NEITHER CAN DRIVE. David turns sixteen the following March, Sarah the following April. It is early July, neither one within sight of sixteen and the keys to a car. Eight weeks remain of the summer, a span that seems endless, but with the intuitive parts of themselves they also sense it is not a long time and will go very quickly. The intuitive parts of themselves are always highly aggravated when they are together. Intuition only tells them what they want, not how to achieve it, and this is intolerable.
Their romance has started in earnest this summer, but the prologue took up the whole previous year. All fall and spring of the previous year they lived with exclusive reference to each other, and were viewed as an unspoken duo by everyone else. Little remarked, universally felt, this taut, even dangerous energy running between them. When that began, it was harder to say. They were both experienced—neither was a virgin—and this might have both sped and slowed what took place. That first year, in the fall, each had started at school with a boy- or girlfriend who was going to some other, more regular place. Their own school was special, intended to cream off the most talented at selected pursuits from the regular places all over the city and even beyond, to the outlying desolate towns. It had been a daring experiment ten years before and was now an elite institution, recently moved to an expensive new building full of “world class,” “professional” facilities. The school was meant to set apart, to break bonds that were better off broken, confined to childhood. Sarah and David accepted this as the sort of poignant rite their exceptional lives would require. Lavished, perhaps, extra tenderness on the vestigial boyfriend and girlfriend in the process of casting them off. The school was named the Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts, but they and all the students and their teachers called it, rather pompously, CAPA.
At CAPA, the first-year Theatre Arts students studied Stagecraft, Shakespeare, the Sight-Reading of music, and, in their acting class, Trust Exercises, all terms they were taught should be capitalized as befitted their connection to Art. Of the Trust Exercises there were seemingly infinite variations. Some involved talking and resembled group therapy. Some required silence, blindfolds, falling backward off tables or ladders and into the latticework of classmates’ arms. Almost daily they lay on their backs on the cold tile floor in what Sarah, much later in life, would be taught was called corpse pose in yoga. Mr. Kingsley, their teacher, would pad like a cat among them in his narrow-toed soft leather slippers, intoning a mantra of muscle awareness. Let your awareness pour into your shins, filling them slowly, from ankle to knee. Allow them to grow liquid and heavy. Even as you can feel every cell, cradle it with your sharpened awareness, you are letting it go. Let it go. Let it go. Sarah had won admission to the school with a monologue from the Carson McCullers play The Member of the Wedding. David, who had attended a theatre camp, had done Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman. Their first day, Mr. Kingsley slid into the room like a knife—he had a noiseless and ambushing style of movement—and once they’d fallen silent, which was almost immediately, had cast a look on them that Sarah still saw in the back of her mind. It seemed to mix scorn with a challenge. You look pretty nothing to me, the look flashed onto them like a spray of ice water. And then, like a tease, it amended:… or maybe I’m wrong? THEATRE, Mr. Kingsley had written in tall slashing letters of chalk on the board. “That’s the way it is spelled,” he had said. “If you ever spell this with ‘ER’ at the end you will fail the assignment.” These words were the actual first he had spoken to them, not the scornful “you look pretty nothing to me” Sarah had imagined.
Sarah wore a signature pair of blue jeans. Though she had bought them at a mall she would never see anyone else wearing them: they were specific to her, very snug, with elaborate stitching. The stitching went in whorls and patterns spreading over the ass, down the fronts and the backs of the thighs. No one else even had textured jeans; all the girls wore five-pocket Levi’s or leggings, the boys the same five-pocket Levi’s or, for a brief time, Michael-Jackson-style parachute pants. In Trust Exercises one day, perhaps late in the fall—David and Sarah were never quite sure; they would not speak of it until summer—Mr. Kingsley turned off all the lights in the windowless rehearsal room, plunged them into a locked lightless vault. At one end of the rectangular room was a raised platform stage, thirty inches or so off the floor. Once the lights were turned off, in the absolute silence, they heard Mr. Kingsley skim the length of the opposite wall and step onto the stage, the edge of which they faintly discerned from bits of luminescent tape that hovered in a broken line like a thin constellation. Long after their eyes had adjusted, they saw nothing but this: a darkness like that of the womb or the grave. From the stage came his stern, quiet voice, voiding them of all previous time. Stripping them of all knowledge. They were blind newborn babes and must venture themselves through the darkness and see what they found.
Crawling, then, which would help prevent injury, and also keep them well off the stage where he sat listening. They listened keenly also, as, both inhibited by the darkness and disinhibited by it, by the concealment it gave, they ventured to venture. A spreading aural disturbance of shifting and rustling. The room was not large; immediately, bodies encountered each other and startled away. He heard this, or presumed it. “Is that some other creature with me, in the darkness?” he whispered, ventriloquizing their apprehension. “What does it have—what do I have? Four limbs that carry me forward, and back. Skin that can sense cold and hot. Rough and smooth. What is it. What am I. What are we.”
In addition to crawling, then: touching. Not tolerated but encouraged. Maybe even required.
David was surprised to find how much he could identify by smell, a sense to which he never gave thought; now he found it assailed him with information. Like a bloodhound or Indian scout, he assessed and avoided. The five guys apart from him, starting with William, superficially his most obvious rival but no rival at all. William gave off a deodorant scent, manly and industrial, like an excess of laundry detergent. William was handsome, blond, slender, graceful, could dance, possessed some sort of race memory of the conventions of courteousness like how to put a girl’s coat on, hand her out of a car, hold a door open for her, that William’s rigid crazy mother could never have taught him as she was absent from his house for twenty hours at a stretch working two full-time jobs and in the time she was home, locked herself in her bedroom and refused to help her children, William and his two sisters, with meals or housekeeping let alone finer things like their homework; these were such things as one learned about one’s fellow fourteen-year-old classmates, within just a few weeks, if a Theatre student at CAPA. William was the heartthrob of Christian Julietta, fat Pammie, Taniqua who could dance, and her adjuncts Chantal and Angie, who screamed with pleasure when William swung and dipped Taniqua, when he spun her like a top across the room. For his part William exhibited no desire except to tango with Taniqua; his energy had no sexual heat like his sweat had no smell. David steered clear of William, not even brushing his heel. Next was Norbert: oily scent of his pimples. Colin: scalp scent of his ludicrous clownfro of hair. Ellery, in whom oil-scent and scalp-scent combined in a way that was palatable, almost appealing. Finally Manuel, as the forms said “Hispanic,” of which there were almost no others at CAPA despite the apparent vast numbers of them in the city. Perhaps that explained Manuel’s presence, perhaps he was some sort of token required for the school to get funding. Stiff, silent, with no discernible talent, a heavy accent about which he was clearly self-conscious. Friendless, even in this hothouse of oft-elicited, eagerly yielded intimacies. Manuel’s scent, the dust-steeped unwashed scent of his artificial-sheep’s-wool-lined corduroy jacket.
David was on the move now, crawling quickly, deftly, ignoring the shufflings and scufflings and intakes of breath. A knot of whispers and perfumey hair products: Chantal and Taniqua and Angie. As he passed, one of them grabbed his ass, but he didn’t slow down.
Almost right away, Sarah had realized her jeans marked her, like a message in Braille. Only Chantal would be as distinctive. Chantal wore every day without fail a thigh-length cardigan in a very bright color like scarlet or fuchsia or teal, belted tightly at the waist with a double-loop belt with punk studs. Different cardigan, same belt, or possibly several identical belts. The moment the lights had gone out someone had scooted beside Sarah and scrabble-grabbed until finding her breasts, then squeezed hard as if hoping for juice. Norbert, she’d been sure. He’d been sitting nearby, staring at her, as he generally did, while the lights were still on. She’d leaned back on the heels of her hands and shoved hard with both feet, regretting she was wearing her white ballet flats, which were turning quite dingy and gray, and not her pointy-toe three-buckle boots with the metal-tipped heels she’d bought recently with her earnings from working both weekend opening shifts at the Esprit de Paris bakery, which job meant that she rose before six every day of the week, though she often did not go to sleep before two. The tit-grabber, whoever it was, had silently tumbled back into the dark, without even a sharp exhalation, and since then she had continued on the heels of her hands and her feet, crab-shuffling, keeping her ass down, her thighs folded up. Perhaps it had been Colin, or Manuel. Manuel who never stared at her, who met no one’s eyes, whose voice she wasn’t sure she’d yet heard. Perhaps he was pent up with violence and lust. “… all kinds of shapes in the dark. This one is cold, it has hard edges, when I place my hands on it, it doesn’t respond. This one is warm with a strange bumpy shape: when I place my hands on it, it moves.…” Mr. Kingsley’s voice, threading the darkness, was intended to open them up, everything was intended to open them up, but Sarah had closed and grown porcupine’s bristles, she was a failure, her most recent recitation in Shakespeare had been awful, her whole body stiff, full of tics.
More than anything she feared running up against Julietta or Pammie, both so earnest and so unself-conscious, like children. They’d be joyfully stroking whatever their hands lit upon.
She’d been found. A hand grasped her left knee, ran its palm down the front of her thigh, the swirled ridges of stitching. She could feel its heat through her jeans. Just like that, in the pit of her stomach a hollowness came, a trapdoor swinging silently open, as if Mr. Kingsley’s voice had been the nagging wind, ineffectively rattling the lock, which this hand had now sprung.
The one hand remained on her thigh while another found her right hand and raised it, laid it flush on a lightly shaved face. It took her thumb, limp and helpless, adjusted its position, and pressed it as if meaning to make a thumbprint. She felt beneath the pad a slight bump, like a mosquito-bite welt. David’s birthmark, a flattened chocolate-colored mole, the same diameter as a pencil eraser, on his left cheek, just offshore of his mouth.
They had not, to this point in their scanty acquaintance, discussed David’s mole. What fourteen-year-olds talked about, even took note of, moles? But Sarah had wordlessly noticed it. David wordlessly knew that she had. This was his mark, his Braille. Her hand no longer passively lay on his face but held it, as if balancing it on his neck. She slid her thumb over his lips, as distinct in their shape as his mole. His lips were full but not feminine, closer to simian. Slightly Mick Jagger. His eyes, though small, were set deep and resembled blue agates. Something intelligently feral about them as well. He was not at all normally handsome but did not need to be.
