The Second Morning

“It’s a good corner, sir,” said Castellanos, at the bins.

Frederick had his hand on the door. He stopped.

“The corner of the gym?”

“Sight line to the yard and the steps and the bike racks. Sight line to the gate, back along the wall. Shade until about eleven.” Castellanos looked at the gym as though it had done well and should be told. “Brick behind me. Nobody comes round it from behind without my hearing them on the gravel.”

“Is there gravel?”

“There’s some gravel.” Castellanos opened the door. “I put a bit down. Yesterday. From the custodian’s heap.”

Frederick got out. He looked at the strip of concrete along the back of the gym, between the brick and the grass, and at the far end of it, by the corner, there was a small grey patch of gravel, about a yard across, very neatly spread, that had not been there at a quarter to eight on Tuesday.

“Did anybody mind?”

“I asked the custodian.” Castellanos shut the door. “He said I could have as much gravel as I liked as long as I didn’t move his bins.” He looked at the bins. “I’m not going to move his bins.”

---

The boy was on the wall.

He was in the same place, at the end nearest the gym, with his bag between his feet, and he had an apple. Frederick saw him before he had come all the way round the corner, and stopped, on the gravel, which crunched, and Castellanos behind him stopped too.

There was a girl with him.

She was sitting on the wall beside him, not very close, with her knees up and her arms round them, and she was talking. She was a small, quick girl with very black hair cut short at the back and long at the front, so that it fell in her eyes and she had to keep moving it, and she was talking the way some people walk, as though she had a train to catch, with her hands, and every so often she stopped moving her hair to point. She was pointing at the corner of the gym.

She was pointing at him.

Frederick knew her name. She was in Mr Abernathy’s homeroom, near the front, P for Paredes, and he had heard her yesterday in fourth period ask the mathematics teacher four questions in a row, without putting her hand up, before the mathematics teacher had finished taking the register, and he had thought at the time that she was the sort of person who found things out by walking up to people and asking them. He had never been able to do that. He had never in his life found out anything by asking for it directly, except from his father, who was a different matter, since his father did not count as a person in that sense, and had rules.

She was finding something out now. Or rather, she had found it out, some time ago, possibly years ago, possibly from her grandmother, and she was telling it, with her hands, to the boy on the wall.

The boy listened.

He listened with the apple. He turned it in his hand and found the place and bit, and chewed, and looked at the girl while she talked, and nodded, once, and looked across the yard at the corner of the gym, at Frederick, standing on the gravel, for about three seconds.

Frederick stood very still.

He had been looked at by a great many people. He knew all the looks. There was the look that went oh, and the look that went is that, and the look that went I must not look, and the look of somebody who had been told to come and say something and was working up to it. There was the look that was not a look at all but a sort of glazing over, in grown-ups, where they stopped seeing him and started seeing a photograph of him. He had catalogued them, at Brookside, at about seven, in a notebook, with headings, until Bridget had found the notebook and asked him what it was, and he had told her, and she had gone very quiet and then given him a biscuit and told him that there were better things to keep a notebook about, such as trains.

He did not know this look. The boy on the wall looked at him the way you look at a bus timetable on a wall when somebody has told you that the times on it have changed: with interest, without alarm, checking.

Then the boy turned back to the girl, and said something, and the girl threw up both hands and said something back that Frederick could hear from the corner of the gym, which was “Theo!”, and the boy went back to the apple.

---

He waited for it in homeroom.

The boy came in in the line behind him, as he had on Tuesday, and sat down at the desk on the aisle side of the gap, and put his bag on the floor, and looked at the radiator, which was banging, and said:

“Morning.”

“Good morning,” said Frederick.

And then nothing.

The boy got out an exercise book, and opened it, and found that it was the wrong one, and got out another, and looked in his bag for a pen and did not find one, and looked at Frederick’s desk, where there were two pens in the groove, because Bridget had packed nine more that morning to replace the two from Tuesday, even though only one of them had gone, on the principle, she had said, that the other one would go today; and took one.

“I’ll give it back,” he said.

