Sixth Grade Kings of the Two-by-Two Squares

The first rule of the official Didgeridoo handbook at Brigalow Primary School is that there is a very clear pecking order of authority on the courts. It goes like this: King, Queen, Jack, Knight, Jester, and Dunce, with each square having certain privileges depending on how high up they are. The King gets to have an extra life than everyone else, gets to choose the Queen once, and can call a sudden death round pretty much whenever they want. Whoever gets to the square first after the bell gets to the King - until they get out, that is. Everybody wants to be a King at least once in a lunch break, though the Queen and Jack will probably conspire to pelt a ball at your face and send you with an overwhelming nosebleed to the sick bay for the rest of the day.

There are other rules, of course. Unlike handball, you can hit a full. You can also bounce the ball as many times as you want in your square - Libby Kent set the new school record last week with 77 bounces. We play Didgeridoo with the spongy fake volleyballs Mr. Filkin uses for Phys Ed class, and because they’re so soft and useless, you can lob a shot straight at anyone who says your mum is so fat that she sat on an iPhone and turned it into an iPad. That’s so two years ago. Fourth grade wasn’t classy.

All in all, there are fifty-seven rules. We made them just before the winter break this year and I’ve got them all in the back of my spelling test book, printed out as neatly as I could manage, which is actually pretty neat. After all, I figured that I would be needing to read from it just about every day.

As the sixth grade’s judge of Didgeridoo, I am the most respected person in the schoolyard during recesses and lunch breaks, as well as being the only consulted authority in special fights and disputes. Even though I too am bound under the official handbook, I have the authority to remove Kings and make them Dunces straight away if I see any suspicious activity going on.

Power like this, though, doesn’t come easy this far on in primary school. I beat Madeline Dixon and David Sevcik in a landslide election four weeks ago at the start of Term Three, after we each gave our speeches standing on the blue bench at the edge of the monkey bars. In my speech I talked about how new things needed structure to make them work - like how the monkey bars need poles at each side to fix them to the ground, or how we needed coloured timetables at the start of the year to know what books we should bring every day. At the end of my speech I handed out stickers that said ‘Keep Calm, Vote Honey’ - with a hand-drawn smiley-face on each one - and I got a full minute of applause.

I had to thank Mrs. O’Hara for suggesting the stickers, when I went to help her mow her lawn a few Fridays ago. Neither of my parents are lawyers, but Mrs. O’Hara says she worked for forty years as a criminal solicitor back when she used to live in Sydney. Now she bakes scotch fingers and scouts the neighborhood’s legal talent. I visit her twice a week to help her garden, and she tells me often that I have a great eye for detail. All I can say is that if Mrs. O’Hara saw me patrolling the courts at lunch with my Sesame Street whistle and plastic hammer borrowed from the preschool playroom, I would be the next in line to be hired at any of the law firms she worked at. I even have a catchphrase: ‘Kermit says… you’re OUT!’. Well. It may not seem impressive on paper, but it all depends on how you say it. I’ve been told that I have an impressive scream.

I am a very good judge. Even just this week, seven people tried to bribe me to do various things to help them get to the King square quicker. Daniel Taylor tried to give me a box of caramel chocolates to stop him from getting out. Mason Qin offered to do my History homework if I went off duty at recess. Ella Selle asked me to meet her in the bathroom and then told me that she would lend me her entire glitter pen set for a week if I pretended not to know about her alliance with Julie Malama. It never worked. Even Miss Studer, our German teacher who hands out lollipops at the start of each class to the students who get their textbooks the quickest, came to offer me two extra lollipops in exchange for getting out everyone who accidentally hit the ball onto her window. 

Jokes on her: I don’t break my rules. I set up a very strict standard for myself the first afternoon after my first day in office. You remember the official Didgeridoo handbook with the fifty-seven rules? I made twenty-five rules for myself too - the Honey Evans Code for Fair Judging of Didgeridoo at Lunchtimes at Brigalow Primary. HECFJDLBP, for not-quite-so-short, though I usually just call it the Honey Code.

Rule #1: No bribes. Rule #10: No interfering with any game, no matter how many times Roo Winton headbutts the ball into my foot. Rule #17: No punching or elbowing allowed when breaking up a fight. That last one is because I used to be a very aggressive Didgeridoo player myself, back when we were just starting to develop it.

I showed Mrs. O’Hara my rules and she said that she was very impressed. ‘With rules like that,’ she had said while holding her afternoon cappuccino, ‘you’ll be the fairest judge there’ll ever be in Brigalow Primary history.’ I had had to agree.

But today, it was hard to judge by these familiar rules that made me such a good judge when Alistair Bon walked up to me and said that it would cheer him up a lot if I would let him be the King for the rest of the term, because his brother had been out late drunk last night and drove off of a cliff and died. I had seen his brother a few times, when his parents took him along to pick Alistair up. He was tall and thin, and loud and kind of annoying. He talked to me once when I was waiting for my mum and when I told him my name was Honey he laughed and said that I didn’t look as sweet as honey. He had greasy hair that covered his eyes and a very pointy nose. Apparently, my parents should have called me Pepper. But that didn’t matter. He was still a person. Not one I liked, but Alistair Bon was my friend and I didn’t like seeing him cry. I just stood there fidgeting with my hammer.

Why me? I guess because I’m the judge, that’s why. I had a very important choice to make: either compromise all the hard work our class had done on Didgeridoo all year, and my reputation, or hurt Alistair’s feelings and make him sadder than he already was, which must have been incredibly, awfully sad. And I know you might think that Didgeridoo is just a game that kids play to pass away the lunch time, but it’s more than that. 

And besides, as Mrs. O’Hara always says, little things are just as important as the bigger things because every person is made of a hundred million tiny decisions and memories. I didn’t want this to be one of mine. 

Alistair Bon was crying already. I considered resigning. After all, Mrs. O’Hara said that a lot of judges did that when things went bad.

But then it hit me. Didgeridoo was important to our class because we had all worked so hard on it together. So it was only right that we should comfort Alistair together too.

I turned to the courts, where everyone was looking at us. The white paint of the lines was so bright in the sun. ‘Hands up if you think we should let Alistair be the King for the rest of the term?’

All the hands went up. I looked at Alistair and he looked back at me and smiled.

Another landslide victory.