Trust Exercise(6)

“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.