What the Others Know

There were eleven of them across the road from the school gate, which was four more than on an ordinary morning and nine fewer than on the second of October.

Frederick counted them from the back of the car while Castellanos waited for the crossing. They stood in a line along the railings of the little park opposite, in coats, with their cameras held low against their stomachs or hung by the strap from one shoulder, pointing at the pavement. One of them was drinking coffee from a paper cup. One of them was talking on a telephone and laughing about something that was not him. Nobody lifted a camera. Nobody ever did, at the school, not since he was five, except on four days in September and October that everybody had agreed afterwards not to count.

“Same as usual, sir?” said Castellanos.

“Same as usual.”

The same as usual was the side gate, where the custodian kept the bins, and the walk round the back of the gym to the main building, so that he arrived at the doors from the schoolyard side, like anybody who had come on the bus. Castellanos walked ten yards behind him as far as the corner of the gym and then stopped and stood there, where he would stand, on and off, until half past three, in the small office by the custodian’s room that had been his since the first week at Ellicott and had a kettle and a chair and a window onto the car park.

At the corner of the gym Frederick turned round.

“Ray.”

Castellanos looked at him. Frederick had never called him Ray before, at school or anywhere, and he did not know why he had done it now.

“Sir?”

“Nothing. Thank you.”

“Sir,” said Castellanos, and looked at the roof of the gym as if he had seen a bird on it.

---

The playground was full and loud, the way it always was at twenty to nine, and it went quiet in a ring round him as he crossed it. Not all at once. It went quiet the way water goes still round a stone, outward, and then it went loud again behind him when he had passed, louder than before, as if everybody had been holding their breath and had decided to use it.

He kept walking. He had learned in September that the only thing to do was to keep walking at the same speed, and to look at the doors, and not to look at anybody’s face, because if you looked at a face you saw what it knew.

Theo was by the doors, with his bag on one shoulder and his hands in his pockets, leaning against the wall by the fire extinguisher where he always leaned.

“Morning,” said Theo.

“Morning.”

“You’re late.”

“I’m not late. It’s twenty to.”

“Late for you.” Theo pushed himself off the wall. “Come on. Abernathy’s doing a thing with the radiators again.”

That was all. They went in together. Frederick understood, walking down the corridor beside him, that Theo had been standing by the fire extinguisher since half past eight so that Frederick would have somewhere to walk to across the schoolyard that was not the doors, and that he would never say so, and that if Frederick ever said so Theo would say he had been there for the radiators.

---

Mr Abernathy’s homeroom was on the first floor, at the end, with a radiator under each window that banged in the mornings and two that didn’t work at all. Mr Abernathy taught chemistry and had been at Ellicott for thirty-one years, and he wore the same brown jacket with leather on the elbows that he had worn, Theo said, in a photograph in the hall from 1998, and he was on his knees by the nearest radiator with a key when they came in, bleeding it into a mug.

The room was nearly full. It went quiet when Frederick came in, the same as the schoolyard, and stayed quiet while he walked to his desk, which was in the second row by the window, next to Theo’s, because of the alphabet. He sat down. He took out his history and put it on the desk, for something to do with his hands.

He could feel them not looking at him. Twenty-eight people not looking at somebody is a kind of noise, and he had heard it before, in September, and it was no easier the second time. A girl in the front row, Carmen, had her telephone under the desk, and when he glanced at it he saw his own face on the screen, very small, beside an empty table, and she saw him see it and turned it over so fast that it fell off her knee onto the floor.

“Sorry,” she whispered, to nobody, and went red to the ears.

Mr Abernathy got up off his knees with the mug in one hand and the key in the other, and looked at the mug, and looked at the radiator, and said to the radiator, “That will do you,” and went to his desk.

He opened the roll book. He took his pen out of the inside pocket of the brown jacket. He did not look up.

“Abrams.”

“Here.”

“Bello.”

“Here.”

He went down the list in the voice he always used, a dry, flat, unhurried voice, the voice of a man who had read the same thirty names every morning for thirty-one years in different orders and had never found any of them surprising. Frederick listened to it coming down the alphabet towards him. Diaz. Eckhardt. Feeney. Gallagher. Grant. He found that he was holding his pen very tightly and made himself put it down.

