The Rehearsal

accumulating on his fingertip in a soft feathered wafer. He rolled it into a ball and flicked it away. The disc began to spin, and he twisted the volume knob slowly up and up so the music faded in, swelling larger and larger until it filled the gymnasium completely. He had chosen a cinematic score, instrumental and surging and overblown.
    “Please take your places and begin,” he called over the opening bars. “The music is your pulse. Take inspiration from it. Detach yourself and divide your mind between watching your partner and listening to the pulse. You should feel alert but at peace. You may begin.”
    Stanley turned to face his partner and held up his palms for her to touch with her own. They looked clearly at each other, and at first he squirmed and frowned, unsure as to what she might be seeing, looking at him in such a clear, frank way. She was a little shorter than him, and her chin was tilted slightly upward to meet his gaze. She had determined gray eyes and a straight thin-lipped mouth. Stanley was close enough to see the down on her cheeks, glowing soft pink in the slanting light, and the fawny scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
    The heavier instruments dwindled to let the strings build their own quiet plucking crescendo. Stanley peeled his right palm away from the girl’s and felt her make the same movement, slowly and carefully, lagging perhaps a quarter of a second behind. She was frowning slightly, but even as he registered the expression he realized that she was attempting to mirror his own. He relaxed into a more neutral face and saw her do the same, his movements reflected back at him in a delicate feminine echo, like a cave that threw back a finer, female version of his own call. He balled his hand into a fist and brought it up under his chin, trying to move slowly and carefully so she would see the whole trajectory of his movement and be able to replicate it simultaneously. She watched his eyes, not the movement of his hand. They were both wide eyed with the strain of trying to communicate without words. Around them the other paired couples were moving similarly, waving their hands about in a slow and measured way. As he spread his fingers out and laced them through the thin cold fingers of his echo-girl, Stanley thought to himself that from above the class must look like some sort of windswept crop, swelling up and back like tiny quivering blades thrusting up out of the soil and into a stiff and ever-changing breeze.
    From the stage the Head of Movement watched them all in silence, his fingertips still resting on the stereo and filmed gray with dust. His gaze drifted over them and came to rest upon one of the boys, standing on the edge of the group and reaching out his hand to touch his partner’s neck with his index finger. The Head of Movement watched the mirrored pair trace an invisible line down each other’s windpipe and into the hollow at the center of the collarbone, and thought, The boy is leading. He could always tell.
    The boy was standing with his chin high and his legs apart and wearing a solemn burning expression on his face that almost made the Head of Movement smile. It was the first time he’d had class with the boy since the teary outburst in his office following the Theater of Cruelty exercise, and when he had walked into the gymnasium that morning and called for the attention of the class he’d at once spotted Stanley bobbing on the periphery, anxious and desperate to be seen. The Head of Movement had looked away. He did not want the boy to cling to him in such a fearfully filial way, craving attention and recognition and time, unaware that all the trembled first-experiences and thought-dawnings that affected him so wholly were, for the Head of Movement, only the vicarious latest in a long line of the same.
    Every year at least one of the students complained about the Theater of Cruelty exercise. The lesson fell into the Head of Acting’s domain and mostly it was he who took the distressed student into his office and soothed any lasting damage. Some years, as with this one, he contrived a reason to leave the class at the last minute, scuttling up the back staircase to the lighting booth above the gymnasium to watch the students from behind the darkened glass. The view was always different. One year the victim-student had been able to wrestle free and fight back, and several of the students on stage had been seriously hurt; another year, the watching