“You didn’t give the other one back.”

“I’ve still got it.” The boy felt in his pocket and produced Tuesday’s pen, and looked at it, and at today’s pen, and seemed to weigh them, and put Tuesday’s back in his pocket. “That’s my home one now. This is my school one.” He put today’s pen on his desk, in the groove, exactly as Frederick’s were in the groove on his. “That’s fair.”

“How is that fair?”

“You’ve got about forty.”

“Nine,” said Frederick. “Today.”

“Huh,” said the boy, and Mr Abernathy came in and opened the roll book and took out the pen from the inside pocket of the brown jacket, and the boy said nothing else at all.

Frederick sat by the window and waited.

He did not know exactly what he was waiting for. He had expected something. When people found out, things happened. At Brookside, at five, a boy called Toby who had been his friend for a whole morning, the first morning, because they had both liked the same box of wooden trains, had gone home at lunchtime and come back in the afternoon having been told, and had stood at the door of the classroom and looked at Frederick across the room as though Frederick had turned into something, a statue or a dog, and had not come near the trains again for a month. When people found out, they changed. They went careful, or loud, or stiff, or polite, or they asked things, or they stopped asking things; they bowed, sometimes, if they were old enough to have been told about bowing and young enough to think it was required; they told their mothers. Something happened to their faces. You could see it go across, like the shadow of a cloud across a field, and when it had gone across the field was a different colour.

He waited for the shadow to go across the boy’s face.

“Hanover,” said Mr Abernathy, and paused, the length of a breath.

“Here.”

“Hartigan.”

“Here,” said the boy, this time, without being told, and Mr Abernathy looked up at him, briefly, over the roll book, and down again, and Frederick thought he saw the corner of Mr Abernathy’s mouth do something, and then not.

The radiator banged. Nothing went across the boy’s face at all.

---

It did not happen in first period, which was English, in a room on the ground floor with a picture of a man with a quill on the wall and a teacher who wanted them to write a page about what they had done in the summer. Frederick looked at the page for a long time. He had been to Öland, where he had a bench with his name on it at the gate, and to the Duchy of Cornwall with his father, where a board of directors had explained a dividend to him, and to a lake in the Laurentians where his father had sat on the dock every evening for an hour without saying anything and Frederick had sat beside him, which was the best thing that happened all summer. He wrote about the lake. He did not say whose lake it was. He said that there was a dock, and pine trees to the water, and a boathouse with canoes in it that you were not allowed to take out before seven.

The boy beside him wrote three lines and drew a fish.

“What did you do in the summer?” said Frederick, before he could stop himself.

The boy looked at his three lines.

“Moved,” he said.

It did not happen in second period, which was mathematics, by the door, or in the break after it, which the boy spent sitting on the wall by the bike racks again, with a second apple, while the girl called Lucía sat beside him and talked and Frederick stood at the end of the bike racks, not at the wall, not near enough to be sitting with them and not far enough to be not, and was talked to by nobody, and looked at by everybody, and watched the boy eat the second apple right round in its spiral and then the bottom of the core.

“Do you eat a lot of apples?” Frederick said, at the bell.

The boy stood up and put the core in his pocket.

“Two a day,” he said. “We get them from a man at the depot. His brother’s got trees.” He picked up his bag. “He says if you eat two a day you never have to see a dentist. I don’t think that’s true. I think he’s just got a lot of apples.”

It did not happen in third period.

---

Third period was history.

Mr Ferrante had the books out on the desks when they came in, one to each desk, in a pile at the front of the row, and they passed them back, and Frederick took his and looked at it. It was the book. He had read it in August in the library, in a week, in an armchair, with a pencil, although he had not written anything in it, because it had been the library’s copy and you did not write in the library’s copy. This was his own copy. It had a sticker on the inside of the cover that said ELLICOTT HIGH SCHOOL and a list of names under it in different pens, of people who had had the book before him, nine of them, going back to 2009, and a space at the bottom.

He wrote his name in the space. F. Hanover. It looked like somebody else’s name, in a list of other people’s names, which was exactly what it was.

