Book Nine: Junior Year Part Four: Spring Characters
Chapter Thirty-one
Prom
Frederick. New Westminster. Saturday, 18 May 2030.
Asked on Ellicott's careers day what he would like to be, he wrote "a railway signalman".
The gym had streamers in it. Paper ones, red and white and blue, twisted, hung from the girders where the big dark heaters were, in long loops across the whole ceiling, so that the heaters were hidden and the light came down through the paper in colours.
He stood in the doorway and looked at it.
In January there had been desks here, two hundred and forty, in rows. In the year before that, at another school, three thousand miles away, cots. Tonight the floor was bare between the painted lines of the court, polished, and at the far end under the scoreboard there was a stage made of the gym’s own benches pushed together with a cloth over them, and on it four boys from the senior year with two guitars and a drum kit and a keyboard, tuning, badly.
“They know four songs,” said Theo, beside him. “Marcus asked. They’re going to play them in a different order every half hour and hope nobody notices.”
They had come as a class. Nobody had decided it. It had simply happened, the way the line of pairs had happened on a bluff: Theo at the Hartigans’ at six, and Lucía at six fifteen with Inés, and Priya, and Marcus and Felix, who had each asked somebody and been told maybe, and Devon and June, who had been going together since February and had told nobody and been found out by everybody. Twelve of them, from homeroom, at the gate of Ellicott at seven, in clothes that were not school clothes, looking at each other.
“You look like a painting,” said Theo, to Frederick, in his own dark suit that Peter Hartigan had lent him and Anneliese had taken in.
“So do you.”
“I look like my dad going to a wedding,” said Theo. “Which is what this is. It’s his wedding suit.” He pulled at the sleeves. “He says it’s been to four weddings and a funeral and it can manage a prom.”
Mr Abernathy was at a table inside the door with a cash box and a roll of tickets and a stopwatch on a cord round his neck. He did not use the stopwatch. He took the tickets.
“Hanover.”
“Sir.”
“Five dollars.”
Frederick gave him five dollars. Mr Abernathy tore the ticket in half and gave him one half and put the other in the cash box and did not look up.
“There’s a punch,” said Mr Abernathy. “Don’t drink it. Mr Kowalski made it.”
Castellanos was in the doorway.
Not the main doors, by the scoreboard, where the class had gone out onto the field on the day of the six point four, at another school. The side door here, by the bleachers, with the fire exit sign over it and the little running man. He stood just inside it in his grey suit with his hands behind his back and looked at the gym the way he looked at every room, and did not look at Frederick at all, because that was how he looked at Frederick.
Thirteen months, now, until June next year.
Frederick did not think about that. He went in.
The band played its first song, which was loud, and then its second, which was louder, and nobody danced, and everybody stood round the edges of the court by the bleachers with cups of Kowalski’s punch, not drinking it, and talking very fast.
Then the third song was slow.
And Lucía put down her cup and took Inés by the hand, without asking, and pulled her out onto the polished floor between the painted lines, and Inés said something that might have been no and then did not say it again, and the two of them danced, badly, laughing, in the coloured light through the paper streamers, and after a moment Devon and June went out too, and Marcus, who had been told maybe by a girl in the year below and was now told yes, and Felix, who was not, and danced with Priya instead, and then a great many people.
Frederick stood by the bleachers.
He had been to dances. Two, at the Palace, in the Blue Drawing Room, for the diplomatic corps, at which he had danced with eleven ambassadors’ wives in a row, very correctly, and remembered none of them. He had not been to this. He stood with a cup of punch he was not drinking and watched the people he had been in homeroom with for five years dance in a gym under paper streamers, and did not mind standing.
Mr Ferrante was on the other side of the gym, by the doors, in the jacket with the leather patches, chaperoning, with his arms folded, watching everything with the expression he wore in history when somebody was about to say something interesting. He did not dance. He had been asked, Theo said, by the girls’ basketball team, as a body, and had said that he had a leg, which was true, and was not the reason.
“Majestad.”
He turned.
