immediately whispered, “Crouch start for It.” They exchanged a grave nauseated look as if the conjured image had pained them both. Bridget felt a little jealous as she watched these two girls share their mutual feeling of pious disgust. The smaller girl’s deliberate revulsion fascinated her. “Crouch start for It,” she said. The subject was just too painful to say more. The taller girl looked down in sympathy and shook her head as if to acknowledge how sickening and inescapable the whole business was. It was all around them.
The eight-year-old Bridget had been unable to comprehend the terrible relation that this particular athletics lesson bore to the act of It, and now as she reflects upon the scene she realizes that she still has no idea how to recognize or execute a crouch start for It. Is there even such a thing? she asks herself doubtfully, but then she recalls once more the poise and perfect confidence of this ten-year-old girl, who is eighteen by now and probably thoroughly schooled in arts beyond the reach of Bridget’s imagining. Bridget reflects on how little she knows. The raindrops reach the sill and quiver there. She feels ashamed.
The saxophone teacher smoothes the newspaper and looks again at the article. The paper is old now, and there have been others, subsidiary stories that recap this first account, stories about holding inquiries and questioning witnesses and deciding who to blame, but this paper remains, folded into eighths, limp and graying with the hangdog look of old news. The headline reads
The saxophone teacher thinks, She would have been at the concert with the three of us that night, if only I’d liked her enough to invite her. The thought nibbles at her for a moment, just as a possibility, like a new shirt that she may or may not try on. Finally she shrugs and snuffs it out. Outside in the courtyard she can dimly hear a group of students from the drama school, chanting and stamping their feet. She pushes the newspaper away and moves to the window to look.
Near the trunk of the ginkgo tree, six students have formed a human pyramid on a thin square of foam matting, while in front of them a larger group pace back and forth. They are like a seething flock of dark crows in the uniform black of the Institute, their feet bare and bloodless against the paving. From where the saxophone teacher is standing, the pyramid looks a little like a card castle, wobbling slightly but standing firm, growing outward and upward as more and more actors withdraw from the foreground drama and add their bodies to the tier.
The saxophone teacher watches the black flurry in the foreground for a long while. Looking back to the solid pyramid of bodies at the base of the ginkgo tree, she is startled to see that she is being watched. One of the boys in the front row, kneeling on the asphalt with his arms extended stiffly to either side, is looking up at her. His head is flung back, and the open collar of his shirt shows the length of his white throat. The saxophone teacher’s first impulse is to step away from the window, but she stays, and she thinks she sees the boy smile up at her. She looks away.
The rehearsal is coming to a close. One of the girls at the front rears up suddenly and calls out, in a rich clear voice that fills the courtyard, “
And as she says it, as the marvelous peal of her voice breaks off and the stamping and drumming comes to a swift and terrible halt and the courtyard fills with silence like a sudden rush of water, as she says it, the card castle behind her begins to fall. It tumbles down in a stately and choreographed cascade, a slow-motion melt. The figures of the actors tumble off to land on light heels and knees on the foam matting, scuttling off and leaping away until the pyramid has disappeared utterly, thawed out to a nothing-puddle of black stillness, all of the actors unmoving and silent where they have come to rest.
The girl at the front is the only figure standing now. She spreads her arms and says, “I imagine—”
There is the tiniest of pauses, the girl outstretched and full of curtailed breath that swells her ribs to bursting. Then it is as if a spell is broken, as if an invisible curtain has come down and an invisible blackout has blanked the stage, and all the fallen figures begin to move. They jump to their feet and dust themselves down and break into conversation, and the saxophone teacher hears “That fall was heaps better that time, you came in right on the beat” and “We can still get that tighter, guys” and “From the top.”
TEN
“So we agree that sexuality is an issue that we’re all interested in, at least,” the boy Felix said loudly, the first time the first-years met to discuss the devised theater project and the King of Diamonds playing card. Felix was bossy and pert and did not understand the humor of what he had just said, scowling at a pair of boys on the far lip of the circle who faintly snickered.
“I liked the idea of using found stories,” one of the girls said. “From the media and our communities and all that, taking them and using them and making them theatrical. I liked that idea.”
“All right,” Felix said graciously, drawing with a fat felt-tipped pen a spiky cloud around the word SEXUALITY. The others watched. At the beginning of the year Felix had labored to snare the role of the group’s organizing mind, to the irritation of most of the students, who looked at the tiny protrusion of his tongue as he wrote and felt they could do better.
“Then what about that story that Grace brought in?” Felix said when he had completed the bubble. “The teacher–student thing at Scabby Abbey.”
He used the nickname to show them that although he was organizing the group, they were not allowed to resent him or regard him as a teacher-figure.
“My sister’s at Abbey Grange,” one of the boys said. “In sixth form. She reckons they don’t know the half of it yet. What she heard was that after all the girl’s friends found out, the teacher kept them quiet for a few months by paying them out. Mostly buying them booze, on behalf.”
“But wasn’t the girl a seventh former? So most of her friends would have been eighteen anyway.”
“It’s what I heard,” the boy said, shrugging.
“How did they get caught in the end?” somebody asked.
“I heard it was another teacher,” the boy said. “The guy had been dating someone else on staff, and then they broke up and she was the one who found him with the girl. That’s what Polly said.”
“I thought it was her friends,” one of the girls said. “They caught on and went to the principal and dobbed her in.”
“I heard that it wasn’t just the one girl who was abused,” somebody said, “it was a whole bunch of them— he was playing them all at the same time. She was just the one who got caught.”
“Do we know whether anything actually happened?” one of the girls put in. “What if nothing actually happened between her and the teacher at all?”
“They had evidence. Like there were some of her clothes at his house. And there was a toothbrush.”
“A toothbrush doesn’t mean
There was a silence as they all digested this new concept.
Then one of the boys said, “Wasn’t he like sixty?”
“He wasn’t that old. There was a photo in the paper last week. He’s got brown hair.”
“So we don’t really know very much at all,” Felix said crossly, swiping his fringe away from his face. He was feeling the helpless boiling irritation of an officious person struggling to control a group too large and original for him. He uncapped his pen and wrote ISSUES at the top of his butcher’s sheet.
“We need to make really awesome use of the card itself,” one of the girls said. “Playing cards need to be an integral part of the performance, not just some little byproduct scene that’s tacked on.”
