The Rehearsal

chosen Susan from A Bed Among the Lentils for you. You’re playing out of your age range a bit, but I think you’ll manage beautifully.”

The rules of the exercise were relatively simple. The students were asked to leave the grounds of the Institute and disperse into the four city blocks that surrounded the Institute buildings. They had to remain in character for two hours. They were to be let out in small staggered batches, one batch leaving as another returned, over a period of three days. The tutors and the off-duty actors would be patrolling the city blocks, appearing to perform ordinary activities, like shopping and ordering coffee and jogging and meeting each other on the street to talk, but all the while observing the actors as they performed.

Dora. Septimus. Martha. Bo. The list went on. Stanley looked out the window and allowed his mind to wander, and soon found that he couldn’t distinguish the names of the characters from the names of the students assigned to become them.

“Stanley,” the Head of Acting called, jolting him out of his reverie. He looked up, but the Head of Acting wasn’t addressing him. “Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire,” he was saying, and a student on the floor was nodding vigorously and scribbling down the name of the role in the margin of his exercise book. Stanley sighed and looked down at his hands.

“I know that some of these roles are easier than others,” the Head of Acting said, “and with some of these characters it’s hard to imagine them out of the context of the play. But remember that every performance is an interpretation. You can be as imaginative as you like. It’s up to you what you want to wear, whether you want to try an accent, whether you want to change your appearance to better suit your role.”

Stanley’s gaze slid sideways to the Head of Movement, standing like a patient shadow behind the Head of Acting, his ankles together and his heels against the wall. He was smiling faintly and nodding his head, but the movement looked automatic, like a weighted pendulum keeping indulgent time behind a pane of glass. He saw the Head of Movement wink at one of the students on the floor, and turned his head quickly to follow his gaze and seek out the recipient of the wink. He was too late to tell. He looked back at the Head of Movement and saw him smile and look carefully down at the floor.

The Head of Acting had reached the first-year group, and all around him his classmates were being branded one by one. Harry Bagley. George. Moss. Irene.

Stanley was assigned the part of Joe Pitt. “Read the play first,” the Head of Acting advised, and smiled a tiny smile before returning to his list. Somebody in the crowd giggled faintly and Stanley blushed, wondering what sort of person Joe Pitt was. He wrote the name on a fresh page of his organizer and then tucked the book into his bag.

August

“How long are you in town for?” Stanley asked after they had ordered. His father was busy scratching something into his electronic notebook and he didn’t answer immediately. He stabbed at the screen, folded the notebook away, and shook out his cuffs.

“Sorry, champ,” he said. “You said?”

“How long are you down for?”

“Just the weekend. I’m speaking at the conference tomorrow and then we fly out. I’ve got a joke for you. What’s the difference between acne and a Catholic priest?”

“I don’t know,” said Stanley.

“Acne only comes on your face after puberty.”

“Dad, that’s revolting,” Stanley said. He thought, A taboo is something that’s forbidden because it’s sacred.

His father held up his hands in surrender. “Too far?”

“Yes,” Stanley said. Or because it’s disgusting. He scowled despite himself and took a drink of water.

“Tell me about you, then,” his father said. “Tell me about drama school. Oh! I forgot—I’ve got something for you. I cut it out of the newspaper this morning.” He thumbed through his briefcase until he found a wad of newspaper, folded in eighths. He passed it across the table to Stanley and hummed merrily as he waited for Stanley to read it.

The headline read Girl’s Death “Terrible Waste.” The article was brief.

“You know the girl?” his father said when he’d finished. He was expectant, his eyes the gleeful half-moons of the laughing Comedy mask in the foyer of the Institute.

Stanley looked at the article again, and swallowed. “You’re going to tell me that this was the million-dollar girl.”

His father laughed. “Stanley,” he said, “this was the million-dollar girl. Did you know her?”

“What if I did?” Stanley said. “What if I did, and this was how I found out, and you’ve just been horribly insensitive to both of us?”

Stanley’s father reached across to twitch the page out of Stanley’s hands. “It’s just a bit of fun,” he said, tucking the wad back into his briefcase. “I thought you’d laugh. Don’t look at me like that.”

He shook his finger playfully at Stanley, and reached for his tumbler. “Anyway, if you did know her,” he said, “then I’d be congratulating you, because you’d have picked her from the start and you’d have taken out a policy.”

“That girl is a real person somewhere,” Stanley said.

“That girl is a corpse somewhere,” his father corrected. He gave Stanley a stern critical look, as if gravely disappointed and seeing him truly for the first time. He said, “I really thought you’d laugh.”

ELEVEN

Monday

The catchment area for Abbey Grange is wide and economically diverse. It is close enough to the city center to touch some of the wealthier areas, but covers several suburbs of middling value and a few streets at its nether edge that properly belong in the backwater suburbs, wide crawling streets with vast gutters and unkempt grass.

The poorer girls who work part-time in fast-food and clothing chain stores are able to effect something of a moral victory over the girls who receive an allowance from their parents and don’t have to work for cash. When the less wealthy girls visit the white and shining houses of the rich they always come armed with a strong sense of entitlement, opening the fridge and changing the channel and taking long delicious showers in the morning, always with a guiltless and even pious sense of righting some dreadful inequality in the world. It is almost a noble thing to cajole and thieve half a bag of crisps from a girl whose pantry is lit by angled halogen bulbs anchored to a chrome bar: it is not a burglary but a form of just redistribution, a restoration of a kind of balance. So the poorer girls tell themselves, as they close their salty fists around their next mouthful and remark out loud that they are rostered on to work the late shift at the candy bar tonight.

The richer girls are made to feel ashamed of their parents’ wealth by these subtle insidious means, and so they begin to overcompensate in justifying the incremented luxuries of their lives, defending each indulgence in terms of sole necessity. “We have to have fresh stone fruit because of Mum’s diet plan,” they say, or, “I have to have my own car because Dad’s away on business so much,” or, “We only had the spa put in because Dad’s got a bad back.” The repeated validations become their mantra, and soon the richer girls begin to believe the things they are compelled by shame to say. They come to believe that their needs are simply keener, more specialized, more urgent than the needs of the girls who queue outside the chippy and tuck the greasy package down their shirts for the walk home. They do not regard themselves as privileged and fortunate. They regard themselves as people whose needs are aptly and deservedly met, and if you were to call them wealthy they would raise their eyebrows and blink, and say, “Well, it’s not like we’re starving or anything, but we’re definitely not rich.”

This stubborn dance of entitlement, aggressive and defensive, does mark a real fear in the collective mind of the Abbey Grange girls who have moved through the years of high school in an unchanging, unitary pack. Always they fear that one of them might at any time burst out and eclipse the others, that the group might suddenly and irreparably be plunged into her shadow, that the tacit allegiance to fairness and middling equality