“Contents,” said Mr Ferrante, at the front, pacing. “Page five. Have a look. That’s the year. That’s where we’re going. Read me the chapters, somebody. Out loud. Paredes.”

Lucía read them. She read them fast, as though they might get away. Chapter One, The First Americans. Chapter Two, The Colonies. Chapter Three, Grievance and Petition. Chapter Four, The Peace of Boston. Chapter Five, The Charter. Chapter Six, she read, and then her voice did something, very small, a sort of bump, like a cart going over a stone, and she read it anyway, and Frederick saw it coming down the page towards her before she got to it.

“The Coming of the House of Hanover,” read Lucía.

The room looked at him.

It did not do it all at once. It did it the way a field of wheat moves when the wind comes across it, in a wave, from the front, where Lucía was, backwards, row by row, head by head, so that by the time it reached the back of the room every single person in the room was looking at the desk by the window three from the back, except Mr Ferrante, who was looking very carefully at the floor, and the boy beside him, who was looking at the book.

Frederick looked at the book too. It was the only thing to do.

They look, and then they have looked.

“Thank you, Paredes,” said Mr Ferrante, to the floor. “Keep going.”

And Lucía kept going, Chapter Seven, The Great Lakes, and the wheat went back the other way, row by row, and Mr Ferrante began to pace again, and Frederick sat with his hands flat on the book and the back of his neck hot, and waited for it to stop being hot.

The boy beside him leaned over.

He did it exactly as he had done it on Tuesday, before roll call, with one elbow on Frederick’s desk and his head quite close, so that nobody else could hear, and he said, in a whisper, in the tone of somebody making a fair remark about the weather:

“Distant.”

Frederick laughed.

He did not mean to. It came out of him before he could do anything about it, out of his nose, mostly, a sort of snort, loud, in the quiet room, in the middle of Chapter Nine, The Four-Year War, and Lucía stopped reading, and the whole room looked at him again, the whole field of wheat, all at once this time, and Mr Ferrante stopped pacing and turned round with the red pen.

“Something funny, Mr Hanover?”

Frederick sat very still. His face was burning. His eyes were watering. He could feel the laugh still in him, behind his teeth, waiting for another go.

“No, sir,” he said.

Beside him the boy was looking at the book, with an expression of perfect, unbroken, almost holy innocence, as though he had never laughed at anything in his life and did not know what laughing was for.

Mr Ferrante looked at Frederick for a moment longer. Then he looked, briefly, at the boy beside him. Then he turned back to the board.

“The Four-Year War,” said Mr Ferrante. “Keep going, Paredes.”

Frederick looked at the page. He did not see it. He saw a boy on a wall, turning an apple, looking at him across the yard for three seconds while Lucía Paredes told him, with her hands, who he was.

So he knew.

He had known since ten to eight. He had known in homeroom, when he said morning, and when he took the pen, and when he said here without being told, and when he wrote three lines and drew a fish. He had known all through mathematics, and on the wall, eating the second apple, telling Frederick about the man at the depot whose brother had trees. He had known, and he had looked at Frederick across the yard the way you look at a timetable, checking, and then he had gone back to the apple.

And nothing had gone across his face at all.

---

The round table by the radiator in the lunch hall had seven chairs taken.

Grant, with the ears. The girl with the long black plait, Ibrahim, whose first name was Amira, which Frederick had learned in English, when she read out her page about the summer, which had been about her grandmother’s garden in Dearborn and had been very good. The small girl with the freckles, who ate crisps one at a time and looked at each one first, and whose name was Priya, and who did not talk much. The boy from the wall, with a tray. Frederick, with Bridget’s sandwich, which was cheese and pickle today, in four triangles, with a note that said THE SANDWICH, FREDERICK.

And two new ones.

Lucía Paredes had come with the boy from the wall, carrying her tray as though it were a briefing, and sat down next to him and opposite Frederick, and was looking at Frederick across the table with the frank, direct, uninterrupted interest of somebody looking into a fish tank. And beside her a tall girl with red hair in two bunches and a very serious face, who had come with Lucía, and who was called June, and who said so, to the table in general, when she sat down, as though she were reporting for duty.

