PRINCE OF MADAWASKA

by Peter Albert

1. The Royal Oui

“That’s amazing,” Madame Brigitte whistled under her breath as her students bent over their desks, scribbling their French paragraphs. She hadn’t intended to be overheard, but Alicia Del Muro, front row center, looked up immediately.

“What’s amazing?” Alicia smiled. She knew her teacher was grading yesterday’s exams. She knew she’d done well. Maybe amazingly well.

Madame Brigitte put down her red pen and looked past Alicia to Armand LeRoy, a pale-faced boy with a black mop of hair: third row, far left. “I’ve never had someone get a perfect score on the first exam,” she replied. “Monsieur LeRoy, do you speak French at home?”

“At home??” Armand sat up, his face flushing hot pink. “You mean, in San José? My aunt and uncle live here. And, yes, Madame, we speak French.”

She raided a manicured brow. “So, you’re not from here? Are you from France?”

“No.”

“Québec?”

“No, Madame...”

Now she cocked her head, inviting him to elaborate. “I’m from Madawaska.”

“Madawaska?”

“It’s a - a République,” Armand stammered. All eyes were on him now, none more intensely than Alicia’s.

“Et on parle français là-bas?” Madame Brigitte pressed, clearly bemused.

“Oui, Madame.”

“Très bien!” His teacher stood up and walked around her desk to face the class. “Does anyone else here come from another country?” she asked, her green eyes sparkling.

Alicia’s hand shot up. “My family’s from Mexico!” she answered.

“Le Mexique…” Madame Brigitte translated distractedly, scanning the blank faces of her other students. “Who in here – besides you, Armand - knows what Le Roi means in English?”

  Alicia’s hand shot up again. “The King!”

  “Exactement!” Madame Brigitte’s eyes were still appraising Armand. “So perhaps Monsieur LeRoy descended from royalty in …in Mada…Madagawa…?”

  “‘Madawaska,’ Madame,” Armand assisted with careful politeness.

“Merci,” she nodded gratefully. “Monsieur Le Roy, you are a prince!”

  Armand’s gray eyes met her gaze. “Well,” he shrugged with a crooked smile, “my father was king, so I guess that does make me a prince.”

  As if his own words had caught him by surprise, Armand’s face went from pink to strawberry-red, and all his classmates were staring at him again.

  Madame Brigitte noted this and slapped her grade book shut to draw attention back to her. “Monsieur LeRoy,” she smiled, “you can report on your kingdom for your oral presentation. And the rest of you will have to choose another francophone place for yours.”

  She stood up and walked over to a large wall map and, with her pointer-stick she led the class through a concise history of global exploration, colonization, independence movements and French protectorates. Armand slumped into his chair, relieved his face had returned to its normal temperature, his classroom presence to its normal invisibility.

  Except for Alicia, whose dark eyes seemed to be locked on him. When the bell rang and his classmates started to leave, Armand stayed in his chair until Alicia left the room. But there she was in the hallway, waiting in ambush and pouncing with a “Hi!” that made his eyebrows leap.

  “I’m Alicia!” she laughed. “So, you’re new here? You live with your aunt and uncle? How do you like California?”

  She realized she hadn’t given him time to recover, let alone answer. “Sorry!” she apologized and pulled her long black hair over one shoulder. “I’ve got my lunch here,” she smiled, tugging her backpack strap. “Do you want to eat?”

“Sure,” he mumbled, and he sped up to follow Alicia down the hall and out the doors. “I like the Quad,” she announced, settling onto the risers that stepped down to the open-air quadrangle in the center of campus. Armand sat down beside her, reached into his backpack, unwrapped a meatloaf sandwich smothered with ketchup, and took a bite.

  “Now,” Alicia said, “why do you live with your aunt and uncle?”

  Armand thought as he chewed slowly, and then replied carefully: “They told my parents I should come to Mt. Hamilton because students who go here get into the best universities.”