“Hanover.”

It was exactly the same. The same voice, the same speed, the same small pause after it that was not a pause for him but the pause Mr Abernathy left after every name, to give the person time. Nobody in the room breathed.

“Here,” said Frederick.

“Hartigan.”

“Here,” said Theo.

“Ibrahim.”

And the roll went on, Ibrahim and Jansen and Kowalski, and somewhere around Moreno the room started breathing again, and by Novak somebody had dropped a pencil case and somebody else had laughed, and by the time Mr Abernathy closed the roll book and said, “Radiators are fixed, don’t touch them, the end,” it was an ordinary Thursday in a room on the first floor with two radiators that didn’t work.

Frederick looked at Mr Abernathy, who was writing something in the margin of the roll book and did not look back.

“He did that on purpose,” he said to Theo, very quietly, as they went out.

“Did what?”

“The voice.”

Theo considered it.

“Abernathy’s had the same voice since 1998,” he said. “It’s in the photo.”

---

Geometry was second period, in the math wing, in a room with a whiteboard that somebody had once written on in permanent marker, so that the ghost of a quadratic equation from some other year floated behind everything Mrs Pruitt drew on it.

Mrs Pruitt was new in September. She was small and quick and wore cardigans in colours that did not go together, on purpose, she said, so that she would always know which day it was by what she had on. She had come from a school in Baltimore and talked fast and drew fast and got cross with the board pens when they ran out, which was often, and kept a jar of them on her desk that were mostly dead. She called everybody by their first name, which no other teacher at Ellicott did, and on the first day of school she had come to the second row and said, “Frederick,” and then, “Is that right? Not Fred, not Freddie?” and he had said that Frederick was right, and Theo beside him had made a small noise into his sleeve, and she had looked at Theo and said, “And you’re Theo, not Theodore,” and Theo had said yes, and she had said, “Good. I’ll get it right first time, and then I won’t have to think about it again,” and she never had.

She did not look at him differently this morning. He watched for it and it was not there.

“Circles,” she said, and drew one, freehand, nearly round. “We’ve done chords. We’ve done tangents. Today we’re going to do angles, and I’m going to show you something that I think is the most beautiful thing in this whole course, and you’re not going to believe me, and then you’re going to prove it yourselves on Tuesday and you will believe me.” She drew a line across the circle through the middle. “This is a diameter. Write that down, Marcus, I know you know it, write it anyway.”

Marcus, at the back, wrote it down with a flourish, as if he were signing a contract.

She put a point on the edge of the circle and drew two lines from it to the ends of the diameter, so that there was a triangle inside the circle with its long side across the middle.

“Look at that angle,” she said, and tapped the point on the edge. “Don’t measure it. Just look. What do you think it is?”

Nobody said anything.

“Guess. Anybody. Nobody’s going to mark it.”

“Ninety?” said someone near the front.

“Why?”

“It looks like ninety.”

“It does look like ninety,” said Mrs Pruitt. “Now watch.” She rubbed out the point and put another one, further round, nearer the end of the diameter, and drew the two lines again, so that the triangle was long and thin. “And now?”

“Still ninety,” said Theo, not very loudly.

“Still ninety. Wherever you put it. Here, here, here.” She put three more points round the edge, fast, and drew the lines to each of them, so that the circle filled up with thin triangles all leaning on the same diameter, every one of them with its corner on the edge, every one of them square. “Every single time. You can put the point anywhere on the circle you like, and the angle won’t care. It’s always a right angle.” She stood back from the board. “That’s not an accident. That’s the circle telling you something about itself. On Tuesday you’re going to find out why.”

Frederick looked at the board. All the triangles, all the points, all of them square at the edge. He found that he liked it very much and could not have said why.

“Homework,” said Mrs Pruitt, “is to draw six of these, with a protractor, as accurately as you can, and measure the angle, and when it comes out at eighty-seven or ninety-two, which it will, write down why you think it did. That’s the real homework. The why.” She capped her pen, which had died anyway. “Ten minutes. Start.”

They started. The room went into the low working murmur of people with protractors, and Frederick drew a circle with the compass and a diameter with a ruler and put his point on the edge, and measured, and got eighty-nine.

