When spring semester started, it didn't take long for Frederick to become a regular fixture at Anne's dorm. If anyone asked him, he could come up with any number of excuses for spending most of his time with Anne: they were taking many of the same classes, so there was synergy in doing homework together; their marathon training was a heavy, time-consuming process; and anyway, hanging around in a girls' dorm was all the better for treating himself to some eye candy, right? All those reasons were true, to varying extents. But the real reasons that Frederick conveniently refused to admit, even to himself, were that he enjoyed Anne's company more than anyone else's, and that there were times when he found the constant partying at the frat house too distracting, so he needed someplace else to escape in order to focus.
Anne's floor mates were pretty quick on the uptake to notice the new addition to their community, and they never let go any opportunity to tease her about it.
"Say, did I just see Hunky Freddy around here again? Anne, I had no idea you knew magic! What kind of spell did you cast, anyway, to turn our humble abode into a hangout for him?"
"Well, Fred's a hot one for sure. Reckon there's any chance he'll ask me for a date?"
"Emma, don't be daft. Anyone can see he only has eyes for Anne."
"Nonsense. He's just a friend." Anne brushed the whole matter away, even though the others looked skeptical.
Everybody saw them as an item way before they started admitting it; and when Anne and Frederick finally acknowledged they'd somehow graduated from being "just friends" to being something more, they couldn't pinpoint an exact moment or incident when it happened. It could have been many instances, yet it wasn't precisely any one of them.
It could have been the instance when Frederick stopped denying that whatever he was doing with Anne actually constituted dating.
"Dude." Frederick felt somebody elbowing him. "Since when did you start hooking up with the Elliot bird? Going up-market, huh?"
"Her name is Anne," said Frederick tightly. "And I'd thank you not to talk about Anne like that ever again."
"Hey, why so uptight, man?" Everyone within earshot turned to stare at Frederick as though he'd suddenly sprouted two heads. Such ribbing was commonplace in the frat house, and for the most part everyone took it with good humor, knowing that for the most part, no malice was intended. And if anyone was going to start acting priggish about it, Frederick Wentworth was the last person they expected to do so, cool cat that he was.
Frederick himself didn't know which offended him more - the slightly lewd connotations of the term "hooking up", or the insinuation that he was dating Anne because of her family money. The truth was, he really didn't give a s*** about whether Anne was rich or poor; in fact, he respected Anne all the more after he found out that she was actually putting herself through college.
"Your dad must be really proud of you," he'd said to her one day, with no idea of the minefield he was stepping into.
"Father? I don't think so. Maybe if I was a boy, it'd be different. If I wanted to please him, I should've gone to a women's liberal arts college and come out as the perfect Stepford wife to somebody. In fact, when I told him I wanted to study engineering, he totally flipped out. He said if I wanted to be ambitious as a woman, there wasn't any reason why a liberal arts education shouldn't be good enough for me - after all, Hillary Clinton went to Wellesley College and look where she is now.
"And what he totally doesn't get is that it's not even a question of what's good enough or not - far be it from me to make a value judgement about that. All I know is what I want to do about my future, and I definitely don't want to waste four good years of college doing something I'm not passionate about."
"Well, you're here. So I guess your dad must've finally come around in the end."
"Nope. He never did."
"Then how did you end up getting here?"
"I got a scholarship. You can't possibly see anyone giving financial aid to the daughter of Walter Elliot, could you?"
Frederick ignored the continued jabbing and prodding from the guys in the frat house. He might be offended, but he wouldn't let them have the satisfaction of getting more of a rise out of him than they had already. And it finally dawned on him that no matter what the others said, he couldn't bring himself to say outright that he and Anne were not dating.
It could have been the point when Frederick and Anne merged seamlessly into each other's groups of friends.
Although she'd never had a thing for basketball in the past, Anne found herself tagging along to Frederick's Saturday games on campus. Sometimes the guys would let Anne join in, ignoring the imbalance in numbers since Anne was too short to give Frederick and his team much of an advantage anyway. But Anne knew all too well that she'd only be in the way if she played, so she never played for very long and spent most of the time at the sidelines.
The one or two occasions when Anne and her girlfriends found time to take the T to downtown Boston for shopping during the weekends, Frederick parked himself in a cafe with a book and nursed a single coffee for the whole afternoon while the girls scrounged in Filene's Basement for bargains. It was a good way of sneaking in some studying without being seen by any of the frat boys. And he'd join the girls and their boyfriends for dinner afterward. Conscious of his efforts to save money, Anne would steer everyone towards diners or Chinese food rather than fine restaurants, and MIT was an egalitarian enough community that nobody really minded; after all, most of them were living on student budgets anyway. To Anne, that was a refreshing change from the preppy, highbrow environment of boarding school.
Most of the time, the girls would call in pizza and eat in on Friday nights, and Frederick would drop in to have his fill. Anne often joked that he was eating them out of house and home, but he knew better than to take it too seriously, especially since he always paid his own way, covering Anne's share of the tab while he was at it. He knew the real cue for him to leave was when the girls popped a DVD into the player and started sprawling around in the lounge to watch some soppy chick flick or other.
Of course, college life in Boston wouldn't be complete without going to Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox, and that was one of the things the guys and girls could all do together. Every time they went to a game, Frederick would buy just one corn dog, and there was an unspoken understanding that Anne was the only one entitled to take a bite out of it.
It could have been the time when Frederick declared that his allegiance was to Anne, and not to the Elliots.