David took her thumb in his mouth, tongued it gently, did not slobber it, kissed it back so it lay once again on his lips. The thumb traced the cleft of his lips as if taking their measure.
Mr. Kingsley’s voice must have continued, unraveling guidance, but they no longer heard him.
David had never in this way deferred a kiss. He felt skewered by lust and as if he could hang there, afloat on the pain. Up floated his hands, in tandem, and closed over her breasts. She shuddered and pressed against him and he lifted his hands just a fraction away, so his palms only grazed her nipples where they strained the thin weave of her cotton T-shirt. If she was wearing a bra it was a soft wisp of one, a silk rag encircling her ribs. Her nipples rained down in his mind in the form of hard glittering gems, diamonds and quartzes and those faceted clumps of rock crystal one grew in a jar on a string. Her breasts were ideally small, precisely the size of the cup of his hand. He weighed them and measured them, marveling, brushing them, with his palms or the tips of his fingers, the same way again and again. With his now-cast-off girlfriend from his previous school he’d evolved the Formula and had then become imprisoned by it: first Kissing with Tongue for the fixed interval, then Tits for the fixed interval, then Fingering Her for the fixed interval before, culminatingly, Fucking. Never a step neglected nor a change to the order. A sex recipe. Now with a shock he realized that it needn’t be thus.
They knelt, knees to knees, his palms cradling her breasts, her hands clutching his skull either side of his face, her face pushed into his shoulder so that a patch of the cloth of his polo shirt grew hotly wet from her breath. He turned his face into the weight of her hair, basking in her aroma, exulting in it. How he’d found her. No word to describe it except recognition. Some chemical made her for him, him for her; they were not yet too fucked up by life that they wouldn’t realize it.
“Make your way to a space on the wall and sit against it. Hands relaxed by your sides. Eyes closed, please. I’ll be bringing the lights back in stages, to smooth the transition.”
Well before Mr. Kingsley completed his speech Sarah broke away, crawled as if fleeing a fire until she hit a wall. Pulled her knees to her chest, crushed her face to her knees.
David was scorch-mouthed, felt strangled by his underpants. His hands, so exquisitely sensitive moments before, were as clumsy as if stuffed inside boxing gloves. He palmed and palmed his hair, which was short and unvarying, off his forehead.
As the lights came on each stared steadily forward into the room’s empty center.
The crucial first year of their learning continued. In classes with tables, they sat at separate tables. In classes with chairs set in rows, they sat in separate rows. Hanging around in the halls, in the lunch-room, on the benches for smoking, they adhered to separate nodes of conversation, sometimes standing just inches apart, turned away from each other. But in moments of transition, of general movement, David’s gaze burned a hole through the air, Sarah’s glance darted out, then away, like a whip. Unbeknownst to themselves they were as noticeable as lighthouses. In repose, even when they both stared straight ahead, the wire ran between them, and their peers changed their paths to avoid tripping on it.
They needed distance to give them fresh darkness. At the end of the year, one knee restlessly bouncing, eyes sweeping the room’s farthest corners, knuckles manically popping, David paused next to Sarah and asked, thickly, for her address. His family was going to England. He’d send her a postcard. She wrote the address briskly, handed it to him, he turned on his heel.
The postcards began a week later. On their fronts, nothing special: London Bridge, the humorless guardsmen at Buckingham Palace, a picturesque punk with a three-foot-high Mohawk. Unlike David, whose family regularly traveled to places like Australia, Mexico, Paris, Sarah had never been out of the country, but even she recognized the postcards as generic, pulled at random from the souvenir-shop carousel. The backs were something else, densely written edge to edge, her address and the stamp barely squeezed between lines. She felt grateful the mailman kept bringing them; he must be squinting at them, as she did, but with different emotions. At least one postcard a day, sometimes several, that she fished out as soon as the mailman had come, leaving the bills and coupons for her mother to find when she got home from work. David’s handwriting was effusive, almost feminine, with tall loops and wide flourishes and yet great regularity, all the letters at just the same angle, all the t’s and l’s just the same height. The content was much like the form: exuberant with observation, and yet deftly measured. Each card made a little vignette. And in the lower right corners, squeezed next to her zip code, one or another of the tentative endearments that wrung the air from her lungs.
The vast southern city they lived in was rich in land, poor in everything else—no bodies of water, no drainage, no hills, no topographical variety of any sort, no public transportation or even the awareness of the lack of such a thing. The city, like vines with no trellis, sprawled out thinly and nonsensically, its lack of organization its sole unifying aspect. Gracious neighborhoods of live oak and chunky brick mansions, such as the neighborhood where David lived, lay cheek by jowl with wastes of gravel, or US Postal Service facilities resembling US Army bases, or Coca-Cola bottling plants resembling wastewater treatment facilities. And chintzy, labyrinthine apartment complexes of many hundreds of two-story brick boxes, strewn about scores of algae-stained in-ground swimming pools, such as the complex in which Sarah lived, might exhaust themselves at their easternmost edge on the wide boulevard, lined with tattered palm trees, which on its opposite side washed the gates of the city’s most prestigious club for Jews. David’s mother, on the family’s return from London, was pleasantly surprised to find him interested in racquetball and swimming at the Jewish Community Center, for which, since enrolling at CAPA, he’d shown only contempt. “Have you even still got a racquet?” she asked.
He produced a racquet from the back of his closet. He even produced a towel. These dangled limply from his hands when he arrived at Sarah’s door. The actual distance from the club, across the boulevard, to Sarah’s door had been vastly greater than suggested by the many continuities. The walk—without the benefit of sidewalks or crossing signals, for their city wasn’t built for pedestrians—from the JCC parking lot to the southern gate of Sarah’s complex had taken close to twenty minutes, in the heat of the damned, along a median planted with scorched rhododendron but not any trees, during which several separate motorists had pulled over to ask if he needed assistance. In their city only the poorest of the poor, or fresh victims of crimes, ever walked. Once inside Sarah’s sprawling and mazelike complex, David reeled—it was enormous, a city of its own, without signs. Sarah and her mother had moved there when Sarah was twelve, their fifth move in four years but the first Sarah’s father had nothing to do with. Sarah and her mother only stopped getting lost in the maze of carports when they put a chalk X on the bleached wooden gate separating their assigned parking space from their back patio. July in their city: an average daytime temperature of ninety-seven degrees. From the sole clue David held, her apartment number, he could never have guessed that she lived on the far, western side from the club, near the opposite entrance. Sarah had given him directions from the western entrance which he’d disregarded, knowing he wouldn’t be coming that way. He had been too ashamed to explain this to her, his plan involving a ride to the club, too ashamed of not having a car of his own, though neither of them had a car of their own, being only fifteen and not legal to drive for a year. It didn’t cross his mind that she felt it as keenly, the utter dispossession of not being licensed to drive in that city of cars. It was part of the excruciating in-betweenness of no longer being children, yet lacking those powers enjoyed by adults. The “streets” within the complex weren’t real streets at all but a tirelessly branching metastasis of walkway, or driveway, the former distinguished by borders of dying impatiens, the latter by bordering spaces to park. It took David over an hour to find Sarah’s apartment. He might have walked two or three miles. David had imagined he would take her in his arms as he’d done on that day in the dark, but he only stood, glued to her threshold, with his sun-boiled blood spreading stains in his eyes. He thought he might vomit or faint. Then the shared air of their childhood touched him: that particular air of their city, mustily buried and cool, from its unending journey through air-conditioning ducts that the sun never reached. No matter if one lived in a mansion or a little brick box, that air smelled just the same. David stepped toward it blindly. “I need a shower,” he managed to say.
For his ruse he’d been forced to wear shorts, knee-high socks, infantile white sneakers, a sporty T-shirt. The outfit embarrassed Sarah. He looked alien to her, unhandsome, though this quibble peeped faintly at her from beneath the hard weight of her lust. The lust in its turn was eclipsed by another and unprecedented emotion, an onrush of sad tenderness, as if the man he would be, full of unguessed-at darkness and weakness, had for a brief instant shown through the boy. The boy pushed his way past her and locked himself in her bathroom. Her mother worked long days somewhere; mother and daughter shared the small, dowdy bathroom, so different from each of the four bathrooms in David’s own home. In this strange realm he showered with a smooth brick of Ivory soap, passing it between his legs, firmly lathering every square inch, meticulous and patient because truly frightened; he’d never had sex with a girl he loved. He’d had sex with two girls before this, both of whom now dissolved in his mind. His mind, slowly dilating as his blood temperature came off the dangerous boil. He’d made the shower water cool, almost cold. He stepped cautiously out of her bathroom, a towel circling his waist. She was waiting for him in her bed.
MR. KINGSLEY, THEIR teacher, lived with a man he called his husband; he twinkled at them provocatively when he said this. This was 1982, far from New York. None of them, except for Sarah, had ever known a man who might call another man his husband while twinkling provocatively. None of them had ever known a man who had lived many years in New York, who had been a member of the original Broadway cast of Cabaret, who referred to Joel Grey, when reminiscing on these times, as “Joel.” None of them, again except Sarah, had ever known a man on whose office wall might hang, among other fascinating and risqué memorabilia, a photograph of an exuberant and barely clad woman, heavily made up, flinging her arms wide and high, who somehow despite zero resemblance was strangely reminiscent of Mr. Kingsley himself, and who was rumored to be Mr. Kingsley, though no one believed it. Sarah’s first cousin, her mother’s sister’s son, was a “leather queen,” Sarah said calmly to platter-eyed classmates; this cousin lived in San Francisco, often wore women’s clothes to sing torch songs, and in general gave Sarah a key to Mr. Kingsley’s esoterica that her peers wholly lacked. This was how David had first noticed Sarah: her aura of knowledge. He sometimes saw her laughing with Mr. Kingsley, and their laughter seemed shared, on the same remote plane. David envied this, as did everyone else, and he wanted to annex that plane for himself.