  “Well, you got a perfect score on the French test, so you’re on your way to Stanford!” She joked, hoping to relax him, but she wondered how much he knew about the Mt. Hamilton High School story. The East Side of San José was home to immigrants, mostly from Mexico but also from Japan, the Philippines and Portugal, who worked the orchards, farms and canneries long before Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley. Then came the Vietnamese refugees, after the Fall of Saigon, but the next wave of immigrants—from India, China and Western Europe—came for the big tech companies and they preferred the West Side and its top-notch public schools. Throughout it all, the East Side remained stubbornly low-income, its schools stubbornly low-performing. That’s why Mt. Hamilton High School made headlines when so many of its graduates were suddenly getting into Cal and Stanford. That’s what Armand’s aunt and uncle probably had in mind when they invited him here.

  Alicia certainly had it on her mind. On one hand, she viewed the news story with cynicism, believing that Cal and Stanford were just trying to counter the criticism that they ignored graduates from local low-income high schools. On the other: if hard-working, bright students from the East Side were given this opportunity, why not to take it? Alicia had signed up for French I because she already spoke Spanish fluently. She would be the sophisticated, exotic face of her freshman class, the feminist Latina vindicator of Mexican-Americans who were either accused of trying too hard to assimilate or of not trying hard enough. And now, here was Armand LeRoy, possibly the most exotic person in her class. Certainly the shyest. She wanted more of his backstory, but she didn’t want to scare him off.

“It must be hard to be so far away from home,” she offered sympathetically. “I couldn’t imagine leaving my family. I’m the oldest of seven kids. My parents need me to help out.”

  Armand unwrapped the aluminum foil around two fat oatmeal cookies. “Seven kids?” he asked.

She nodded. “Four girls, three boys.”

  “I’m sixth of seven.”

  “Catholic?”

  “Of course!” Armand crossed himself and rattled off names: “MadeleineJeanne-MarieMarie-HélèneCélineAlphonseArmandGiselle.” Then he offered her a cookie.

“AliciaJoseIsaMonicaHonorioDiegoAlberto,” Alicia rattled back and took it, happy Armand finally seemed to relax. To celebrate, she took the hot-pink pan dulce from her bag, broke it in two and handed him the bigger half.

2.  At Home with the Michauds

“You ate lunch with a girl today?” Uncle Gilles beamed across the table.

“Is she cute? Eh?” nudged Aunt Marcelline as she set down a green bowl of mashed potatoes.

Armand tried to nonchalantly spread the napkin on his lap, but then he broke into a sheepish smile. After the laughter subsided, Marcelline recited a quick prayer of thanks in French, and then came the clatter of spoons and forks piling potatoes, green beans and thick slices of ham onto plates. Armand’s family back in Maine only said grace for the le reveillon on Christmas Eve and at Pacques, but here, three thousand miles away, he savored the ritual as a tether to his fondest memories from his childhood. These included his aunt and uncle visiting from California, a fairy-tale place overflowing with Ghirardelli chocolate, blood-red zinfandel and dried apricots.

Now, incredibly, Armand was here, under the ersatz-elegance of the crystal chandelier dangling from the cottage-cheese ceiling of a ranch-style home on a cul-de-sac just outside Alum Rock Park. California seemed even more exotic than anything he imagined as a child, which made his aunt’s French words feel as vital as oxygen to a diver exploring a deep-sea trench.

  “Armand,” Marcelline asked once they began eating, “how did you do on that French exam?”

Armand washed down some potatoes with a cold swig of milk. “I got 100%,” he reported. “It was pretty easy, though,” he added quickly. “Beginner French.”

  “I knew it!” Gilles grinned. “You show California you’re no dummy just because you’re from the farm!”

  “Yeah, and you can pick a potato!” his wife laughed, pushing the green bowl toward Armand. “So your parents, they’re gonna be okay without you this season at Harvest?”

  “C’mon, Marcelline!” Gilles chided before Armand could reply. “Rosaire and Jeannine have seven kids. They can get through Harvest with six. Armand didn’t have this opportunity back home. We didn’t either, remember?”