The weekend at the start of spring break, Anne let Frederick into her dorm on Friday night after everyone on the floor had either left for home or for their respective vacations, and smuggled him into the girls' bathroom. Their job was to douse the entire bathroom with water, and then scour every single surface thoroughly with disinfectant.
"Can you tell me why we're doing this, again? Don't you guys have a janitor or somebody?"
"It's Mary." This had to be the umpteenth time Anne repeated the story ever since her sisters had first hatched the idea of spending spring break in Cambridge. "Ever since she was little, Mary's always been afraid of catching some bug or other. I guess it's got to do with how insecure she's been, growing up without Mom. Anyways, she won't go into a bathroom unless it's totally spotless. Just one black spot and she'll freak out." Anne gave a resigned sigh. "Well, they're family. And they're coming tomorrow morning, so it's a little late for me to do a Houdini and vanish into thin air."
Elizabeth had been the one to put together the entire scheme in the first place, back when they'd all been at home for winter break.
"Anne, I never knew you were so sneaky. We all thought you were either stupid or crazy to go to a monastery like MIT, you know. But it looks like you were the one who had the best ideas after all. How could you be so selfish? You totally have to introduce us to all the geeks you met over there - you can't possibly keep them all to yourself! Who knows when they'll make it rich - look at Bill Gates! I know - I'm going to visit you for spring break. After all, you won't have any other plans, so there won't be any problem for you to play host to your dear sis, right?"
"If you're going, I want to go too," Mary had whined. "You always have all the fun, and nobody ever remembers about me. Don't give me that look, Liz. You always say I'm too ugly to ever get a boyfriend, but you just wait and see!"
That was when Anne knew all her hopes of doing anything exciting for spring break had been dashed to pieces. She'd have no choice but to play host to not just one, but two sisters for an entire week.
Preparing for Elizabeth and Mary's arrival was the business of an entire night, for after the bathroom was done there were also Anne's dorm room and the common lounge on the floor to tackle. Anne's roommate Harriet Smith had kindly agreed to let Anne borrow her bed while she was away for the week, so Anne busied herself giving the bed frames the once-over with furniture polish and dressing the twin beds with hotel-grade linens sent especially from home, while Frederick pumped air into a blow-up mattress on the floor.
"Won't you join us, like maybe for dinner tomorrow night or something?" Anne hoped that having Frederick around, for some of the time at least, would provide some variety and relief for her. The prospect of spending a solid week with nobody but her sisters for company was extremely daunting.
"Thanks, but no thanks. Entertaining Elliots has never been my cup of tea, so I'll give it a pass." From everything Frederick had heard about Anne's father and sisters, he didn't care if he never met them. Firstly, he had no use for a parent who would willfully choose not to support their child's ambitions, especially someone like Anne who was clearly so talented in her field. As for Anne's sisters, everything about the genesis of this visit indicated that they were spoiled, empty-headed and boy-crazy - the exact opposite of everything he liked about Anne.
"Ouch. Have you forgotten my last name or something?" Anne knew exactly what he meant, but she deliberately put on her best crestfallen look to provoke him into apologizing.
"You're different. I think of you as Anne, not an Elliot. Sorry, OK?" He teasingly gave her a light peck on the tip of her nose and she wrinkled it in mock disgust.
After they'd worked into the wee hours of Friday night cleaning up the dorm, after Anne had gone all the way to Boston Logan Airport to receive her sisters in a limo taxi and after she'd given them a thorough walk-through of the MIT and Harvard campuses, as well as driving them all around Cambridge, it was Elizabeth and Mary who did the Houdini act. By Sunday night, they'd checked into a five-star hotel in Back Bay, leaving Anne alone in the dressed-up dorm room.
Frederick came by as soon as he saw Anne's email telling him that her sisters had left.
"What happened?"
"Nothing. Too many things. Depends on who you ask. Liz can't sleep on any bed smaller than a queen size, Mary can't stand the smell of the bathroom, both of them want a bathtub and won't use the shower stalls. And of course, it's easier for them to start building up their summer wardrobe at Filene's than to pick up the next tech billionaire by hanging around Harvard and MIT during spring break."
"Well, at least you have your bed back." Frederick started squishing the air out of the blow-up mattress. Anne still looked so forlorn that he couldn't resist giving her a hug. "And you still have me."
"Yeah," Anne hugged back, tighter than she realized. "I have you."
Or to Anne at least, it could have been the moment when she figured out the Lindy Hop without any real need for an instructor.
It was one of those times when everyone had a lot of pent-up energy after a whole week of being cooped up studying for midterms. With Anne's 19th birthday coming up the following week, they'd all decided to have an early celebration over the weekend, with a trip downtown for dinner followed by a swing party.
Anne wasn't sure where Frederick got his swing skills from, since this was the first time they'd ever gone dancing together - they'd simply had too many other things to do. Most likely, he'd picked it up at the frat house. But any jealousy Anne felt towards whichever girls Frederick might have danced with before was relatively short-lived, since that night they were so naturally paired that nobody else dared to even try supplanting Anne as his partner.
Before long, they were actually doing the Lindy Hop. Anne knew her footwork was probably garbage, but it didn't matter anymore. All she cared about was the thrill of whirling around and around, with no one but Frederick in her consciousness.
Chapter Notes:
Canon Notes - This chapter maps into the part of canon which says, "They were gradually acquainted, and when acquainted, rapidly and deeply in love." As in canon, they spend a few months (equivalent to a semester of college) getting to know each other gradually, and at the end of it they find that they've become a couple.