In 1982, none of them, except Sarah, had ever known a gay person. And equally, in 1982, none of them viewed Mr. Kingsley’s gayness as anything but another aspect of his wholesale superiority to all other adults in their world. Mr. Kingsley was impossibly witty and sometimes impossibly cutting; the prospect of talking with him was terrifying and galvanizing; one longed to live up to his brilliance and equally feared that it couldn’t be done. Of course Mr. Kingsley was gay. They lacked the word for it, but intuition supplied the frisson: Mr. Kingsley was not just gay but an iconoclast, the first such they’d ever encountered. This was what they longed to be themselves, little though they could put it in words. They were all children who had previously failed to fit in, or had failed, to the point of acute misery, to feel satisfied, and they had seized on creative impulse in the hope of salvation.
Strange, appropriate disruptions and traumas foretold summer’s end. Hurricane Clem crawled toward them from the Caribbean, turning his wheel on the nightly newscast. Sarah’s mother took her week’s vacation, and sat home regarding Sarah with weary suspicion and making her put masking-tape X’s on the windows and fill up the spare water jugs. Sarah only got away by claiming she needed to use the library, on the campus of the college very near David’s house. She and David got themselves dropped off far apart from each other and both mistakenly far from the library, and even once they had found each other, felt somehow misused. They walked in the dizzying heat, end to end of the summer-struck campus, hopelessly looking for somewhere to be, too hot and upset to link hands. Periodically, a grounds worker in a golf cart piled with tarps and sandbags would drive past and throw them a look. There were no college students on campus. The whole campus including the library was closed. Crossing an ocean of parking-lot asphalt they came upon the football stadium, like a ruin of Rome standing silent and bleached in the heat. They squeezed through a bent scissor gate. Behind a snack bar, at the base of a popcorn machine, on a pair of flattened boxes that smelled of stale grease, Sarah let David fuck her, her mouth crushed in his ear, her legs looping his waist, her hands struggling to hold his sweat-slippery back. His rhythmically agonized exhalations scorched the side of her neck when he came. For the first time she didn’t, and felt an aloneness. They hunched away from each other to get dressed again. David didn’t brush off the bits of junk stuck to her legs, or make some comment that let Sarah feel it was all right to laugh. David, fighting with the laces of his sneakers, wished he hadn’t come without her. He wished he hadn’t felt her so rigid beneath him on a bed of cardboard. It had been very different from the times in her apartment when they’d had all her bed and her carpeted floor and the hallway and even the living room couch and armchair across which to spread their desire, when they sometimes would surface as if from a dream, and laugh to find themselves in a new room, and he’d touched every inch of her skin with his lips, and pushed his tongue in her cunt, and seized hold of her hands when she bucked and cried out, both of them startled and thrilled by her pleasure.
After dressing, they walked off the campus, having wound up so close to its edge, and found they were at the same plaza where Sarah’s French bakery was. In a store Sarah liked, David watched her try on jewelry, weird handcrafted stuff made with unpolished rocks. When Sarah’s mother’s Toyota appeared outside the shop window, Sarah rushed away without letting him kiss her in front of the clerk. David stayed longer, and left with a ribbon-tied box.
REMEMBER THE IMPOSSIBLE eventfulness of time, transformation and emotion packed like gunpowder into the barrel. Remember the dilation and diffusion, the years within days. Theirs were endless; lives flowered and died between waking and noon. Hurricane Clem made landfall, and turned the boulevard David had crossed at midsummer into a raging brown river that sucked cars from the curbs and turned trees upside down. The first day of school was delayed for a week, confirming their suspicion that a lifetime, not a summer, had passed. They couldn’t possibly still be fifteen. They took the natural ambition, at that age, to shock the peer group with a summer metamorphosis to greater extremes, being actors. Chantal returned to school with an Afro. Norbert tried, with uncertain success, to conceal himself under a beard. The most passionate female friendships had somehow expired. Sarah did not know why, as she came back through the doors to the Black Box, her whole body grew rigid when Joelle Cruz came shrieking her way. The previous spring she had practically lived with Joelle. Joelle had an older sister, Martine, at the school, and Sarah had spent fewer nights at home than with Joelle, in the back seat of Martine’s grimy car, as they drove around in quest of liquor, or drugs, or a bouncer who’d fall for their cheap fake IDs. Joelle had introduced Sarah to coke, Rocky Horror, and wearing ballet flats with jeans; now her very flesh repulsed Sarah. It was too damp and pink. Sarah could smell Joelle’s pits. Sarah felt that she did nothing different; she only was different. She didn’t blow Joelle off. She didn’t speak coldly to her. But no; she had changed. She was not Joelle’s friend anymore. It felt so ordained, so engrained in the utterly new circumstances of sophomore year she was sure Joelle knew it as well, even willed it, perhaps, an overt act to which Sarah only responded.
But Joelle’s irrelevance was irrelevant to Sarah, even as Joelle stood there talking to her. Everything was irrelevant to Sarah apart from David. She imagined his acknowledgment flashing toward her like a mirror. She and David had traveled so far ahead, just the two of them; they’d disappeared past a horizon, discarding their school selves behind. If they kept the shucked skins it was just for the sake of disguise. For Sarah it went without saying that their summer would be their secret, like a Mount Olympus (had she known what this was at the time) where they whispered together like gods. She had not even thought to explain this to David. She assumed that he already knew.
David burst into the Black Box not as a winking mirror but a spotlight, bearing down bright and hot, and swinging his arms in a slightly hitched way. He was hiding something he exposed by his very attempt to conceal it, flanked by a dozen of their classmates who clung to his charisma like lint. Sarah found herself holding a tiny gift box with a bow while they all stared at her.
Colin crowed, “David’s gonna get down on one knee!”
“Look at you, red as a beet!” Angie laughed.
“Open it, Sarah,” begged Pammie.
Sarah shoved the box back in his hand. “I can open it later.”
“Open it now,” David urged. Perhaps Colin and Angie and Norbert and Pammie and everyone else of whom Sarah was so grotesquely aware were invisible to him and he could not even hear what they said. That glimpse, of herself alone at the heart of his gaze, only lasted an instant. His indifference to their audience struck her as a dare or a test. She didn’t see as a counterindication to this angry idea of hers his hot blush as deep as her own; if her face was as red as a beet, his was red as a burn, he’d come out in lurid blotches that overlapped with his boy’s patchy stubble to make a mess of his face.
“I’ll open it later,” she said as Mr. Kingsley came in, waving his arms around his head to indicate that while it was glorious to be reunited, would they please shut their traps and get into their seats.
David wound up two rows behind Sarah; she didn’t have to look to know exactly where he was. Facing forward she burned with her sense of a wrong. By her or to her? Her head would not turn, she would not look his way no matter how hard he willed her to do it. Adrenaline was roaring through them both, its warning urgent and obscure. Just minutes before, David had been striding through the big double doors, in fact bouncing, in fact funny-walking from lightness of heart because he was finally stepping onstage in the role of her boyfriend. Sarah his girlfriend. David viewed these roles as sacred; they were the two roles he most cared about. Who gave a shit about Hamlet? He’d been afraid the little box was too small, that she’d be disappointed by a box that could fit in the palm of her hand. But when she opened it, the silver chain would unfurl, the blue stone would lie in the hollow he loved at the base of her neck. Something like his own radiance would pour from her—not the fright, or disgust, he had seen. Or the shame? Of him, obviously.
David struggled to jam the box back out of sight. He needed to get it to his locker, destroy it, the indigestible lump that it made in the front of his jeans was a joke. To David, love meant declaration. Wasn’t that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn’t that the whole point? Sarah felt David’s eyes on her all through the class and kept perfectly still, held them there with her mind. Years later, in a future in which she enters theatres only as part of the audience, Sarah will see a play in which an actor asks, “Can’t there be a silent language?” and be surprised when her eyes fill with tears. Two rows in front of David, aching with the effort of keeping perfectly still so his gaze, like a moth, won’t take flight from the back of her neck, Sarah doesn’t yet know the words for this language that doesn’t have words. She won’t understand what it means, when David stops speaking this language to her.
“EGO RECONSTRUCTION,” SAID Mr. Kingsley, “requires a foundation. My darling Sophomores: one year older and wiser than when we first met. What might that foundation be?”
They wanted so badly to please him. But the question of how never had a clear answer. Say the right thing? (But what could that be?) Say a deliberately wrong but funny thing? Ask another question in response to his question, as he often did when responding to theirs?
Pammie raised her hand, eager and hopeful. “Modesty?”
He laughed at her in disbelief. “Modesty! Explain why you think so, and please don’t be modest. Please flaunt your thought process, Pammie, so maybe I can fathom what it is.”
Pammie’s plump face, beneath gold barrettes, flushed to the roots of her hair. But she had an odd stubbornness, a capacity to dig in her heels and argue. She was a Christian, a disposition unremarkable outside the walls of their school but within it unsupported, even mocked, and in the previous year she’d grown used to defending herself. “People who have too much Ego are stuck-up,” she said. “Being modest is the opposite of being conceited.”
“Let me make one thing clear: we can never have ‘too much’ Ego—so long as we’re in control of it.”
Control of the Self: each of them feared they lacked this. Sarah, for example. Earlier that year she had asked her mother to file paperwork to get Sarah a hardship permit, a driver’s license for people as young as fourteen who needed it to support their family financially, which Sarah had argued she did, offending her mother completely. In their subsequent fight, Sarah put a kitchen chair through the sliding glass door to their back patio, the repair of which cost her the whole summer’s worth of her bakery wages. “And you think you could drive,” Sarah’s mother had said.
David, for example. That day Sarah gave back the box, he had crushed it using only one hand, in the process cutting open his palm. When she later tried to ask, “Can I open it now?” he’d replied, “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” Whether these examples proved self-control or its lack remained unclear to him.