“No, you’re right,” Marcelline reflected soberly. When they’d come out west forty years ago, Gilles started as a mechanic at the prune cannery in Sunnyvale. He joked that how his upgrade to Machinist at Persyst Alloys in Milpitas mirrored the evolution of Silicon Valley was uncanny. Marcelline’s bookkeeping skills, of course, were valuable either place. “Armand,” Marcelline clarified, “this is what your parents want for you, this opportunity. This is where they invented computers. What did they ever invent back in Crosse-Fougères? The frozen french fry?”

  Marcelline and Gilles shared a chuckle before drifting into a momentary, silent reverie. Their hometown was like an old, battle-scarred Maine Coon: slow to move, helpless to stop time from slipping through its feeble claws. Crosse-Fougères now was little more than potato fields surrounding the intersection of Daigle Road and U.S. Route 1. The LeRoys and the Michauds were two of the last families still living in the two-mile stretch bounded the St. John River on the north, the rusting, remnant Bangor & Aroostook tracks on the south, Ouellette’s sleepy cedar mill on the east and the white shrine of Ste-Agathe-du-Lac on the west.

  In a sense, the Cyr family was still there, too, as Marcelline and Jeannine Cyr married into the Michaud and LeRoy families. After their parents passed, the sisters kept the old farmhouse in good repair: new white clapboard siding, shiny metal roof, re-caulked sunporch windows overlooking the lilac hedge. It became the guest house for visiting friends and family, and the bunker for extra hands in the potato fields during Harvest. It would also be the gift for the first Cyr grandchild who opts to stay in Crosse-Fougères—and an investment, the sisters calculated, in their own wellbeing as they themselves grew older. But the sad discovery that Marcelline and Gilles would never have children was the final factor in their decision to leave Crosse-Fougères for California.

  In the years that followed, time took its toll on Crosse-Fougères. Mills closed, other families left, and storefronts, homes and train waystations crumbled into rubble mounds that sprout sumac and milkweed. The once-bustling village only exists today in the waning memories of a few elders, and in their collections of old photographs.

One photograph is framed and hangs in the LeRoys’ parlor, between a print of Jesus with outstretched arms and the Virgin Mary with the infant at her bosom. In it, a young Jeannine Cyr and Rosaire LeRoy wave from a parade float after being crowned King and Queen of the Potato Harvest. Only one of the commercial buildings bedecked with patriotic bunting behind them still stands—Sirois Feed ‘n’ Fuel—and even that would have been demolished if Nu-Moon Cannibas hadn’t set up shop there after marijuana was legalized.

  These changes so depressed the LeRoys that last year, after a tearful evening of California zinfandel, they pulled that photograph down. The wallpaper “shadow” behind the photo only made things feel worse, though, so the photo went back up, but the come-to-Jesus talks with their son Alphonse continued: about his quitting the high-school football team, his failing grades, his eyes glazing over before he’d push away and walk out into the night whenever they brought this up.

“At least we know where he goes,” Marcelline muttered when she unlocked the old Cyr home one morning.

  “And what he does…” Gilles sniffed before opening a window to let the lilac perfume wash away the lingering skunk-smell of pot. Then they sat on a lounge chair in the sunporch.

  “He’s a good kid,” Rosaire sighed.

  “He stands up for his little brother,” Jeannine agreed, looking over the lilacs to the school-bus stop. That was where the hulking Albert brothers, built for football and potato harvesting, had cornered skinny little Armand and began hammering him with malevolent glee. Armand’s shrieks drew Alphonse out of this very sunporch, his fists swinging wildly before landing first on Luc and then on Ben, sending both bullies scurrying while Armand lay curled-up and whimpering on the ground. 

“What do you expect from the Alberts?” Alphonse shrugged as he watched his mother patch Armand up in the LeRoy kitchen. “They’re assholes.”

  Jeannine grimaced. She couldn’t scold Alphonse for his language after he’d rescued little Armand, whose head she tilted with one hand while pinching his bloody nose with the other. “Army,” she fretted, “you make yourself a target, carrying your fiddle around like that. Can’t you just leave it at school?”

  “But I caht practice it if I doht brig it hobe…” Armand protested.

