Booby Prize

Priya knocked at a quarter to eight.

She knocked on every door on the third floor, one after another, all the way down the corridor, four knocks each, and said through every door the same thing, in the voice of a junior in nursing who had been up since six and had a clipboard: “Sun Devil Welcome! Nine o’clock! At the Wright! It’s mandatory! There’s a wristband check!”

Frederick was dressed. He had been dressed since half past six, because he had not really slept, the way nobody really sleeps the first night in a new place, and had lain in the dark from five listening to Tyler breathe. Tyler had gone to sleep at about four. Frederick knew, because at four the keys had stopped and Tyler had said into the microphone, very quietly, “Okay. Okay, Jussi’s got it. Night,” and taken the headphones off and lain down on the window bed in the hooded sweatshirt and been asleep, as far as Frederick could tell, before his head arrived on the pillow.

He was asleep now. The snow was still falling on the two screens.

“Tyler.”

Nothing.

“Tyler.”

A sound came out of the hood.

“It’s orientation. At nine. It’s mandatory.”

The hood turned over, slowly, like a seal on a beach.

“Is it mandatory,” said Tyler, from inside it, “or is it, like, mandatory mandatory?”

Priya, through the door, on her way back up the corridor, without stopping: “There’s a free T-shirt!”

The hood was still for a moment.

Then Tyler sat up.

---

They walked to the Wright under the arcades, which ran from building to building so that you could cross most of the campus without stepping into the sun, because the Charter of the March, a sign on a pillar explained, said that shade was a right. It was half past eight and ninety-eight degrees.

Tyler walked beside him with his eyes screwed up, in the sweatshirt.

“Aren’t you hot?”

“I’m boiling.” Tyler did not take it off. “I haven’t been outside since the airport.” He looked at the sun in the gap between two pillars as though it had said something to him personally. “It’s so bright.”

“It’s the sun.”

“I know what it is,” said Tyler.

Rhys and Sam walked ten yards behind, Rhys with a folder and a highlighter, in case there was anything at orientation worth highlighting, and Sam with nothing at all, looking at the roofs.

---

The Wright was round.

It was round in every part, on purpose, as though the man who drew it had decided there would be no straight lines and kept his word: a great pink and sand-coloured drum ringed with arches, with gold discs round the top like a crown and two long curved arms reaching out across the grass on thin pillars, so that it looked less like a hall than like something that had landed. The Valley, the sign by the door said, called it the Wright, after the architect, who had drawn it in the last year of his life and never seen it built. It was the one building in the March, the sign said, on which nobody had ever been heard to disagree.

“It looks like a cake,” said Tyler.

“There,” said Frederick. “Somebody’s disagreed.”

Inside it was cool and dim and red, and the seats went up in long curves to the back, and there were two thousand people in them.

Two thousand first-years, in maroon, in shorts, with their wristbands on, talking, all of them at once, in a noise like surf. Frederick and Tyler sat in the third row of the second tier, on the aisle, because Tyler said he liked the aisle in case he needed to leave, and Rhys and Sam sat directly behind them, because that was where they were going to sit, and the girl who had walked into the wall with the lamp sat four rows further back and did not take her eyes off the back of Frederick’s head for an hour and a half.

---

The Dean of Students spoke first, about water.

She said to drink it. She said it eleven times, Sam said afterwards, though Frederick had stopped counting at seven. She said that the residence halls were dwellings under the law of the March, and that the law fixed the most heat a dwelling could lawfully hold, and that if their room was hotter than that they were to tell the desk, at once, at any hour, and not to be brave about it, because people had been brave about it before, in this university, and had died. She said it quite simply, and the surf went quiet for a moment, and then she said that no class met outdoors above the threshold, and that the threshold was measured where they stood and not at the airport, and the surf came back.

Then the President spoke, for four minutes, about the river, and sat down, and was the only speaker of the morning who stopped when she said she would.

And then a senior came out onto the stage, with a remote control in her hand, and stood in front of an enormous screen, on which there was a picture of a bird.

---

Her name was Kaylee Brandt-Ortiz. It said so on the screen, under the bird, and under her name it said Vice-President for Student Life. She was small and very brown from the sun and very sure of herself, in a gold T-shirt and a maroon skirt, and she held the remote control the way people hold a microphone at a wedding when they have been told they have three minutes and intend to have eleven.