“June,” said June.

“Hello,” said Frederick.

“I know who you are.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not going to say anything about it,” said June. “My mother said not to say anything about it, so I’m not.” She opened a yoghurt. “That’s me not saying anything.”

“Thank you.”

“Is it true you’ve got a horse?” said Lucía.

“Lucía,” said June.

“What? That’s not saying anything. That’s a horse.” Lucía leaned forward. “Have you?”

“No,” said Frederick. “There are horses. In London, outside my father’s house. They’re not his. They’re the Household Cavalry’s. I’m not allowed to ride them, because they’re working.”

“What do they do?”

“Stand outside.”

“That’s work?”

“It’s very hard work,” said Frederick, who had once asked one of the troopers in London and had been told, without the man moving his lips, that it was the hardest work in the world, sir, and also the most boring, and that he had once stood there for two hours with a wasp inside his helmet. “You’re not allowed to move. Even if there’s a wasp.”

Lucía looked at him, and then at June, and then back at him, as though she had been given more than she had paid for and was deciding whether to complain.

“Have you got a crown?”

“No.”

“Has your dad got a crown?”

“Several,” said Frederick. “But they’re not his either. They’re in the Tower, in London. And one’s in Edinburgh. And one’s in Hanover. And there isn’t an American one at all, because nobody’s crowned here, because there’s only the one coronation, and that’s in London, so here there’s just a sort of hat on a cushion, at the Parliament, that nobody wears either. And he only wore the London one once, in 1973, and said it gave him a headache.”

There was a silence at the table.

He had not meant to say all of that. He had meant to say no. But he had been asked a question, and the question had an answer, and the answer had parts, and he had found, as he always found, that once he had started on the parts he could not stop until he had given all of them, because it would have been untrue to leave any of them out. It was a thing that happened to him. His father said it was a family failing, and that he had it too, and that the cure was not to stop giving all the parts but to be more careful about which questions you agreed to answer.

Grant was very red. Priya had stopped with a crisp halfway to her mouth. Amira Ibrahim was looking at him with her very straight back and an expression that might have been interest. June had her spoon in her yoghurt and was not moving it.

Lucía opened her mouth.

“Lucía,” said the boy from the wall, without looking up from his tray, “eat your lunch.”

Lucía shut her mouth. She looked at him. Then she looked at her tray, and picked up her fork, and ate her lunch.

The boy went on eating his. It was something brown again, with gravy, and he was eating it with the concentration he had brought to the apple, and he did not look up, and he did not say anything else, and after a while Grant asked Priya whether she had done the mathematics, and Priya said she had, and June said that she had not, because it was not due until Friday, and that she did not do things before they were due, as a principle, and Amira Ibrahim said that was a stupid principle, and June said it was a principle and that principles did not have to be clever, they had to be kept, and they argued about it, and Frederick ate his sandwich, and the radiator did not bang, and nobody looked at him for nearly five minutes.

Behind the counter at the end of the hall, the woman in the apron with the radio was serving a boy from one of the older years, and Frederick saw her look across the hall at the round table by the radiator, at the seven of them, for a moment, with a ladle in her hand; and then she reached up behind her without looking and turned the radio up, very slightly, the width of a fingernail, the way she had on Tuesday, and went back to the boy.

---

It did not happen in fifth period, or sixth, or in gym, which was last, which was in the gym, the building Castellanos stood at the corner of, and which was taught by a short, square, cheerful man called Mr Kaminski with a whistle on a cord and very large calves, who divided them into two teams by the simple method of making two boys stand at the front and pick.

Frederick had been picked before. At Brookside. He knew how it went. It went one of two ways. Either he was picked first, by a boy who wanted to be seen to have picked him, or he was picked last, by a boy who wanted to be seen not to have, and in both cases the whole of the rest of the class watched the picking to see which, and he stood there and was looked at and knew that whoever picked him was not picking him at all.

