Freddie

The passes came on Monday, in homeroom, in a cardboard box.

Mr Abernathy gave them out in the order of the list, walking down the rows with the box under his arm, reading each one before he handed it over, so that he looked at every photograph and then at every face and then back at the photograph, once, without comment, the way a man at a frontier does it. Frederick watched him come. Abrams. Bello. Diaz, Eckhardt, Feeney, Gallagher. Grant, who looked at his and went red. Mr Abernathy came to the window row and stopped at Frederick’s desk and took out the next card and read it and looked at the photograph and then at Frederick and then at the photograph.

He did not say anything. He put it down on the desk.

It was a white plastic card on a green cord, with ELLICOTT HIGH SCHOOL - STUDENT across the top in green capitals, and the school’s crest, which was an oak tree, badly drawn, and underneath, in smaller black capitals, HANOVER, F., and GRADE 7, and 2025-26, and in the corner a photograph, about the size of a postage stamp, of a boy against a grey cloth, with his hair flat on one side and an expression of mild, polite, total astonishment.

Mr Abernathy gave the boy from the wall his. The boy looked at it and grinned, the same grin as in the photograph, so that there were for a moment two of them, one large and one the size of a postage stamp, both looking as though they had just won something.

He leaned across the gap.

“Swap you,” he said.

“No.”

“I’ll give you a pen back.”

“You haven’t got any of my pens. You’ve got them at home. You said.”

“I’ve got one here,” said the boy, and produced from his pocket, after some searching among other things, a pen, and looked at it, and Frederick saw that it was not one of Bridget’s pens at all but a cheap blue one with the end chewed, and the boy looked at it too, and seemed surprised, and put it back. “I’ve got one somewhere.”

At half past three, at the side gate, Mr Obi held out his hand.

“Pass.”

Frederick gave it to him. Mr Obi looked at it, carefully, holding it at arm’s length, the way people look at things when they have left their glasses somewhere, and then at Frederick, and then at the pass again.

“That’s you,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t look like you.” Mr Obi gave it back. “Looks like somebody’s told you the price of something.” He made a tick on the clipboard with the pen on the string. “Go on. Your man’s waiting.”

---

It happened on Tuesday, in mathematics, at about twenty to ten.

The mathematics room was on the ground floor, by the door, and the mathematics teacher, who had stopped saying Your Ro and now said Frederick very clearly in advance, as though she were announcing a train, had given them twenty questions on fractions and told them they had fifteen minutes, and gone to sit at her desk with a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST TEACHER, and the room had gone quiet in the particular way that a room goes quiet when everybody in it has realised at the same moment that question four is harder than it looks.

Frederick was on question nine. He liked fractions. They were exact, and they told you where you were. He had done the first eight in order, without stopping, and was looking at the ninth, which was a sum with a mixed number in it that had been put there by somebody who wanted you to make a mistake, when the boy from the wall, beside him, on the door side, said, quite loudly, not in a whisper, in the ordinary voice you use across a table when you want the salt:

“Freddie. Pen.”

Frederick stopped writing.

He did not look up at once. He looked at question nine, at the mixed number, at the little horizontal line in the middle of it, for what felt like a long time, and heard the word go out across the quiet room, Freddie, and come back to him off the walls, and land.

Then he looked up.

The boy from the wall was holding his hand out, palm up, across the gap between the desks, and looking at Frederick’s pens in the groove at the top of Frederick’s desk, and waiting. He was not looking at Frederick. He was looking at the pens. His own pen, the cheap blue one with the chewed end, lay on his own desk, beside his worksheet, with its insides out, in three pieces.

“What did you call me?” said Frederick.

The boy looked at him, then, surprised, as though Frederick had asked him what day it was.

“Freddie,” he said.

Somebody in the row in front turned round. It was Gallagher, a boy with a crew cut and a gap in his teeth, and he looked at the boy from the wall, and at Frederick, and his mouth opened slightly, and stayed open.

Frederick looked at the boy from the wall.

