Home Opener

The T-shirt was gold, and on the back of it, in maroon capitals a foot high, it said FIRST YEAR.

“No,” said Frederick.

“Everybody wears it,” said Priya. She was at the door of three hundred and twelve with a box of them on her hip, a ticket tucked into each one. “First-years in gold, in the Furnace, the whole game, standing. If you sit down a senior comes and stands next to you.”

“What does the senior do?”

“Stands next to you,” said Priya, “until you stand up.”

She held another one out across the room, toward the bed by the window, and Tyler lifted one side of the headphones and looked at it.

“What is it?”

“Football. The home opener. It’s Nebraska. It’s the whole floor.” She shook the shirt a little. “It’s a hundred and four at kickoff, but the stadium’s a cooling place, so it’s actually colder than here.”

“It’s sixty-eight in here,” said Tyler, who kept the room at sixty-eight.

“It’s got the biggest screen in the March,” said Priya.

There was a pause. Tyler looked at the shirt, and at his own two screens, on which the snow was falling, and at the shirt again, with the expression of a man who has been told that there is a larger fire somewhere.

“How big?”

“A hundred and twenty feet,” said Priya, who had said it before.

Tyler took the shirt.

---

The stadium had been open since one.

It stood down in the butte country by the lake, a great bowl dug half into the ground, and on the hottest Saturdays the law made it a public cooling place from one o’clock, so that by five, when the third floor of Palo Verde Hall came down the hill in its gold, with Rhys in front and Sam at the back, it had been full for hours of people who were not there for the football at all. Old men in folding chairs under the misting fans. Families with coolers. A woman asleep on a bench with a baby asleep on her. In the long tunnels under the stands the cold air came out of grilles in the concrete like breath, and every forty yards there was a trestle table with a red sign over it in English and Spanish, FREE DRINKING WATER, BY LAW, and a volunteer in a maroon apron filling paper cups from a steel urn as fast as people could take them.

A man in a red shirt was standing at the first one with his wallet out.

“How much?”

“It’s free,” said the volunteer.

“Okay, but how much?”

“It’s the law.”

The man looked at her. He was large and pink and very wet, with a large white N on his shirt, and had clearly flown in that morning from somewhere with a different arrangement.

“What is?”

“Water,” said the volunteer, and gave him two cups, and he stood there with one in each hand as though he had been given something very strange in a foreign country and did not want to be rude, and drank them both, and said, “Huh,” exactly the way Tyler said it, and went back to the end of the queue.

“Nebraska,” said Sam, behind Frederick, with something like sympathy. “Ninth in the Realm. Sixty-one degrees in Lincoln this morning. I checked.”

“Why?”

“In case,” said Sam.

---

The Furnace was the north end, behind the goal, a great steep bank of seats that went up from the wall above the end zone almost to the sky, gold at the bottom where the first-years were, four thousand of them, standing, with the seniors in maroon above them all the way up like a weather front.

There was a woman on the wall at the front with a megaphone, in a gold wig and maroon paint to the elbows, with her back to the field, and it was Kaylee Brandt-Ortiz.

Rhys made a small sound.

“FIRST YEARS,” said the megaphone.

The gold rows said something.

“That was bad. That was Tucson. FIRST YEARS.”

Louder.

“Okay. Some of you were at the Wright.” Kaylee paused, and it was the pause of a woman who had spent a fortnight being talked to by Dev. “So. Corrections.” She held up a finger. “Eighteen. Eighty. Five.”

Beside Frederick, Sam lifted one hand off the rail with three fingers up, and put one of them down.

“The Diet,” said Kaylee. “Not the King. The first March Diet gave Tucson the university and gave us a school for teachers.” Sam put the second finger down. “And our founders did not say we will teach Tucson.” She took a breath that the whole Furnace could hear. “They said, we will teach the teachers.” A silence in the gold. “I know. I know. It’s not a chant. Deal with it.”

Sam put the third finger down.

“She’s good,” said Rhys, quietly, as though at a graveside.

“So here’s what you need,” said Kaylee, and lifted her free hand with three fingers up and crooked, like the three prongs of the fork on the emblem. “That’s the fork. Three fingers. Forks up when we score. Forks up when they miss. Forks up when you don’t know what’s happening, because you won’t. And when they score, and their people go up, and they think they’ve got us, I’m going to ask you a question, and you are going to answer it like you mean it.” She lifted the megaphone. “WHO ARE WE?”

“THE BOOBY PRIZE,” said four thousand first-years, who had been in the Wright.

“They meant it as an insult,” said the megaphone. “In eighteen eighty-five. In the Diet. WHO ARE WE?”

“THE BOOBY PRIZE!” said Frederick, out loud, with four thousand other people, and found that he was grinning so hard it hurt. Kaylee did not look at the sixth row once, with enormous concentration.

---

The screen hung at the far end, over the south stands, a hundred and twenty feet of it, and at that moment it was showing the Furnace. The camera came along the gold rows, face by face, and Frederick looked at his shoes until it had gone past, and Rhys shifted a little to the left without seeming to, so that a tall fair officer of the Royal Protection Service was between the King and a hundred and twenty feet of light.

