Second Year

August 2034. Frederick has the bed by the window now, because Tyler has moved across campus to a roommate who never stops talking. The housing office paired the new freshman by questionnaire: up before six, reads in bed, keeps the room at sixty-eight, no guests. Only his protection officer, the Chancellor and his mother knew that Alexander I had enrolled at all, and nobody knew the room. Frederick is quietly furious. It was supposed to be his.

Second Year is a year of an orientation speech corrected in writing, a protection officer of forty-six who sings bass at eight in the morning, an A painted to a programme with one stripe on one cuff, a republican professor and an Emperor in his back row for a whole year, a road trip to Tucson in a hired minibus, a footnote in a textbook that is wrong about a pardon, and a family that is wrong about it differently; and, underneath it and rising, a cousin who stops writing the programme in November and is perfectly composed, and the one warning their arrangement allows.