Inattentive

Castellanos fell in beside him on the walkway, at a parent’s distance, which on a covered walkway four feet wide was about eighteen inches.

“Was it wrong?” said Frederick.

“Was what wrong?”

“You read the board. Twice. I saw you.”

Castellanos looked at the rain coming off the edge of the walkway roof in a sheet.

“I’m a parent,” he said. “Parents don’t know anything about Article Two. That’s how you can tell them from teachers.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” said Castellanos. “It isn’t.” He held the door of the old building open for a girl with a cello case bigger than she was, and let her through, and let Frederick through after her. “Geometry?”

“Second floor.”

“Then I’ll be on the second floor.”

“Doing what?”

“Waiting,” said Castellanos. “It’s most of what parents do.”

---

Mrs Pruitt had come to Ellicott in September from Baltimore, and in five months she had not once worn two things that matched.

Today she had on a mustard cardigan over a lilac cardigan, buttoned so that the mustard one was one button out all the way down, and a scarf with lemons on it, and she was standing at the board with a protractor the size of a bicycle wheel, drawing triangles.

“Good morning, everybody. Sit anywhere. It’s not a seating-plan day, it’s a triangle day.” She drew another one. “Frederick, Theo, at the front, please, you’re always at the back and I’m starting to think it’s personal.”

Mrs Pruitt called everybody by their first names. She had done it from the first morning in September, and on the afternoon of the thirty-first of October, in this room, in sixth period, she had looked across at the second row and said Frederick, could I have a word outside? in exactly the voice she used when you had not done the homework, and taken him out into the corridor, into the sun, and told him it was two o’clock, and nothing else, because she had not known what else to say and had not pretended to. He had liked her very much since.

He and Theo sat at the front.

“Congruent triangles,” said Mrs Pruitt. “Two triangles are congruent if they’re the same size and shape. We’ve done this. You know this. What you don’t know yet, because I haven’t told you, is that knowing it isn’t enough.” She tapped the board with the protractor. “Look at these two. They look the same, don’t they?”

They did look the same.

“They’re not,” said Mrs Pruitt happily. “I drew them wrong on purpose. This one’s a degree out. You can’t tell from the picture. You can never tell from the picture. In geometry you don’t get to say it looks like it. You have to prove it from what you’re given. Side, angle, side. Angle, side, angle. Side, side, side. Those are your rules. If you can’t prove it from what you’ve been given, you don’t know it, you only think you do.” She turned round and beamed at them. “Isn’t that wonderful? It’s the only subject in the school where thinking you know something counts for absolutely nothing.”

Frederick wrote down you can never tell from the picture, and looked at it, and did not like it as much as he had expected to.

---

The inspector came in at a quarter to ten.

He came in without knocking, as before, and went to the back, as before, and sat in the chair by the window, and this time he did not uncap his fountain pen at once. He took a stopwatch out of his waistcoat pocket instead, on the end of the watch chain, and held it in his palm and looked at it.

“Carry on,” he said. “I’m not here.”

“Oh, hello,” said Mrs Pruitt. “Are you the inspector? I’m Ellen. Do sit wherever. We’re doing congruence.”

Mr Stroud looked at her for a moment as though she had offered him a sweet he had not asked for and could not now refuse.

“Mrs Pruitt,” he said.

“Ellen’s fine.”

“Mrs Pruitt,” said Mr Stroud, and pressed the stopwatch.

It clicked. Everybody heard it click. Mrs Pruitt looked at it and then at the class and then at the board, and went on, slightly faster.

“Right. So. Side, angle, side. Who can tell me what we’re given in this one?”

Three hands went up. Mr Stroud clicked the stopwatch again and wrote something down.

“He’s timing us,” whispered Theo, delighted.

“He’s timing her.”

“He’s timing everybody. Look at him. He’s a man who times eggs.”

---

Frederick tried to think about triangles.

He was good at triangles. He was good at mathematics generally, the way he was good at history, without trying, because both of them were about things being where they were for a reason. He liked that a proof went one step at a time and that you could not skip a step. He liked that a triangle did not care who had drawn it.

