Trust Exercise(7)

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.