View from Saturday (9781439132012)

A
LSO BY
E. L. K
ONIGSBURG

Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth

From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

About the B'nai Bagels

(George)

Altogether, One at a Time

A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver

The Dragon in the Ghetto Caper

The Second Mrs. Gioconda

Father's Arcane Daughter

Throwing Shadows

Journey to an 800 Number

Up From Jericho Tel

Samuel Todd's Book of Great Colors

Samuel Todd's Book of Great Inventions

Amy Elizabeth Explores Bloomingdale's

T-Backs, T-Shirts, COAT, and Suit

TalkTalk

Thanks to Dr. Robert Stoll
for educating me about the life and times of Florida sea turtles.
—E L K

Atheneum Books for Young Readers
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1996 by E. L. Konigsburg

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Book design by Becky Terhune and Anne Scatto
The text of this book is set in Weiss.

Printed in the United States of America

19 18 17 16 15 14

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Konigsburg, E. L.

The view from Saturday / E. L. Konigsburg.—1st ed.
p. cm.

“A Jean Karl book.”

Summary: Four students, with their own individual stories, develop a special bond and attract the attention
of their teacher, a paraplegic, who chooses them to represent their sixth-grade class in the
Academic Bowl competition.

ISBN 0-689-80993-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-6898-0993-4
eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-3201-2

[1. Teacher-student relationships—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction.
4. Contests—Fiction. 5. Physically handicapped—Fiction.] I.Title.

PZ7.K8352Vi 1996

[Fie]—dc20 95-52624

This is for David for beating the odds.

M
rs. Eva Marie Olinski always gave good answers. Whenever she was asked how she had selected her team for the Academic Bowl, she chose one of several good answers. Most often she said that the four members of her team had skills that balanced one another. That was reasonable. Sometimes she said that she knew her team would practice. That was accurate. To the district superintendent of schools, she gave a bad answer, but she did that only once, only to him, and if that answer was not good, her reason for giving it was.

The fact was that Mrs. Olinski did not know how she had chosen her team, and the further fact was that she didn't know that she didn't know until she did know. Of course, that is true of most things: you do not know up to and including the very last second before you do. And for Mrs. Olinski that was not until Bowl Day was over and so was the work of her four sixth graders.

They called themselves The Souls. They told Mrs. Olinski that they were The Souls long before they were a team, but she told them that they were a team as soon as they became The Souls. Then after a while, teacher and team agreed that they were arguing chicken-or-egg.
Whichever way it began—chicken-or-egg, team-or-The Souls—it definitely ended with an egg. Definitely, an egg.

People still remark about how extraordinary it was to have four sixth graders make it to the finals. There had been a few seventh graders scattered among the other teams, but all the rest of the middle school regional champs were eighth graders. Epiphany had never before won even the local championship, and there they were, up on stage, ready to compete for the state trophy. All four members of Maxwell, the other team in the final round, were in the eighth grade. Both of the Maxwell boys' voices had deepened, and the girls displayed lacy bra straps inside their T-shirt necklines. The fact that the necklines were out-sized and that the two pairs of straps matched—they were apricot-colored—made Mrs. Olinski believe that they were not making a fashion statement as much as they were saying something. To her four sixth graders puberty was something they could spell and define but had yet to experience.

Unlike football bowls, there had been no season tallies for the academic teams. There had been no best-of-five. Each contest had been an elimination round. There were winners, and there were losers. From the start, the rule was-. Lose one game, and you are out.

S
o it was on Bowl Day.

At the start of the day, there had been eight regional champs. Now there were two—Epiphany and Maxwell.

It was afternoon by the time they got to the last round, and Mrs. Olinski sat shivering in a windowless room in a building big enough and official enough to have its own zip code. This was Albany, the capital of the state of New York. This was the last Saturday in May, and some robot—human or electronic—had checked the calendar instead of the weather report and had turned on the air-conditioning. Like everyone else in the audience, Mrs. Olinski wore a short-sleeved T-shirt with her team's logo across the front. Maxwell's were navy; Epiphany's were red and were as loud as things were permitted to get in that large, cold room. The audience had been asked not to whistle, cheer, stomp, hold up signs, wave banners, or even applaud. They were reminded that this Bowl was for brains, not brawn, and decorum—something between chapel and classroom—was the order of the day.

Epiphany sat on one side of a long table; Maxwell, the other. At a lectern between them stood the commissioner of education of the state of New York. He smiled benevolently over the audience as he reached inside his inner breast pocket and withdrew a pair of reading glasses. With a flick of his wrist he opened them and put them on.

Mrs. Olinski hugged her upper arms and wondered if maybe it was nerves and not the quartering wind blowing from the ceiling vents that was causing her shivers. She watched with bated (and visible) breath as the commissioner placed his hand into a large clear glass bowl. His college class ring knocked bottom. (Had the room been two degrees colder, the glass would have shattered.) He withdrew a piece of
paper, unfolded it, and read, “What is the meaning of the word
calligraphy
and from what language does it derive?”

A buzzer sounded.

Mrs. Olinski knew whose it was. She was sure of it. She leaned back and relaxed. She was not nervous. Excited, yes. Nervous, no.

The television lights glanced off Noah Gershom's glasses. He had been the first chosen.

My mother insisted that I write a B & B letter to my grandparents. I told her that I could not write a B & B letter, and she asked me why, and I told her that I did not know what a B & B letter was. She explained—not too patiently—that a B & B letter is a
bread and butter letter
you write to people to thank them for having you as their houseguest. I told her that I was taught never to use the word you are defining in its definition and that she ought to think of a substitute word for
letter
if she is defining it. Mother then made a remark about how Western Civilization was in a decline because people of my generation knew how to nitpick but not how to write a B & B letter.

I told her that, with all due respect, I did not think I owed Grandma and Grandpa a B & B. And then I stated my case. Fact: I was not just a houseguest, I was family; and fact: I had not been their houseguest by choice because fact: She had sent me to them because she had won a cruise for selling more houses in Epiphany than anyone else in the world and if she had shared her cruise with Joey and me instead of with her husband, my father, I would not have been sent to Florida in the first place and fact: She, not me, owed them thanks; and further fact: I had been such a wonderful help
while I was there that Grandma and Grandpa would probably want to write me a B & B.