The Secret Saturday

Winning, it turned out, was the easy part.

At a quarter past ten, Kabir went to the office to begin governing.

Principal Halvorsen was a large, tired man who had run the school for a long time and was frightened, mostly, of the number of children in it, which kept going up while the building stayed the same size. He looked at Kabir over his glasses.

“I’ve been elected,” Kabir said.

“Congratulations.”

“I need three-hour recess, and hot chocolate every day.”

Principal Halvorsen made the face that adults make, the one that is a no wearing a smile. “Recess is fifteen minutes.”

“Why?”

“It’s the schedule.”

“Who’s in charge,” said Kabir. “You, or the schedule?”

Principal Halvorsen opened his mouth, and closed it, and Kabir watched a large tired man arrive, in real time, at the same place Ms. Dhillon had arrived at on the first morning: the place where you find out you have been taking orders your whole life from a piece of paper and cannot, on the spot, say why.

“The schedule,” Principal Halvorsen admitted.

“That’s what I thought,” said Kabir, and went to tell his voters.

At recess, which was fifteen minutes long, as it had been since before any of them were born, the class wanted results.

“Where’s the hot chocolate,” said Cole.

“There isn’t any,” said Kabir, and sat down on the cold step. “The bell is real, and the schedule is real, and Principal Halvorsen is more scared of them than I am. It’s the calendar again. Everything is the calendar.”

“So you can’t do anything,” said Cole.

“I can do one thing,” said Kabir.

He stood up on the cold step as though the step were a stage.

“You can’t have three-hour recess,” he told them. “The bell is real. I can’t move a real thing. But nobody can see Saturday. Saturday is only a feeling. And I’m in charge now.” He looked around at all of them. “So. For the next ten minutes, it’s Saturday.”

“It’s Wednesday,” said Tyler.

“Prove it,” said Kabir.

Tyler opened the black book, and found that it did not, anywhere in it, contain a single thing that proved it was Wednesday, and closed it again.

So for ten minutes, on a Wednesday in September, in the most notorious city in Canada, twenty children had a secret Saturday. It cost nothing. It was on no schedule and could therefore be cancelled by no one. It was the only campaign promise Kabir ever kept, and it was, the class agreed, the best recess of their lives.

Tyler stood at the edge of it, not playing, holding the black book against his chest.

“You can be in charge of it,” Kabir told him.

“In charge of what. It isn’t real. You said so yourself.”

“In charge of making sure nobody says it’s Wednesday. That’s a real job. It’s the only rule I have, and it’s yours.”

Tyler thought about this. Then he opened the black book to a clean page and wrote, at the top, in his very best letters, SATURDAY. RULES. Underneath it he wrote the first rule: NO WEDNESDAYS. And he stood a little straighter, guarding a day that did not exist, which turned out to be the first job he had ever loved.

At home, over dinner, Kabir mentioned that he had been elected.

“Elected,” said Papa, sitting up. “My son. Elected.” He was already, somewhere behind his eyes, telling the men at NordMart. “Elected to what?”

“To speak for everyone.”

“Everyone.” Papa sat back, well pleased. “You see,” he told Mummy, “in this country a boy comes off an airplane, and in three years he is speaking for everyone. Where else. Nowhere else.” He had, behind his eyes, already told the men at NordMart, and they had, behind his eyes, been impressed.

“And what did you promise?” said Mummy, in the careful voice.

“Hot chocolate. Three-hour recess. A secret Saturday.”

The careful voice went very still. “And can you give them these things?”

“No.”

“Then people will talk,” said Mummy. “About a boy who promises and does not deliver.”

“People are going to talk anyway,” said Kabir, handing her own words back to her without knowing they were hers, “so I gave them something true. I gave them Saturday.” He went back to his food. “You should try it. It’s your idea.”

Mummy did not answer. In the doorway of the kitchen, where she believed no one could see her, she looked at her son the way you look at a mirror that has started to talk back.

By the time the plates were cleared, Promila Aunty already knew, because Promila Aunty always already knew. She telephoned to congratulate Mummy and did it, warmly, for forty-five minutes. “A leader,” she said down the line. “Already a leader.” Mummy said thank you, and yes, and thank you, and watched, the whole time, the boy at the table who had beaten a schedule with a feeling.

When she finally hung up, she wiped down the table Kabir had already cleared, and then wiped it again, and then a third time, the way she pressed shirts that had no wrinkles left in them.