“Hi!” said Kaylee Brandt-Ortiz.

Two thousand people said hi.

“Okay. So. I’m going to tell you a story. Every freshman at this university hears this story in their first week. Every freshman. Since forever. And it’s the story of who we are.” She pointed the remote at the screen. “This is a booby.”

On the screen, the bird looked at them. It was a large seabird, white and brown, with a long pointed beak and an expression of great stupidity, and enormous bright blue feet.

“It’s actually a really cool bird,” said Kaylee.

Somebody at the back whooped.

“So in eighteen ninety-five,” said Kaylee.

Behind Frederick, very quietly, Rhys made a noise like a man who has trodden on a plug.

“Eighty-five,” Rhys whispered.

On the screen behind Kaylee, the bird had given way to the seal of the university, enormous, maroon and gold: the sun coming up behind the butte, and the stepped path, and the river, and the open book, and round the ring the name of the university, and at the bottom, in large clear figures, 1885. Kaylee’s gold T-shirt had 1885 across the front of it as well.

Frederick did not turn round. He felt Sam, behind him, lift one hand, very slightly, off his knee, with one finger up.

“So in eighteen ninety-five,” said Kaylee Brandt-Ortiz, “when Arizona was, like, brand new, the King decided where everything was going to go. And the King gave Tucson the university. And he gave us,” she spread her arms, “a school. For teachers.”

The surf made a long low groan, the groan of two thousand people who had been told this was the story of who they were and did not like the beginning of it.

“The Diet,” whispered Rhys, in agony. “It was the Diet.”

Sam’s second finger went up.

Frederick sat very still, in the third row of the second tier of the Wright, with his hands on his knees, and looked at the seal, and thought about the first March Diet of 1885, which he had read about in December, in bed, at two in the morning, a sitting at Prescott that had given away a university and a teachers’ school in the same afternoon and gone home; and about the King of the day, his great-grandfather, who had been in London, and married that year, and told about it, if at all, some weeks afterwards, by letter, and had probably not known where Tempe was.

He did not say anything. It seemed to him that the first thing he ought to learn at the University of the March was how to sit in a room while somebody got his family wrong, and not mind.

He found that he did not mind at all.

“And everybody in Tucson laughed at us,” said Kaylee. “They said, in the actual government, out loud, that we got the booby prize. The loser’s prize. The prize you get for coming last.” She let that sit. “And do you know what our founders said? The week after? In the newspaper?”

She lifted the remote control over her head like a torch.

“We will teach Tucson!”

There was a moment’s silence in the Wright.

Then somebody near the front shouted it back, WE WILL TEACH TUCSON, and then somebody else, and then a whole block of the first tier, and then it caught, the way a thing catches in a hall of two thousand people who are eighteen and frightened and in a new place and want very badly to be told who they are, and it went round the curved rows and up the tiers to the back of the hall and came round again, louder, TEACH TUC-SON, TEACH TUC-SON, with stamping, so that the floor under Frederick’s feet shook.

Behind him Rhys had put his face in his folder.

“The teachers,” said Rhys, into the folder. “We will teach the teachers. It was in the newspaper.”

Sam’s third finger went up. Then Sam leaned forward, between Frederick and Tyler, and said, under the chanting, in the voice in which he did everything, the voice of a man reading out a column of figures that he has checked twice and found correct:

“Three.”

---

“So remember,” said Kaylee, when it had died down, “we are the booby prize.” She pointed the remote at them, at all of them, slowly, from one side of the hall to the other. “We came last. We got the loser’s school. And we are a hundred thousand strong.” She lowered the remote. “Who are we?”

“THE BOOBY PRIZE,” said two thousand people.

And Frederick, who had been the first prize every day of his life since before he could walk, in fourteen countries, from the moment he was registered at the Karolinska as Crown Prince to the moment the hundred-pound note came off the press with his face on it, found that he had said it too, out loud, with the rest of them, and meant it.

---

Kaylee had not finished.

“And okay, one more thing,” she said, and her voice changed, and became the voice of somebody leaving the script. “I know everybody’s thinking it. So I’m just going to say it.” She looked round the hall. “Yes. He’s here. Somewhere. In this room.”

The surf stopped.

“And we are going to be so normal about it,” said Kaylee Brandt-Ortiz.