Tyler watched it go by with deep satisfaction.

“That’s a good screen.”

“The field’s down there,” said Frederick.

“Yeah, but it’s small.”

---

At twenty-five past seven, with the sky over the mountains gone a long sore red and the floodlights on, the bands came out and the whole stadium got up. The announcer said it was a hundred and four degrees, and then said the Index, which was lower, and asked them to stand for the national anthem, and sixty-five thousand people who were already standing stood a little more.

The bands played the Battle Hymn, the first verse and the refrain, the short form for sport, and the bowl sang it, sixty-five thousand voices going up into the dark over the floodlights, the Nebraskans in red in the south-east corner and the March in maroon and gold, and Frederick stood in the Furnace and sang it with them. He had sung it, he supposed, two hundred times. He had never sung it from inside it, as one of the people it was about, with nobody looking to see whether he knew the words.

When it was over the bands lowered their instruments and the stadium began to sit, and nothing else was played.

“No God Save the King,” said Rhys, out of the side of his mouth, with satisfaction.

“I’m not here.”

“You’re here.”

“Not officially.”

“There was a memo,” said Sam, from beyond Tyler, without looking round. “In June. Household to the university. The King attending a fixture as a student is not present for the purposes of the royal anthem.” He considered the field. “It’s a good memo. It’s very short.”

Frederick looked down at the captains walking out for the coin, small and bright under the lights, and thought about a man in an office in New Westminster writing in June, in one sentence, that he was not there. It was, he thought, the nicest thing anybody in the Household had ever done for him.

---

He did not understand very much of the game.

He understood that the Sun Devils were in maroon and Nebraska in white and red and very much larger, and that Nebraska scored first, in about four minutes, by running at the Sun Devils in a straight line until the Sun Devils got out of the way; and that when they did the south-east corner went up in red, and four thousand first-years turned to Kaylee, and Kaylee lifted the megaphone.

“WHO ARE WE?”

“THE BOOBY PRIZE!”

The red corner stopped. You could see it stop across the whole width of the stadium, a corner of large pink people looking at each other, trying to work out whether that had been an insult, and to whom, and why the people who had said it looked so pleased.

He understood that it was hot, and did not stop being hot. Between every series of downs a boy in a maroon apron came along behind them with a bucket of iced towels and dropped one round the neck of anybody who looked as though they needed it, and twice it was Frederick, and the cold made him gasp. At the end of the first half a girl two rows down sat suddenly in the middle of a cheer, very white, and the senior behind her who was supposed to make her stand knelt beside her instead with a cup of water and put up a hand, and a medic came up the steps two at a time.

“That’s the law as well,” said Sam. “They can’t make you stand if the Index is over.”

“Is it over?”

“For her it is,” said Sam.

And he understood that at some point in the third quarter something changed, the way the light changes in a room, and the Sun Devils began to win. A boy with twenty-two on his back caught a ball that had been thrown at somebody else and ran with it the whole length of the field, toward the Furnace, with the whole of Nebraska behind him and getting further behind, and the noise began low down in the gold and came up through the maroon to the top of the stand and went out over the lip into the night, and he crossed the line right below them and fell over and lay on his back in the end zone with the ball on his chest, and the Furnace went up.

Frederick went up with it. He did not decide to. He found that he was off his feet with his fork in the air, and that Tyler, beside him, who had watched the entire run on the screen at the far end and not once looked at the field, had his fork up as well, in the wrong hand.

“Did you see it? On the replay? They had the angle from the top.”

“He was right there,” said Frederick, pointing down at the boy in the end zone, thirty feet away.

Tyler looked down at the field briefly, as though at a rumour.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s better on the replay.”

---

It was thirty-four to twenty with forty seconds left, and the seniors had begun to move.

He felt it before he understood it. The maroon rows above them had begun to come down, a step at a time, the way a tide comes in, pressing the gold gently forward toward the wall, and Kaylee was standing on the wall with her arms spread and was not saying anything into the megaphone at all, only smiling. Along the foot of the Furnace a line of stewards in yellow jackets had appeared from nowhere with their backs to the wall and their arms folded and the faces of men who had stood there before and knew exactly how it ended.

“Oh,” said Frederick. “They’re going to…”

A hand closed on his right arm, above the elbow, quite gently.

Another closed on his left.

Rhys was looking at the field. Sam, who had come round Tyler at some point without anybody noticing, was looking at the field as well.

“No,” said Rhys.

“Everybody’s going.”

“Yes.”

“Everybody.”

“Sixty thousand people over a wall four feet high,” said Sam. “Somebody always goes under.” He did not let go. “Sergeant says no field. She said it in June. She said it again at half time. She’s in the press box with binoculars and she can see your elbow.”

“It’s a football field.”

“It’s a crush,” said Rhys, and for once there was no smile in it at all.

The clock went to zero, and the Furnace went over the wall.

