Next Year's List

Mrs Lockyer came back on the Thursday.

She came at nineteen minutes past eight, in the middle of the register, which nobody had ever done; Mr Abernathy had reached Gallagher and left his pause after it, the length of a breath, and in the pause the door of Room 14 opened and she was standing in it, in a grey cardigan, with her spectacles on a cord round her neck and the clipboard held flat against her chest with both arms.

Frederick had not seen her since the second of September. He had not seen her at all, in nine months, except twice at a distance, in the corridor by the office, going somewhere with the clipboard; and once at the Tomb, in November, in a black coat, among the teachers, not looking at him. She was the same. She had a face like a timetable, and a voice that did not need to be loud, and she did the thing to the room that Dame M did to rooms, without trying, just by standing in its door; and twenty-seven people who had been doing nothing in particular stopped doing it.

“Mr Abernathy,” she said. “Forgive me.”

Mr Abernathy looked at her over the roll book.

“Mrs Lockyer,” he said. And then, after the pause: “Grant.”

“Here,” said Grant.

Mrs Lockyer waited, in the door, with the clipboard, while he finished. She did not come in. She stood there through Gupta and Hanover, in the same flat voice, and Frederick said here in his and did not look at her, and she did not look at him; and through Hartigan, and here, and Theo did not look at her either; and on to Kowalski and Lam and Morales, and the radiators, which had been off since April and were the only things in the building that anybody had ever been grateful to; all the way down to Zielinski, and the last pause, and Mr Abernathy closing the blue cloth book.

“Thank you,” said Mrs Lockyer. She came in.

---

“Next year’s lists,” she said.

She stood at the front, by Mr Abernathy’s desk, and took a sheet off the clipboard, one sheet, printed, with a column of names down it and a column beside the names left blank, and held it up so that the room could see it was a sheet.

“Eighth grade,” she said. “Homerooms. This is Mr Abernathy’s. It will go along the rows, from the door, in the order you sit. Each of you will find your name on it and check that it is spelled correctly, and initial it, in the column, in pen.” She looked at the room over the top of her spectacles, which she had put on. “If your name is spelled wrongly, you will say so now. Not in September. In September it will be too late, and you will be spelled wrongly for a year, and so will everything that has your name on it, and it will be your own fault.” She held the sheet out. “Miss Abrams.”

Miss Abrams, by the door, at the front, took it.

It went along the rows. Frederick watched it go, from the door, the way he had watched the order fill the room on the first morning, desk by desk, from the door to the windows, row by row; and it took a long time, because every person who got it read the whole thing, not only their own name; and some of them laughed, and some of them said things, and Gallagher said that he was spelled with a c in it, which he was not, and was told so, by Mrs Lockyer, from the front, without looking up. Mr Abernathy sat at his desk and did nothing and let it take as long as it took.

It reached the window row, and came along it, in order, desk by desk; and Frederick heard Gupta, in the desk behind his, read it, under her breath, moving down the names, and stop, and say, quietly, “Oh.”

And then it was over his shoulder, and in front of him, on the lid of his desk, beside the groove for pens and the hole for an inkwell that had not had an inkwell in it for fifty years.

He looked at it.

ABRAMS, R. BELLO, K. All the way down, the names he had heard every morning for nine months in Mr Abernathy’s voice, with a pause after each, in the same order. GALLAGHER, S. GRANT, D. GUPTA, A.

HANOVER, F.

He took the pen out of the groove. He initialled it, in the blank column, in pen, F.H., the way he had initialled the bottom rail of a room divider in pencil in March; small, and straight, so that it would not be any trouble to anybody.

And then he read the next line.

HARGREAVES, M. (NEW)

And under it:

HARTIGAN, T.

---

He did not move.

He sat at the desk by the window, three from the back, with the pen in his hand and the sheet on the lid in front of him, and looked at the line between his name and Theo’s; at the eleven letters and the full stop and the bracket and the word in it; and did the arithmetic, because he always did the arithmetic, before he could stop himself.