Mr Kaminski made Grant pick, and a boy called Feeney.

Feeney picked a tall boy. Grant picked a tall boy. Feeney picked a girl who was, it turned out, the fastest runner in the seventh grade and had been at her last school, and said so. Grant went red and picked Lucía, who was not tall but was, it was clear, extremely determined. They went on picking. Frederick stood in the row on the bench and waited, and felt the class watching, and watched them watching, and saw Feeney’s eye go to him and stop and go on, and Grant’s eye go to him and stop and go red and go on, and did not know which of them was going to do it, or when, or whether they were going to do it at all or just leave him there at the end until there was nobody left and Mr Kaminski had to say and Hanover goes with.

“Hartigan,” said Grant.

The boy from the wall got up off the bench next to him and went and stood behind Grant.

“Ibrahim,” said Feeney.

“Paredes,” said Grant, who had already got Lucía, and was told so, and went red, and said “June”, instead, meaning the girl, and June went.

There were four left on the bench. Frederick and three others.

The boy from the wall leaned over and said something in Grant’s ear. Grant looked at him, and then at the bench, and then at the boy again, and then, very red, at Frederick.

“Hanover,” said Grant.

Frederick got up and went and stood behind Grant, next to the boy from the wall, who was looking at the gym ceiling, at the girders and the heaters and some very old banners from the 1980s hanging off them, with great interest.

“What did you say to him?” Frederick said.

“I said if he picked you first everybody’d think he was sucking up,” said the boy, to the ceiling, “and if he picked you last everybody’d think he was scared of you, and he should pick you about fifth from the end, so nobody’d think anything.” He looked at Frederick. “That was about fifth from the end.”

“Fourth.”

“Close enough.” The boy looked at the bench, at the three still sitting on it, who were all looking at the floor. “Are you any good?”

“At what?”

The boy looked at Mr Kaminski, who was putting out cones.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Whatever this is.”

“No,” said Frederick. “I’m not any good at anything physical.”

“Me neither,” said the boy. “I’m small. I just get in the way.” He considered. “That’s a skill, though. Getting in the way. You’d be surprised.”

---

The only question the boy from the wall asked him all day, he asked at a quarter past three, at the bike racks, after gym, while Frederick was standing at the end of the racks waiting for the bell, and Castellanos was standing at the corner of the gym, and the boy was sitting on the wall again, doing up a shoelace that did not need doing up, in the slow, careful way of somebody who does not want to go home just yet.

He finished the shoelace. He looked across at the corner of the gym.

“That man,” he said.

Frederick went still. Here it was.

“Is he yours?”

“Yes.”

The boy nodded. He looked at Castellanos for a while. Castellanos looked at the yard, and the steps, and the bike racks, and the gate, with his hands folded in front of him, and did not look at anything in particular, the way he did.

“He was there at eight,” said the boy. “This morning. And yesterday. And he was there at break. And at lunch, when I came out to the fountain, he was there. And he’s there now.” He looked at Frederick. “Does he get lunch?”

Frederick opened his mouth.

He shut it again.

He did not know. He had not thought about it. He had not, he realised, standing at the end of the bike racks, thought about it at all, not once, not on Tuesday and not today, where Castellanos had lunch, or when, or whether, or what, or who brought it, or whether you could eat lunch with your hands folded in front of you at the corner of a gym looking at everything at once. He had been on the detail five weeks. Frederick did not know whether he had a wife, or children, or a dog, or where he lived, or what he did on the evenings when he was not standing at the ends of corridors. He knew that he took stairs one at a time and was always at the top first. He knew that he had been a policeman in Tucson. He knew that he had put down a yard of gravel, from the custodian’s heap, so that nobody could come round the corner behind him without his hearing.

“I don’t know,” said Frederick.

The boy nodded, as though that was a perfectly reasonable answer and he would have given the same one.

