Midterms

The gym had desks in it. Two hundred and forty of them, in rows, a yard apart, on the polished floor between the painted lines of the court, with a clock on a stand at the front and Mr Abernathy at a table under the scoreboard with a stopwatch.

He had not been in a gym full of desks before. Every gym he had been in since May had been full of cots. He stood in the doorway on Monday morning with his pencil case and looked at the rows, and Theo, behind him, said Freddie, quietly, and he went in and found H, and sat.

History first. Then English. Spanish on Wednesday, with Señora Ruiz at the table under the scoreboard instead of Mr Abernathy, who looked at nobody and smiled once at the clock. Mathematics on Thursday. Chemistry on Friday.

He did not think about chemistry until Thursday night.

---

The history paper came back on Monday the fourth, with the assignment from before Christmas clipped to the front of it.

Mr Ferrante walked between the desks handing them out face down, which he always did, so that nobody saw anybody else’s mark unless they chose to, and at Frederick’s desk he did not stop or look at him and went on.

The assignment on top. The letter from a woman on Twenty-Second Street, invented, beginning you are too thin. On the back, his one line. She heard. Most didn’t. I don’t know what I’ve done about them yet.

Under it, in red, in Mr Ferrante’s square hand, a mark that was good and not the best. And under the mark, smaller:

Nobody does. That’s why it’s the question.

At the front of the room by the door, Inés turned hers over, and looked at it, and turned it face down again, very quickly, like a door shut on something she did not want looked at, and put her hand flat on it.

“Miss Castañeda’s was the best in the year,” said Mr Ferrante to the room, at the board, without turning round. “It was a letter to the Governor of California from a woman in a shelter in Ventura who had not heard anything on the radio since the thirty-first of May, because the shelter’s radio was broken and nobody came to mend it.” He picked up the chalk. “On the back she wrote one word. I’ll leave it to her whether she tells you what it was.”

Inés did not tell anybody.

At break, on the low wall, Lucía said that she had asked, and that Inés had said nobody, and that that was the word.

---

The chemistry paper came back on Tuesday.

Mrs Okonedo did not hand them out face down. She did not believe in it. She believed, she had told them in September, that a mark was a fact like any other, and that facts were not improved by being turned over. She walked between the desks with the stack against her chest and put each one on its desk face up and said the name and nothing else.

“Hanover.”

Fifty-four.

He looked at it.

Fifty-four, in blue, at the top of the first page, and under it a line in Mrs Okonedo’s small upright hand: Equilibria. Again. See me if you wish.

Not a fail, quite. The line was fifty. Four over it. It was the lowest mark he had had in anything since the seventh grade, and it was not a mistake, because he could see on page three exactly where he had stopped understanding and begun writing things down in the hope that they would turn into understanding, and they had not.

He did not turn it over.

Beside him, Theo had seventy-one, and was looking at it with an expression of mild suspicion, as though it might be somebody else’s.

“Mr Hanover,” said Mrs Okonedo, at the front, not loudly, not lowering her voice either.

“Miss.”

“Equilibria are difficult. Most people find them difficult. You found them difficult.” She put the empty stack down. “That is all fifty-four means. It does not mean anything else and it should not.”

“Yes, Miss.”

“I can see you on Thursday at lunch, if you wish.”

“Yes, Miss. Please.”

“Thursday,” said Mrs Okonedo, and turned to the board, and wrote Le Chatelier on it, and underlined it twice, and that was the end of it.

---

At the bell, Theo did not get up.

Frederick did. He had his bag on his shoulder. He waited by the door, the way he always did, and Theo was still at his desk, with the seventy-one in front of him, putting his pencils into his case one at a time, very slowly, the way he had never once in four years put his pencils away.

“Theo.”

“Go on. I’ll catch you up.”

Frederick looked at him.

Theo did not look up. He was looking at Mrs Okonedo, who was at her desk at the front, marking something, with her glasses on. And when the last of the class had gone out past Frederick into the corridor, Theo got up, with the seventy-one in his hand, and went to the front, and stood beside Mrs Okonedo’s desk, and said something to her, low, that Frederick could not hear from the door.

Mrs Okonedo looked up at him over her glasses.

She looked at him. Then she took her glasses off, which she did not do, and said something back, short, and nodded.

Frederick went out into the corridor and did not wait.

He did not know what it was. He did not ask. At lunch Theo came and sat down on the low wall with an apple and said nothing about it, and Frederick said nothing about it, and Marcus talked for twenty minutes about a boy in the year above who had got ninety-eight in chemistry and was, in Marcus’s view, not a real person.

Whatever it was, it was Theo’s.

---

At four, at the kitchen table, with the blue book closed by his cup, he told his father.

He had not decided to. He had thought, in the car, that he would not, because it was fifty-four and not anything else, and because his father had read boxes for fifty-six years and did not need to be told about equilibria. But his father had looked at him when he sat down in the plastic chair, the reading look, and had said, before anything else:

“Face.”

“What about it?”

“Wrong.” A breath. “Why?”

So he told him. Fifty-four. Chemistry. Equilibria. Page three. Mrs Okonedo, face up, not lowering her voice. That is all fifty-four means.

His father listened with his whole face.

At the end he was quiet. He looked at the window over the garden, where the snow from a week ago was still in the shadow of the wall, grey now. Then back at Frederick.

“Good,” said his father.

Frederick stared at him.

“Good?”

“Earned.” The breath. “Yours.”

Frederick thought about that. About a line in the Register that he had read once at fourteen and never forgotten, because it was the only line in his own article that he was sure was true. He has never been given a mark above what he earned.

“It’s not very good, though, Papa. It’s fifty-four.”

His father’s eyebrows rose. The old expression, from the head of a table on a terrace, when somebody had said something that was about to be very gently corrected.

“Latin,” said his father.

Frederick waited.

“Nineteen. Sixty. Two.” A breath. “Forty. One.”

“You got forty-one in Latin?”

“Failed.” His father looked enormously pleased with himself. “School.” Another breath. “Father. Furious.”

At the sink, Bridget made a sound that might have been a cough.

“What happened?”

His father thought about it.

“Again,” said his father. “Next. Year.” A pause, and the hold, and the lips trying something longer. “Sixty. Eight.”

“Sixty-eight the next year.”

“Earned,” said his father, firmly.

Frederick sat in the plastic chair at the corner of the kitchen table and laughed. He could not help it. His father, the King for fifty-six years of fourteen realms, had failed Latin at school in 1962 with forty-one and been proud of the sixty-eight ever since.

“Did anybody know?”

His father’s eyebrows went up. The face of a man asked whether anybody knew a thing he had kept for sixty-eight years in case somebody asked.

“Now,” said his father. “You.”

He picked up his tea with both hands, slowly, and drank it, and put it down.

“Thursday,” said his father. “Lunch.”

“I’m seeing Mrs Okonedo.”

“Good.” A breath. “Equi. Libria.”

“You know what an equilibrium is?”

His father looked at him with very great dignity.

“No,” said the Duke of Cumberland. “Never. Did.” He pointed one finger, slowly, at the blue book by the cup. “Trains.”