  Alphonse cut him off. “You carry your fiddle, Army!” he ordered. “You’re talented and wicked-smart. You’ll go farther in life than those two chrisses de marde ever will and they know it and it makes them mad so they take it out on you. But as long as I’m around, don’t worry. They’ll leave you alone!”

  Jeannine didn’t dare let go of her youngest son’s head, so she brought him into her bosom and mopped her tear in his black hair, whispering “Merci, mon fils…” to Alphonse.

  But Alphonse quit the football team and essentially quit high school just before Armand would be starting his freshman year. Jeannine fretted that the Alberts would have a field day on Armand without Alphonse around to protect him.

“Send Armand to live with us,” Marcelline wrote and attached a newspaper clipping. “The San José Mercury-News says students from Mt. Hamilton High School near our house are getting into the best universities!”

Her offer meant more to Jeannine than all the apricots and zinfandel in California, but it took her trembling finger a full minute in the rotary-dial to call Marcelline.

  “I’m afraid for him to be so far away,” Jeannine confessed.

  “But aren’t you also afraid for him if he stays?” Marcelline argued. “And since when were you ever afraid? Remember when we were kids in the bog, picking the têtes-de-violon for Maman, and you chased away that big moose? You know they’re more dangerous than bears!”

  Jeannine snorted into the receiver. “I didn’t know it was a moose! I thought it was a bear!”

After they stopped laughing, Jeannine sighed. “You’re right,” she confessed, wiping a tear. “I didn’t use to be afraid of anything, but all that changed when I had my children…” She stroked the handmade doily beneath her telephone and added,” Now I’m afraid of everything.”

Armand agreed to the proposal so quickly his parents were a little alarmed. “You’re sure now,” they kept repeating, and more than usual they found themselves in the wooden pews of Ste-Agathe-du-Lac. As usual, Jeannine had her checklist of prayers for their seven children: for the four older girls, now married off and mothers, the prayers went mostly to the grandchildren for overcoming bed-wetting and straight teeth; for Alphonse, with his clear heart but clouded brain; for her long-legged baby Giselle la gazelle, the future track star who loved more than anything to listen to Armand play his violin.

  And especially for Armand. Couldn’t the saints have found some other way to intercede on his behalf besides sending him three thousand miles away? Couldn’t God have given him some of Alphonse’s brute strength, Giselle’s speed?

  “He’ll have to stick up for himself,” lamented Rosaire to his older son, who lay prone on a lounge chair in the Cyr sunporch. Alphonse nodded, his grey-blue eyes fixed on his mother’s lace curtains billowing at the window. The dark clouds were building with such intensity that he knew the whole house would rattle beneath a booming thunderclap and a searing flash of light. Alphonse loved how the storms raked the rolling potato fields. He loved Crosse-Fougères. He had plans for the future, sure: but none of them would take him anywhere else.

  As if to answer their parents’ prayers, Armand took up jogging with his little sister. They watched their two youngest lope down by the fiddlehead bog, where the New Brunswick pulp-mill smokestacks beyond the river belched rotten-cabbageheads of white smoke. They saw their son grow stronger, his pale face grow color. Rosaire told Jeannine that surely Armand’s lungs were growing bigger too because when the kids left they were talking and when they came back after an hour, they were still at it.

  On the July evening before the drive to the Bangor airport, Rosaire took his wife’s hand. “Come look,” he said and led her outside to the lilac hedge between them and the Cyr house. The sunporch was lit up amber under the purple sky, and through an open window, the warm air carried the strains of A La Claire Fontaine. Giselle was curled up on a lounge chair as Armand dipped and rose with the bow of his violin. In the doorway stood Alphonse, eyes closed, his right hand waving an invisible baton. When Armand launched into a reel, Giselle jumped up, locked arms with Alphonse and danced a little jig while their brother swayed with his music.

  “He’s fine,” Gilles promised. He might have meant Armand or Alphonse, but either way she agreed with a quiet “Mon Dieu” and leaned into her husband’s flannel side to dry her eyes.