Señora Ruiz was beside him. A dark red dress, not the green one. No folder. He had never seen her without the folder at a school occasion, and her hands did not seem to know what to do with themselves, and she had folded them at her waist, the right over the left, lightly, the way you would hold a hat if you had one.
“Señora.”
“I have been chaperoning these,” said Señora Ruiz, “for twenty-two years.” She looked at the floor, at the dancers. “Every May. At this school. Twenty-two proms.” She paused. “Nobody has ever asked me to dance.”
He looked at her.
“So I am asking you,” said Señora Ruiz. “Since you are the King, and cannot refuse a lady, which I am told is the rule. And since you conjugate like a cathedral.” Her mouth moved. “If you would like.”
He put his cup of punch down on the bleachers.
“I would like.”
The fourth song was a cumbia. The band from the year above did not know that it was a cumbia. They thought it was something else, and played it slightly too fast, and Señora Ruiz said ay under her breath and took his left hand in her right and put her other hand on his shoulder and said, in Spanish, very briskly, I lead, you follow, it is not difficult, a child can do it, look, and he looked.
He followed.
He was not good at it. He was better than he had expected. She was very good, and patient, and said bien every time he got it right and nothing every time he did not, which was a teacher’s trick and he knew it and it worked anyway, and after half a minute he stopped looking at his feet.
Round them the class had stopped dancing.
Not stopped. Slowed. Looked. Lucía and Inés, holding hands, at the edge of the court. Theo, by the drums, with his mouth open. Marcus. Priya. And then, because the class had looked, other people looked, and for a moment the whole gym was looking at the King of fourteen realms being led round a painted basketball court by his Spanish teacher to a cumbia played too fast by four boys who did not know it was one.
He did not mind. He found that he did not mind at all.
“Bien,” said Señora Ruiz. And then, in English, quietly, as they turned under the paper streamers: “Martin put my name on the list.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do. You are a very poor liar. So is he.” She turned him, firmly. “He put my name on the list for the folder. And he would not put his own. And somebody put his.” She looked at him. “I do not ask who. I have an idea who.” She turned him again. “I only want to say that I have been carrying that folder for twenty-two years, on every trip, every May, and nobody once in twenty-two years asked what was in it.” A pause. “He did. On an aircraft over Kansas. He asked me how many telephone numbers in it had worked.” She looked at the floor between them. “None, I told him. And he wrote it down.”
The song ended, slightly too soon, because the band from the year above had lost its place.
Señora Ruiz let go of his hand and stepped back and curtsied, not very low, the way you curtsy to somebody you have just taught something.
“Gracias, Majestad.”
“Gracias, señora.”
She went back to the doors, to Mr Ferrante, and stood beside him with her hands folded at her waist, and Mr Ferrante said something to her without unfolding his arms, and she laughed.
At ten Priya found him by the bleachers.
She had her phone. She had had it all evening, held up, taking pictures, and showing them to nobody.
“I took one,” said Priya. “Do you want to see?”
She held it out.
It was the gym. From high up, from the top of the bleachers, where she must have climbed. The whole court, under the paper streamers, the coloured light coming down through them, and on the floor between the painted lines a great many people dancing, blurred, because they were moving, and because the light was low. Lucía and Inés. Devon and June. Marcus. A girl from the year below. Three seniors. A boy from the chess club with his eyes shut. Nobody looking at the camera. Nobody looking at anybody but whoever they were dancing with.
He looked for himself in it. He was not there. He had been by the bleachers, out of the frame.
In the bottom corner, very small, in the side doorway under the fire exit sign, a man in a grey suit with his hands behind his back.
“It’s nobody in particular,” said Priya. “That’s why I like it.” She looked at it. “I’m going to send it to my grandmother. She’ll ask which one is you. I’ll say none of them.” She put the phone away. “She’ll like that better.”
“So do I,” said Frederick.
At the side door, under the little running man, Castellanos had not moved. But when Frederick looked across the gym at him, through the dancers and the coloured light, Castellanos looked back, for the first time all evening, directly, and something happened at the corner of his mouth.
The band started its first song again, in a different order, and hoped nobody noticed.