“The foundation we require for Ego Reconstruction is Ego Deconstruction,” Mr. Kingsley concluded. They’d all heard about it last year, from the then-Sophomores and now-Juniors, who had constantly harped on this mystery while refusing to share even the slightest detail. “You’ll get there when you get there.” “You’re still Freshmen! Don’t try to climb a ladder in midair.” “The last time I checked, you couldn’t cross a bridge by starting in the middle.” The then-Sophomores and now-Juniors were a strikingly effusive, tight-knit class who seemed to possess some special aura the now-Sophomores lacked that wasn’t just the advantage of age. The then-Sophomores and now-Juniors were more photogenic, individually and together. In a school with no athletic program, they gave the impression of a cheerleading corps. Their clothing was coordinated, their teeth square and white. They had coupled early and lastingly, the exception of one couple, Brett and Kayley—whose saga of rupture, grief, and joyful reconciliation over the course of a few weeks the previous year had been consumed school-wide with the avidity usually reserved for soap operas—being the sort that proved the rule. The few then-Sophomores still single were exclusively affiliated, as Third Wheels or Best Friends. There were no loners, like Manuel, or irredeemable losers, like Norbert. There was no one like Sarah, whose fearful secret it was that during the Brett-Kayley hiatus, she had spent a night with Brett at his father’s condo, during which he’d talked about Kayley, and cried, and at one point interrupted his kissing of Sarah to throw all his bedcovers out the window. After he and Kayley made up Brett had grabbed Sarah’s wrist in the dusk of a Showcase rehearsal and warned her, “Don’t tell anyone,” and she’d been so afraid of the stain she might make on his image she hadn’t even told David.
Though now David angled away when he saw her approaching. When unavoidably they met in classrooms David stared coldly and Sarah stared even more bitterly coldly and it was a contest, to pile up coldness, to shovel it furiously from their hearts.
“Let’s form a circle,” Mr. Kingsley said.
As so often before, they grew uneasily aware of their crotches as they sat down cross-legged, and felt the icy touch of the linoleum numbing their asses. Most of them had privately concluded that Ego Deconstruction/Reconstruction was some sort of fleshless orgy, and they were helplessly blushing, their skin crawling with arousal and dread. The wall of mirrors doubled their circle, around which Mr. Kingsley paced in orbit. His gaze was cast somewhere beyond them. His very way of gazing told them plainly how far they fell short—of last year’s Sophomores? Of their own potential? Of the actors he’d known in New York? They felt their deficit all the more sharply because the unit of measure was wholly unknown. Sarah tried to see David, but he’d placed himself near enough to her left or her right that she couldn’t see him, while far enough that she couldn’t sense him. Would David be chosen? Would Sarah be chosen?
“Joelle,” Mr. Kingsley murmured, in a tone of regretful admonishment. Sadness, almost, at her failure, but what had Joelle done? She was pink year-round, and a summer’s worth of sunburn had her mottled and peeling all over her face and down into the cleavage broadly exposed by her tight V-neck top. The new raw pink skin turned bright red at the sound of her name; all the curls of dead, half-peeled skin seemed to rustle with fear. Her surface was disgusting, Sarah thought. “Joelle, please stand at the circle’s exact center. You’re the hub. Invisible lines radiate out from you to each one of your classmates. These lines are the spokes. Your classmates, and you, and these spokes, make the wheel. You’re the hub of the wheel, Joelle.”
“Okay,” Joelle said, blushing fiercely, a fountain of blood pounding under her skin.
“I’d like you to choose one spoke now. Look down the length of that spoke. Someone’s at the other end. Someone you’re bound to, by that spoke passing through you, and passing through them. Who’s the person you’re looking at?”
The linoleum doesn’t feel cold anymore. Please, no, Sarah realizes, staring straight ahead at Joelle’s middle, at her soft belly concealed beneath the tight top.
“I’m looking at Sarah,” Joelle says huskily, her voice almost a whisper.
“Tell her what you observe.”
“You didn’t call me all summer,” Joelle barely chokes out.
“Go on,” Mr. Kingsley says, gazing somewhere miles away; he’s not even looking in Joelle’s direction. Perhaps he’s using the room’s giant mirror to watch Joelle’s burning skin, her glittering eyes, her too-tight top, out of the corner of one eye.
“And I would call you, and you wouldn’t call back, and I mean, maybe it’s me, but it’s like, I feel like—”
“Stand up for your feelings, Joelle!” Mr. Kingsley barks out.
“We were best friends and you act like you don’t even know me!” The strangled grief in her voice is far harder to bear than the words. Sarah is frozen, a statue, she’s staring blindly at the opposite wall with its door to the hallway as if she could will herself out of this room, and then suddenly it’s Joelle who bolts: Joelle stumbles headlong through the circle, practically stepping on Colin and Manuel, she wrenches open the door and, unleashing a wail, disappears down the hall. In her wake no one breathes, no one looks anywhere but the floor, no one even looks at Sarah. Life is suspended. Abruptly, Mr. Kingsley wheels on Sarah.
“What are you doing?” he demands, and Sarah flinches in alarm. “Go after her!”
Sarah lurches to her feet and out the door, unable to imagine the faces she’s leaving behind, even David’s. She isn’t even able to find where he was in the circle.
The halls are deserted, the slippery black-and-white checkerboard rapping harshly against the hard soles of her boots. Her punk boots, cruel-toed with metal stilettos and three large silver square buckles each. Behind closed classroom doors on the west hall the Freshmen and Juniors doze through the requirements, English and algebra, social studies and Spanish. Down the south and east halls, the real life of the school can be heard: the jazz band splashing through Ellington; the lone pianist’s hands prancing over the keys in the dance studio and the thumping of bound, bloody feet. The smokers’ courtyard is empty, its sun-bleached benches bearing only acorns from the massive live oak. The outdoor classroom, a walled-in rectangle of grass with a stage at one end, is also empty, its street-side gate padlocked. Sarah wills David, not Joelle, to appear in these secretive places, David to be sitting on the empty smokers’ bench, David to be sitting underneath the oak tree. The rear entrance leads to the rear parking lot, where the students park and also eat lunch, on the hoods of their cars, when the weather is good. Joelle is outside the doors, doubled up, honking with sobs. Joelle clearly meant to escape in her car but was slowed by her grief; the keys to her Mazda poke out of one fist. This is the brand-new, rocketlike little Mazda Joelle bought with cash—more than ten thousand dollars in cash—she once showed Sarah, stuffed in a coffee can under her bed. Sarah didn’t know where this money came from. Drug sales, she assumed; possibly something else. Each day Joelle drives the car to a friend’s house a few blocks from home and then walks the rest of the way, so her parents won’t see it. Joelle is not convoluted but simple, not sullen but sunny, yet she has the extensive clandestine life of a career criminal, and this used to enthrall Sarah. Now Joelle appears stripped bare, her essence exposed. She’s just a party girl, overeager to be liked. The insight startles Sarah not because of its unkindness but because this, she suddenly knows, is the sort of insight Mr. Kingsley is constantly trying to extract. He paced with impatience last year when they told each other, during Observation, such things as, “You’re a really nice girl,” or, “I think you’re handsome.” Yet at this moment, Sarah equally knows, there’s a story unfolding into which her true feelings don’t fit. She is supposed to hug Joelle, make it up to her. She knows this as surely as if Mr. Kingsley stood there, supervising it all. She has the strong feeling he is there.
Joelle, precociously fleshy and pungent, so obliviously manifests the carnal that Sarah’s own self-conscious carnality becomes disgusting to her, along with her own flesh, her own scent. Joelle’s enormous breasts are heavily freckled, their trapped clefts and creases are constantly sweaty; Joelle’s crotch, encased in her jeans, trails an olfactory banner like some sort of sticky night flower to inflame jungle bats. Joelle sleeps with much older men; at school, she disregards boys as if they’re not even incipient men. She only has eyes for Sarah.
Half closing her eyes, almost grinding her teeth, Sarah takes Joelle into her arms. Joelle clings to her gratefully, soaks her shoulder with tears and slick snot. This is also self-control, Sarah thinks. This brute willing of the self to take action. Until now, Sarah thought self-control was only restraint: not putting the chair through the glass.
“I’m really sorry,” she hears herself mumbling. “I’m so messed up right now, I didn’t mean to seem distant. Things have just been so crazy.…”
“What’s been going on? I could tell you had shit going on! I just knew—”
Soon the counterfeit is complete. Sarah intended to confide in no one, and if someone, Joelle least of all. Now, as if reading a script, she tells Joelle about the decoy tennis racquet, the empty snack bar. Confession made, she’s in receipt of Joelle’s whole devotion again. Joelle’s sobs turn to mirth, her abject supplication to glee. She clings to Sarah no longer from the weakness of grief but to prevent herself rolling merrily on the sidewalk. Having bought back a friendship she no longer wanted by defiling the one thing she cared about most, Sarah knows it doesn’t matter that she enjoins Joelle to a “secrecy” that puts Joelle into raptures. Joelle is practically wrapped like a vine around Sarah as they stumble back into the classroom and almost literally into David, because they’ve been gone for so long class has ended, and David’s the first on his feet, to escape. At the sight of David, Joelle bursts out laughing and covers her face. David shoulders roughly past Sarah and Sarah feels bonfires ignite on her skin. Mr. Kingsley, also on his way out, says as if as an afterthought, “Sarah, come by and see me tomorrow at lunch.”
Not even David in the course of escaping fails to hear the summons, or fails to understand what it means. Even Joelle, who has so misunderstood her entire transaction with Sarah, understands what Mr. Kingsley’s summons means. Joelle tightens her hot grip on Sarah with sisterly envy. Sarah has become the kind of Problem they would all like to be.
“THAT WAS KIND of you yesterday,” Mr. Kingsley began, after closing the door behind her with a resonant click. He’d indicated the chair she should sit in, and perhaps it was the novel sensation of sitting in a chair in his office that induced her to say, right away, “I didn’t want to be kind.” She was aware of a dangerous urge to spar with him.
“Why not?” asked Mr. Kingsley.
“I don’t feel close to Joelle anymore. I thought, with everything you’ve taught us, that honoring my feelings about that was what I should do. But yesterday it seemed like the way that I felt didn’t matter.”