3.  The Rise and Fall of the Empire LeRoy

“You’re fine,” Cindy Beltran assured Armand after backed into her while opening his locker. “Just say something in French,” she requested. Armand replied “Je m’excuse,” which sent Cindy blushing back to her friends across the hall, leaving him confused about why she was standing behind him in the first place. Armand grabbed his lunch and headed out to the Quad, where Alicia was sitting on the steps as usual.

  “Pan dulce?” she offered. He took half.

  “Cookie?” he reciprocated. They chewed in silence for a moment, and then Alicia pointed across the quadrangle.

  “What do you think they’re doing?” she asked. He looked up to see Cindy and her friends giggling at him from across the Quad. Alicia’s black eyes narrowed. “Don’t let it get to your head,” she smirked, “but they have a crush on you. But don’t lie, though: you did tell them you were a prince!”

“I said if my dad were King, that would make me a prince. That’s not a lie.”

  “Well, is your dad King?”

  Armand hesitated a moment, then replied, “Technically, yeah, he was.”

  “Oh, so are you a prince then?”

  He exhaled, got up and left Alicia alone with her uneasy thoughts. Everyone’s fascination with Armand was starting to annoy her. Madame Brigitte certainly hadn’t been helping with her “Très bien, mon petit prince!” every time Armand answered in his perfect, fluent French.

But his French sounded weird, too. Once Alicia pronounced a word the way he did, and when Madame Brigitte corrected her, she protested, “But that’s how Armand says it!”

  To which Madame Brigitte retorted, “Well, in his case it’s correct because that’s his accent.”

To which Armand said nothing, fidgeting restlessly, wanting to run off somewhere fast.

  He emailed Giselle that he’d joined the track team. She told him to try the triple jump and advised him to think of Hop-Skip-Jump as Hop-Skip-Fly! He did and he did, and he won that event at his first meet because no one from the other team really understood how to jump it, because no one else had Giselle for a little sister.

Principal Saldivar announced the team victory over the PA system in French class the next morning. When she mentioned Armand by name, the giggle-girls buzzed, and Alicia bristled.

  Then there was the school recital. When Madame Brigitte discovered that Armand played violin, she lamented Mt. Hamilton High School’s long-disbanded orchestra, adding that she didn’t see French lasting much longer, either. Armand volunteered to play his violin at “Back To School Night” if only to cheer her up, and his Vivaldi brought a standing ovation. When Principal Saldivar acknowledged this over the PA system the next morning, Alicia’s tongue-cluck was buried under the gushes from both the giggle-girls and Madame Brigitte.

  It wasn’t until Sunday that Alicia even spoke to Armand again. Her family had business downtown that morning, so they attended Mass at Five Wounds Church instead of their usual St. John Vianney. Alicia was admiring the ornate statuary and how the magenta glow of the stained-glass windows made everyone and everything look so interesting. One particular couple across the aisle had a coarse gravity to their ruddy faces, something familiar about their eyes, too. Then a boy slid into the pew beside them, and Alicia gasped: it was Armand.

  To her scrutinizing eyes, the Michauds didn’t look like fancy people. Armand’s aunt wore nylons and blocky sandal-heels with straps that squeezed her ankles like two trussed chickens. Under his uncle’s checkered polyester blazer was a Hawaiian shirt. Alicia reference-checked them against her parents: her mother’s neat make-up and black-lace dress, her father’s dark jacket and gleaming silver hair. They were Mexican immigrants who met in a prune cannery in Sunnyvale, yet they looked far more “royal” than Armand’s aunt and uncle.

She scrutinized Armand now with deepening suspicion. She’d been googling places he might have come from, based on his stammering introduction - Mada-something-or-other. Up came Madagascar, which Wikipedia confirmed was a francophone country. However, her image search for the Madagascar royal family produced photos of dark-skinned Asiatic people, looking more like regal Hawaiians or Brahmin Indians than the earthy red-cheeked trio across the aisle.

After Mass, Alicia ran ahead of her family to plant herself in the church foyer. When Armand came through the doors, she jumped at him with a “Surprise!” He recoiled, and Alicia reached across him to extend her hand to Aunt Marcelline and Uncle Gilles.