Two thousand people turned round.

They did it all at once, the whole hall, every head, a great slow rustling turn like a field going over in a wind, and looked behind them, and to the sides, and up at the tiers, craning, half standing, whispering, where, where is he, is that him, no, where. Every head in the Wright turned except about thirty, which were the thirty nearest the third row of the second tier on the aisle, and which did not turn at all, and looked straight ahead at the stage with enormous concentration, because they knew exactly where he was and had known since a quarter to nine.

Tyler turned round.

He turned right round in his seat, with interest, and looked up at the back of the hall, and along the rows, and down at the first tier, screwing up his eyes.

“Where?” said Tyler.

“I don’t know,” said Frederick.

Tyler looked for a while longer. Then he turned back to the front.

“I don’t see him,” he said. He thought about it. “Wait. There’s a king? Here? Like an actual king?”

“Apparently.”

“Huh.” Tyler frowned at the stage, where Kaylee was saying something about the free T-shirts. “What does a king actually do, though?”

Frederick opened his mouth.

He had been asked it before, by a great many people, in a great many forms, by tutors and journalists and schoolchildren and, once, a deputy in the Riksdag, and he had a great many answers to it, of different lengths, for different rooms, and he chose, for the third row of the second tier of the Wright, the shortest and truest he had.

“Mostly,” he said, “he reads.”

“Hang on,” said Tyler.

His telephone had lit up on his knee. On the screen there was a small picture of a flame, guttering, and a line of red writing that said FIRE LOW. Tyler bent over it with his thumbs going, and his whole face had changed, gone narrow and urgent and far away, the face of a man in a blizzard.

“Jussi’s asleep,” said Tyler, to the telephone. “Who’s on wood? Who’s on wood?”

Frederick waited.

Tyler did not look up again until the end of the session.

---

After the Wright there were circles.

They were sent out of the hall in groups of twelve, by the colour on their wristbands, to rooms all over the campus, each with an orientation leader, and the circle with the green wristbands went to a room in a low building at the end of a long arcade, where the air conditioning was so cold that a girl from Yuma put on a cardigan, and the leader was a sophomore called Dev with a shaved head and a clipboard and the cheerful exhaustion of a man doing this for the fourth time that morning.

“Okay,” said Dev. “Name, where you’re from, and one fun fact. Go round.”

They went round.

A girl from Flagstaff with a twin. A boy from Sonora who could juggle. The girl from Yuma, whose fun fact was that she was cold. Then Rhys, who had been put in the green circle by a coincidence that Frederick suspected had cost somebody across the road a telephone call.

“Hey! Rhys. Wilmington.” Rhys smiled the practised smile. “Fun fact: I’ve read the Charter eleven times.”

There was a silence in the circle.

“Cover to cover,” said Rhys.

The silence went on.

“Cool,” said Dev, and moved his pen. “Next.”

“Sam,” said Sam. “Accounting.”

Dev waited.

“And a fun fact?”

Sam looked at him with great calm.

“That was it,” said Sam.

Dev looked at Sam for a moment, and then, being a sophomore who had done this four times that morning, wrote something on his clipboard and let it go.

“Tyler,” said Tyler. “Parma. Ohio.” He thought. “Fun fact, I’ve never seen a sunrise.”

The circle laughed.

“Like, on purpose,” said Tyler. “I’ve been up at sunrise. Like when I haven’t gone to bed yet. But I’ve never, like, gone to see one.”

“Never?” said Frederick.

Tyler looked at him across the circle with mild surprise, as though he had asked whether Tyler had ever been to the moon.

“Why would I?” said Tyler.

“Next,” said Dev.

It was Frederick.

The circle went very quiet. Not silent: quiet, the particular quiet of eleven people who all, except one, knew exactly who was sitting in the twelfth chair and had been waiting for an hour to hear what he would say. Dev’s pen had stopped moving. The girl from Yuma had her cardigan pulled up to her chin.

“Fred,” said Frederick. “New Westminster.”

He thought about a fun fact.

He had a great many. He had been anointed in an abbey from a spoon. He had a cousin who was an emperor and an aunt who was a queen. He had been on a coin since he was fifteen and a note since he was sixteen. He had more titles than he had ever managed to count on a long flight, and had once been made colonel of something that rode camels.

“I once flooded a cellar,” said Frederick, “with forty pints of beer.”