It was not difficult. Hanover. Hargreaves. Hartigan. H, A, N; H, A, R, G; H, A, R, T. N came before R, and G came before T. It was in the right place. It was exactly where it should be. Mrs Lockyer had not made a mistake; Mrs Lockyer did not make mistakes; it was alphabetical, and it was not personal, and nobody had chosen anything.

And the seating followed the form list. In every room. In every subject. Wherever the H’s fell. He had known it since the first afternoon in September, when he had understood that every teacher at Ellicott had been sent the same list by Mrs Lockyer, and every teacher sat the room in the order of the list, because Mrs Lockyer had said so, and nobody at Ellicott argued with Mrs Lockyer.

An alphabet had put Theo beside him. On the first morning, by the bike racks, a woman with a clipboard had read out a list, and the H’s had fallen where they fell, and a boy with an apple had been the next name after his; and nobody had chosen it; and everything since had come out of that, the wall and the apple and Freddie and a half-birthday and four flights of stairs and a dumpling and a partition and a corridor and a letter under the salt. All of it out of the order of some letters.

And now an alphabet was going to take it back. The same way. By accident. Without anybody choosing anything. In September, a girl he had never heard of, from somewhere he did not know, would come in at the door of Room 14 and stand in a line, and go in in order, and sit where she was put; and she would be put in the desk next to his, by the window, three from the back, because that was where HARGREAVES, M. fell; and Theo would be put in the one after, which was somewhere else.

If you wish to sit by your friend, Mrs Lockyer had said, on the steps, on the second of September, you should have been born with a different surname.

He had been. He had been born with a different surname. He had been born with no surname at all, which was the trouble; and somebody in the Household had chosen Hanover for the form, out of the history book, because the form had a box for one; and it had put him in the H’s.

He became aware that he had been looking at the sheet for some time.

Beside him, Theo was waiting, with his hand out.

He gave it to him.

---

Theo read it.

He read the whole thing, from ABRAMS, R. to ZIELINSKI, P., the way everybody had, not only his own name. Frederick watched him read it, out of the corner of his eye, without turning his head. He watched him get to the H’s, and stop, for about a second; and then go on, to the end, to the bottom, and come back up.

He took the pen out of his own groove. He initialled his line. T.H., in his small square capitals that sloped very slightly backwards.

Then he looked at the line above his, for about three seconds; steadily; with interest, without alarm; checking.

“Huh,” said Theo.

He passed the sheet over his shoulder to the desk behind.

That was all. He did not look at Frederick. He did not say anything else. He put the pen back in the groove, and folded his arms on the lid of his desk, and looked at the front, where Mrs Lockyer was waiting for her sheet to come back to her, with an expression of a boy who has read a list and initialled it and is now thinking about lunch.

The sheet went on, to the end of the row, and up to the front, and Mrs Lockyer took it, and ran her finger down the blank column, and found it full, and nodded once, and put it on the clipboard.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Miss,” said Gallagher. “Who’s Hargreaves?”

Twenty-six people did not look at the desk by the window, three from the back, so hard that Frederick could feel it on the side of his face like the sun.

Mrs Lockyer looked at Gallagher over her spectacles.

“A new pupil,” she said. “In September.”

“From where, Miss?”

“From elsewhere,” said Mrs Lockyer, and took off her spectacles, and went.

---

It was, after that, an ordinary day; which was the worst thing about it.

There was mathematics, in which the H’s sat where the H’s had sat since September, and Theo beside him, on the door side, where he had been on the morning of the pen; and the mathematics teacher, who had stopped saying Your Ro in September and had said nothing since that was not about mathematics, gave them a sheet of puzzles because it was the last week; and Theo did the puzzles, and Frederick looked at the chair beside his, with Theo in it, doing puzzles, and thought, Hargreaves.

There was history, in which Mr Ferrante had given up on Chapter Sixteen and was reading them a book, out loud, with the beard, about a ship; and Frederick sat by the window, and Theo beside him, by the aisle; and Mr Ferrante read, and his eye went round the room, as it did, and stepped over Frederick as it did, the way you step over a step you know is loose; and then, which it did not usually do, came back, and stopped, for a moment, on the space between Frederick’s desk and Theo’s. Just for a moment. As though there were something there that he could see and nobody else could. And went on.