  “You must be the aunt and uncle,” she smiled. “I’m Alicia, Armand’s friend from school. Armand’s told me about how you invited him to come to Mt. Hamilton so he could get into Berkeley or Stanford!”

Marcelline took Alicia’s hand in hers. “That’s true!” she beamed. “We don’t have kids, but I know that back home, Armand didn’t have big schools like Mt. Hamilton. If he was lucky, all he’d get into was Fort Kent or Orono. There is more opportunities for him here!”

          “Now where’s ‘back home,’ again?” Alicia asked, casting a furtive glance to Armand.

  “Oh, Crosse-Fougères,” Gilles waved. “In the middle of nowhere. Way up by Canada, where they grow potatoes. And brrrrr! Does it get cold there in the winter!”

  Alicia’s smile didn’t falter, but from what she was piecing together, these folks were not royalty.

“So, you grew potatoes, Armand?” she asked, half-teasing.

  His uncle answered for him: “He sure did, and he picked them too. If you come up to visit sometime in the fall, we’ll put your pretty hands right to work, too!”

“Oh Gilles!” Marcelline rolled her eyes. “A pretty girl like you we won’t make pick potatoes. Come visit my sister Jeannine and she’ll teach you how to knit doilies.”

By now, Alicia’s parents found her and, after polite greetings, Mrs. Del Muro apologized for having to get somewhere in a hurry. “Nice to meet you, Armand,” she repeated, her white teeth bright against the red lipstick.

“Nice people, eh?” Gilles asked as they drove up Alum Rock Avenue, but Armand just grunted with his eyes closed and his hand on his forehead as if testing for fever.

When Alicia walked into French class Monday morning, she was surprised to find Armand already there in hushed conversation with Madame Brigitte. They looked up blankly at Alicia just as the bell rang and students began filing in. Alicia settled into her seat, trying to catch Armand’s eye with a “what gives?” shrug, but his eyes stayed solemnly focused on his desk.

“OK, class,” Madam Brigitte clapped. “I want you to think about your oral reports. Take one of these and pass it along.” She handed each row a stack of papers. “Write your name and circle your top three choices on the map where I highlighted French-speaking places, and get this back to me by Friday.” As she watched her students pass the maps down the rows, she added, “It’s First Come/First Served. Don’t wait too long or I’ll assign a country to you.”

  Alicia quickly took her purple pen, circled the Island of Madagascar, folded her paper and reached over to drop it on Madame Brigitte’s desk.

“Voilà, Madame Brigitte,” she sang, and turned around to confirm that Armand still hadn’t handed in his paper yet. She had headed him off at the pass. It was First Come/First Serve, and since Alicia claimed Madagascar, he’d have to pick some other place while Alicia would reveal her research on Madagascar and its royal family and expose Armand’s fib for what it was: a joke he was trying to play on the whole class. 

On Friday, Madame Brigitte announced she would post the assignments of oral presentations on francophone places. “Only one of you can do France,” she reminded her class. “Some of you will be doing Luxembourg, Senegal, Belgium, Côte d’Ivoire and Monaco. Any questions?”

  Alicia knitted her brow: no mention of Madagascar. Maybe Madame Brigitte didn’t notice that two students planned to cover the same country, but certainly she’d remember Alicia opted for it first. All the same, Alicia decided it was only fair to warn Armand that Madagascar was already taken, so she stopped him after school at his locker, getting his track shoes for practice.

  “Madagascar??” he repeated. “I wasn’t going to do my report on Madagascar!”

  “But …that’s where you said you came from!”

  “No, it’s not!” Armand shot back. “I said I was from Madawaska!”

  “Wait…” Alicia fumbled in her backpack for her binder with the map and list of options. “You said Madawaska? It’s not even on here. You just made that up, didn’t you?” She closed her binder. “Just like the whole thing about being a prince, you made that up, too. You think you fooled everyone. You’re not a prince, you’re a potato-picker!”

