You Will Call Me Drog (8 page)

But I only half-listened, because a red-faced Big Boy was heading toward us right then with his fists balled up, about to pop.

“Drog,” I said, “we gotta get out of here.”

I bolted out the gym door and ducked out of sight on one side of the concrete steps. Big Boy ran down the steps and looked both ways, clenching and unclenching his hands. Then he took off toward the playground.

As soon as his back was turned, I tiptoe-dashed for the Fremont Street entrance. The floodlight didn’t reach to that end of the schoolyard, and the streetlight made a deep shadow of the steps. Perfect. I crouched down and got ready to wait a while.

Not too long, I hoped, because I forgot my jacket inside. The ground, the wall, and the concrete steps all felt super cold. My teeth knocked together and the air smelled like snow.

“Well,” Drog said. “I practically had those little monsters wetting their pants, didn’t I, Boy?”

Actually, it was pretty funny when I thought about it. I pictured Wren with her hands on her hips, bawling me out, and I laughed a shivery laugh out loud. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t hear Big Boy come up behind me.

“There you are!”

He must have run all the way around the school. No point in hiding any more. I stood up.

“Give me that crazy puppet, man. I’m throwing it in the trash can!”

“Aaaaeeeeeeeeeee!” screamed Drog.

“No! Wait! You don’t understand,” I said.

“Understand? I understand you wrecked my play!”

“I’m sorry about the play, Big Boy, but—”

“Give me that thing!”

I couldn’t believe how fast he tackled me, grabbed Drog by the head, and tried to rip him off my hand.

For a second I thought, ALL RIGHT! HE CAN DO THIS! But only the wolf costume came off. Drog held on.

“Let ... go ... you!” Big Boy grunted at me.

“Can’t,” I panted.

Big Boy pinned my two wrists to the ground with one hand, and with the other he reached into his pocket and pulled out something shiny. A cigarette lighter!

“Jeez, Big Boy, I didn’t know you smoked,” cracked Drog.

Big Boy’s grip tightened. “Shut up, Parker!”

“Shut UP, Drog,” I said.

Big Boy flicked the lighter, trying to get it to catch. “You gonna take this thing off or not? ’Cause I’m torchin’ it either way!”

“Murder! Murder!” Drog screamed.

I imagined my whole hand on fire, like picking up a dozen lit sparklers from the wrong end. Even I didn’t want to get rid of Drog that bad.
Think of something. Anything.

“Over, here, Dad!” I yelled over Big Boy’s shoulder. “Great! You’re just in time!”

Big Boy fell for it. He turned to look behind him, and his grip loosened just enough that I could jerk my hands free, roll to the side, get up, and run like crazy for home.

“Parker!” Mom said. “I thought you were going to call me when you were ready.”

“Oh, uh, I decided to walk.”

“In your T-shirt? You must be frozen! Where in the world is your jacket?”

“Sorry. I left it at school.”

She made me put on a sweatshirt and drove me back to the gym. The custodian was just locking up, and he had my jacket propped on the handle of his push broom. If he had seen what happened at the play, he didn’t say anything.

“I’m getting plenty worried about you, Parker,” Mom said on the drive home.

I could see it. The frown lines between her eyebrows had deepened to valleys, and I felt like a steaming pile of dog poop. With Dad gone, I should be trying to avoid getting her upset instead of making more trouble. If only I could just... take care of all this.

Even with my sweatshirt and my jacket on, I was shaking, but I tried not to let it show.

“I’m okay, Mom,” I said. “Trust me.”

I went straight upstairs and took a hot shower, holding Drog up out of the stream of water.

I probably should have felt good about fooling Big. Boy but I just felt tired. Tired of Drog. Tired of trouble and confusion. Tired of myself. How pathetic was that, calling to Dad for help, even if the trick worked?

“The thing is, Boy,” Drog said as I toweled off, “never let them know you’re afraid.”

“Listen, Drog, I got us out of that one, but you got us into it in the first place. From now on will you just keep your big mouth shut? Or at least speak for yourself, not me!”

“Ungrateful boy. I’m just showing you what life’s all about.”

“Huh! How would you know? You’re nothing but a talking head!”

That shut him up for the rest of the night.

I was pretty sure I knew what was waiting for me when I got to school the next day. I was wrong. Big Boy was nowhere on the playground.

He was in the classroom, sitting in my seat. The minute I came in, kids stopped talking or fooling around to watch. With his thumb, Big Boy pointed to his old seat in the back with my stuff piled on it. I went.

I fumbled in my book bag, putting things away in the desk one by one to give everybody time to get bored with snickering or giving me stink-eye. Then I looked up. “Room 202 is a Drog-free Zone!” the blackboard exclaimed, and “Just Say No to Drogs.” Wren’s handwriting.

