The Head of Movement said, “But you did have a relationship with this young girl.” He enunciated carefully, placing a slight emphasis upon young, as if he were pressing his fingerprint upon the word.
“Not… I mean… it wasn’t… she consented,” Stanley said. “Yes, we had a relationship.”
“Until she’s sixteen, Stanley, her consent doesn’t count for much,” the Head of Movement said. He drew away and looked down his nose at Stanley as if he meant to wash his hands of the whole affair.
“They can’t come,” Stanley said. “The parents. They can’t be there. They can’t know about it.”
“No,” the Head of Movement said. “They can’t.”
“What are we going to do?” Stanley asked. “Do we cancel?”
“The play is not my responsibility,” the Head of Movement said. “The ticket sales are not my responsibility. This girl is not my responsibility. My job is only to let you know what you need to know. I don’t make people’s choices my business. I don’t want to know what you did with this girl. But if this is in any way damaging to the Institute—I’m compelled to act.”
Stanley nodded dumbly.
“Really, Stanley,” the Head of Movement said at last, for the first time expressing real exasperation at this pale and twitching victim seated before him in the small room. “I mean, how could you not know that somebody was watching you? For Christ’s sake. You must have been being bloody careless, if somebody was watching the whole time.”
“Stanley,” Isolde said, “do you want to go all the way with me? Some time?”
Stanley ran his finger down her cheek. Deep inside he was irritated at her for even mentioning it, for giving the prospect a shape, a voice. It seemed indecent. He would have preferred to leave the act unmentioned until it was over. He would have preferred not to speak at all, to stop her mouth with his and tug at her cuffs and her waistband and unpeel her swiftly like a ripe fruit. Her question was logistical, organizing, reductive. He would not have asked it. He was a romantic.
“Do you think we’re ready?” Stanley said, cunningly answering her question with a question, but looking at her with such a grave and contrite expression that she would be fooled into thinking he was truly engaging with the matter at hand.
“Yeah,” Isolde said. She began to smile before she’d finished the word, and then he was smiling back at her and moving in to kiss her and laugh with her, laugh against her, his teeth against hers.
“I do too,” Stanley said. “I think we’re ready.”
“Do you want to?” Isolde said shyly.
“Course I want to,” Stanley said. “I was only waiting until you were sure. I didn’t want to put any pressure on you. I wanted you to be the one to ask.”
This wasn’t really true, but he was pleased with the way it sounded.
The Head of Movement’s office door was open, and Stanley didn’t knock. He padded up to the doorframe and lingered there for a moment before he began to speak.
“I should have failed,” he said. “That’s all I wanted to say. I should have failed the Outing. I told someone outright that I was doing an acting exercise. I even told her I was doing Joe Pitt.”
The Head of Movement looked up at him, the light from his desk-lamp drawing down the shadows around his eyes and his mouth. “Why?” he said, making no move to gesture Stanley inside, and so Stanley remained at the doorway with his hands tugging at the straps of his backpack, moving his weight from foot to foot.
“Because otherwise she might have thought that Joe Pitt was really me,” Stanley said. “I didn’t want her to think that.”
The Head of Movement sighed and rubbed his face with his hands.
“Stanley,” he said, “why are you telling me this? You don’t want a failing grade on your card. It’ll be a mark against you. If this was weighing on your conscience, why didn’t you just resolve to do better next time? Why would you choose to sabotage yourself?”
“To make you respect me,” Stanley said.
“To make me respect you,” the Head of Movement said.
Stanley was breathing quickly. “To make you see me,” he said. “To make you see me when you look.”
The Head of Movement looked at the boy and wondered if he should relent. Stanley’s throat was tight and he quavered when he spoke, but underneath his nervousness there was that persistent thread of self-congratulation, even now. The Head of Movement felt a flicker of anger. Even now, he thought. Even now the boy is performing, and adoring his performance, adoring himself.
“Every year there’s someone like you, Stanley,” he said. “And someone just like you will come along and fill the hole that you leave when you move on. Every word that comes out of your mouth—they’re just lines. They’re lines that you’ve learned very carefully, so carefully you’ve convinced yourself they are yours, but that’s all they are. They’re lines I’ve heard many times before.” The Head of Movement tossed his head suddenly, and snapped, “Why don’t you see me when you look? I could ask that of all my students. All my selfish cookie-cutter students who troop in and out each year like a dead-water tide.”
“What about that boy you were with in the art department? Is he a cookie-cutter student too?” Stanley asked sourly.
There was a pause. The Head of Movement raised his eyebrows.
“The boy I was with in the art department?” he said.
“The masked boy from the Theater of Cruelty,” Stanley mumbled. “Nick.”
“What do you want to know about Nick?”
“Is he a cookie-cutter student too?” Stanley was thoroughly embarrassed now.
The tutor looked him up and down and almost laughed. “Maybe so,” he said. “But he’s like me. He’s like I once was. I listen to him speak, and watch him move, and it is like a kind of rebirth. I can relive myself, through him. I can be new again just by watching.”
Stanley looked at the floor and didn’t speak.
“Thank you for coming to me today,” the Head of Movement said, after a moment. His voice was cold and his face had closed. “We will amend your records to show a failing grade.”
THIRTEEN
“Are you good friends with your sister, Isolde?” the saxophone teacher asks mildly one afternoon, after Isolde’s lesson is over and the girl is repacking her case.
“Not really,” Isolde says.
“Do you hang out with her much at school?”
“No. It’s weird when the juniors hang out with the seniors. And she’s got friends in her own year. They don’t like me around.”
“Would she be someone you’d talk to, if you needed someone?”
Isolde flushes scarlet immediately. She turns away from the saxophone teacher and ducks to fiddle with the clasp on her satchel. “Probably not,” she says.
“Okay,” the saxophone teacher says kindly, watching her.
“I don’t know who I’d talk to,” Isolde mumbles.
“Not your friends?”
“No.”
The saxophone teacher waits while Isolde shuffles her music and stuffs it into her backpack.
“Actually it’s kind of weird that Victoria’s so popular,” Isolde says, regaining composure, “because she was ruined. Three years ago, in fourth form. Her friends decided they didn’t really like her and they had a conference about it to decide what to do with her. In the end they just gathered around one lunchtime and told her that she wasn’t allowed to sit with them or talk to them anymore. And then they all ran away.”
“I suppose she moved on and found some new friends,” the saxophone teacher says.