He’s heard, thought Frederick. Everybody’s heard. Ellicott was a school. By break the whole of the seventh grade knew there was a new name in Mr Abernathy’s H’s, and by lunch the eighth grade knew, and by the end of lunch the custodian would know, and Mr Obi on the gate, and Mrs Tolliver, and the radio.

He did not say anything to Theo about it.

Theo did not say anything to him.

---

At the table of nine by the radiator, they said something.

“She’s from Baltimore,” said Lucía, before anybody had sat down. “My cousin knows her cousin. Her dad’s a dentist. She plays the cello. Her name’s Martha.” She put her tray down. “She’s supposed to be nice.”

“She has a right to the H’s,” said June Delaney, and put her yoghurt down with a click. “Everybody has a right to their letter. It’s not her fault where she falls.”

“Nobody said it was her fault,” said Lucía.

“You were going to,” said June.

“I was going to say she plays the cello.”

“You were going to say it nastily.”

Devon Price, at the end, with his mouth full, said that Frederick could just ask.

There was a silence at the table of nine.

Devon Price looked round it, at eight faces, and swallowed. “What? He could. Anybody could. Anybody can go and ask Mrs Lockyer if they can sit by their friend.” He looked at Frederick. “You could just ask.”

Frederick looked at his tray. It was macaroni. Mrs Tolliver had the radio on, behind the counter, and it was the weather, and it was hot.

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

He did not answer. He did not know how. He knew the answer; it was the easiest answer in the world, and it was the one his father had given in a letter to the Hartigans a week ago, about a frontier, that would be to borrow one Crown’s authority for another; but there was no way of saying it at a round table in a school canteen over macaroni that did not sound like exactly what it was about; and he sat with it in his mouth, and could not say it, and could not say anything else.

“He can’t,” said Priya.

Everybody looked at her.

She did not say anything very often. She sat by the radiator, at the end, and ate her crisps, one at a time, and looked at things. She was looking at Frederick now, over a crisp.

“Anybody can ask,” said Priya. “That’s the thing. Anybody can. So he can’t.” She ate the crisp. “Because if he asks, it isn’t anybody asking.”

There was a silence again.

Devon Price looked at her for a long time. Then he looked at Frederick. Then something happened in his face, slowly, like a bus pulling out; and he went red, from the collar up; and said “Oh,” and looked at his macaroni, and did not say anything else for the rest of lunch.

Theo, beside Frederick, ate his pudding.

He had not said anything. He had sat through all of it, Baltimore and the cello and the right to the H’s and you could just ask, with his spoon, and eaten his macaroni and then his pudding, without looking at anybody; and Frederick waited, all through lunch, for him to say it. I could ask. Because Theo could. Theo was anybody. If Theo asked Mrs Lockyer whether he could sit by his friend, it would be a boy from Milwaukee asking to sit by his friend, and nothing else at all.

Theo did not say it.

He finished his pudding. He put his spoon in the bowl. He looked at the bowl.

“It’s alphabetical,” he said, to the bowl. “That’s the point of it.”

And he picked up his tray and went to the hatch.

---

He went to the custodian’s office after lunch.

He did not decide to. He found that he was walking there, across the yard, in the heat, past the bike racks and the wall, round the end of the gym; and that he was standing in the doorway of Mr Pavlik’s office, which had a kettle and a chair and the radio, and a calendar from a hardware shop with a picture of a lake on it, and a window eighteen inches up from the floor of the yard that looked across at the wall; and that Castellanos was sitting in the chair, with his coffee on the sill and the radio low, and was looking at him.

Mr Pavlik was at the desk, in his overalls, eating a sandwich out of a paper bag. He looked at Frederick and then at Castellanos and went on eating.

Frederick stood in the doorway.

