Third Period

There were nine photographers across the road on Monday, not eleven, and two of them were drinking coffee out of the same flask, taking turns with the lid, and none of them lifted a camera.

Theo was by the fire extinguisher.

“You’ve done the history,” said Theo, instead of good morning.

“Yes.”

“I knew you would. I’ve done half of it. I’ve done the half with the dates in.” He fell in beside him. “You can tell me the half with the reasons.”

“There aren’t any reasons. That’s the question.”

“Then I’ve done all of it,” said Theo, pleased.

---

In homeroom Mr Abernathy was not on his knees by the radiator. The radiator had been fixed over the weekend by somebody from the district who had left a note on it, in capitals, DO NOT BLEED, and Mr Abernathy had pinned the note to the noticeboard beside the fire drill as though it were a historical document.

He opened the roll book. He took his pen out of the brown jacket.

“Abrams.”

“Here.”

“Bello.”

“Here.”

It went down the alphabet in the dry flat voice. Diaz, Eckhardt, Feeney. It was the same as Thursday and the same as every day, and it came to him, and went past him, Hanover, here, Hartigan, here, and nobody breathed differently, and Carmen in the front row had her telephone face down on the desk and did not touch it, and by Moreno somebody was whispering about a party, and by Novak Mr Abernathy had said, “Ms Okafor, if the party is so interesting, perhaps you’d like to call the roll for me,” without looking up, and the class had laughed, because he said it about once a month, and everybody waited for it.

It was a Monday. It was the last Monday of October. There were paper pumpkins in the window of the office downstairs that somebody in the front office put up every year, and a notice on the board about the Fall Formal, and the corridor smelled of floor polish and wet coats.

---

First period was Spanish, and Frederick was good at Spanish, the way he was good at most languages, because he had grown up in three and picked up a fourth in a kitchen, and Señora Ruiz gave him back a test with a ninety-four on it and a note in the margin that said ¡Cuidado con el subjuntivo!, and he was careful with the subjunctive for the rest of the period and got it wrong twice anyway.

Second period was English. They were still on the poem about the man looking at a field. The teacher read it aloud again, the whole thing, and then asked what the man was looking for, and nobody knew, and Felix said, “A cow,” and the teacher said that was not as stupid as it sounded, and Felix looked offended.

At the end of second period the bell went and they went out into the corridor in the usual crush, and Frederick stopped at the water fountain at the end of the science hall, the one that only worked if you held the button down with both thumbs, and drank, and looked at the clock above the doors to the stairwell.

It was ten past ten.

He did not know why he looked at it. He looked at it every day. It was the clock you passed on the way from English to history, a big round school clock in a wire cage so that a ball could not break it, and it was always two minutes fast, and everybody knew it was two minutes fast, and nobody had ever fixed it, and he had stood at this fountain at ten past ten on Mondays for three years.

He wiped his mouth and went to history.

---

Mr Ferrante had written on the whiteboard before they came in, in his large blocky capitals with the red pen that was nearly out, so that the last letters were pink:

1840. WHO MADE HIM KING?

And under it, smaller, in black:

News of Victoria’s death reached New Westminster on 18 July. The accession was read from the steps of Columbia Palace on 15 August. Between those dates: who was King of America? On what authority? Who decided?

Frederick sat down in his place by the window, next to Theo, because of the alphabet, and took out the homework, which was two sides on exactly that, and looked at the board.

“Hands up,” said Mr Ferrante, “if your answer is Ernest.”

Mr Ferrante was the youngest teacher at Ellicott and had a beard he was not good at yet, and he taught history as though it were a series of crimes that nobody had ever been charged with, pacing up and down in front of the board with the red pen, stopping, turning, pointing it at people. He had told them on the first day that he did not care what they thought as long as they could prove it, and that if they could prove it he would change his mind in front of them, and he had done it twice since September, once about the Stamp Act and once about the price of bread in Philadelphia in 1779, and both times the class had cheered.

About half the room put their hands up. Theo put his up, and then looked at Frederick, and put it halfway down, and then up again.

“Keep them up,” said Mr Ferrante. “Now: keep it up if you think anybody in the Realm knew he was King on, let’s say, the tenth of July.”

All the hands went down except two.

“Devon.”

“Nobody had to know,” said Devon Price, from the back. “He just was. That’s what it says on page ninety. The Crown passes at the moment.”

“Says who?”

“The book.”

“The book,” said Mr Ferrante, “is a book. Who said it in 1840?”

Silence. Devon looked at page ninety as though it might say.

“Somebody had to say it,” said a girl near the front, June’s friend Priya, who never put her hand up and always got it right. “The first time. Before it was a rule. Somebody had to decide it was a rule.”

“Yes.” Mr Ferrante pointed the red pen at her. “Who?”

“The Governor-General?”

“Partly. Who else?”

“The Chief Justice,” said Priya. “And the ministry. Together. Inside a month. They worked it out because nobody had written it down.” She frowned. “And then nobody ever wrote it down after either. They just kept doing what they’d done.”

“So who made him King?”

Priya opened her mouth, and closed it.