He did not know what he felt. He felt, mainly, hot, at the back of the neck, the way he did when the room looked at him, except that the room was not looking at him, only Gallagher, and the heat was a different heat, and was coming from a different place. He felt the word sitting in the air between the desks, where the boy had put it, quite casually, the way you put down a cup.

Freddie.

Nobody called him that.

Nobody had ever called him that. He had been called Frederick by everybody, all his life, in every room he had ever been in, by his father and by Dame M and by Mr Lorimer and by the Governor-General and by Bridget and by the lady at the desk at Brookside every morning for seven years. He had been called sir, by the detail, and by footmen, and by the people who came to the Palace and did not know what else to call him. He had been called His Royal Highness in print and Prince Frederick in public and the Prince behind his back and, once, by a newspaper in London that his father had cancelled, the Little Prince of the Potomac. His mother called him älskling, which was not a name at all but a thing you said to the person you loved most, and which she had said so many times that it had worn smooth, like a stone in a pocket. On Öland, in the summers, the caretaker’s children, Elsa and Nils, who rowed him round the bay in a boat that leaked, called him Fredde, because that was what you called a Fredrik in Swedish if you were nine and on an island and had never been told that he was anything in particular; but that was in Swedish, and on Öland, and in a boat, and it belonged there, the way the bench at the gate with his name on it belonged there, and did not come off the island.

Nobody in English had ever done anything to his name at all. It was not the kind of name that was done things to. It had been given to him by two people at a Council of State in a hospital in Stockholm, and it was written down in eleven places in fourteen capacities, and you did not shorten it any more than you shortened a statute.

“Nobody calls me Freddie,” he said.

“I do,” said the boy from the wall.

He said it without any emphasis at all. He said it the way you would give somebody the time. And then, since that seemed to him to settle it, he looked at the pens again.

“Pen,” he said.

Frederick gave him a pen.

The boy said “Ta,” and took it, and bent over his worksheet, and started on question five, and Gallagher, in the row in front, closed his mouth, slowly, and turned round, and Frederick sat by the door in mathematics with question nine in front of him and the mixed number and the little horizontal line, and found that he had forgotten entirely what question nine was asking, and had to read it three times.

---

He did not ask why. He thought about asking for the rest of mathematics, and through the break, at the bike racks, while the boy ate the first apple, and through English, and he did not, because he did not know how to ask it without making it a discussion, and he could see, from the way the boy had said it, that it was not a discussion, and that if he made it one, something would happen to it, the way something happens to a soap bubble if you try to pick it up.

The boy told him anyway, at lunch, when Lucía asked.

“Why do you call him Freddie?” said Lucía, across the round table, with her fork in the air, in the voice of somebody who has been waiting since twenty to ten.

The boy from the wall did not look up from his tray. It was something orange today, with a crust.

“Frederick’s too long,” he said. “It’s three goes. Fred-er-ick. By the time you’ve got to the end of it he’s gone round a corner.”

“So call him Fred.”

“Fred’s a man who fixes boilers.” The boy ate a forkful of the orange thing. “There’s a Fred at our block. He fixes the boilers. He’s about a hundred. He’s got a van.” He chewed. “He’s not a Fred.”

Lucía looked at Frederick, as though checking that he was not a Fred.

“So Freddie,” said the boy from the wall, and that was the end of the explanation, and also, it was clear, the end of the discussion, and he went back to his lunch.

Lucía considered this. She put her fork down. She looked across the table at Frederick, with her short black hair falling in her eyes, and moved it, and said, experimentally, as though trying on a coat:

“Freddie.”

“No,” said the boy from the wall.

He did not say it loudly. He said it in exactly the voice he had used for Lucía, eat your lunch, without looking up.

“What?”

“You can’t.”

“Why not? You do.”

“I found it,” said the boy from the wall.

There was a pause at the round table. Grant, who was in the middle of a sandwich, went slowly red from the ears inwards. Amira Ibrahim looked at the boy from the wall with her very straight back and an expression of great interest. June put down her yoghurt.