It went the way water goes over a weir, all at once and then continuously, gold first and maroon after, down onto the grass in a long falling roar, past the stewards, who stood aside with great dignity at exactly the right moment as if they had arranged it, and up the field in a flood toward the players and the great painted Sun Devil at the fifty, thousands of them, running, with their forks up, while the band played and the screen showed all of it from above, a gold and maroon tide pouring across a green field under the lights.

Tyler went with it.

Frederick saw him look at the screen, and at the wall, and at the screen again, and then, with a face of total surprise, as though his legs had made a decision without consulting him, climb over the seat in front and go down the steps and over the wall with the sweatshirt tied round his waist, and drop onto the grass, and be gone.

And then the section was empty.

---

It was a great steep bank of empty seats going up into the dark, with paper cups rolling about in it and towels and a single flip-flop and a gold wig on a step, and in the sixth row of it the King of fourteen countries stood between two officers of his protection, with their hands on his arms, and looked at the field.

Rhys let go first. Then Sam.

“Sorry,” said Rhys.

“It’s all right.”

“It’s not,” said Rhys. “But sorry.”

Down on the field the tide had become a lake, a great slow-turning crowd of gold and maroon round the Sun Devil at the fifty, with the players held up somewhere inside it on people’s shoulders, and somebody had let off a maroon smoke flare that hung over the whole thing in the floodlights like a flag.

There was one other person left. She was three rows up, a girl in a gold shirt with her left leg in a boot to the knee and a pair of crutches across her lap, and she was looking at the field with exactly the expression he could feel on his own face. Then she looked down at him, and at Rhys and Sam on either side.

“You too?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Ankle.” She tapped the boot with a crutch. “What’ve you got?”

Frederick thought about it.

“Them,” he said, and nodded at Rhys and Sam.

The girl looked at Rhys and Sam, standing in a deserted grandstand in gold T-shirts with their arms folded and their eyes on the field and the lanyards on their chests exactly where other people wore warrant cards.

“Bad luck,” she said, with feeling, and went back to watching.

---

On the screen at the far end the camera had come down out of the sky and was moving through the crowd on the field at head height, looking for faces.

It found a broad pale boy with a round face in a gold FIRST YEAR shirt, standing quite still in the middle of eleven thousand people who were jumping, and looking straight up at the camera with an expression of complete astonishment. Then he saw himself. Frederick watched it happen, a hundred and twenty feet high: the boy understanding that the face on the screen was his own, and his mouth opening, and his hand coming up, slowly, the wrong hand, with three fingers crooked, toward the screen, toward himself.

The stadium cheered him. It did not know who he was. It did not need to.

“That’s Tyler,” said Sam.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

He stood in the empty Furnace and watched his roommate on the screen for the eight seconds the camera stayed on him, and found that he was laughing, and that it had very nearly turned into something else on the way out, and had not.

---

Tyler found them under the arcades on the way back, at a quarter to eleven, at ninety-six degrees. He had grass on both knees and somebody else’s maroon paint on his face, and the sweatshirt was round his neck, inside out, with a maroon handprint on the back of it that he could not account for. He walked beside them for a while without saying anything, breathing hard.

“Did you see?” he said at last.

“I saw.”

“I was on the screen.”

“You were.”

“I’ve never been on a screen,” said Tyler, slowly, as if it were a fact about the world he had only that evening discovered. “My whole life. I’ve been on, like, every screen. I’ve never been on one.” He walked. “It was so big.”

At the desk in the lobby Mr Luna looked up over his glasses at the four of them, and at the grass on Tyler’s knees, and said, “Thirty-four twenty, son,” to nobody in particular, and wrote something on the clipboard, and Tyler went up the forty-five steps two at a time, which Frederick had not seen him do before, and was in the room with the headphones on before anybody else had reached the second floor.

---

He read the text from his mother again at midnight, in bed, with the room at sixty-eight and Tyler at the screens telling somebody in Finland about the screen.

I am watching on the computer. I can see a great many students in yellow. I cannot see you. Good.

It had come at ten to eight, in the first quarter. He had read it in the Furnace and laughed and put it away, and had not thought about it again until the walk home, under the arcades, when he had worked out, for no reason, the way you work out a sum without meaning to, that ten to eight in Tempe was ten to four in the morning in London.

He wrote back.

Why were you up at four?

The answer came at once. It was eight in the morning there now.

I wanted to see your game.

You hate football.

I hate all football equally. It is a principle. And then, a moment later, before he had answered: Old women do not sleep, Fredde. Go to sleep. You are young and it is your job.

He lay and looked at it. She was fifty-nine. She had never in his life called herself old, not even as a joke, and he lay in the dark with the snow falling on the two screens three yards away and turned the word over, and could not find anything under it, and decided that it was a joke after all.

Goodnight, Mamma.

Goodnight. Yellow is very nice on a crowd.

“It’s gold,” he said, aloud, to the phone, and Tyler lifted one side of the headphones and said, “What?” and he said, “Nothing,” and Tyler said, “I was on the screen,” as if he had only just remembered, and put the headphones back on.