He knew exactly what would happen if he said it. He had known since nineteen minutes past eight. He would say Sergeant, and Castellanos would say sir, and he would say could you telephone the Household; and Castellanos would not ask why, because asking why was not a thing Castellanos did; he would put down his coffee and take out the telephone and telephone the Household, and somebody at the Household would telephone Dame M, and Dame M would telephone Dr Brooks, and Dr Brooks would telephone Mrs Lockyer; and in September a girl from Baltimore who played the cello would be put somewhere else, in the G’s or the J’s or another homeroom, by arrangement, and would not be told why; and nor would anybody else; except that everybody would.

It would take about forty minutes. He had seen the Household do harder things in less.

“Sir?” said Castellanos.

Frederick looked at him.

Castellanos had not moved. He was sitting in the chair by the window with his large hands on his knees and his coffee on the sill, and he was looking at Frederick with no expression at all; the way he had looked at the man with the van outside the bakery on Canal Street; waiting.

He was not going to ask either, Frederick understood. He was going to sit there and wait, for as long as it took, for Frederick to say whatever it was or not say it; and he was not going to help.

“Nothing,” said Frederick.

“Right you are, sir,” said Castellanos.

Mr Pavlik held out the paper bag. There was a biscuit in it, at the bottom, a ginger one, in a twist of greaseproof paper.

“Biscuit,” said Mr Pavlik. It was the first word Frederick had ever heard him say.

Frederick took it.

“Thank you,” he said.

He went back across the yard in the heat, with the biscuit, to the bell.

---

Chemistry was on Tuesdays and Fridays. But it was the last week, and the timetable had given up, and on the Thursday afternoon the seventh grade was sent back to Room 14 for the last lesson, for what Mr Abernathy called demonstrations.

It was the same room, and the same desks, and the same order, the order of the list, from the door to the windows, back to front; Mr Abernathy taught his chemistry in his homeroom and saw no reason to move anybody for it. And because it was the last week he had given up on the syllabus too, and was doing his demonstrations, which meant standing at the bench at the front in his brown jacket with a pair of goggles pushed up on his forehead, setting fire to things in small quantities and saying what they were, while the room watched and the radiators said nothing.

He had set fire to magnesium, which went white and made everybody look away. He had set fire to copper, which went green, and made Grant say cool, and was told that it was not cool, it was copper. He had set fire to something in a dish that went a colour Frederick did not have a name for, in English or Swedish, and had said strontium and nothing else.

At five to three he was holding a test tube over a flame, with his left hand, the one with the scar across the back of it from the knuckles to the wrist, and saying “Hydrogen,” and about to do something with a splint; when the door of Room 14 opened, and Mrs Lockyer was standing in it, with the clipboard.

---

“Mr Abernathy,” she said. “Forgive me. Again.”

Mr Abernathy looked at her, with the goggles on his forehead and the test tube in his hand.

He put the test tube in the rack. He turned off the gas. He did it slowly, the way he did the register, as though each thing had to be done before the next could be begun.

“Mrs Lockyer,” he said.

She came in. She took a sheet off the clipboard; not the list from the morning; a different sheet, larger, folded once. She unfolded it on the bench at the front, beside the rack and the dish of strontium, which was still smoking a little; and Frederick, by the window, three from the back, could see that it was a plan of the room. Of Room 14. The desks, drawn in rows, little rectangles, from the door to the windows, back to front; and in each little rectangle, in her small upright print, a name.

“For September,” said Mrs Lockyer. “Drawn up from the list. Every form teacher has one. They are to be pinned inside the door, on the first day, so that the pupils can find their places.” She smoothed it on the bench. “This is yours.”

Mr Abernathy looked down at it.

He looked at it for a long time. The room did not breathe. Twenty-seven people sat at their desks in the order of the list and looked at a man in a brown jacket with goggles on his forehead looking at a sheet of paper, and nobody looked at the desk by the window, three from the back, or the one beside it; so hard, all of them, that Frederick could hear it.

Mr Abernathy looked up from the plan.

“I would prefer not to,” he said.

---

There was a silence in Room 14.

Mrs Lockyer looked at him over her spectacles.

“I beg your pardon, Mr Abernathy?”