“How so?”
“You wanted me to go after her and make her feel better, and tell her we still were best friends. And I did, even though I was lying. And now I have to keep lying because she thinks that we’re best friends again.”
“What makes you think that’s what I wanted?”
“Because you told me to go after her!”
“Yes, but that’s all I told you to do. I didn’t tell you to make her feel better. I didn’t tell you to lie, and say the two of you were still friends.”
“Then what was I supposed to do? She was crying. I felt guilty.” Now Sarah was crying, which she had sworn she wouldn’t do. All the anger she’d brought into the room was transformed into sobs. There was Kleenex on the end of Mr. Kingsley’s desk nearest her chair, as if people often sat where she was sitting and cried, whether out of anger or some other emotion. She took a handful and blew her nose in it.
“You were supposed to stay with her in that moment, with tenacity and honesty. And that’s what you did.”
“I wasn’t honest. I lied!”
“And you’re aware of the lie, and aware of the reason you told it. You were there in that circumstance, Sarah. More there than Joelle.”
That this disparagement, to her, of her classmate might be considered a dishonest behavior of Mr. Kingsley’s wasn’t among Sarah’s thoughts at that moment. His comment seemed true in some way, and for a moment her crying subsided. “I still don’t understand how telling a lie makes me true to my feelings, unless you’re saying that making someone feel better is more important than telling the truth.”
“I’m not saying any such thing. Honesty is a process. Standing up for your emotions is a process. It doesn’t mean running roughshod over everyone else. If you weren’t a person of integrity, I don’t think you’d be sitting here challenging me about what happened yesterday.” Sarah prickled with alertness to hear him describe her as “challenging” him. It was clearly the right thing to do. “I’ll be counting on that integrity of yours when the English students are here in the spring,” he went on. “They’ll need the guidance of someone like you.”
This futuristic leadership role seemed far less real to Sarah than her current crises. “I feel like, in telling her we’re still friends, I’ve put myself in a trap.”
“You’ll find your way out.”
“How?”
“I said you’ll find your way out.”
Sarah cried with renewed force, for such a long time that she eventually grew aware of an unfamiliar luxuriousness. Mostly she cried alone, on rare occasions in front of her mother, but either way the emotion alongside of grief was impatience. Her own impatience, her mother’s impatience, with her tears. Mr. Kingsley seemed to grow more contented and patient the more that she cried. He sat smiling benignly. Under the narcotic of his patience she felt tempted to share the real reason she was crying, but thinking of it she cried too hard to speak, and then she’d been crying and thinking so long, she felt she’d actually talked about David, perhaps even been told what to do, and a strange peace overtook her that might have just been exhaustion. Mr. Kingsley still smiled benignly. He seemed more and more satisfied.
“Tell me about life outside school,” he said when her guttering breaths had grown calm.
“Like what? Um. My mom and I live in the Windsor Apartments.”
“Where are those?”
“You don’t know? Oh my God, they’re like the biggest apartment complex in the world. Every building and carport and tree looks the same. The first year we lived there, every time we went out we got lost coming back. We had to put a chalk X on our gate.” This made him laugh, and she swelled with pleasure.
SO MUCH OF what they do, with Mr. Kingsley, is restraint in the name of release. It seems they have to throttle their emotions to have complete access to them. Access to one’s own emotions = presence in the moment. Acting = responding with authentic emotion under made-up circumstances. They fill their notebooks with such singular declarations, each of which, as they’re writing it down, seems to offer the key, or perhaps the keystone, that will make the whole structure cohere, but later, when Sarah reads her notes over, she hears a repetitive melody that never climaxes or ends, like the maddening song that the ice cream truck plays in the summer. Sarah doesn’t blame the information, or Mr. Kingsley, its source, any more than she would blame the book she is struggling to read, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, for its impenetrability. Clearly she’s too young to read Tropic of Cancer, but she can’t accept this; if she knows what the words mean, the book’s meaning ought to unfold. Stubbornly she keeps trying. Similarly, with acting, stubbornly she keeps trying. Similarly, with David, stubbornly she keeps up her half of the duet each blames the other for starting, this new flavor of longing embittered by outrage but no less exclusive to them. It’s still a promise, Sarah stubbornly believes. Still a performance that each reserves just for the other. Sarah hides her fear that she’s wrong—that she doesn’t have talent, or David—beneath a youthful indifferent swagger, an insistence that she’s willing to do anything.
By late September, the mainstage rehearsals have started. Their school day already ends late, at four p.m., unlike the day at normal schools, which ends at two thirty. But during times when there’s rehearsal, which is more than half the year, rehearsal starts at four thirty and can go on for three or four hours. At dismissal the whole mass of Theatre students pours across the parking lot to U Totem for junk food: Funyuns and hot-pepper-spiced pork skins, individual servings of ice cream, rolls of SweeTarts and stacks of Kit Kats. Joelle shoplifts most of her items and never gets caught. Back in the parking lot they gorge on their feast, throw their wrappers in the outdoor trash cans, wash their hands before hitting the mainstage. For all their shoving, shouting immaturity, their indifference to nutritional standards, their unhygienic disorder as expressed in their lockers, their backpacks, and, for those who have licenses, cars, there are certain fastidious habits all the Theatre students observe as a group, by reflex. They would never dream of eating on the mainstage, in the wings, in the house with its red velvet seats. They may be teenagers, but there is nothing teenage about their dedication to this space, their cathedral. They’d as soon defecate in the aisle as eat candy bars here. They’ll retain some of these habits the rest of their lives. Long after they’ve left the theatre, and their theatre dreaming, behind, they’ll still spell it “theatre.” The alternate spelling will always seem ignorant to them. The master’s pride in a difficult tradecraft: they’ll have Mr. Kingsley to thank for bestowing this on them, whatever else they conclude about him.
These long days, this life conducted almost wholly away from their parents, in a nearly unsupervised world of their peers, is the source of the ardor they feel for their school. Freedom, selfhood—those intangibles they might have once thought were reserved for adults—turn out to be already theirs. Even Sarah, still months from her license and perhaps an eternity away from a car after having to spend all her earnings on fixing the sliding glass door, tastes freedom now that Joelle will drive her anywhere, anytime, in the Mazda, despite the fact that they live an hour’s drive from each other, on opposite sides of the city. It’s a swift balm to Sarah’s resentment at having been forced to renew their friendship. Sarah and Joelle are both on costume crew, and have nothing to do until Mr. Freedman, the costume designer, has finished the measurements, but they stay for rehearsal because they would not dream of leaving; they sit in the house with their tedious history homework. David is on props crew, which also has nothing to do because props crew is waiting for certain artistic conflicts to be resolved between Mr. Browne, the props master, and Mr. Kingsley, the director, but the props crew stays also; everyone stays, regardless of whether they have to, except for certain Freshmen who don’t yet understand the ethos or whose parents object to a twelve-hour day.
From her seat in the house Sarah sees David, at a break in the blocking, cross from stage right to stage left very near the rear wall. He disappears in the direction of the shop. All the curtains are up in the fly space; the stage is a thrillingly vast, utilitarian maw in which the actors mill, waiting. Sarah rises quickly from her seat, tells Joelle she’s going to the bathroom. Outside the theatre doors, she hooks left to follow the hallway that leads to the shop’s outside door. As if on cue, the door opens and David steps out. It’s past six; the hallway is empty. They’re alone, for the first time since that late summer day on the college campus. The hall is empty but this emptiness is momentary; the shop door is just here, farther down is the loading-dock door that leads into stage left, the sets crew is not building yet, awaiting, as is the props crew, resolution of conflicts about the design, but any moment they’ll wander through here, through their realm.
Sarah and David have torrents of accusations they have hoarded for weeks, to unleash on each other. Now their fury deserts them. “Hey,” David says, a hot blush rising out of his polo shirt collar.
At the sight of that blush, Sarah’s own chest seems to swell and implode. Heartbreak doesn’t flow through the heart but along that frail shallow canal of the sternum.
“Hi,” Sarah says, staring at his sternum where it hides from her under his shirt. She longs to lay her head there in repose from this agonized longing.
“Where are you going?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she says honestly.
They reenter the shop together. Its workspace takes up the full height of the building. Circular saw, band saw, splintered scrap plywood, sawdust on the floor. At its far side, a steep ladderlike staircase leads up to a mezzanine level of storage; at the back of the storage area, a door opens onto the second-floor hallway, a realm of musicians’ rehearsal rooms. Over the summer, someone has cleared out all the old flats and dismantled set pieces and other detritus and the storage mezzanine is quite empty. They pass out the door in the opposite wall and now stand in the second-floor hallway. Sarah crosses the hall to the double doors leading into the band room. These double doors are set back from the hallway a couple of feet so they form a wide, shallow alcove; she tries the double doors, which are locked. When she turns back, David catches her mouth with his, pressing her into the alcove’s corner so she feels the protruding door hinges bite into her arm. Not protected or hidden at all; back pressed into the corner, she can see the whole length of the hallway. There is only the chance that none of their classmates will wander this way. These thoughts crawl along the bottom of her mind, clear but disregarded, as she devours David’s mouth with her own. This is his power over her: not his cock or his hands but his mouth. Cock and hands are precocious enough. They belong to a fortunate, confident man, and have traveled in time for unguessable reasons to append themselves to a teenager. Unlike them his mouth is not a foreign power; it’s her own missing part. Seeing him for the first time, last year, she had stared with recognition at his mouth, at its unhandsome, simian quality, his lips slightly too wide for his narrow boy’s face. His mouth is nothing like hers because made for hers; her first time kissing him had been the first experience of her life that had exceeded expectation.
