“It is a tradition at the Institute,” the Head of Acting continued, “that on closing night the cast will choose one prop from their production to be handed on. The prop they choose will serve as the driving stimulus for the production the following year. Last year’s production, titled The Beautiful Machine, received from the previous year’s students a large iron wheel. In the original production the wheel had been part of a working rickshaw. In Beautiful Machine the wheel was redressed as the Wheel of Fate and became a central visual component of the beautiful machine itself.”

One of the boys was nodding vigorously to show he had seen The Beautiful Machine in production and remembered the wheel very well. The Head of Acting smiled faintly. He said, “The cast of Beautiful Machine, last year’s first-year students, have chosen a prop from their production that will become the locus of yours. I have it here in my pocket.”

He paused for a long moment, enjoying the tension.

“Does anyone have any questions, before I leave you all to conduct your first meeting?” he asked.

Nobody could think of a question. The Head of Acting reached into his pocket and withdrew a playing card. It was a card from an ordinary deck, thinly striped on the reverse side, pinkish and round edged. He held it up for them all to see and turned it over in his fingers to show the King of Diamonds, bearded and thin lipped and pensive, holding his axe behind his head with a thick hammy hand. The Head of Acting tossed the card on the ground, inclined his head politely, and left the room.

The gymnasium door closed softly in his wake and sent the King of Diamonds scudding sideways. The card was ever so slightly convex, shivering on its slim bowed back like a small unmasted ship lost at sea. For a moment there was only silence. Then one of the girls said, tentatively, “The King of Diamonds is one of the Suicide Kings. In case anybody didn’t know.” She spoke in an apologetic way, as if meaning to excuse herself for breaking the silence and speaking first.

“The King of Hearts is holding his sword so it looks like it goes into the side of his head—” she demonstrated “—and the King of Diamonds is shown with the blade of his axe facing toward him. It’s the same on every pack. The two red kings are always called the Suicide Kings.”

Everyone craned to look, and saw that she was right. There was another silence, a different sort of silence this time, a silence ringing with the last words spoken: the Suicide Kings. It’s always a different sort of silence once the first idea has been cast, Stanley thought.

After a few moments more the collective concentration broke. They looked up and grinned sheepishly, and laughed and stretched and shifted and began to chatter and looked around for a leader who would guide them on from there.

July

“Do we get to a stage, do you think, as teachers,” the Head of Movement said, “when the only students who can really affect us are the ones who most remind us of a young version of ourselves?”

The Head of Acting laughed. “And always a very flattering version, too,” he said. “Only ever the vigor and the ideals. And the bodies. The supple, fit young bodies that we all imagine we must once have had, before everything else set in.”

The Head of Acting was some ten years older than the Head of Movement, and he had not aged well: his pale eyes were rimmed on their undersides by a wet pink rind that always made him look rather ill.

“I think it’s sadly true for me,” the Head of Movement said. “There’s this one acting student this year—a boy. He’s very much like how I was, I suppose. How I imagine I must have been. When I’m teaching his class I forget all my doubts about… about everything, really. I watch him so closely and I really delight in his progress—I mean really—I keep seeking him out and watching him change, little by little, and I feel excited and generous and all the things that teachers are supposed to feel.”

As a teacher the Head of Acting had always maintained a deliberate distance from his students, but his withdrawn and profoundly unmoved manner seemed to cause them, strangely, to worship him the more. It was the Head of Acting who most of the students sought to impress, and it was the Head of Acting who most of them remembered in the years that followed. His coldness and his deadness attracted them somehow, like puppies to a master with a whip. The Head of Movement did not possess this gift of indifference, the Head of Acting thought now: he showed too much of himself, wore his skin too plainly; he was too contemptuous of his students when they let him down.

“The illusion of depth in a character,” the Head of Acting had said only this morning to his second-year class, “is created simply by withholding information from an audience. A character will seem complex and intriguing only if we don’t know the reasons why.”

The Head of Movement was stroking his knuckles with his fingertips. He shook his head.

“And I keep reminding myself that in all probability it’s just vanity,” he said, “my seeking out a younger version of myself and watching so greedily, like someone in a fairy tale bewitched. It’s a sad thing. I don’t think I can connect in the same way with the other students. I just don’t—” He spread his arms and shrugged. “I just don’t care enough,” he said. “I don’t care enough in what makes them different. They’d never know. I get up in front of them and teach and it’s like any stage performance, knowing the role back to front and getting on and doing it. But underneath it all it’s just an act.”

“Maybe you’re being too hard on yourself,” the Head of Acting said. “Putting too much of an expectation on yourself that you actually have to care. Maybe you don’t have to care. Maybe you can not care and still be a great teacher.”

“Maybe,” the Head of Movement said.

“Who is the student who captures you?” the Head of Acting said. “The younger version of you.”

The Head of Movement hesitated, squinting up at the light fitting above the Head of Acting’s head.

“I’d rather not say,” he said at last, a little shyly, as if the boy was a crush that he held still too close to his heart.

“All right,” the Head of Acting said. “But if you let me, I bet I could guess.”

April

“My dad has this theory,” Stanley said. “He reckons schools should take out insurance policies on the students they think are most likely to die.”

There was a pause, then all six of them put down their forks and turned to look at Stanley properly.

“What?” they said.

“Because there’s always one kid who dies,” Stanley said. “In any high school, right? During your time at high school, any school, you can always remember one kid who died.”

His smile was faltering now. He had intended the remark to be flippant and amusing and slightly shocking, but his classmates were looking nauseated and confused. He tried to let a surprised and disappointed look flit across his face, as if to communicate that his audience was not as debonair and outrageous as he had hoped, that the six of them had let him down somehow by this pinched and prudish outlook, by their backward and unfashionable scope that left no room for wit or scandal. He tried to make his eyebrows peak in the center and his smile turn down slightly, a worldly look that was contemptuous and cheerful and uncaring. He tried not to care.

“That’s retarded,” one of the girls said.

Stanley smiled wider. He could not rightly retreat now. He was committed to voicing, and thus partly owning, a point of view that wasn’t his own. He felt trapped, and so tried to redeem himself by becoming jolly and charming, like his father could be, and amplifying his own part, his own sponsorship of the idea, until it seemed as if the idea really was his own.