Armand looked stunned, and so did Cindy Beltran and Liliana Torres, who had been eavesdropping from across the hall and who were now beginning a fever-pitch of whispering. Armand grabbed his track shoes, slammed his locker and went outside to the now-empty Quad. He knew Alicia would follow him, and she did, standing over him as he sat down to tie his shoes. Without looking up, he told her, in a low and angry voice: “Madawaska is a place, alright. It’s real. It’s real, câlice de tabarnak! And it’s not fancy like California. It’s poor and struggling, but it’s also quiet and green and people work hard to keep their businesses and their farms going…”

His face was neither pale nor pink. It was gray. She’d never seen him like this before.

  “Yeah, I picked potatoes,” he seethed, his voice now rising. “My whole family did. Yeah, my dad was King. He was Potato King, at the Harvest Fair, which was a Big Fucking Deal in Crosse-Fougères. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you? A community trying to hang on to its language and culture while the rest of America tries to erase its history as if it never even existed. You wouldn’t know about any of that, would you? You never picked a potato, did you?” 

Alicia’s bottom lip began to quiver. Armand had never seen her like this before. He felt a wave of remorse, took a breath, and continued in a softer voice:

  “Madame Brigitte asked me about Madawaska. She asked why I called it a ‘Republic’ when it’s just a town in Maine. I told her Madawaska is bigger than that, it’s a whole region. She said I need to do my report on someplace real, where French really is an official language, so I was pointing on the map where people really do speak French, but then you came in…”

Then he just stopped. “Maybe I should just do Madagascar,” he laughed sarcastically. “After all, that’s where I’m from, right?”

  Alicia gave a nervous shrug. “Sure,” she mumbled and then stood up abruptly. “I gotta go. Sorry, Armand, I’m really sorry!”

She bee-lined back to Madame Brigitte’s class, but it was locked. She had to wait until early Monday morning to get one-on-one time with her teacher before the class started. Their conversation was quick and difficult. Then Alicia went to her locker to wait for the bell to ring, and that’s where Cindy Beltran found her.

  “It’s all a lie about Armand LeRoy being a prince, right?” Cindy asked.

  “What?”

  “We heard you arguing with him on Friday! We heard everything. You were pissed!”

  “Um…I don’t know,” Alicia mumbled: “I mean, I guess…I don’t know!”

  Cindy was joined by Liliana Torres, and they went on about Armand pretending he from Madagascar, which was just a place from a cartoon movie. That he was pathetic, white trash who picked potatoes on a farm in Bakersfield or whatever.

“He does that stupid jumping thing at track, like so what?” sneered Liliana.

  “He plays the violin, too. What a dork!” Cindy agreed.

Alicia groaned. What really stung about this sudden backlash against Armand was that Alicia and Alicia alone had unleashed it. She never meant for it to go so wrong, so fast. Now she would try to make it right: if Madame Brigitte would let her.

4. The Final Report

The Michauds were naturally optimists, so Marcelline’s letter to the LeRoys back in Crosse-Fougères lavished praise on Armand’s grades, his triple jumps and violin-playing. She didn’t mention his new sullenness when they tried to reel him into conversation at supper, his sour spurning their attempts to coax a laugh.

“Maybe it’s a problem with that girl from Church,” Marcelline guessed. “Alicia. I don’t see her anymore at Mass…”

  “Girls…” Gilles grimaced. His nephew’s face always turned bright red so quickly, but before it always ended with a sheepish smile. What troubled Gilles now was there was no more smile.

  Madame Brigitte noticed the shift, too. She decided to stop calling Armand “mon petit prince,” and to let him change his presentation topic from St. Pierre & Miquelon to Madagascar. And, at his request, to let Armand give his presentation today: a whole month early.

  Armand walked to the front of the class, held his notes up and began reading aloud:

“My report is on Madagascar. At 229,000 square miles, it’s the fourth largest island in the world. Antananarivo is the capital and largest city…”

He pulled the notes down. “I have never been to Antananarivo,” he told the class. “I’ve never been to Madagascar, either. The biggest Island I’ve ever been to is Alcatraz.”

A few classmates tittered, and Armand went back to reading: “Madagascar lies between Africa and the Indian Ocean. It has mountains and a tropical climate. Most of the native animals don’t exist anywhere else in the world. The first people came in outriggers from Borneo 1000 years ago, and then people came from Africa, India and other islands. The Merina people of the highlands made up the royal family of Madagascar…which I was never part of.”  