Gasping for breath, she takes his skull between her palms and fills the whorl of his ear with her tongue, because she’s learned this disables him, even more than when she struggles to take his whole cock in her mouth. Then, some indelible scruple or shame interferes with his pleasure, while her tongue in his ear makes him swoon. They’d even made this a joke, in the course of their summer: they called it his kryptonite. Now he moans, unrestrained, and literally falls to his knees, pulling Sarah down with him. With his free hand he yanks open his jeans, fumbles his thick erection through the vent in his boxers. Her clothes have no such apertures, it’s necessary to pull off her jeans entirely, at least from one leg, which means removing a boot, then her panties as well; heaving breath, they’re both tugging and yanking her clothes in the middle of the black-and-white checkerboard floor of the hallway with all the unself-conscious diligence they might have brought to stretching canvas across the wood frame of a scenery flat. Then Sarah is naked, from the toes of one foot to her waist, and the hot, slippery fit is accomplished; despite their fierce mutuality to this point, they’re both shocked to find themselves copulating in a public space of their high school, and now they bear down even more frantically, until with awful wrenchings of his face David comes, in his throes knocking Sarah’s head unexpectedly hard against the door of the band room, which is now at her back. At almost the same time they hear another door open and quickly slam shut: the door to the shop mezzanine.
They’re both trembling, their fingers useless as sausages, as they restore themselves into their clothes. They don’t exchange another word; Sarah does not even know whether their eyes meet and part as they peel off in different directions, neither going back through the shop mezzanine door. David strides toward the rear stairs that will lead to the loading dock entrance, Sarah turns the corner to the main hallway and goes down the wide central stairs, across the piazza, back through the theatre’s doors.
“Where’ve you been?” Joelle says, then starts laughing. “You bad girl.” She hands Sarah her compact, and Sarah stares at her mouth in its dusty porthole. Her lipstick is rubbed off, her lips swollen and tender-appearing, strangely large for her face, like his mouth.
AT LAST, THE ends and the means seem to match.
They have a new Movement teacher, who will teach them to move. They will learn to move by moving; they will learn to free their movements by free movement. The Movement teacher’s mission is so simple Sarah finds it idiotic. There is something else about the Movement teacher Sarah vaguely dislikes. She’s not sure how to feel when she realizes her dislike stems from the fact that the new teacher is female. Mr. Kingsley, Mr. Browne, Mr. Freedman, Mr. Macy who does set design, dramaturgy, and theatre history: all men. Ms. Rozot will teach them Movement. From the moment they meet her, they all disrespect her, covertly. Something in Mr. Kingsley’s gaze, as he introduces Ms. Rozot, warns them: they may mock her but they’d better keep it quiet.
She is a dancer and “multidisciplinary performer,” and she trembles with joy at the prospect of being their teacher. “Teaching is a sacred trust,” she gushes. “You are the future.” Despite their secret disrespect they are secretly flattered. They’ll give her a chance.
Since the tryst in the second-floor hallway, David has severed the wire. There is no longer even anger as a point of connection. His gaze backpedals from Sarah’s like a magnet escaping its likeness. He has mastered the trick of existing elsewhere even when they are in the same room. An alien lives in his body; amnesia has sponged clean his brain. With each confirmation that David has vanished, Sarah feels more anguished and exposed, as if her moment of desperate abandon were still going on with the whole gaping class in attendance. Movement class will be held in the Black Box; they arrive as the Seniors are leaving, and Sarah sees David pausing with Erin O’Leary. Erin is a Senior, petite and blond, her flawless face grave with the consciousness of her preeminence. Erin has a film credit, a SAG card. She drives a pale blue Karmann Ghia convertible. The sheer quantity of her superiorities is laughable; she’s like an implausible fictional character. Her tiny body, with its ideal, tiny hips and tiny breasts and compact little ass, drags generalized attention like a net. The boys, even the Senior boys, fear her: she is rumored to date real, established actors whom she meets on her “sets.” The girls loathe her. She travels in a cylinder of rarefied air, untroubled by her social isolation: she’s only here because it’s trashy to drop out of high school. Next year, she’ll attend Juilliard.
“Where are you headed?” David says to Erin.
“Restoration Comedy. You?”
“Movement.”
“Ugh, I hated it. We ought to get showers.”
“Oh, you’re okay,” David says, to which Erin laughs charmingly. She is so perfectly, adorably small that the crown of her glossy blond head barely grazes his chin. She gazes up at him, contentedly submissive. A girl who can do anything she wants. Can date a Sophomore if she wants. Anoint him.
Sarah plows into the Black Box, blind with revelation. Her cheeks, armpits, and crotch squirm with needles of heat, her familiar stigmata. Within the fist of her chest, her ribs snap like so many dry twigs. “Welcome!” Ms. Rozot is exulting. “Welcome to Movement.” Right away Ms. Rozot has them leave their chairs, their books and jackets and purses, and come down to the great square platform of the stage. Sarah has difficulty relinquishing her pile of books, folders, spiral-bound notebooks, the tattered, fractionally digested paperback of Tropic of Cancer on the top of the heap like a cake decoration; she has been pressing the pile to her chest like a shield or a bandage, and giving it up she feels physical pain. Her chest groans at the fresh exposure. She can hardly stand straight. David is somewhere behind her, she can feel him there—looking at her? When she can’t turn around and look back? Perhaps they’re all looking at her. They all know her dilemma. Yesterday, trying to escape David’s baffling absence, which she now understands, she’d climbed up to the fly rail and instead of solitude found Pammie, Pammie’s face blotched and sticky with tears. Twenty-four feet in the air, they’d had no recourse but to speak to each other, two girls compelled by their classwork to a level of intimacy far beyond what they shared with the rest of the world, and yet also two girls who had never once traded a single superfluous word. “You love him, don’t you,” Pammie said.
The Black Box was just as it sounded, a black box of a room with a large platform stage at the center low enough to require no stairs, four sets of riser seating on each side, and aisles around the platform and around the sets of risers. During performances, black drapery made the aisles behind the risers backstage, four velvet hideaways also clandestinely useful at times, but today the drapery is furled, the box is open to its walls and its faraway ceiling, crisscrossed by the lighting catwalks. They are to walk, walk, walk—move, move, move!—all through this marvelous space; they must make themselves free to explore every inch. Not the catwalks or ladders, no. [Laughter.] “All right, you are all very clever! You will explore all terrestrial inches. In literature, there is an idea called automatic writing. You write without resting your pen. The pen must keep moving and moving; perhaps it is writing ‘Why the fuck do I have to keep writing?’” [More laughter, shocked and charmed, at her profanity. Her profanity, tinged as it is with her accent, is more charming than shocking. Is it possible they could respect her?] “Well, this unbroken movement, of the pen, unlocks the secrets within. And if the pen can do this, then how much more the whole body? Let your body lead you. Your only order to it: never stop moving. Otherwise, it is in charge! I will help you with music.”
Oh, no, they can’t respect her. It’s perfectly ridiculous. And the music she’s playing! Cat Stevens. The Moody Blues. Satirically, then, they walk, walk, walk!—making faces at each other, swinging their arms, bouncing on the balls of their feet, speeding up comically so they’re marching like robots. Whenever Norbert and Colin pass each other, they make absurd faces. Then, when they pass each other again, they both make absurd faces and leap in the air, still without breaking stride. This behavior spreads, evolves. Most of the boys adore Monty Python, and embarrass the girls at lunch with their flawlessly recalled and completely unfunny enactments of skits, by which they, the performers, are slain with hilarity. In the Black Box, the boys do “silly walks,” and then pratfalls-in-motion to show they are slain with hilarity. By and large, the girls grow increasingly serious as the boys grow increasingly ludicrous. The girls no longer walk, they glide, they skim, they slice. The music changes to classical stuff without words. The girls begin taking on speed. An additional layer is added: high speed without hitting one another. They are weaving a mad tapestry with their movements; some unpredictably change direction in the hope of collisions. No matter what they do, no matter how subversively they do it, Ms. Rozot cries from the sidelines:
“Good!
“Move! Move! MOVE!
“Ah—you are making something.”
Indeed they are. Somehow, silliness dies. All the theatrical forms of movement—the “silly walks” and pratfalls, but also the arm-swinging (“I am carefree!”) and the deliberate direction-changing (“I am a rogue!”)—leach out of the room. Unexpected collectivity has slowly emerged in its place. Perhaps most important, embarrassment has been given up. Without their having noticed it, they’re no longer embarrassed. Their speed has equalized until they’re all traveling at about the same rate. Their winding paths, their cloverleafs and hairpins and loops, knit some underlying pattern as if they learned this maypole dance beside their parents as children, as if it binds them to something, and makes of them something.
Sarah’s face is streaming tears. At the point where she ought to curve left or curve right she goes straight, and plunges out the Black Box doors and down the hall, running, her speed snatching the tears from her face.
There’s a single toilet stall at the back of the girls’ dressing room, off stage right, which no one ever uses except during performances. Sarah locks herself in and succumbs, her whole body folded and violently jerking as if she’ll throw up in the bowl. Her mind startles her with the wish to be dead. To be dead, instead of in pain. Suicide, she realizes, isn’t opting out of the future, it’s opting out of the present, for who can see more of the future than that? Reference to the future, to its unbroken promise, is the reflex of those for whom the future’s mirage still exists. Such people are lucky, deceived.
As if Sarah’s thoughts had conjured her, Ms. Rozot comes into the dressing room and insists on discussing the future. Sarah cannot imagine how, apart from her own mind’s self-defeating wizardry, this unwanted hippie Frenchwoman could have located her in this bathroom. Ms. Rozot is brand-new to the school. More than half the school’s experienced students and teachers do not even realize this bathroom exists. Outside the stall door Ms. Rozot says, “Sa-rah? Sa-rah?” mispronouncing both a’s the same way, like the “o” sound in “odd.” “Sarah, are you in there? Are you in pain?”
“Please leave me alone!” Sarah sobs angrily. Why is solitude so fucking hard to achieve? If only she had a car, she thinks for the billionth time. She would lock all the doors and just drive.
“Sarah, I want to share with you something. I think it will help you. Young people like you experience pain more intensely than those of us just a bit older. I speak of emotional pain. Your pain is greater, in duration and strength. It is harder to bear. This is not a metaphor. It is a fact, of physiology. Of psychology. Your emotional sensitivity—it is superior to that of your parents, your teachers. That is why these years of your life, when you are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, are so difficult, but also so important. That is why developing your talent at this age is so crucial. This heightened emotional pain is a gift. A difficult gift.”
