The Rehearsal

watched. At the beginning of the year Felix had labored to snare the role of the group’s organizing mind, to the irritation of most of the students, who looked at the tiny protrusion of his tongue as he wrote and felt they could do better.
    “Then what about that story that Grace brought in?” Felix said when he had completed the bubble. “The teacher–student thing at Scabby Abbey.”
    He used the nickname to show them that although he was organizing the group, they were not allowed to resent him or regard him as a teacher-figure.
    “My sister’s at Abbey Grange,” one of the boys said. “In sixth form. She reckons they don’t know the half of it yet. What she heard was that after all the girl’s friends found out, the teacher kept them quiet for a few months by paying them out. Mostly buying them booze, on behalf.”
    “But wasn’t the girl a seventh former? So most of her friends would have been eighteen anyway.”
    “It’s what I heard,” the boy said, shrugging.
    “How did they get caught in the end?” somebody asked.
    “I heard it was another teacher,” the boy said. “The guy had been dating someone else on staff, and then they broke up and she was the one who found him with the girl. That’s what Polly said.”
    “I thought it was her friends,” one of the girls said. “They caught on and went to the principal and dobbed her in.”
    “I heard that it wasn’t just the one girl who was abused,” somebody said, “it was a whole bunch of them—he was playing them all at the same time. She was just the one who got caught.”
    “Do we know whether anything actually happened?” one of the girls put in. “What if nothing actually happened between her and the teacher at all?”
    “They had evidence. Like there were some of her clothes at his house. And there was a toothbrush.”
    “A toothbrush doesn’t mean rape ,” the girl said, with a sharp little laugh. “A toothbrush means the opposite of rape. It doesn’t even mean a one-night stand. A toothbrush means you’ve got foresight. It’s like if they found pajamas at his house, little girly flannel pajamas, pastel pink with a pattern of clouds. It can’t be evidence . It’s an investment. A toothbrush is an investment.”
    There was a silence as they all digested this new concept.
    Then one of the boys said, “Wasn’t he like sixty?”
    “He wasn’t that old. There was a photo in the paper last week. He’s got brown hair.”
    “So we don’t really know very much at all,” Felix said crossly, swiping his fringe away from his face. He was feeling the helpless boiling irritation of an officious person struggling to control a group too large and original for him. He uncapped his pen and wrote ISSUES at the top of his butcher’s sheet.
    “We need to make really awesome use of the card itself,” one of the girls said. “Playing cards need to be an integral part of the performance, not just some little byproduct scene that’s tacked on.”
    “I think that’s a given,” Felix said. “Well, let’s talk about the card then, and the different ways we could use it.” He underlined the word ISSUES, recapped his pen with a careful snap and looked expectantly at them all.
    “Just the one card, or the whole pack?”
    “I reckon the whole pack,” somebody said. “It’s a really great aesthetic for costuming and we can use it to shape the play kind of, like if we have four acts, each with a suit name, or thirteen scenes that each have a card name in a particular suit.”
    “That’s a good idea.”
    “Yeah! We can dress up like the court cards, with their weapons and stuff. Don’t they all have weapons?”
    “What if we made up a game ? A card game that we could use as the focus of the play. If you draw a red card you will be attracted to women. If you draw a black card you will be attracted to men.”
    “Yeah, and every individual card could stand for some sort of particular—I don’t know. Some sort of particular habit or trait or something. Something to do with sexuality or whatever.”
    “If you draw His Nobs, you leave before the morning?” one of the boys said, and everyone laughed.
    “What’s His Nobs?”
    “One of the jacks in cribbage.”
    “Hang on,” said Felix, scribbling. “We’re going too fast.”
    “We’re going fine,” one of the boys said. “You’re just writing too slow.”
    Felix felt his authority begin to ebb. He scowled and wished he had appointed a scribe.
    “What if we