“I would prefer not to, Mrs Lockyer,” said Mr Abernathy. He left the pause after it, the length of a breath, the pause he left after every name. “Pin it.”

“The seating follows the form list,” said Mrs Lockyer. “It has followed the form list since before you came to this room.”

“In the seventh grade.” Mr Abernathy folded his arms. The scar on the back of his left hand was very white in the light from the windows. “In the seventh grade nobody knows anybody, and an alphabet is as good a way as any of beginning. Better than most. It is fair. It is not personal. Nobody has chosen anything.” He looked down at the plan. “That was what you said, I think. On the steps. On the second of September. I was standing at the bottom of them, with my card.”

Mrs Lockyer did not say anything.

“Nobody is going to change anything,” said Mr Abernathy. “You said that too. I remember it particularly. I thought at the time it was very well put.” He looked at her. “I am holding you to it, Mrs Lockyer. Nobody is going to change anything. Including the seating.”

---

Mrs Lockyer looked at him for a long time.

Frederick, by the window, with his hands flat on the lid of his desk, did not move. Beside him, Theo did not move. Nobody in the room moved at all, except the smoke from the dish of strontium, which went up, very slowly, in a thin grey thread, in the still air, and spread out against the ceiling.

“And Miss Hargreaves?” said Mrs Lockyer.

“Miss Hargreaves,” said Mr Abernathy, “may have the desk by the door. Front.” He put one finger on the plan, on the little rectangle nearest the door. “Where Miss Abrams is now. By the radiator.”

He looked across the room, at the radiator under the window by the door, the one nearest to Miss Abrams’s desk; which was cold now, and had been since April, and which every person in the room knew, because they had been in the room in January, was one of the four that worked.

“She is new,” said Mr Abernathy. “New people should sit by the door. Where they can see who comes in. And by the warm.” He took his finger off the plan. “She is coming from Baltimore, I am told, and she will feel the cold in January, and she will want to be near the four.” He paused. “Miss Abrams has been cold since Christmas. She can have the window.”

Miss Abrams, by the door, at the front, turned round in her seat and looked at him with an expression of a girl who has been cold since Christmas and has never told anybody.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

“Not at all,” said Mr Abernathy. He looked at Mrs Lockyer. “Everybody else,” he said, “stays where they are.”

He did not look at the desk by the window, three from the back. He did not look at the one beside it. He did not look anywhere near them, not once, all the way through, from I would prefer not to to where they are. He looked at Mrs Lockyer, and the plan, and the radiator, and Miss Abrams; and Frederick, by the window, watching him not look, understood that that was the whole of it; that a man with a scar on the back of his hand had found the one way to do it that was not about anybody at all.

---

Mrs Lockyer looked down at the plan on the bench.

She looked at it for some time. Then she took a pen from the clip at the top of the clipboard, and uncapped it, and bent over the plan; and wrote something, small, at the top of it, in her upright print, above the little rectangles; and capped the pen.

“By arrangement with the form teacher,” she said. “That is what I shall write.” She folded the plan in half and put it back under the clip. “On the original. In the office.”

“Thank you, Mrs Lockyer.”

She went to the door. She stopped in it, with the clipboard against her chest, and turned round, and looked at Mr Abernathy at the bench with the goggles on his forehead.

“Other teachers will be sent the list, Mr Abernathy,” she said. “As usual. What they do with it is a matter for them.”

“It always is,” said Mr Abernathy.

Mrs Lockyer looked at him a moment longer.

Then she looked at the room. All of it; the rows, from the door to the windows, back to front, every desk, every face, in order; the way she had looked at a crowd on a set of steps on the first morning and silenced it without trying. And for one moment, which Frederick was not sure he had seen, her eyes reached the desk by the window, three from the back, and the one beside it; and stayed there, for about the length of one of Mr Abernathy’s pauses; and something happened at the corner of her mouth, very small, like a clerical error, and was corrected.

“Good afternoon,” said Mrs Lockyer, and went.

---

Mr Abernathy turned the gas back on.

He took the test tube out of the rack. He pulled the goggles down off his forehead, over his eyes. He held the test tube over the flame, with his left hand, the one with the scar; and took a splint from the jar, and lit it, and held it to the mouth of the tube.