Despite herself, she’s listening. “Are you saying,” she manages after a while, “that in the future, when I’m older, things won’t hurt as much?”
“Yes, exactly. But Sarah, I am saying something else. Don’t turn away from the pain. When you are older, yes, you will be harder. That is a blessing and a curse.”
Ms. Rozot does not insist Sarah open the door, and this alone opens Sarah. They linger, she does not know how long, on their opposite sides of the door. “Thank you,” she whispers at last.
“Please take your time,” says Ms. Rozot, departing.
IT’S BEEN OBVIOUS from the beginning who are Broadway Babies and who aren’t. Those who truly can sing, who can give them the old razzle-dazzle, who live for that one singular sensation, have for the most part drawn attention to themselves from the first day of school. They cluster around the Black Box piano during rainy-day lunchtimes and sing The Fantasticks. They wear the Cats sweatshirts to school that they got on their holiday trip to New York. Some of them, like the Junior named Chad, are enviably serious musicians who can not only sing but play Sondheim, for real, from sheet music. Some of them, like Erin O’Leary, don’t just sing but dance like Ginger Rogers, having apparently put on tap shoes at the same time as they took their first steps.
Sarah’s failure to be Erin O’Leary used to be a point of pride, if a wobbly one. Now Sarah is furious with her coarse heavy hair, the opposite of Erin’s dandelion floss, with her wide hips the opposite of Erin’s trim ones, with her big unskilled feet in their dirty misused ballet flats the opposite of Erin’s miniature ones which make scissoring blurs through the air. Sarah is furious with the faltering squawk of her voice, the opposite of Erin’s “songbird.” Historically, Theatre students like Sarah (and David) who couldn’t sing or dance solaced themselves with Uta Hagen, Beckett, and Shakespeare. They reminded themselves they were serious Theatre Artists, that Broadway was cheeseball one end to the other. Of course they kept this knowledge to themselves, out of respect for Mr. Kingsley and genuine awe for his musical talent. They were never troubled by their condescension, or at least Sarah wasn’t. But now that it’s mainstage auditions again, all of them are reminded, some of them more painfully than others, of how much they’re exalted by big musicals. David loves Jesus Christ Superstar, knows all the words, sings along tunelessly with the album when he is alone. Sarah has the same secret relationship to Evita. They are serious; but how much better if they also could sing, if they could startle and move their classmates on those rainy days standing around the piano? If, implored by Mr. Kingsley, they could deign to play Christ, or Evita—for the good of the show, given that they were best for the role?
Such secret talent isn’t theirs, however. They remind themselves—though not in conversation, for David and Sarah don’t speak to each other, or have any idea where the other is sitting, so many rows distant as to be reduced to just a dark head tilted over a book, remote and indifferent and hateful and completely ignored (in fact, not even noticed)—of how corny Guys and Dolls is, how glad they both are to be taking a pass on auditions, how much more absorbing they’re finding Endgame (David) or the first scene of King Lear, beyond which she has never yet managed to penetrate (Sarah). They do not share these similar feelings, the similarity having no meaning for them. They do, of course, actually watch the auditions, their hearts in their mouths, almost sick with vicarious hope.
It is, Sarah bitterly thinks, like an Erin O’Leary coronation. Erin will be Adelaide, of course. Acknowledging this, she sings “Adelaide’s Lament,” Mr. Bartoli, the dance department accompanist who also serves as musical director, practically bouncing off the bench as he plays, so acute is his pleasure in playing for her. Many, many of the boys, including many who, like David, can’t sing, but who, unlike David, don’t care, sing “I got the horse right here,” making up for their laughable voices with a lot of mugging and humorous gestures. Some of them will get cast, as the gamblers do not have to be melodic and do have to be funny. David flushes with the consciousness of his own cowardice, the fraudulence of his appeal to Erin. Soon Erin, like Sarah, will find him repulsive unless he can make himself worthy. Sightlessly staring at Endgame, he vows to himself that he’ll audition for the musical next year. In their department, auditions take place constantly—for the grade-level Showcase productions; for the Senior Directing Projects; for the Outdoor Shakespeare every May; for the Spring Mainstage (Drama) and, as now, Fall Mainstage (Musical)—and each round of auditions tends to confirm a corresponding, slightly different pecking order: the purely social pecking order of the sophomore class, in which both Sarah and David rank high; the pecking order of the Serious Actors, which David has started to climb; the pecking order of the Adults-in-Training, the perpetual Stage Managers, whose skills Mr. Browne ferrets out even when they are trying to hide them (Sarah fears this is her fate). But only fall auditions for the mainstage musical reveal a pecking order applicable to the whole school, for only in the fall musical does the whole school take part. The dancers happily subordinate themselves to chorus roles. The instrumental-music students hold their own auditions, for the mainstage orchestra. Among the Theatre students it is often repeated that the dramatic and musical mainstage productions are equal in status, but everyone knows this is bunk. Playing the lead in the dramatic mainstage doesn’t even rate as highly as playing a secondary character in the musical. None of them, not even those who arrived at the school with an actual hatred of musicals, question this valuation. None of them wonder what things might be like if, say, someone other than Mr. Kingsley ran the Theatre program. Brilliant as he is, his hierarchies must be objective, and even last year, when it was still a point of pride to Sarah not to be Erin O’Leary, she had asked her mother for ballet, jazz, and tap lessons, so as to do better in the in-school lessons. Her mother had said, “Are you kidding? Isn’t that what you’re already doing all day, instead of preparing for college?”
As the auditions wear on, Sarah puts down King Lear and she, Pammie, Ellery, and Joelle, who will all work on costumes, compile a cast list. The female roles are a gimme; it’s hardly possible to guess wrong. The male roles, more numerous, sometimes make for a dark horse or two, and the fun lies in guessing at these. Norbert is auditioning, and Ellery sinks in his seat and grabs Sarah and Joelle, on either side of him. “Girls,” he whispers, “give me strength.”
“Why aren’t you auditioning?” Sarah asks him.
“Just because I’m beautiful and black doesn’t mean I can sing.”
Last year, as Freshmen, they had taken sight-reading, and been obliged to stand at the piano and warble the length of a page of sheet music chosen with indifference to their ranges, if they even had ranges. It hadn’t been much of a showcase for vocal, or even sight-reading, skill, and a few of them, as often happened, had bombed, while a few others unexpectedly triumphed. Taniqua and Pammie, both church chorus veterans, had amazed with their sheet music literacy and their competent voices. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Manuel, when summoned to the piano, went rigid, his sheet music snapping in the breeze of his quivering hands. His skin, always dustily brown, turned mesmerically red like a coal in the fire. Just when they thought he would faint, his mouth slowly hinged open—and hung that way, mutely, as if he were an abandoned ventriloquist’s dummy. A rustle of incipient laughter passed over the room. “Quiet,” Mr. Kingsley had said, striking the first note of whatever it was he had given Manuel to sight-read. They were all forced to watch Manuel’s pitiful trembling outlive the note’s lengthy vibration. “One more time,” Mr. Kingsley had said, striking the key and renewing the note in their ears. Was it possible for total petrifaction to grow yet more total, yet more petrified? It apparently was. Manuel was going to stand there enacting the meaning of “dumbstruck” until either Mr. Kingsley showed mercy or the bell rang to end class. “You’re not off the hook,” Mr. Kingsley had finally said, dismissing Manuel with surprising anger. In general Mr. Kingsley’s anger was reserved for his pets, who wore it as a badge of distinction. Mr. Kingsley didn’t bother being angry at people of whom nothing much was expected.
Now, as Mr. Kingsley called, “Next!” to the auditioners waiting concealed in the wings, Ellery clamped Sarah’s elbow again. “Am I dreaming?” he squeaked.
Manuel had come onstage, an apparition. Perhaps it wasn’t Manuel. He wasn’t dressed like Manuel, in the slightly too-small and slightly too-youthful striped T-shirts you could tell, just from looking, had been bought from the sale rack at Sears, or maybe from the Purple Heart Thrift Store, by Manuel’s unknown mother, after being discarded by whoever had bought them at Sears. The shirts Manuel wore every day had pills, and faint, ancient stains of the kind that defeated all efforts, and they squeezed his upper arms and his neck. For pants, Manuel wore corduroys that had almost no cord left. And regardless of weather conditions, Manuel never took off his jacket, the same fake-wool-lined corduroy jacket they’d first seen him in, and that seemed to them now as permanent as a turtle’s scuffed shell. The onstage Manuel was missing this traditional garb, though not dressed any better. He wore a pair of black slacks that were shiny with age, and a grayish-white button-up shirt that, despite being short at the sleeves, was tightly buttoned at the cuffs, emphasizing the bony excess of his wrists. The feet were encased in hard black leather shoes that looked too small, and the usual bushy brown hair was combed back from the face exposing large, startled eyes, unfamiliar to all, beneath an equally novel, creased brow. A sheaf of paper was gripped in the hands. The Manuel-apparition looked like a waiter, an unhappy and poorly dressed waiter. Sarah realized with amazement he was dressing, as well as he could, for the part. Guys and Dolls would of course call for old-fashioned menswear: leather shoes, slacks, a button-up shirt. Not one other boy, for the sake of the audition, had made the slightest alteration to his everyday clothes. They’d all auditioned in their Levi’s and polos and dumb slogan T-shirts.
It did seem possible this was a dream. As on the day of the sight-reading test, a titter passed over the house, instantly extinguished when Mr. Kingsley stood up from his place in the center of the third row. “Okay, Manuel. What do you have for us?”
Ellery squeezes Sarah’s hand, and Sarah squeezes back. On his other side he has Joelle’s hand. On Sarah’s other side is Pammie. Joelle and Pammie are squeezing their eyes shut and clutching their cheeks; Pammie is so agonized she balls up in her seat like a hedgehog. Both Joelle and Pammie, for their separate if equally feminine reasons, feel a motherly pity for Manuel, though neither has managed to befriend him. He doesn’t afford the slightest opportunity, speaking to no one—not even Pammie, with her pious childlike fearlessness, can get him to answer her cheery “Hello!” Sarah hears Pammie fervently mumbling. It’s possible, in fact likely, that she’s praying.
