The Roll

He still woke at six.

Six in New Westminster was three in Los Angeles. Some part of him had decided on a lawn under the galaxy to keep that city’s hours for a while, in case it was needed, and nobody had told it to stop.

He lay on his back in the grey and looked at the crack in the corner of the ceiling. The house was quiet. He no longer took the duvet onto the floor under the window, or not often. Four times in June, twice in July, none in August. Each time he had woken under the blanket from the end of the bed, tucked in at the side. Nobody had ever mentioned it.

The first day of junior year. His fifth first day at Ellicott, and the first on which he would walk into the building as King in his own right, with no Regent anywhere and no box that anybody else would do if he did not.

He found he was looking forward to it, and did not know whether that was allowed.

---

Breakfast was at a quarter past seven at the end of the long kitchen table nearest the range, as it had been since he was four.

Bridget put down eggs and toast and a glass of milk, and at his elbow, on its own plate, a second piece of toast, buttered. It had been there every morning since June.

His mother came down at twenty past with her coffee and the folded newspaper and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair.

“Är du nervös?”

“No.” Then, because she would know: “A bit.”

“Good. If the first day doesn’t make you a bit nervous, it isn’t a first day.” She turned a page. “Your father asked Niamh twice yesterday what day it was today. Both times he said Tuesday, school back to her, to show he knew.” She looked at him over the glasses she was not wearing. “He hasn’t asked what day it is since September. That’s new.”

He ate the second piece of toast.

“He’s waiting for you to come back and tell him how it was. Like any father.” She went back to the paper. “So go and have one, älskling. And then tell him.”

---

Castellanos drove, in the dark blue car with no flag on its wing. The car with the flag was the Crown’s and the car without it was Ellicott’s, and the Household had settled after a short bitter argument he had not been allowed to attend that the two were not to be confused. Castellanos drove it himself. He did not trust anybody else at the lights on the Axis at a quarter to eight, when the tourists crossed to the Palace railings without looking.

Frederick sat in the front. He had asked to in October, and Castellanos had said nothing, which meant yes.

Down the Axis under the trees, the Monument white in the middle, the tourists already at the railings behind them looking up at the Standard. Then the ordinary streets, shops opening, buses. A number fourteen went by the other way. It was not Peter Hartigan driving. It never was.

“Monday,” said Castellanos, at the lights on Tenth Street.

“Yes.”

“Nine o’clock.”

“I know.”

Two white cups at the north wing door at nine on Mondays, the step and the chair. Thirteen of them since the fourth of June. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes not.

At the gates of Ellicott High School Castellanos said, “Sir.”

“Sergeant.”

“Have a good first day.”

In a year of school mornings he had never said anything at the gates but sir.

“Thank you. You too.”

Something happened at the corner of Castellanos’s mouth. Frederick got out.

---

Theo was on the low wall by the bike racks with his bag between his feet, where he had been at ten to eight on the first day of seventh grade, when Frederick was twelve and knew only that the boy next to him in the H’s had a Wisconsin accent and ate an apple at break with enormous concentration.

He was taller.

Frederick stopped on the pavement. He had seen Theo all summer, at the flat and the Palace and for four days at Solliden, and had not noticed. Now, with the sun behind him, he saw it all at once: very nearly the biggest boy in the year, the blazer already short in the sleeves on the first day, and the ears, a subject at the back of homeroom since seventh grade, grown into at last.

“What,” said Theo.

“You’re taller.”

“Two inches since May. Mum measured me against the door frame on Sunday. Kate’s furious. She says I did it on purpose.”

“How’s Kate?”

“Gone. Yesterday. The nursing college on the river. She’s in the residence with a girl from Ohio who’s got a rabbit she’s not supposed to have.” He picked up his bag. “Dad drove her over in the van from the depot and Mum cried in the car park and pretended she didn’t. Kate took the lizard. Off the wall with a knife so the tape wouldn’t tear it.” He looked at the gate. “So I’ve got the whole room. It’s terrible, Freddie. Nobody talking through the partition at midnight about lizards.”

“I know.”

“I know you know. I warned you, in June, in the car.” He hitched the bag. “Come on. I want to see if Abernathy’s still doing it the same.”

---

The homeroom at the end of the east corridor on the first floor: the long windows over the playing field, the two cream radiators under them that had never worked. Frederick’s desk by the window, three from the back, Theo’s beside it.

Mr Abernathy was at the front in the brown jacket. Frederick had seen him three times over the summer: at the Palace reception for the families in July, at the edge of the Blue Drawing Room with a glass of water, saying nothing for two hours except, at the end, to somebody from the Prime Minister’s office, I’d prefer not; once outside a bookshop, where he nodded and said Hanover and walked on; and for four seconds on the ABC in August, at the end of a corridor, looking as though he would like the camera to go away.

The brown jacket. The glasses. And across the back of his left hand as he opened the roll book, from the side of the little finger to the base of the thumb, a long thin white scar.

He took out his pen.

“Abrams.”

“Here.”

“Bello.”

“Here.”

He stopped.

A quarter of a second. In four years he had never stopped between Bello and Diaz, because there had never been anything there. He looked down at a line that was new.

“Castañeda.”

With the ñ, as it was written.

From the front row, the desk by the door that had stood empty for four years because the room had one more desk than people, a girl’s voice, low and flat:

“Here.”

Thirty heads turned very slightly towards the door and turned back quickly. Every one of them knew what it was to be looked at for something that was not your fault.

Frederick, by the window, had to turn furthest, and looked longest. Small and dark and very upright, hair tied back, a blazer too new. Looking straight at the board with her hands flat on the desk. She did not look round.

“Diaz.”

“Here.”