The boy behind him leaned forward. It was Devon Price, who sat at the back with Marcus and was mostly interested in football and had never said more than six words to him in a year, and he leaned across the gap between the desks and whispered, so that only Frederick could hear, very fast, as if the words would go off if he held them too long:

“Are you going to be King?”

Frederick did not turn round. He looked at his circle, with its diameter and its point and its two lines, and the eighty-nine he had written beside it in pencil.

“I don’t know,” he said.

It was true. It was the truest thing anybody had asked him since Wednesday, and the truest thing he had said. His father had not decided. His father had asked. In fourteen capitals, people were looking things up.

There was a pause behind him.

“Oh,” said Devon Price. Then, after a moment, in a different voice, the voice of somebody who had expected an answer and had got a real one instead and did not know where to put it: “Okay. Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“What did you get? For the angle?”

“Eighty-nine.”

“I got ninety-four,” said Devon Price, and sat back, and Frederick heard him rub something out.

Mrs Pruitt was at the front, at her desk, testing board pens on the back of her hand. She did not look up. But when the ten minutes were over and she went round the room looking at everybody’s circles, she stopped at Frederick’s and looked at the eighty-nine and said, “Close. Your diameter’s a little bit off the centre. That’s the why,” and moved on to Devon’s, and said, “Ninety-four, Devon? Where’s your centre?” and Devon said he didn’t know, and she said, “No, I can see that,” and the room laughed, and Devon laughed too.

---

At lunch they sat where they always sat, at the long table by the window at the far end of the cafeteria, under the noticeboard with the rota for the chess club on it that nobody had looked at since September.

There were nine of them most days. Theo, and Frederick, and June and Felix, who had been his friends since they all started at Ellicott and whom the Household, at his asking, had never named to anybody; and Marcus and Devon from the back of the math room, who came and went; and three others from Theo’s football side, who sat at the end and talked about football and occasionally about the junior who had broken her wrist on the climbing wall in gym, which none of them would admit to having seen.

Today all nine were there, and two more Frederick didn’t know, who sat at the very end and looked at their food.

Nobody said anything about Wednesday.

He noticed it the way you notice a clock has stopped, by the space where the sound ought to be. They talked about the geometry. They talked about Devon’s ninety-four. Felix talked about his sister’s wedding in Delaware, which was in November and which he had been told he would wear a tie for, and about how he was not going to wear a tie, and June said he was going to wear a tie, and Felix said he would wear a tie when Theo wore a tie, and Theo said he had worn a tie once, to a funeral in Milwaukee, and it was fine, ties were fine, Felix should stop being a baby about the tie.

They talked about Halloween, which was Tuesday, and whether anybody was going to the thing at the community centre, which nobody was, because it was for Year Sevens.

They talked about Marcus’s trombone, which he had left on the bus on Monday and which the bus company had found and kept in a lost property office in the north-east of the city, where Marcus had had to go and identify it, and the man had made him play something to prove it was his.

“What did you play?” said June.

“God Save the King,” said Marcus, and then went very red, and looked at Frederick, and looked away, and said, “I know you’re not supposed to. Unless the King’s there. It’s just the only thing I know all of,” and nobody said anything for a moment.

Frederick laughed.

He hadn’t meant to. It came out of him the way it had at the Hartigans’ table on Tuesday, all at once, and he put his hand over his mouth and it went on coming out through his fingers. Marcus stared at him. Then Marcus laughed too, with relief, and then Theo, and then everybody at the table, the two at the end who didn’t know him and the three from the football side and June, who laughed so much she had to put her fork down, and for about a minute the whole long table by the window was laughing at nothing at all, at a trombone in a lost property office and a man in a booth asking a boy to play God Save the King, with no King present, to prove he owned a trombone, and people at the other tables turned round to look.

When it stopped, Felix said, “Anyway. I’m not wearing a tie,” and they went back to the wedding.

That was the only time all lunch that anybody came near it. Frederick ate his lunch and listened to them talk about everything else, carefully, all of them, the whole table working at it together without anybody having said a word to anybody about what they were doing, and he thought that it was the hardest work he had ever seen nine people do at once, and that they were doing it for him, and that if he thanked them it would stop being possible.

So he didn’t. He asked June if she’d done the history, and she hadn’t, and he told her the bit about the Reform Act, and she wrote it on her hand.