“What do you have for us?” Mr. Kingsley repeats.
Manuel again turns that mesmerizing color of a live coal. At length he says, barely audibly, “I am going to sing the ‘Ave Maria’ of [a bunch of syllables Sarah can’t hear].” Strings seem to be tied to his elbows, equally pulling on him from both sides, so that, in his tensile, motionless state, he might fly to pieces. Then the stage-left string breaks, and he lurches toward Mr. Bartoli, extending his music. Mr. Bartoli pages through it, nods. “Shall I begin?” he asks.
Manuel wrings his hands in a fretful grandmotherly way, abruptly drops them to his sides. Mr. Kingsley, still standing, his back to the rest of the house, says, “Manny, I know you can do it.”
He speaks as though he and Manuel are entirely alone. Yet no one in the house fails to hear him, to the very last row.
It’s possible for silence to change quality. The silence had been enforced, the silence of quashed merriment. Now it’s the silence of genuine puzzlement. Mr. Kingsley never uses nicknames or pet names. To indicate an altered attitude he sometimes calls them, instead of their given names, Ms. or Mr. and then their last name. This denotes bemusement, disapproval, and much in between, but whatever the case there is always a distance implied. “Manny” observes no such distance. “Manny” doesn’t even observe that there might be some forty-odd people elsewhere in the room.
Mr. Kingsley sits down again. The back of his head, with its limited features, its expensive haircut, and the ends of his spectacles’ temples hooking over the backs of his ears, is nearly as expressive to them as his face—it radiates a peremptory certitude. “Come on. You know what I want. Give it to me.” If the back of his head can say this, just imagine the front. (Ms. Rozot: “If the pen can do this, how much more the whole body!”) Manuel—Manny?—seems to be in wordless communication with this hidden front of Mr. Kingsley’s head. He gazes into it, receives something from it—he looked different when he first came onstage, and he somehow looks different again. With what might almost be called self-possession he nods to Mr. Bartoli. Mr. Bartoli raises his hands, brings them plunging back down. Manuel sucks air into his lungs.
To this point in her life, Sarah has associated opera with Bugs Bunny in braids, PBS, overweight men wearing tunics, shrieking women, and shattering glass. She’s never understood, certainly because she’s never seen a live opera but also because she’s never heard a half-decent performance, not even in part, on TV, that opera, in fact, is the highest redemption of longing. That it’s her own anguish, salvaged by music. The victorious army’s fight song, in defense of her mute, savaged heart.
Now she understands why Ms. Rozot has warned her to not turn away from her pain.
Manuel sings. His Spanish accent, which he drags like a weight on his uncertain journeys amid English words, is a bona fide now. Who else among them could sing this, even if they were blessed with the voice? Who else among them is blessed with the voice? Manuel sings, it seems, to horizons beyond the light booth. His eyes are cast up, anxiously, as if he’s aware he is barely retaining the fickle attention of God. So plaintively does he exhort this remote audience that Sarah glances back over her shoulder, expecting to see ranks of angels, their feet floating just off the ground. Instead she sees the faces of her classmates, rapt with unself-consciousness, the joyful respite from the problems of self. She too has passed out of herself, so thoroughly, so happily, that for a moment even David’s face is strange to her, and not just because his eyes are full of tears.
Her body twists forward again as if slapped, as Manuel, like a fountain, upraises his arms and their glorious burden, his final note, into the air. As if they awaited this gesture, the house detonates: clapping, whistling, foot-stamping, Ellery leaping up to shout, “Hombre!” Onstage Manuel, streaming with sweat, grins while wringing his hands. We’ve all had this dream, Sarah thinks. The dream in which, to the world’s surprise and our own, we turn out to be best.
Mr. Bartoli pushes the piano bench smartly behind him, crosses to Manuel, claps him on the shoulder, and pumps him warmly by the hand. They’re only forty-odd kids but they make the noise of a full house. They keep going, on their feet, so that except to the rows nearest him, Mr. Kingsley goes almost unnoticed when, pushing his spectacles onto the top of his head, he roughly draws his sleeve across his forehead and eyes. Then, “Someone write down the date!” he shouts at them. “Manuel Avila’s public debut!”
IN THE PARKING lot, at lunchtime, Sarah sits hunched on the hood of the Mazda with Joelle, Sarah scratching sometimes in her notebook, the two of them smoking clove cigarettes, Sarah ignoring the sandwich her mother has packed her. Her mother packs for Sarah, every morning, even when they’re not speaking, as now, a sandwich of meat from the deli, sliced cheese, Grey Poupon, a slice of tomato, and lettuce on some kind of a bakery bun that will have either poppy or sesame seeds. “Your sandwich looks like a restaurant sandwich!” Joelle once exclaimed in wonder, and since then Sarah doesn’t unwrap it, but when lunchtime is over drops it into the trash as they’re going inside. She does so with her face turned away, as if not having seen herself do it might mean that she hasn’t. On the far side of the lot the pale blue Karmann Ghia pulls in, perhaps some litter from the Del Taco drive-through carelessly tossed on the floor, perhaps David, ridiculous in a pair of Ray-Bans, enthroned on the passenger seat, but if Sarah has not in fact seen this, it might mean it isn’t the case. No one can prove it’s the case. Her eyes are night headlights; they only see what’s just ahead. It’s an unending labor, this policing of vision and thoughts.
“You look exhausted,” Mr. Kingsley says, once he’s shut his office door with a click that broadcasts the length of the hall. The ticket of admission. The door has shut on faces pretending absorption in the bulletin board, as if anyone need consult beyond his or her memory to obtain the full cast list, which was posted last week (Sky Masterson: Manuel Avila). Her fellow students are loitering in the hallway outside in the hopes of obtaining what she’s just received: his particular summons. Pride and humiliation strangely mingle their tastes in her mouth, or perhaps it’s the tart, rancid coffee to which she has lowered her face. He’s handed it to her, in a Styrofoam cup, from his personal drip coffee maker. Pride she’s been chosen, humiliation at what she presumes are the grounds for his choice. They all know the students with whom he is sometimes seen driving away, at lunchtime, in his olive Mercedes; whom he detains with no more than a look, as the rest of the class filters out of the room; behind whom he closes the door to his office at lunchtime. They’re the Troubled students, the borderline ones, whose sufferings are eagerly whispered the lengths of the halls. Jennifer, who missed school for a month and now only wears sleeves that hang well past her wrists. Greg, the incandescently beautiful Senior, with whom Julietta and Pammie are madly in love, who despite his impeccable clothes, dazzling smile, and kindness, was thrown out of the house by his father, and now lives at the YMCA. Manuel, whose stark poverty is newly palatable because coupled with talent. And Sarah, about whom they say—what?
She’s so in love with David she let him fuck her in the hall! And now he’s dumped her.
“I don’t get a lot of sleep,” she concedes.
“Why not?”
“I have this job. At a French bakery. I have to be there at six in the morning on weekends. Both days.”
“What time do you go to sleep on the nights you have work?”
“Maybe two.”
“What time do you get up on weekdays?”
“The same. About six.”
“And you’re going to bed when? On weekdays.”
“The same. One or two.”
“You’re going to kill yourself,” he observes, and she thinks he’s predicting an event in the future, her actual suicide, and then realizes he’s speaking figuratively, or probably figuratively, about the long-term effects of not sleeping enough.
“I am really tired,” she agrees, and just like that, she is crying again. Her shoulders hitch, and try as she might she can’t stop bringing up chunks of wet, ragged noise. She knows it’s expected yet knows equally that sometimes, some greater forbearance is also expected. Mr. Kingsley is not Ms. Rozot. Jennifer the failed suicide, Greg the orphan by force, impoverished Manuel, and her, Sarah—they’ve all been robbed of heedless childhood and that’s why they’ve been chosen, their precocious adulthood acknowledged. All kids want such glamorous knowledge. The darkness of it. The hardness of it. The realness of it. The cold fact that life really is fucked. And Sarah, with her Morrissey T-shirts and her unfiltered Camels and her sleep deprivation and her willful compliance with sexual hungers, she’s been asking for this awful dispossession, with one mind she’s been hot on its trail, and now that she’s got it she longs to go back. If she could only go back, and eat the sandwich her mother packed her, with its thoughtful tomato.
She cries, as expected by him, and she eventually masters her tears, as also expected by him. She cleans her face and blows her nose with his Kleenex and disposes of it in his trash. She even takes out her Sportsac of makeup and unhurriedly fixes her face. When she snaps shut her compact she feels his approval as clearly as if he had spoken. “So,” he says, pleased. “Why don’t you tell me what’s actually happening.”
She tells him. Not all that same day; they’re already out of time. But now she is a regular. Their meetings wholly evident, and wholly unacknowledged, as is any exclusive liaison, by those it makes complicit, yet excludes. David sees, and grinds his molars together by day and by night to the point that the dentist has threatened to make him a mold to wear while he’s asleep. David, God help him, has no consciousness of discarding Sarah, but of being discarded. Here’s a girl, unlike any other girl he’s ever been with, who, once told of his love, doesn’t grab hold of his hand, hang herself on his arm, drag him out to the mall or the movies with the chattering flock of her friends, but to the contrary, spooks like a horse when he walks in the room. Swathes herself in cold air and then dares him to try and reach her, and how can he? Is it possible their whole love affair was a misunderstanding? David had known she slept with guys who were older than he, in some cases much older. Seeing her embarrassment, their first day back at school, David had felt like a charity case. She’d allowed him, but he shouldn’t let anyone know. And then the thing in the hallway, strange proof: she’ll come to him when nobody’s looking.
Or is it possible, Sarah says to Mr. Kingsley, that their whole breakup is a misunderstanding? Isn’t it possible, Sarah begs Mr. Kingsley, that David still loves her? How could he say that he did, and then not?