“That’s not how names work,” said Lucía.

“That’s exactly how names work,” said June, who had a principle about everything and would clearly have one about this. “That’s how all names work. Somebody finds them.”

“Somebody gives them.”

“Same thing.”

“It is not the same thing,” said Lucía, and they argued about it, at length, across the table, about whether names were found or given, and Priya ate her crisps one at a time and looked at each one first, and Frederick sat in the middle of it with Bridget’s sandwich, which was egg and cress today, with a note that said THE SANDWICH, and did not say anything, because nobody had asked him, and because he did not trust his face.

He had not said that the boy from the wall could. He had not said that Lucía could not. Nobody had asked him either thing. It had been decided, like the seating, by somebody else, without any discussion, and he found, sitting at the round table by the radiator with the argument going on over his head, that he was more pleased than he had been about anything for as long as he could remember, and that he did not know where to put it.

At the counter at the end of the hall, Mrs Tolliver, who had heard the whole of it, as she heard the whole of everything that happened within forty feet of her radio, served a boy from the ninth grade with a ladle and did not turn the radio up at all, this time. She turned it down. By about the width of a fingernail. As though she wanted to hear what happened next.

---

The boy from the wall said it eleven times on Tuesday. Frederick counted.

He said it in mathematics, about the pen. He said it in the corridor outside English, Freddie, wait, when his bag strap came undone. He said it twice at lunch, once to ask whether Frederick was going to eat the crusts, which Bridget had cut off, so there were none, and once to ask whether Bridget always wrote notes. He said it in history, in a whisper, when Mr Ferrante drew a map of the Great Lakes on the board and put Milwaukee in the wrong place: Freddie, that’s wrong, that’s Racine. He said it in gym, when Mr Kaminski made them run round cones, Freddie, go left, which was wrong, and Frederick went left and hit a cone. He said it three times in sixth period, which was the library, where they were meant to be reading in silence and the librarian kept looking at Frederick to see if the cushion was all right.

And at a quarter past three, at the bike racks, when the bell went, he said it the eleventh time, across the yard, standing up off the wall with his bag on his shoulder, loudly, in a voice that went over the tarmac and bounced off the end of the gym:

“See you, Freddie!”

And went off towards the front gate and the buses without waiting for an answer.

At the corner of the gym, Castellanos, who had his hands folded in front of him and was looking at the yard and the steps and the bike racks and the gate, did not move at all. Not a muscle. Frederick watched him not move. It was a very complete way of not moving, like a held breath, and it went on for about two seconds longer than Castellanos’s ordinary way of not moving, and then Castellanos unfolded his hands and turned and walked back along the gym towards the side gate, ten yards in front, and Frederick followed him over the gravel.

His mother was in the car by the bins. It was Tuesday.

---

She did not say anything in the car.

She asked him in Swedish how his day had been, and he said in Swedish that it had been fine, and told her about fractions, and about question nine, and about Mr Ferrante putting Milwaukee where Racine was, and she listened, looking out of her window, and asked whether Racine was a large place and he said he did not think so, and she said that it was a beautiful name, Racine, it meant root, and he said he knew, and she said of course he did, and the car went past the shops and the stop and over the bridge, where it slowed down and nothing happened, and up the Axis with the sprinklers going, and stopped at the north wing door.

Castellanos got out and came round to open her door, and then his.

His mother got out first. She stood on the step in her grey coat with her handbag, waiting for him, the way she always did, and he got out with his bag, and she put her hand on his hair and flattened the piece that would not settle, the way she always did, and then she stopped, with her hand still on his head, and said, in English, quite quietly:

“Freddie?”

He looked up at her.

She had heard. She must have heard it through the car window, across the yard, the eleventh time, See you, Freddie, bouncing off the end of the gym; or she had seen Castellanos not move. She was looking down at him with her hand on his hair and an expression he did not know, a very careful expression, the expression of somebody holding a thing that is not theirs and that might be valuable, to see how heavy it is.