“Nobody,” said Theo, unexpectedly, beside Frederick, and the room turned round and looked at him, because Theo did not answer in history. Theo went red and kept going. “Nobody made him. That’s the point. Three men in a room decided that nobody had to make him. That it just happened, when she died, by itself, the second it happened. And then they wrote a proclamation that said so, a month late.” He looked at his homework. “I’ve done the half with the dates. That’s what the dates are.”

“Hartigan,” said Mr Ferrante, in a tone of deep satisfaction, “has done the reading.”

“Half,” said Theo.

“The good half.” Mr Ferrante turned to the board and drew a long red arrow from 18 JULY to 15 AUGUST and wrote over the top of it, in pink, because the pen was dying, A KING NOBODY HAD SEEN. “So for a month, Ernest the First is King of America, by the law of the Union, from the second Victoria died in London, and not one person on this side of the Atlantic knows it. Not the Governor-General. Not the Primate. Not the man who sold newspapers outside the palace. He’s King in the Realm for four weeks and nobody’s told the Realm.” He turned round. “Is that a problem?”

“It’s a problem for the newspapers,” said Felix.

“Is it a problem for the law?”

Frederick did not put his hand up. He never did, in history, not because he did not know the answers but because in history, of all the subjects, the answers had his family’s names in them, and he had found by the end of his first year that if he answered a question about a King, everybody looked at him to see whether he was answering it as a student or as something else, and he did not know himself, half the time, which. So he did the reading, and wrote the homework, and kept his hand down, and Mr Ferrante, who was not stupid, had stopped calling on him for Kings in the first month without either of them ever saying a word about it, and called on him for bread prices instead.

Mr Ferrante did not call on him now. He looked round the room, and his eye went over Frederick and did not stop, the way it always did, carefully, the way you step over a step you know is loose.

“Frederick,” said Mr Ferrante.

The room went still. It was not much. A pen stopped. Somebody at the back stopped chewing.

“The Primate,” said Mr Ferrante, “on the fifteenth of August, at the cathedral. After the proclamation. He said something from the pulpit. It’s in the reader, page ninety-two, the bit in the box. Will you read it for us? You’ve got the best reading voice in the room, and Hartigan’s done enough for one day.”

It was a box. It was a quotation in a box in a school reader. That was all it was. Frederick found the page. He looked at the box, and at the words in it, and for a moment did not read them, and then read them, out loud, in his ordinary voice, the one he used for the trains.

“The Church of America has no power to make a King. The King has reigned since the hour of his predecessor’s death, by the law of the Union. Nothing done at the Palace or in this cathedral this morning has made him King, or could have.”

He stopped.

“Thank you,” said Mr Ferrante, and turned back to the board, and wrote under the arrow, in black, because the red had died altogether, NOTHING DONE HERE MADE HIM KING. “So. If nothing done at the Palace made him King, and nothing done in the cathedral, and nobody in the Realm even knew, then what is a proclamation for? Two sides. Thursday. Use the reader. Use your brains. Do not use your phones, Ms Okafor, I can see it from here.”

Frederick wrote it down in his planner. What is a proclamation for. Two sides. Thursday.

Theo, beside him, wrote nothing down, and then leaned over, while Mr Ferrante was pacing, and wrote in the margin of Frederick’s homework, very small, in pencil:

good voice

And then, under it:

but you sounded like the radio

Frederick rubbed it out with his thumb and did not look at him, and Theo grinned at the board.

---

The rest of the period was ordinary. That was the thing he would remember about it afterwards, when he went back over it, which he would, many times, the way you go back over the last few minutes before a thing to see if you could have known. It was ordinary all the way to the end. Mr Ferrante talked about the Governor-General of 1840, who had been an old soldier and had nearly made a mess of it and had been saved by a Chief Justice with gout, and drew the three of them on the board as stick men in a box, one with a bandaged foot, and the class laughed. Devon asked whether you could be King of somewhere you had never been, and Mr Ferrante said that every King of America had been exactly that, the present one included, and moved on, and nobody looked at Frederick, not even Devon, and Frederick wrote it down. Felix’s pen leaked. The radiator under the window, which nobody had fixed, banged twice. Outside, in the schoolyard, a groundskeeper was blowing leaves into a pile with a machine that whined, and the leaves blew back, and he blew them again, and Frederick watched him for a while through the window, a man in an orange jacket in the grey morning, patiently blowing the same leaves into the same pile, and thought that it was the most peaceful thing he had ever seen.

The clock on the wall at the back said twenty-five to eleven. It was not two minutes fast, that one. It was right.

The bell went at ten to.

He packed his bag. He put the reader in, and the homework with good voice rubbed out of the margin, and his planner, and his pen. Theo was already at the door, waiting, holding it with his foot, saying something to Felix about lunch.

“Frederick,” said Mr Ferrante, at the board, wiping it, not turning round.

He stopped.

“Good reading,” said Mr Ferrante, to the board. “Thank you.”

“That’s all right.”

He went out into the corridor with Theo, into the crush and the noise and the smell of wet coats, past the water fountain that only worked with two thumbs, under the clock in its wire cage that said eight minutes to eleven and meant ten to, towards fourth period, which was chemistry, and lunch after it, and the long table by the window, and it was a Monday, and nothing had happened, and nothing was going to happen, and he was thinking about the man with the leaf blower, and about the Chief Justice with gout, and about whether Theo was right about the radio, which he was.