A week before the final Julian caught up with me on the stairs by the reading room. This time he had neither papers nor a red pen, and he kept his hands in his pockets as though he did not trust himself. A folded sheet with the student support emblem stuck out of his jacket pocket, a timetable, opened and folded shut a great many times by the look of the creases.
"Two minutes," he said. "Not about the essay."
I stopped.
"I've signed up with student support." He said it evenly, the way people report a vaccination. "I've been going for three weeks, on Tuesdays. They give you exercises, half of them are silly, but the other half…" He cut himself short: the Julian from my first life would have unfolded a whole story out of that, with a fracture line running through it. The new one compressed it into a report. "The other half work. And I've applied for the next cycle's spring intake. I'm rebuilding the portfolio on my own."
"Good."
"I need one piece of advice – advice, not help." He breathed out. "How do you ask for support so that it doesn't turn into… what we had?"
It was the right question. The first right question in both my lifetimes. Which was precisely why it had to be answered by a consultant and not by Klara from the library.
"Three rules," I said. "Ask for something specific: not 'save me' but 'look at section two'. Ask the person whose job it is, and take a refusal without haggling. And always name out loud what you were given: support that has no name turns into theft."
He listened as he had never listened in our sessions, not memorising the wording but weighing the price. The first rule he took with a nod. At the second the corner of his mouth twitched: "take a refusal without haggling" – we both knew what that lesson had cost him. Over the third he was silent longest.
"Is that all?"
"That's all."
"Thank you, Klara."
He named out loud what he had been given. He had learned the third rule on his first try. I nodded and went on up the stairs, and he did not call after me, and that was new as well.
On the Thursday the school was taking in the papers for the spring intake. There was a small queue at the scholarship office, tenth-years with brand-new folders, ironed smooth by their parents' hopes. Julian stood among them like everybody else, simply waiting the way one waits in institutions, not turning the wait into a scene. From a distance I watched him hand in his folder, that same folder, creased, with the faded coffee stain in the corner. Inside were new pages; outside, the old scar remained.
The secretary looked at the stain with the doubt of a woman who has been taking in immaculate folders for twenty years. Julian said something to her that I did not hear, and she suddenly laughed and brought the stamp down with a swing, the way one puts a full stop at the end of a sentence that has come out well. And he smiled, not the smile kept for trustees, the one that made adults want to rescue him, but his own ordinary, slightly crooked one.
And on the Friday the list of finalists for the national selection appeared behind the glass by the scholarship office. The crowd was familiar by now. Hanna found my name before I did and squeezed my elbow hard enough to leave a bruise.
"Sorry," she said, without letting go. "I'll apologise properly later. First let me finish reading."
There were two finalists from the Gymnasium: Klara Mohr and Konstantin Eisenberg, transferred from Moritzberg a month earlier, to where the programme was stronger and the Foundation nearer. Charlotte stood at the noticeboard for a long time. Her name was not on the list, for all her father on the board of trustees, for all the tutors, the cups and the lessons in self-assurance. She read the list twice, straightened the ribbon in her hair with the gesture of somebody checking that a crown is still in place, and left with her back perfectly straight. Arithmetic did not fail her even here: Charlotte could count, and she had grasped before anyone else that some lists are not corrected by a telephone call from Daddy.
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