He did not say anything.

His mother tried it again. She said it slowly, as though it were a word in a language she was learning, and she was not sure of the stress.

“Freddie.”

It did not fit in her mouth. He heard it not fit. It came out with too much care on it, the way her English always had too much care on it when she was moved, so that it sounded like a word from a phrasebook, correct and foreign; and he saw her hear that too, and something went across her face, quick, and then she smiled, a small one, at the corner of her mouth, and took her hand off his hair.

“No,” she said, in Swedish. “That one is not mine.”

“Mamma…”

“It is not mine, älskling. I can hear that it isn’t.” She looked at him. “Whose is it?”

“The boy from Milwaukee,” said Frederick. “Who sits next to me. Theo.” He considered. “He says Frederick is three goes.”

His mother thought about this, on the step, in her grey coat, in the late sun, with Castellanos holding the door and looking at the gravel.

“It is three goes,” she said at last. “It was meant to be. Your father chose it.” She turned towards the door. “I shall go on with älskling. It is only two and a half, and it is mine.”

She went in. At the door she stopped, as she always did, without turning round, and he thought she was going to say something else, and she did not; she only stood there for a moment with her hand on the frame; and then she went on in, and up the stairs, quickly, the way she went out of rooms when she did not want to be seen being whatever she was being.

---

Castellanos had to decide whether it was unusual.

Frederick knew that he had to decide, because he watched him decide it, in the passage inside the north wing door, after his mother had gone up. Castellanos had shut the door and was standing beside it, with a small black notebook in his hand that Frederick had seen him write in every evening at six, standing, by the door, before he went off; and he had the notebook open, and a pen, and was looking at a page, and not writing.

Frederick knew what the notebook was. It was the detail’s note. Every officer on a detail kept one, and at the end of every day wrote in it what had happened that the next officer ought to know, and anything unusual, and the note went to the head of the detail, and a copy went to Dame M, who read it at seven with her coffee. He had been told that when he was eight, by a different officer, who had shown him the notebook, and explained that it was so that everybody who looked after him knew the same things, and had let him read a page, which had said P. wished to know why the trains on the Union Station board are sometimes marked “on time” when they are 1 min late. Explained I did not know. P. not satisfied.

Castellanos looked at the page for a long time.

“Sergeant Castellanos,” said Frederick.

“Sir.”

“Are you going to put it in?”

Castellanos did not pretend not to know what he meant. That was one of the things Frederick had begun to notice about him: he never pretended not to know what you meant. It saved a great deal of time.

“I’m deciding whether it’s unusual, sir,” he said.

“Is it?”

Castellanos looked at the notebook.

“It’s new,” he said. “New’s not the same as unusual.” He considered. “A new pen’s not unusual. A new teacher’s not unusual. A new route to the gym, I’d put in, because somebody else might drive it.” He looked at the page. “A new name, I don’t know. I haven’t had one before.”

“What would you put?”

Castellanos thought about this for some time. Then he wrote something, short, in small square capitals, and Frederick could not see what, and closed the notebook, and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

“What did you put?”

“I put what happened, sir,” said Castellanos. “That’s all you ever put.” He went to the hard chair against the wall by the north wing door, a plain wooden chair with a straight back that had appeared there in the first week of August, the week he came, without anybody explaining it, and that Frederick had never yet seen anybody sit in; and sat down in it, with his hands on his knees. “Good night, sir.”

---

The Household held a meeting about it on Wednesday morning. Frederick found out from Bridget.

He came down to the kitchen at half past six and Bridget was at the range with her back to him doing something to a frying pan, and she said “Sit,” without turning round, and he sat at the table by the range, at his place, and she put an egg in front of him, in the blue cup, and toast, and stood over him with her arms folded and the frying pan still in one hand, which was what she did when she had something to tell him and wanted to make sure he had his mouth full before she told it.

“There was a meeting,” said Bridget.

He took the top off the egg.