Mrs. Belcher came in, put her papers down, and stood in front of her desk, her signal for us to pay attention.

“Parker, what are you doing back there?”

“Um, Big Boy and I traded seats.”

She looked at me, then Big Boy, then me. “Well, all right, then. I see you’ve worked it out. Wren, please erase the board.”

Wren looked past me on the way back to her desk.

Mrs. Belcher set her papers aside. “Now about the play last night.”

I slid down in my seat.

“It didn’t go at all the way we rehearsed it,” she said. Why was she smiling? “But sometimes unplanned things turn out best in the end. If our goal was to entertain the kindergarteners and their parents, I would have to say we succeeded, wouldn’t you?”

Nods all around, but Big Boy folded his arms, and Wren tried to disappear me with a laser look.

Mrs. Belcher went on. “Everyone worked hard on the play, and we should be proud,” she said, “but I think we owe special thanks to Parker—or, I should say, to Drog—for our success. Take a bow, Drog.”

She and the kids clapped and turned toward me.

Oh no. I pulled him out and held him up. The class hooted and clapped even louder. Not that Drog needed any encouragement.

“My fans,” he said. “Congratulations on casting me as the wolf for our first production. We were boffo last night, at least I was, and I wish to thank—actually, why should I thank anyone but myself? And who is this Parker person of whom you speak? A stagehand, perhaps? Shall I blow his house down?”

I jammed him into my pocket.

Mrs. Belcher burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. The class did too—all but two, who just got madder.

“Oh, Parker, you’re so funny,” the girl in front of me said. “How do you
do
that?”

I spoke up so everybody could hear me. “I
don’t
do it. It’s like Drog says, I’m just a stagehand.”

But nobody got what I was trying to say.

Was that going to be my life now? Sitting in the back and having everyone misunderstand for different reasons?

At recess Wren came over to me, linking elbows with two other girls. “We heard you beat up Big Boy after you ruined his play,” she said. “How could you do that?”

If it had been anyone but Wren, I would have laughed.

“I couldn’t. I didn’t. I got away, that’s all.”

“Nobody believes you anymore,
amigo.
And Drog is a drag.”

“I guess that just about sums it up,” I said.

It killed me the way she said “amigo” and meant the opposite. She looked so disgusted as she turned away. Couldn’t she understand what that was like, to have nobody believe you?

I realized walking home that Drog hadn’t said a word all day, at least not to me.

I held him up to my face. “Drog, can you tell me how I manage to get everyone who matters mad at me?”

“Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?” he sniffed. “I’m nothing but a talking head.”

So that was it. For a minute I actually felt bad and almost apologized, but I stopped just in time. Why should I apologize to Drog? About anything? After all the things he’d said to me, all the ways he was ruining my life, how could my one little talking-head insult bother him so much?

I didn’t have to worry. By the time we got home and up to my room, he was yakking again.

“For our next production, you and I will write the script,” he said. “Or rather I will dictate and you will write it down. How about ‘A Day at the Camel Races’? Or ‘Little Dumber Boy Does Christmas’? Or ‘Exorcist, the Musical’? I also sing, you know. A sonorous baritone.”

I reached for Wren’s geode on the shelf over my desk and turned its crystals to the wall. It looked too much like an eye.

The next day, Mrs. Belcher asked if I could stay a few minutes after school. I probably wasn’t in any more trouble, or she wouldn’t ask; she’d tell me to stay.

It turned out she wanted me to watch a video she had picked up about these supposedly famous puppets called Punch and Judy.

“I thought you might like to know that yours is not the only badly behaved puppet in the world,” she said.

The video combined clips from old-time Punch and Judy shows at county fairs all over England and America and in some other countries, too. The puppet master would carry his theater on his back and set up in any park or town square, and the people, mostly children, would gather around to watch.

I couldn’t get over how totally mean the Punch character was. Even when he did something wrong, he just made fun of anyone who complained. Or hit them over the head. He and his wife Judy argued all the time and beat on each other. And the audience loved it.

“I never heard of Punch and Judy before,” I told Mrs. Belcher.

“Well, a lot of people haven’t these days. After hundreds of years, the tradition is dying out.”

“I didn’t think Punch was funny. Did you?”

“Not really, but times have changed. For one thing, people are more worried about violence right now than they have been in the past.”

“I sure am,” I said. I thought of Big Boy and his lighter.

Mrs. Belcher put the video back in its envelope and gave it to me to borrow.

Drog was awfully quiet all the way home. But when I started to replay the video, he cried out, “No! No! Put me in your pocket! Stick your hand in the trash can!”