“Hydrogen,” he said.

There was a small, sharp, ridiculous sound, like somebody saying pop in a very empty church.

Grant said cool.

“It is not cool, Mr Grant,” said Mr Abernathy. “It is hydrogen.” He put the test tube back in the rack and pushed the goggles up. “Homework,” he said. “There is none. It is the last week. Go home.”

The bell went.

---

At the bike racks, Theo did up a shoelace that did not need doing up.

Frederick stood beside him. The yard was emptying round them, into the heat, towards the gate and the buses and the stop by the bike racks where a 22 was coming in, two minutes late, from Fourteenth Street; and beyond the bins, at the side gate, by Mr Obi in his fluorescent vest, a long dark car had drawn up, early, because it was Thursday, and in the back of it, by the window, there was a woman with fair hair, reading something, who had not looked up.

“He preferred not,” said Theo, to the shoelace.

“Yes.”

“I’m going to prefer not,” said Theo. “All summer. To everything.” He pulled the shoelace tight. “Kate’s going to say Theo, empty the bin, and I’m going to say I would prefer not to. And Mum’s going to say Theo, your room, and I’m going to say I would prefer not to.” He considered. “And Mum’s going to kill me.”

“Probably.”

Theo stood up. He picked up his bag, and put it on his shoulder, with the front pocket, the one with the zip, against his side.

He did not say anything about Hargreaves, or the list, or the seating plan, or the morning, or the custodian’s office, which he could see from the wall, and must have seen Frederick go into, and come out of, with a biscuit.

“You didn’t ask,” he said.

“No.”

Theo looked at him for about three seconds. Steadily.

“Nor did I,” he said.

And then he looked past Frederick, at the long dark car by the bins, and the woman with the fair hair in the back of it, who had put down whatever she was reading, and was looking, now, through the window, at the two of them by the bike racks.

Theo lifted his hand. Not a finger; the whole hand, palm out, at about the height of his shoulder, the way you wave at somebody’s mother.

In the back of the car, the Queen of Sweden lifted hers.

“Tomorrow,” said Theo. “Ten to eight. Last day.” He hitched the bag. “Don’t be late. I’ve got something to do.”

And he went to the stop.

---

“Tell me,” said his mother, in the car, in Swedish, as they turned out of the side gate past the bins. “In order.”

He told her, in order. All of it. Mrs Lockyer in the door at nineteen minutes past eight, and the sheet, and the line under his name, and the arithmetic. Mr Ferrante’s eye. Baltimore, and the cello, and the right to the H’s, and Devon Price going red. Priya. The custodian’s office, and Castellanos not asking, and the biscuit. And the plan on the bench at five to three, beside the strontium, and what Mr Abernathy had said, every word, in the right order, with the pauses.

His mother listened to all of it without saying anything, looking out of the window at the road, with her hands in her lap.

When he got to I would prefer not to, she turned her head and looked at him.

When he got to I am holding you to it, she put one hand over her mouth.

When he got to the radiator, and Miss Abrams, she took it away again, and looked out of the window, at the river going past, and did not say anything for a long time.

“Would you have asked?” she said, at last, to the window. “If he hadn’t?”

Frederick thought about the doorway, and the kettle, and the chair, and Castellanos’s large hands on his knees, waiting; and the forty minutes.

“No,” he said.

“I know,” said his mother.

She looked at him then. The look she gave him on the first morning of every school year, at a quarter past seven, in her dressing gown; checking a list. She reached across the back seat and put her hand on his hair, and flattened a piece of it that had not, in her view, settled.

“Och brevet?” she said. And the letter?

“Not signed.”

“Tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” said Frederick. “He said he’s got something to do.”

His mother took her hand away. She looked out of the window again, at the river, and the bridge, and the Axis coming, and the Palace at the end of it, white in the heat.

“Det ordnar sig,” she said. It will sort itself out.

She said it the way she said everything she was sure of; quietly, to the window, as though it had been decided some time ago, by somebody else, and she was only passing it on.