“You should ask him,” he said, and stood up, and put his bag on his shoulder, and the bell went, the long flat electric bell from inside the building, and he said “See you,” and went off across the yard towards the front gate and the street and the stop where the buses were, red and cream, without looking back, eating something out of his pocket that might have been the end of the second apple.

---

It was Wednesday. His mother did not collect him on Wednesdays.

Castellanos walked ten yards in front of him along the back of the gym, over the gravel, which crunched, to the side gate, where there was a man in a fluorescent vest with a clipboard and a lanyard, who had been there on Tuesday too, and who looked at Frederick and said, “Pass?”

“I haven’t got one yet.”

“Thursday,” said the man. “They do the photographs Thursday.” He wrote something on the clipboard with a pen on a string, very neatly, and Frederick saw that it was HANOVER, in capitals, under TUESDAY: HANOVER, in the same capitals. “Name’s Obi. I’m on the gate. Go on, then. Your man’s waiting.”

Castellanos had gone past the bins and opened the car door, and Frederick got in and sat forward with his bag on his knees, and Castellanos got in at the front and put his seat belt on and started the engine and looked at him in the mirror.

“Seat belt, sir.”

Frederick put on his seat belt.

The car pulled away from the bins, very slowly, and out of the gate, and into the street, and stopped at the corner to let a bus go by, a red and cream one, full, with schoolchildren standing in the aisle holding the bars and the windows open and somebody’s arm hanging out of one of them, and Frederick watched it go, and looked at the back of Castellanos’s head, at the short grey hair, and the large brown neck above the white collar, and the hands on the wheel.

“Sergeant Castellanos.”

“Sir.”

“Did you have lunch?”

There was a pause. The bus had gone. Castellanos did not pull out. He sat at the corner with the engine running and looked at Frederick in the mirror, for perhaps two seconds, which was a long time for Castellanos to look at anything, and Frederick saw something happen in his face that he did not have a heading for.

“I had a sandwich, sir,” said Castellanos.

“Where?”

“At the corner of the gym.”

“When?”

“About twelve. When the yard was empty. While you were in the hall.” Castellanos looked back at the road. “The custodian brought me a coffee. In a cup with a crack in it. He said it was his second-best cup and I’d get the best one when he knew me.”

“Who made the sandwich?”

Another pause.

“My wife, sir.”

Frederick sat with his bag on his knees and looked at the back of the large grey head.

“What was in it?”

“Turkey,” said Castellanos, and pulled out from the corner, very slowly, into the street. “And a pickle she puts in that I don’t care for. She knows I don’t care for it. She’s put it in for twenty-two years.” He looked in the mirror again, briefly. “Why do you ask, sir?”

Frederick thought about the boy on the wall, doing up the shoelace that did not need doing up, looking across the yard at the corner of the gym.

Does he get lunch?

He had known since ten to eight who Frederick was. He had been told, with hands, at length. And he had spent the whole day knowing it, and borrowing pens, and saying distant in history so that Frederick laughed out loud in front of everybody, and telling Lucía Paredes to eat her lunch, and telling Grant where to pick him, and the one thing he had asked, the one thing in the whole day he had wanted to know, out of everything there was to know, had been whether the man at the corner of the gym got any lunch.

“Somebody asked me,” said Frederick. “And I didn’t know.”

Castellanos drove. They went past the shops, and the stop, where the bus that had passed them had stopped and was letting people off, and the bridge, where the car slowed down and nothing happened, and the river with the sun on it, and the Axis, wide and white, with the sprinklers going.

“Who asked you, sir?” said Castellanos, at the lights on the Axis.

“The boy who sits next to me,” said Frederick. “From Milwaukee.” He looked out of the window. “I don’t know his first name.”

He did, in fact. He realised it as he said it. He had heard it shouted across a yard that morning by a girl with her hands in the air.

“It’s Theo,” he said. “I think.”

Castellanos said nothing. The lights changed. And then, as they pulled away up the Axis towards the white buildings and the gates and the gravel and the north wing door, he said, to the windscreen, in the voice he used for sight lines and gravel, which was the voice he used for everything:

“Tell Theo it was turkey.”