But the board in room fourteen kept coming back.

A PERSON UNDER SIXTEEN CANNOT BE KING.

It was the be that bothered him. He had said reign. He was nearly sure he had said reign, and he could not now remember exactly, and it seemed to him, the longer he did not remember, that it might be important, in the way that a degree out on Mrs Pruitt’s triangle was important.

Because he was fifteen. And on the thirty-first of October, at the long table, in a chair halfway along the window side with a green leather seat that he had held on to underneath with both hands where nobody could see, he had sat while twenty-two people in dark suits listened to the Clerk read a proclamation, and he had heard it, every word, because he had been concentrating very hard on not doing anything with his face.

He found he could remember it. He had not tried to remember it before. It came back now, in geometry, in the Clerk’s flat careful voice, as clearly as if somebody had put it on the board.

Whereas His Majesty King Ernest the Fifth has by his Declaration of Abdication given up the Crown (a great many commas) solely and rightfully come (more commas) His Royal Highness Prince Frederick Alexander (his own name, the whole of it) We, the Lords and others of His Majesty’s Privy Council, do now proclaim him George the Fifth.

Do now.

Not will. Not in May.

Now.

And before that, his mother, with her hand on the bishop’s Bible, saying after the Clerk that she would truly and faithfully execute the office of Regent in the name and on behalf of His Majesty King George the Fifth. In his name. On his behalf. You could not do a thing on behalf of somebody who was not there yet. You could not swear in somebody’s name if the name was in the garage until the spring.

Then again, proclamations said all sorts of things. They said High and Mighty and liege Lord and by the Grace of God, and nobody in the room had thought he was high or mighty, least of all him. Dame M said a proclamation was the Clerk being polite about the future. That was probably all now was. Politeness.

He looked at Mrs Pruitt’s triangles, which looked the same and were not, and felt the small unease of first period come back, a little less small and a little less distant, like a drip that had moved one tile nearer.

---

“So,” said Theo, very low, at his elbow, not looking at him, looking at the board with an expression of total absorption in side-angle-side. “Who’s King? Till May?”

“Nobody, I suppose.”

“Nobody.”

“My mother does it. As Regent.”

“So she’s King.”

“She’s not King. She’s Regent. She’s the Queen of Sweden.”

“So she’s King of here and Queen of there.”

“No.”

“Then who’s King of here?”

Frederick did not answer.

“Freddie.” Theo was still looking at the board, with the absorbed face. “Who are you, then?”

“Me.”

“Who’s me?”

“Theo.”

“I’m just asking. For the score.” Theo tapped his back pocket, where the planner was. “I’ve got a column for it.”

---

“Frederick?”

He looked up.

Mrs Pruitt was looking at him. So was everybody else, more or less, the way a class looks at somebody who has been asked a question and has not answered it, which was a particular kind of looking that he had not been on the end of very often at Ellicott, and found he did not like.

“I’m sorry, Mrs Pruitt?”

“Which rule? For this one?” She pointed at the board with the protractor, at a pair of triangles with two sides and the angle between them marked. “What are we given? Which one do we use?”

He looked at the triangles. There were two sides marked on each, with little ticks to show they were equal, and an angle between them, with a little arc. It was the easiest one on the board. He had known it in September.

He opened his mouth, and what was in his head at that moment, still, was the number on the board in room fourteen, and the proclamation, and in May, and the bicycle in the garage, and what came out of his mouth was:

“Sixteen.”

There was a silence.

Then there was a laugh, quite a big one, from the back, and from the middle, and from Theo, who laughed with his whole body and then put his head down on the desk and went on laughing into his arms.

“Sixteen,” said Mrs Pruitt, kindly, “isn’t a postulate, Frederick. It’s a number.” She looked at him for a moment longer, not unkindly, with her head a little on one side, the way she looked at a triangle she suspected of being a degree out. “Side, angle, side. Theo, sit up.”

“Sorry, Mrs Pruitt.”

“Side, angle, side,” said Frederick.

“Thank you.”

At the back of the room the stopwatch clicked.