“At half past seven last night. In Dame M’s office. Ten minutes. Dame M, and the man from the Private Secretary’s office with the moustache, and Miss Lindqvist from your mother’s side, and Sergeant Castellanos, who was asked to come because it was in his note, and wasn’t asked to sit down, and didn’t.” She paused. “About a name.”

He ate some egg.

“I wasn’t at it,” said Bridget, “but I gave them their coffee. And the man with the moustache said, as I was putting his cup down, that the Household could hardly have the heir to the throne being called Freddie in a schoolyard like a boy in a comic, and he said Freddie like it was something on his shoe. And Miss Lindqvist said that in Sweden it would be Fredde and nobody would mind at all. And the man with the moustache said this was not Sweden. And Miss Lindqvist said she was aware of that, with respect.” Bridget looked at the ceiling. “And then they both looked at Dame M.”

Frederick waited, with egg on his spoon.

“And Dame M,” said Bridget, “put her hand on her folder, the way she does, and didn’t open it, and said: If we say one word about it, it acquires a supervisor.” Bridget nodded, slowly, as though she had been turning this over all night. “Just that. It acquires a supervisor. And then she said that the Household would not be expressing a view, and that this was the Household’s view, and that the meeting was closed, and could Bridget please take the cups.” She unfolded her arms. “Ten minutes. A meeting to decide not to have a meeting. I’ve worked here nineteen years and I’ve never seen the like.”

Frederick put the egg in his mouth.

He sat at the table by the range and ate it, slowly, and thought about a room in the Palace at half past seven at night, with four grown-ups in it and a man standing, and coffee, and the man with the moustache from the Private Secretary’s office saying Freddie like something on his shoe; and Dame Margaret Roper, who had been a captain in the Navy for twenty-two years and had never once in his life not known what to do, putting her hand flat on her folder and deciding, for the Household, out loud, to do nothing.

It acquires a supervisor.

He understood it. He thought he understood it, anyway, in the way you understand a sentence in Swedish before you have worked out every word of it. If Dame M had said it is not suitable, it would not have been his any more, or the boy’s; it would have been the Household’s, and the Household would have had to manage it, and to manage it the Household would have had to watch it, and the moment anybody watched it, it would have stopped being a thing that a boy had said across a desk about a pen and become a thing that was permitted. And Dame M had seen that. In ten minutes, with a cup of coffee going cold. And she had decided that the only way to keep it was to leave it entirely alone.

“Bridget,” he said.

“What.”

“Did Dame M say anything else?”

Bridget thought about it.

“She said,” said Bridget, “as they were going out, to nobody, at the door, I have no idea whether that was right.” She took his plate. “And then she went to bed. At eight. Which she never does.” She put the plate in the sink and turned round and looked at him, and pointed the frying pan at him across the kitchen, like a judge.

“And I’ll tell you this for nothing,” said Bridget. “I’m not calling you it.”

“I know.”

“Nobody in this kitchen is calling you it. You’ve had your name since you were born and it’s a perfectly good name and it’s three goes because it’s meant to be.” She turned back to the range. “Eat your toast, Frederick.”

She said it with all three goes in it, very clearly, every one of them, Fred-er-ick, as though she were putting them down one at a time on the table in front of him, so that he could see that none were missing.

He ate his toast.

At a quarter past seven Castellanos was at the north wing door with the car, and the hard chair by the door was standing against the wall, empty, where it had stood since August; but Frederick saw, going past it, that it had been moved, very slightly, about four inches, out from the wall and round, so that whoever sat in it would be facing the door to the stairs and not the door to the gravel.

He got into the car. He sat forward, with his bag on his knees.

“Seat belt, sir,” said Castellanos.

Frederick put on his seat belt, and the car pulled away over the gravel, very slowly, and he looked out of the window at the Axis and the sprinklers and the white buildings, and he thought about a wall by some bike racks, and a boy on it with an apple, who in about forty minutes was going to look up and see him come round the corner of the gym, and say it, the twelfth time, as if it were nothing at all.