The circle laughed. It laughed properly, with relief, eleven people at once, and the girl from Yuma said, “Oh my God, I saw the picture,” and then went red and put her face in the cardigan.

Tyler looked appalled.

“Dude,” said Tyler. “That’s a waste.”

---

Kaylee Brandt-Ortiz found him at the T-shirt table.

The T-shirts were on trestles in the shade of the long arms of the Wright, in piles by size, maroon, with THE BOOBY PRIZE across the front in gold and 1885 across the back, and Tyler had taken three, one to wear and two, he said, to sleep in, and was standing in the shade putting the first one on over the sweatshirt. Frederick had taken one. He was folding it when somebody said, at his elbow, in a small voice, “Hi.”

She was still holding the remote control. She did not seem to know she was holding it.

“Hi,” said Frederick.

“I’m so sorry,” said Kaylee Brandt-Ortiz.

“What for?”

“Dev told me. Just now. Dev said you were in the third row.” She closed her eyes. “I said the King gave the university to Tucson.”

“It was the Diet.”

“I know that now. Dev told me. Dev said it’s in, like, every book.” She opened her eyes again. “Is that, like. Is that a crime? Saying it was you?”

“It wasn’t me. It was my great-grandfather.”

“Is it a crime saying it was him?”

Frederick considered it.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’d have to ask.”

“Ask who?”

He looked at her for a moment, and found that he did not know what the honest answer to that was, and that it was very funny, and that he could not say why to anybody standing at a T-shirt table in the shade at a hundred and three degrees.

“A lawyer,” he said.

Kaylee looked relieved. Then she looked at the remote control in her hand, as if noticing it for the first time, and then at him again, with new horror.

“And eighteen ninety-five.”

“It’s on your shirt.”

She looked down at her shirt. 1885.

“Oh my God,” said Kaylee Brandt-Ortiz.

“It’s all right.”

“And teach Tucson.” She looked at him almost pleadingly. “Was that wrong as well? Dev said it was wrong as well. Dev said it was in the newspaper. In eighteen eighty-five.”

“It was we will teach the teachers.”

Kaylee stared at him.

“Teach the teachers?”

“Yes.”

“That’s so much worse.”

“I think it’s better.”

“It’s so much less of a chant,” said Kaylee Brandt-Ortiz, in despair, and went away across the grass in the heat with the remote control, still holding it, toward the long arm of the Wright, where Dev was waiting with his clipboard and an expression of deep and weary sympathy.

---

They walked back at noon, at a hundred and seven degrees, Tyler in the T-shirt over the sweatshirt, his face gone the colour of both.

“Take the sweatshirt off,” said Frederick.

“I’m good.”

“You’re maroon.”

“It’s school spirit,” said Tyler, and walked on, in both.

Halfway along the long arcade by the library, Tyler stopped in the shade by a pillar and drank half a Glacier from his pocket in one go and wiped his mouth.

“Did you see him?” he said. “In the end?”

“Who?”

“The king guy.”

Frederick looked at the pillar.

“No,” he said.

“Me neither.” Tyler screwed the top back on. “I looked, though.” He considered. “He’s probably, like, at the back. With guys.”

“Probably.”

“I’d hate that,” said Tyler, with sudden feeling, and walked on.

---

His telephone went in the lobby of Palo Verde Hall, under the cold grille, by the lift that was still out of service. It was a text, and it was from London, where it was eight in the evening.

How was the booby prize? Tell me everything. I am in bed with my cold and very bored. M.

He stood in the lobby and wrote back. He told her about the bird, and the seal, and 1895, and the King of the day being blamed, and teach Tucson, and two thousand people saying the booby prize in a round pink hall, and that he had said it too. He did not tell her about Tyler turning round in his seat to look for him. He was saving that. He wanted to tell her that one himself, out loud, on the telephone, so that he could hear her laugh, which was rare, and which when it came the room heard.

The answer came in under a minute.

Good. Now drink some water. M.

He looked at it.

Then at the time on the screen, and then he did the sum, and it was eight o’clock in the evening in London, in August, with the light still in the sky over the roofs, and his mother, who was called Early behind her back by the household at Columbia Palace and knew it, and who had not once in his life gone to bed before eleven, was in bed.

With a cold.

He put the telephone in his pocket and went up the forty-five steps.