The Rehearsal

make the whole play a kind of fantasy, like set in a fantasy world or whatever, where as soon as you turn a certain age you have to draw a card?”
    “You get sent to a fortune-teller or something—”
    “Like a tarot reader.”
    “Yeah! It’s like a coming-of-age ritual thing. A rite of passage.”
    “The card becomes like your identity card. You keep it with you always.”
    “You can’t show it to anybody.”
    “So queens might mean drag or something, and if you drew a queen you’d have to take up drag.”
    “Queen—like drag queen!”
    “That’s what I meant.”
    “Is that what we really believe, though?” Stanley said. “Do we really believe it’s like that—that your identity is dealt out to you, given to you the moment you grow up, and from then on it becomes your—your motif or something? Like a badge?”
    “Yeah,” the first boy said. “Do you not believe that?”
    Stanley opened his mouth but then closed it again. He wasn’t sure.
    “But doesn’t that mean you’d have one card for the rest of your life?” somebody said.
    “Yes,” the emphatic boy said. “Unless you gamble it away. In a high-stakes game of chance. In a deadly game of chance in an underground bar, where you run the risk of ending up with nothing.”
    “We could do that really well.”
    “It would dramatize really well.”
    “Really steam-punk.”
    “I reckon.”
    “Anyway,” one of the girls said crossly, “it doesn’t matter what we actually believe. It’s a great idea. The Head of Acting would go nuts for it. It’s just the sort of crossover thing he loves.”
    “What do you mean, crossover?”
    “With the teacher–student thing. Using stories from the media. Did anyone see the production a few years back about the witch hunt, and they had actors in disguise all through the audience pretending to be members of the public?”
    “Yeah, I saw that.”
    “Until you didn’t know who was acting and who wasn’t, all around you. It was really scary, actually. The season totally sold out. They had to extend by a week.”
    There was a small hush as they all imagined extending their opening season by a week. Felix had stopped writing and was looking around with his pen limp in his hand.
    “I like the Abbey Grange idea,” someone said.
    “So do I.”
    “What are we going off, though? Just a few articles in a local paper? That isn’t enough.”
    “We’ll have to research it. We’ll have to find out more.”
    “Because at the end of it everything collapses,” one of the girls said. “For the girl, the victim, the one who was abused. It all comes down around her like a castle of cards.”
    July
    The blinds were open on the corridor side when Stanley and the girl passed, carrying their costumes down to the art department. They heard the noise and turned their heads, and then they stopped and moved closer to the glass, to watch.
    A boy was howling, squirming and bent almost double with his hands at his groin. The Head of Voice was crouched over him, leaning right over with her feet planted sturdy and apart and her cheek against his, and her plump arms around him, clasping him tight. She was muttering urgently and inaudibly into his ear as he howled. His howl was unpitched and irregular and ever-changing, morphing into a guttural hum, a throaty kind of gurgle, even a bat-shriek that was too high and whispery to be heard. He appeared to be trying to twist away from the Head of Voice but she was clamped tightly to his back and the boy could only writhe and struggle. His eyes were closed.
    “What’s happening to him?” Stanley whispered.
    “Remedial Voice,” the girl whispered back. “He’s working through a lot of stuff from when he was a kid, I think. Really bad stuff that’s all locked inside.”
    The boy was slack faced and open mouthed and his expression showed no pain, but the noise he was making was raw and brutish and full of hurt. It was frightening, this terrible noise coming out of this boy’s calm unworried throat. If it weren’t for the leaping of his Adam’s apple, Stanley would have thought the noise recorded.
    “It’s horrible,” Stanley said.
    The girl shot him a disdainful look, as if he couldn’t hope to understand. “Better than releasing it any other way,” she said. “Putting kittens in a microwave or whatever.”
    “Is that what he’s doing? Releasing it?”
    “Course,” the girl said, and tossed her head. “That’s her specialty. Head of Voice. People hire