  More chuckling.  Armand blushed slightly and continued: “In 1882, France occupied Madagascar, but the anti-colonialism movement started growing by 1920, and Madagascar declared its independence in 1960. Today it’s not a kingdom, it’s a republic. This is good news to me because, again, I was never part of Madagascar’s royal family.”

  Laughter came now waves, propelling him along: “Madagascar’s official languages are Malagasy and French. The population is 29 million. Leading industries are agriculture, manufacturing, fishing and tourism. Potatoes aren’t as important in Madagascar as they are in Maine, USA. Where I was born. Where I picked potatoes as a boy. My dad was elected Potato King, which some people say makes me Potato Prince. You can decide for yourself if you believe that title should come with a crown…”

Armand had to wait for the guffaws to end before winding down: “Typical Madagascar foods includes rice, vegetables, meat and fish, with curry, coconut milk and spices. Art includes silk-weaving, woodworking, and music. I don’t know if the violin is popular there. I guess it is. How could people not love the violin?” Laughter rose again, but he kept going: “The national sport is rugby. I doubt the triple jump is popular there. It’s not popular here either which was good for me because it’s easy to win when nobody else wants to do it…”

Armand sat down to cheering applause. He tried not to look too pleased with himself, but when he looked up, Madame Brigitte was nodding not to him, but to Alicia.

  Alicia stood up, turned to face the class and began: “I’m Alicia Del Muro, and my report is on La République de Madawaska.”

  Armand sat up as if zapped by electricity. Alicia pretended not to notice as she continued:

“In 1612, the Acadians sailed from France to Canada, befriended the Mi’kmaq tribe and co-existed peacefully in fishing villages and farms. But the British began invading in the 1700s, and in 1755 they destroyed all the villages and farms and forced out the Acadians. Some fled to Louisiana and became Cajuns. Some went to France and Québec. But some went up the St. John River, the boundary today between the US and Canada. In the early 1800s, Britain and the US argued back and forth about the border, but the people in the St. John Valley wanted to be independent from both countries. They declared themselves citizens of the ‘République du Madawaska.’ Here’s their flag.”

 Alicia held up a drawing of an eagle on a white background beneath an arc of six red stars.

  “The Aroostook War lasted from 1838-1839. It was mostly a peaceful war. The only injured people were two British soldiers who came between a mother bear and her cubs in the woods. After the war ended, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty set the boundaries in 1842. Today, Madawaska covers parts of Maine, Québec and New Brunswick. In Mi’kmaq, "Madawaska" means ‘place of porcupines’ because so many porcupines live here. Most people in Madawaska speak French. Madawaska culture includes writers, weavers, woodworkers and musicians, especially violin-players. They eat têtes-de-violon, which are baby ferns, and buckwheat crepes called ‘ploies.’  The main religion is Catholicism and the main industries are lumber, paper mills, wind power and potato farming.”

  Alicia put her notes away. “There are two main borders to the US,” she told the class: “North and South. Along the Northeast border, the majority speak French and pick potatoes. Along the Southwest border, the majority speak Spanish and pick lettuce. Armand and I both came from families of pickers. We both grew up in big Catholic families that didn’t have money and didn’t speak English. What’s different is that some people don’t know Madawaska is real. My mom and I sometimes get yelled at for speaking Spanish, but at least no one says there’s no such thing as Mexico.”

Alicia sat down, and then she added: “One more thing. The last name ‘Roy’ is common in Madawaska, but if you have “le” in your name like LeRoy, it means you might be from royalty. I did some research and traced the LeRoy family back to Charlemagne, King of France.”

The classroom was silent until Cindy Beltran turned to Armand and asked: “So you really are a Prince?”

“Now, now! No more of that!” Madame Brigitte waved, her eyebrow arched. “Everybody knows that a true prince doesn’t brag,” she added with a nod to Armand, whose cheeks flushed royal pink and whose somber face, Alicia thought, melted into the most regal of smiles.