Chapter Six
From Brewer’s The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
"Heir-Presumptive. One who will be heir
if no one is born having a prior claim. Thus
the Princess Royal was heir-presumptive till
the Prince of Wales was born; and if the
Prince of Wales had been king before any
family had been born to him, then...his brother
would have been heir-presumptive."
She saw Mikhail, finally, when the bell sounded. As she looked up at him, he was turning away from her, toward the classroom. She reached out in his direction, but he was moving suddenly, lurching forward and away again.
"What did you say your name was?" she asked him, loudly enough for two other girls to turn in her direction but apparently not loud enough for him to hear and respond to her. "What’s your name?" she shouted.
"Mikhael," he shouted back. "Don’t shout at me." And he was gone. Freddy picked up her books and hurried off to her own class, hoping she’d find him there, but a quick scan of the room showed her that he was definitely not in the same class. "I’ll find him later," she thought, but she knew as surely as she knew her own lack of significance in the world that she wouldn’t find him later. Not soon, at any rate. After all, she’d never even seen him before today and the term was more than half behind her.
The balance of her day went as days usually went: nothing interesting happened and she only learned what she thought she had already known on any and every subject. At three o’clock, with no after-school activities scheduled, she boarded her bus for the trip home. Once again she checked the conveyance, as she had all of her classes, in cace Mikhael might be on her bus, but she was disappointed to discover that he wasn’t. Most likely he was headed in a different direction yet again.
As the schoolbus pulled away from the curb she spotted someone she thought might be Mikhael. The boy’s hair was what she thought she remembered and the shirt and jacket as well. The boy was entering a limousine and after the way he had described himself, as everyone’s dog, she knew she she was wrong about the boy she was watching.
There was no way this could be Mikhael. Only rich boys rode in cars that were chauffered. Only rich boys. Not people who talked to her.
Fridays were good for Freddy. On Fridays she understood that pressures are abating and her need to be special changed to a need to simply be. That included the need to be with boys, her special need to be with one boy who liked her in a different way. So, without the need to excel at everything, Freddy often took a more relaxed tone on a Friday. She actually flirted with the boys she liked and she always hoped that her flirting would bring about a movie date, or an invitation to a school dance or a party. What never occurred to her was that her behavior switch was too late, came too late in the week to impress a boy that she was date material. Instead they all just thought she was tired from too much showing off her brains without letting those brains consider her body. And at least one group of boys really knew it.
"Freddy has no breasts," Ian Carter said on this particular Friday to the other three boys who were close to him at the time. "I could see across the inside of that shirt she was wearing and she doesn’t have any."
"That’s ‘cause she isn’t a real girl," Jeremy Finn responded.
"Course she is," said Barry Hedge. "My sister takes gym class with her and she told me Freddy has too got breasts and their pretty ones, too."
"What does your old sister know about breasts?" Ian said with a haughty tone in his voice.
"My sister has great boobs," Barry added. "She knows what’s what when it comes to them things."
"Aw, you’ve got better breasts than Freddy does, Barry," Ian spat back at him. "You got real girly breasts."
Barry, who was overweight and sensitive about it, reared back, swinging his arm above his head, his hand clenching hard into a fist. He was about to lay one on Ian, when Harry Barnett grabbed his arm in mid-swing and whipped him around to face the other way.
"Hey, what are you doing?" Barry snarled at him.
"Leave it alone, Barry, leave it alone, hear?" Harry said to him. "Ian’s just being stupid, that’s all."
"You just like Freddy too much, Harry," Jeremy said.
"I don’t." Barry was almost stammering now.
"Yeah, you do," Ian agreed.
"You do," said Harry. "And it shows."
"She’s a wise-ass," Barry said defensively.
"But you like that in your women," Ian added. "You like ‘em dominant."
"I don’t even know what that means," Barry protested.
"You probably will one day," Harry said.
"Yeeeeeeaaaah!" Barry muttered, taking a step back away from the others. He paused phsyically and vocally. "You all think you’re so smart." He turned on his heels and ran off down the hallway.
"Think he’s going to check out Freddy?" Ian asked the other two.
"Like a library book?" Jeremy asked.