---

He did not need to turn round. He could see it in the window, which was dark with rain and had the room reflected in it like a second room behind the glass, faint and the right way round: the rows of desks, the backs of heads, Mrs Pruitt in her two cardigans, the bicycle-wheel protractor, and at the back, small and square, Mr Stroud, writing, with the clipboard tilted on his knee.

Frederick could not read it in the window. He did not need to.

When the class got up to work in pairs on the worksheet, and Mrs Pruitt went round the room, and Mr Stroud rose from his chair at the back and walked slowly up the side of the room looking at the worksheets over people’s shoulders the way a man looks at fruit in a market, he stopped behind Frederick for a moment, and the clipboard came down to the level of Frederick’s eye, flat, as Mr Stroud leaned to look at Theo’s worksheet, and there it was, in fountain pen, in a small upright hand that had been taught by somebody very strict a long time ago:

Geometry. Mrs Pruitt (cardigans). 9.45. Pace adequate. Board work adequate. Boy in the H’s, inattentive.

And a small numeral, in a circle, after it.

1.

Mr Stroud straightened up, and looked at Theo’s worksheet, which had a drawing on it of a triangle wearing a crown, and moved on without comment.

---

“That’s you,” said Theo, under his breath, not looking up, colouring in the crown.

“I know it’s me.”

“Boy in the H’s. He doesn’t know your name.”

“He’s not supposed to know my name. Nobody’s supposed to know my name.”

“He doesn’t know your face, Freddie. He looked right at you. Twice. Nothing.” Theo held up the worksheet and looked at the triangle in the crown critically. “Do you know how many people in the Realm don’t know your face?”

“Everybody in this school knows my face.”

“Apart from two.”

“Apart from two,” said Frederick.

“And they’re both here today,” said Theo, “and they’re both in charge of something.” He took out his planner and opened it at the back, on his knee, under the desk, and under INSPECTOR KNOWS: 0 he wrote, very neatly, INSPECTOR HAS NOTICED: 1.

---

Devon Price was behind them.

Devon Price was always behind somebody. He was a thin, quiet boy with glasses who sat at the back of every room in the school and almost never spoke, and when he did it was always in a whisper and it was always, Frederick had noticed in seventh grade and gone on noticing, the question that everybody else in the room had been thinking and nobody had wanted to ask.

On the first of November, in this room, while Mrs Pruitt was looking for her pens, Devon had leaned forward and whispered, Do we have to call you anything?, and Frederick had said No, and Devon had said Okay, and that had been the whole of it, and nobody had ever asked again.

He leaned forward now.

“My cousin’s put it up,” he whispered.

Frederick turned his head.

Devon had his telephone in his lap, under the desk, face up. On it was the photograph of the board. THE CROWN. NOT A HAT. And under it, the eight words and the brackets. And under the photograph, a line of writing, and under that a little number with a heart beside it that was going up while Frederick watched it, 41, 43, 48.

“I only sent it him for the notes,” whispered Devon. “He’s at the college. He does civics. I thought he’d think it was interesting.” He looked at the number. “He thought it was interesting.”

The line of writing under the photograph said: lol is this real?? ellicott high in the capital teaching kids the KING can’t be KING

52.

“Can you ask him to take it down?”

“I did. He said why, it’s history.” Devon looked at the telephone and then up at Frederick, through his glasses, with the quiet face, and leaned a little nearer, and whispered the question that everybody in the room had been thinking since twenty past nine and nobody had wanted to ask.

“Are you, though?”

“Am I what?”

“King.”

“Yes.”

Devon nodded slowly.

“Then why’d you say you can’t be?”

“I didn’t. I said you can’t reign.”

Devon thought about this. Behind him the rain went on against the window, and in the window the faint second room went on behind the glass, with the faint second Mr Stroud at the back of it, writing.

“Is there a difference?” whispered Devon.

Frederick opened his mouth to say of course there is, and found, sitting there with the triangle in the crown in front of him and you can never tell from the picture in his notes, that he did not know what it was.

“I don’t know,” he said.

61, said the telephone.