---

After school Theo walked with him to the corner of Garfield Street, as he did most days, before the car took one of them one way and the bus took the other the other.

They didn’t say much. It was cold, the first properly cold afternoon of the autumn, and the leaves on Garfield Street had gone from yellow to brown in a week and were coming down in the wind in handfuls.

“Devon asked me,” Frederick said, at the corner. “In geometry. If I was going to be King.”

Theo had his hands in his pockets. He looked at the leaves.

“What did you say?”

“I said I didn’t know.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

Theo nodded, as though that settled something.

“He asked me too,” he said. “Between classes. Devon. He asked if you were going to be King and I said ask him yourself.” He kicked a heap of leaves off the kerb into the gutter. “So I suppose he did.”

“I suppose he did.”

“Was he all right about it?”

“He said sorry. Then he asked what I got for the angle.”

“What did you get?”

“Eighty-nine.”

“I got ninety,” said Theo. “Exactly ninety. First time.” He looked smug about it for a moment and then looked at Frederick. “Pruitt’s going to say mine’s wrong, isn’t she? Because it’s too right.”

“Probably.”

“Typical.” The car had come round the corner and was waiting with its engine running, and Castellanos was standing beside it looking at the sky. Theo hitched his bag up on his shoulder. “See you tomorrow.”

“I’m rowing tomorrow. Early.”

“See you after rowing, then. Smelling of river.” He was already walking away, backwards, towards the bus stop. “Tell your dad I got ninety!”

“I will.”

He didn’t know why Theo had said it, and then in the car he did. Theo had never once sent anything to his father. Not a word, not a message, not hello, in the whole year, because Theo didn’t do that, because that was the Crown and Theo stayed out of the Crown. Tell your dad I got ninety. It was not about the Crown. It was about a boy in a hospital bed, and geometry, and Theo had thought about it, Frederick realised, all the way from the gate to the corner of Garfield Street, before he decided he could say it.

---

His father was asleep when he came in, and then not asleep.

The nurse said he had had a quiet day. She said he had been asking, in his way, about the time, all afternoon, and that she thought he had been waiting. Frederick sat in the chair by the bed and did his history until his father’s eyes opened, and then he put the history down.

“Hello, Papa.”

The hand on the blanket, an inch, and down.

“I went to school,” Frederick said.

His father looked at him for a long time.

“School,” his father said.

It came out whole. He was pleased with it. Frederick could see him being pleased with it, the way he had used to be pleased with a draft that came back with nothing changed.

“Yes. It was all right. Everybody had seen it. Nobody said.” He thought about how to tell it, and decided to tell it like the trains, plainly, in order, because that was what his father could follow best. “The photographers kept their cameras down. Mr Abernathy said Hanover the same as always. A boy asked me in geometry if I was going to be King, and I said I didn’t know, because I don’t.” He looked at his father. “Is that all right? That I said I didn’t know?”

His father’s eyes stayed on his. Then he closed them and opened them again, slowly, which was yes, and Frederick let out a breath he had not known he was holding.

“And at lunch Marcus played God Save the King on his trombone in a lost property office,” he said, “and everybody laughed.”

His father’s mouth moved at the corner. Not quite a smile. It was harder to smile now than to say school. But the corner moved.

“And Theo says to tell you he got ninety. For the angle in a semicircle. Exactly ninety, first time.”

He had not expected anything. He had said it because he had promised. But his father turned his head on the pillow, the long slow turn, all the way to look at him, and the look on his face was a look Frederick had not seen since before September, a look of pure attention, the look he used to have when somebody at the far end of a long table said something he had not expected and wanted to hear again.

“Good,” said his father.

---

At a quarter to five he took out the timetable and opened it at Friday.

“Six-fourteen from Richmond,” he read. “Six-forty from Baltimore, the fast one.”

His father listened with his eyes shut, the way he always did. Outside the window the light had gone, and the lamps were on in the car park, and below them on the railway a train went north, lit all down its length, people inside it reading, people looking out at the dark and seeing only themselves.

“Seven-oh-two from Philadelphia,” Frederick read, “calling at Wilmington.”

His father’s hand lay on the blanket between them, open, palm up. Frederick did not take it. He didn’t need to. He knew it was there.