"Like Marilyn Monroe, stupid," Barry told him. "He’s going to look down Freddy’s shirt and see for himself what she’s got there."
"We should watch him do it, right?" Ian suggested in a question.
"Yeah," the other two chorused and the three of them moved off down the hallway to see if they could catch up to Barry in his quest for cup-size truths.
Freddy, of course, was completely unaware of any of this. She was sitting, as she often did on a Friday, on the third step of the rear staircase, the one furthest away from the cafeteria or the gym. It was usually a quiet spot in the late afternoon. The classrooms on the second and third floor on this side of the building were reserved for chemistry labs and industrial vocational classes. Most of those ended right after lunch and so there were fewer students or teachers using this particular stairwell. She found it a perfect place to sit and read for eight minutes or just to think about things. On this Friday she was reading.
She didn’t look up when she heard the footsteps behind her. "Whoever it is," she thought, "will go right by me." She paid so little attention to the slight clatter of feet that she didn’t notice the sudden lack of footfalls. What did finally attract her attention was the sound of breathing. It was coming from above her. With a sudden tug of apprehension she slowly glanced up and saw the face of Barry Hedge staring, upside down, at her on the step below.
"What are you doing?" she yelled at him.
"Don’t get angry," Barry said quickly, a fearful grab in his throat.
"What were you doing, Barry? Tell me."
"I was just... looking."
"Looking at what?"
"Your..."
"Oh."
They both remained silent for a while.
"Do you want to ask me out?" Freddy said, finally breaking the lull.
"Me? No. Why?"
"Nothing."
"Would you go out with me?"
She looked at him and thought about the question. Then she replied. "You’re not my type, Barry," she said, but she was secretly glad that he had asked her. It made this Friday a perfect day. She instantly returned to her book and ignored him, hoping he’d go away.
She heard feet moving, but she wasn’t sure of their direction. When Barry didn’t appear in front of her, she assumed he’d gone back the way he came. But she was surprised and alarmed when another male voice spoke to her from below.
"I like your spirit," said the voice and she knew at once it was Mikhael. That touch of the foreign "something" in the air told her it must be him.
"Who the hell are you?" Barry shouted from above her somewhere, close but not as close as he’d been.
"Don’t answer him," Feddy said.
"Hey!" came a shout from far above her. Ian had been unable to contain himself with the newcomer in the picture. "Hey, you! Dog boy! Get down and lick my boots!" This brought derisive laughter from the other boys with him. Barry was heading up in their direction now and Freddy was on her feet.
"Ian Carter, you wash your mouth out with soap!" She called up to him. She followed this with a loud, long Bronx Cheer. "Don’t let them talk to you like that," she said in Mikhael’s direction.
"I don’t care, really," he said quietly.
"Well, I do. I hate the way they talk down to me."
"Well, perhaps I can offer some solace," the boy said to her. "May I offer you a ride home at the end of the day?"
"A ride home, how?" But she remembered the sight of the boy she thought was him entering the limousine and she knew what he meant.
"I have a car that brings me here and takes me away," he said. "I would put it at your disposal."
A door slammed above them and Freddy understood that to mean that Barry and the other boys were gone.
"Thanks. I’d love a ride."
"And you’re not afraid to enter a strange person’s car? Hasn’t your mother cautioned you about doing such things?"
"My mother knows I have sound judgment," she said.
"And you will let me take you home?"
"I will."
He came around the corner of the stairwell and stood looking up at her.
"If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them. I am here to answer all."
"You talk funny," she said. "Are you from a foreign country?"
"My family is. I am born here."
"And you have money, I guess, if you have a car and driver. Your family must be important folks."
"My father is heir-presumptive to an important position in the old world. Here he merely works in a bank."
"What does..." she was going to ask him to define the concept of heir-presumptive, but chose instead to ask another question. "What does it feel like to be special?"
"I told you that already. I am everyone’s dog. Here there is no respect for what is special in a person. That is something you should already know, Fredericka."
"I like the way you said my name just then," she told him, "with that extra ick sound. You made it soft and ladylike."
"It is how we would say it in my father’s land."
"Well, I like it."
That day, and for most of it and not just this one moment, Freddy cherished being Frederica. Suddenly Friday had taken on the polish she had always imagined it could.
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