The Rehearsal

between boys and girls. The final class of twenty always comprised ten of each, so neither the boys nor the girls really regarded the other as a rival: each sex was competing in parallel, vying only against their own. As a result the girls were cautious and deceitful with each other but bright and flirtatious with the boys; the boys, in turn, laughed loudly and publicly when they were addressed but in the meantime they sat apart from each other and watched the girls form their swift bonds of togetherness and false sympathy with something between bewilderment and scorn.
    Stanley was watching the girls now. Even as rivals they were pressing together, sowing shallow seeds of friendship and community: “I know it won’t happen,” they said, “but I hope we all get in. I hope we all do. Wouldn’t it be amazing, if the tutors came out and said, Let’s take them all?” The girls said, “Even if some of us don’t get in, we’ll stay in touch,” and some of them said, “I don’t have a chance, really. Not against you guys. I cried in the first audition when you did that piece about the hope chest. You’re so much better than me it’s not even funny.” The girls said, “Underneath it all I just want to be liked by everyone, liked and even loved.” One girl was massaging another’s shoulders. She ground the heels of her hands into the shoulder blades of her rival, her adversary, a girl whom she had only lately met, and in a low voice she said, “You’ll be awesome. You were awesome at the first audition. You’ll get in, no problem.”
    Later Stanley would arrive at the opinion that girls were naturally more duplicitous, more artful, better at falsely sheathing their true selves; boys’ personalities simply shone through the clearer. It was that female art of multitasking, he would conclude, that witchy capacity that girls possessed, that allowed them to retain dual and triple threads of attention at once. Girls could distinguish constantly and consciously between themselves and the performance of themselves, between the form and the substance. This double-handed knack, this perpetual duality, meant that any one girl was both an advertisement and a product at any one time. Girls were always acting. Girls could reinvent themselves, he later thought, with a sour twist to his mouth and his free hand flattening the hair on his crown, and boys could not.
    Which would be harder for the tutors, he wondered now, choosing between the girls or choosing between the boys? Did they have a different set of criteria for each, a different benchmark that took into consideration this fundamental difference between these unitary blunted boys and these many-headed Hydras, the girls? He realized with a kind of underwater flinch that all the girls in the room were beautiful, all of them glossy and svelte like variations on a theme. The boys, by contrast, were mostly odd and ordinary, not yet grown into their faces and their shoulders and their hands, some of them greasy and brash, some of them thin and spotted and hoarse. Looking around, it seemed to Stanley as if the boys were here to audition for ten different character parts in a play, and the girls were all auditioning for a single role. He got up and moved away.
    The room was a mess: costume racks, painted flats, trunks, scaffolds and ladders, swollen cardboard boxes, paint cans, shrouded furniture. On the auditorium wall there were shelves and shelves of faceless polystyrene heads wearing helmets and bonnets and crowns, and in the corner a rusted suit of armor standing with his pelvis forward and his hands upon his hips.
    Every five or ten minutes another number was called. The caller was a sharp gray woman who struck each name off her clipboard with relish, and watched them between strikes with pity and mild curiosity, as if they were gladiators dressed up to die.
    “Number 5,” she called now.
    Number 5 jumped to his feet and trotted nervously out of the room. The others watched him go.
    “What if this is part of the test?” said Number 14 once the door had shut. “What if they’re videoing us now and watching us on live feed just to see how we bond?”
    “What if there isn’t even an audition at all?” said Number 61. “We just get taken out of the room one by one once they’ve watched us for long enough, and then they tell us to go home.”
    “Like rats,” said Number 14, as if in summary. They fell silent.
    A few of the boys were pacing around the room,