Eckhardt. Feeney. Gallagher. Grant. The same speed, the same small pause after every name.

“Hanover.”

“Here.”

“Hartigan.”

“Here.”

Thirty-one. Mr Abernathy closed the roll book and put the pen away and looked over his glasses at the room, and then out at the field.

“Radiators are fixed. Don’t touch them. The end.”

---

Her name was Inés. Lucía found that out in the corridor between homeroom and first period by walking up to her and asking, a method Frederick had never in his life been able to use.

“Inés Castañeda,” said Lucía, at break, on the low wall, with Theo and Priya and Marcus and Frederick in a row beside her. “From Ventura. She’s living with her aunt in the Heights since June. Her mom and dad are still out there. Her little brother’s in seventh grade at the middle school.” A pause. “Their house was on the flats by the river mouth.”

They had heard the river mouth at Ventura on Priya’s radio in the gym at Franklin, in the long list the tired man read out.

“Did you tell her we were in Santa Monica?” said Marcus.

“She knew. Everybody knows.” Lucía looked across the yard to a bench by the far fence, where the girl from Ventura sat alone with her bag on her knee, eating an apple. “She said she knows who you are, Freddie, and she’s not going to make a thing of it, and she’d be grateful if nobody else did.”

“That’s fair.”

“And she said I could tell you something, if you asked. She’d rather you heard it from somebody else than had to ask her.”

“What?”

“She didn’t hear you. On the Friday, at two, when you said get down. They were in the high school gym at Ventura with a thousand people and no power, and nobody had a radio that worked, and when the six point four came nobody told them anything. Everybody ran.” Lucía looked at her hands. “She wanted you to know, so you wouldn’t think she owed you anything.”

He looked across the yard at the bench.

All summer: letters and cards, hundreds, in the boxes and on the trays. A woman in a supermarket on Tenth Street who took hold of his sleeve. A man at the Tomb in July. People who had got down because a boy on the radio said so in two languages.

And one who had not heard, and said so.

“Tell her thank you.”

Lucía looked at him.

“For telling me. And tell her she doesn’t owe me anything. Nobody does.” He thought. “And tell her the radiators really are broken, in case she touches one.”

Lucía laughed and got up off the wall and crossed the yard and sat at the other end of the bench from the girl from Ventura, not too close, and took something yellow out of her bag and held it out.

A lemon.

The girl looked at it, and at Lucía, and took it.

“She’s been giving everybody lemons all morning,” said Priya, quietly. “From her grandfather’s tree. She was out there for August. She gave me three. I don’t know what to do with three lemons.”

“Salad,” said Frederick. “With oil. A motorman from Pomona said.”

---

History was third period, with Mr Ferrante, at the top of the west stairs.

No stick. Not on the desk, not against the wall. When he went to open the window, because that room was always hot in September, there was only a very small hitch on the left that you would not have seen unless you had watched him carry an old man across the sand on that leg.

“Junior year,” he said, when they were sitting. “The history of the Realm. From the beginning.” He picked up the chalk. He said a historian who could not write on a blackboard had no business writing on anything else. “Which is where?”

“Lexington,” said somebody at the back.

“That’s the beginning of the war. Not the Realm.”

“The Peace of Boston,” said Priya.

“Closer. That’s the end of the war.” He turned to the board. “The Realm begins on the day it gets a piece of paper. Everything before that is two sides arguing about what the paper should say.” Square capitals, squeaking: 1783. “The Charter of Union. That’s where we start. And we end about thirty-five weeks from now somewhere round 1988, if we’re lucky and nobody asks me anything interesting.” His eyes passed over Frederick and moved on. “Which somebody will.”

He put the chalk down.

“One more thing, and then I won’t say it again.” He looked at the ones who had been on the pier, and the ones on the bluff, and the one at the desk by the door who had been in a gym in Ventura in the dark. “This year we’ll read a great many documents. Proclamations, Acts, speeches, letters. Some of them by Kings.” He did not look at Frederick. “And every time I’m going to ask the same question until you’re sick of it. Not what did it say. Anybody can read what it said. Who heard it?”

He picked the chalk up again.

“Who heard it, and who didn’t, and what happened to the ones who didn’t. 1783. Page one.”

At the desk by the door Inés opened her book. Her hand lay flat on the page a moment, very still, before she turned it.

---

The last bell went at ten past three. He came out onto the top step with Theo into the last of summer’s heat coming up off the stone: the yard, the bike racks, the gate, the dark blue car at the kerb with Castellanos looking straight ahead. People going home from an ordinary first day.

Lucía went past them down the steps with her bag nearly empty.

“How many lemons left?” said Theo.

“One. It’s for Señora Ruiz tomorrow. Inés is in that class too. I asked.”

“How is she?” said Frederick.

Lucía thought.

“She asked where the bus stop for the Heights was, and I showed her. And she said the lemon was the first thing anybody had given her since June that wasn’t because of the sea.” She hitched the bag. “So I’m giving her another one tomorrow. I’ll have to ask Grandpa for more.”

“He’ll post them.”

“He’ll post them, and Grandma will stop him, and he’ll do it anyway, with too many stamps.” She went down the steps and out of the gate to the bus stop, where at the end of the queue, small and upright with something yellow in her hand, Inés was waiting for the bus to the Heights.

“Four o’clock?” said Theo.

“Four o’clock.”

“Tell your dad Abernathy did the roll the same. Tell him the radiators are fixed.” Then, quieter: “Tell him you liked it. He’ll want to know that. Like anybody’s dad.”

“My mother said that this morning. Exactly that.”

“Well. She’s right, and so am I, and you’ve only got two of us, so you’d better listen.” He went off down the steps towards the number fourteen, two inches taller, the blazer short in the sleeves, and did not look back.