just trying to do something nice for me.”

“Apology accepted,” I said, tweaking her nose in return.

“And you shouldn’t worry about me like that when I’m sure you have big, important eleven-year-old things to think about instead, right?”

I shrugged. She was right. I did have important eleven-year-old things to think about. Lots of them. But they weren’t going to stop me from worrying about her sometimes. I didn’t tell her that, though, because as much as she didn’t want me to worry about her—I didn’t want her to worry about me.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Buttloads.”

“Really? Buttloads? You’re going with that?”

I told her I was.

She hugged me tight, told me she loved me and to run upstairs and towel off and put on some dry clothes so I wouldn’t catch a cold. I found an extra-fluffy towel in the linen closet in the upstairs hallway. It was in the middle of the stack and when I pulled it out the whole thing toppled over. I tried to put them back the way Mom had but it didn’t look the same. Finally I just shoved them up on the shelf in a pile, closed the door, and went to my room to dry off.

The first thing I did when I came through the door was go up on my toes and touch the model P-51 Mustang fighter plane that hung from the ceiling so it would swing back and forth. I did the same to the Hawker Hurricane so it looked like the two planes were fighting. Man, if I had a big fan I’d turn it on so it would look like all my fighter aircraft models were flying around in a huge air battle. Every time I pictured it, though, the Apache helicopter always won.

The Apache is my favorite because it’s like the one my dad pilots. He surprised me with the model the last time he was home and we built it together. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I stare up at it and pretend it’s a real helicopter, and me and Dad are in it flying top secret missions and battling the forces of evil to save the world. And we have cool code names and sunglasses. Before he left we hung the Apache helicopter model right over my head so it would be the first thing I saw when I woke up. That was a long time ago.

On Monday Mom drove me to school because I missed the bus and by the time I got there everybody knew about what happened on Saturday. I put my lunch box and my jacket in my cubby in the hallway and looked through the little window in the door. I could see Budgie and the rest of the class doing the morning assignment. Budgie must have noticed me in the window because he looked up from his work and smiled.

“Hey, Saturday boy!” he said as I opened the door.

I didn’t say anything. Instead I went to my seat and sat down and looked at the whiteboard. There was a sentence written on it that read, “Gracie, my dog, ate her dinner.”

There were other words, too. Words like “subject” and “verb” and “appositive”—names of things I was supposed to identify when diagramming the sentence. I opened my desk to get a pencil so I could get started but I couldn’t find one. I looked around the room but everybody was busy and it was very quiet. They’d all be done soon and Ms. Dickson would come around to check our work, only I wouldn’t have any work to check and then what?

She’d make an example of me is what.

Ms. Dickson loved making examples of me. One time she made me come to the front of the class and sit in an empty seat right next to her desk for the whole day. Then there was the time she caught me with a note and I had to write “I will not write notes in class” over and over on the whiteboard while she went on teaching. I bet this time she’d put me in the stocks and have the class throw tomatoes at me. She had a good imagination when it came to stuff like that.

I looked around and saw Ms. Dickson two rows away and steadily closing in. Luckily she was old and didn’t move very fast. One time Budgie told me that if you listened carefully you could hear her creak when she walked, but I didn’t believe him. At least I’d never heard any creaking and I’m a pretty good listener.

I searched through my desk. Where was my pencil? I was starting to think maybe Budgie had taken it so I’d get in trouble. I tell you, if I had some knockout drops and rope and a whole bunch of itching powder I’d fix his wagon real good. Or I could just tape a big bug inside his underwear.

Then I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. It was the new girl and she was waving her hand at me. I think maybe she’d said something, too.

“Hm?”

“I said do you need to borrow a pencil?”

Her name was Violet and she sat in the row next to me. She wasn’t like the other girls in my class. I couldn’t tell you how, exactly, she just wasn’t. The other girls were screechy and chirpy and traveled in flocks. But not Violet.

“Pencil?”

“Oh, just take it!”

Pencil? Yes! Pencil! And it didn’t even matter that it was girly with cupids on it or that the eraser was all pink and heart-shaped. I didn’t even care if everyone saw me writing with a girl’s pencil. I’m using a girl’s pencil! I got out a piece of paper and wrote so fast and hard that the point broke off.

“Derek!”

I jumped. Ms. Dickson had snuck up on me.

“Well this is interesting,” she said. “I think perhaps we should share this with the rest of the class.”

Ms. Dickson took my paper to the front of the class. I looked around the room. Everybody was looking at me and for once it wasn’t because I’d spoken out of turn or started babbling on about superheroes. This was different. This was the good kind of being looked at.

Then I looked at the whiteboard and so did the other kids and then they were looking at me again but this time they were looking at me the way they usually do. Then they started laughing. Ms. Dickson had erased the sentence about Gracie and her dinner and written a new one in its place. It read, “I’m using a girl’s pencil.”

And then, to my horror, she had me come up to the front of the room and diagram it.

THAT DAY AFTER SCHOOLI went to my hideout. But not right away. I went home first and had a snack but I was still angry so I didn’t really like it as much as I could have even if it was a Chocolate Ka-Blam and Chocolate Ka-Blams were usually my favorite.

My hideout was in the loft in the garage. I’d stacked up a bunch of boxes so you couldn’t see me from below, and if I pulled the ladder up, then there was no getting to me at all. I was totally safe. Except for the time I saw a fiddleback spider. That time I didn’t really feel safe at all. That time freaked me out and I didn’t go back for a month.

I had a milk crate to sit on and an old coat that I could put on in case I got cold. There was a skylight pretty much right over my head so I could read the comics that I kept in a plastic box. They were all alphabetized and individually wrapped. Sometimes instead of taking them out of the box I’d just run my fingertips along the top of them and listen to them rustle together.

They were treasures. Mine and my dad’s and even some of his dad’s— Red Vengeance number one, for example. Also Gumshoe Comics number fourteen featuring the first appearance of Guttersnipe, and issue twenty-three of The Marvelous Magpie where her secret identity is revealed. These weren’t just classic issues. They were frickin’ epic.