Trust Exercise(2)

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.