“I understand that you are all unhappy,” Quigley was saying. “I know that the events of last summer were difficult for you all—”
“Where’s Dr. Larkin?” a girl from behind me called.
“She will be here this evening to give the lecture. As you all know.” Quigley cleared his throat. “And she’s also agreed to assist me in overseeing auditions.”
A ragged cheer.
“But, as you are all aware, I will be making up the final cast list on my own.” Into the heavy silence that followed, he said, “Please remember that I once sat in your same chairs. I too participated in the Dramatics Society—well, the full-fledged, academic year Dramatics Society—and I am very pleased to be back here, working with you all.”
I was fascinated by how he kept reminding the students that not only was he in charge, but that they knew it. I was also fascinated by the way he had casually insulted their program as a lesser cousin of St. Genesius’s undergraduate society. As I watched him fidget onstage, I thought he was on the verge of asking us not to eat him, please, if we would be so kind. He eased himself off the stage with a pasted-on confidence; his hands were clenched into little balls.
Theo turned to me. “So,” he said with a lazy smile. “This should be a shitshow.”
“Oh, come on. The man is trying,” Rupert said as we stood, gathering our things. Theo pointed to the back corner of the auditorium, up by the sound booth, and I followed him up the aisle.
“Yeah, but you can see him try,” Theo said. “It’s sad. You never want to see someone try.”
“‘There is no try,’” Rupert intoned, the voice of someone quoting something I didn’t know.
“Still,” I said. “Is there a reason Dr. Larkin is so popular? I mean, she couldn’t stop what happened last year.”
Theo flung himself down into the seat closest to the wall. “Are you talking about the accidents? Nobody could stop them. They came from everywhere and—and nowhere. But they definitely didn’t come from Dr. Larkin, and she was the one they hung for it.”
I had more questions, not the least of which was why we had moved to sit so far away from everyone else (and also why there wasn’t any such thing as “try,” when the word was right there, in the English language, for us to use) but Dr. Larkin was hurrying down the aisle, a legal pad in her arms. She settled down in the front row, empty now other than Dr. Quigley, and left a few seats between them. Still, despite this gesture of distance, the two leaned in together to discuss something briefly. Quigley shook his head, but Larkin pressed on, cupping her hand around her mouth to shield her speech.
Quigley shook his head a final time, and stood. “First up, we have Florence Keener,” he said. The room quieted, and a tall, strong-shouldered girl in the row popped up and ran down to the stage. “Let’s begin with some applause, please. It isn’t easy to go first.”
Theo clapped heartily. “Florence,” he said, “Florence is terrific,” and it was the first time I’d really seen him like that, glowing for someone else. Of course, he was objectively quite handsome, with his thick blond hair and full mouth. But when someone existed as Theo did, in opposition to everything around them, I spent so much time tracing the invisible lines of their personality out that I never thought to follow them in.
All of that is to say, I didn’t usually find murderers handsome. Was I imagining it, or was his smile not quite stretching across his face?
“She’s great, right?” Theo asked.
“What?”
“Florence. Try to pay attention—it’ll distract you, if you’re nervous about your audition.”
He’d utterly misread my fidgeting. “Thanks,” I said, but when I focused in, I realized that Florence was, in fact, “great.” She was reading for Gertrude, the role of Hamlet’s mother, and her height and the rich curvature of her voice lent themselves to queenliness, to the suggestion of danger. She would be an excellent choice.
So would the next girl, and the next.
That was the tragedy of it: so many roles in Hamlet, and only two written for women. If Quigley and Larkin had any sense, they’d be reimagining some of the male roles for their talented female cast—there wasn’t any reason, say, that Hamlet’s schoolfriends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern couldn’t be played by girls. There wasn’t any reason that the title role couldn’t be, for that matter. But I wasn’t the director.
I wasn’t fantasy-casting the show, either. The notes I was taking—and I was taking copious notes—had a different aim altogether. I was here, primarily, to solve a mystery. When sleuthing, I refused on principle to theorize in advance of the facts.
But that meant, of course, that I needed . . . facts.
Florence was confident, easy in her manners: this meant nothing. It would take confidence to orchestrate a series of “accidents” under everyone’s noses. The next two girls, Keiko and Beatrice, had been at Oxford the year before. (Keiko did an excellently understated Ophelia, all subtle, discordant worry.) The first boy to audition, Asher, hadn’t been, and I noted how short he was, how he licked his lips before he began to speak. His eyes kept fluttering over to Theo and Rupert and me, up in the back corner, which meant everything and also nothing. (Theo was, again, very attractive.) A pair of twins got up and asked shaky permission to perform a scene together, rather than a monologue; I noted their nervousness and was writing new?, when Rupert murmured, “That’s a brave move on Mateo’s part.”
“Braver than he and Elio were last year,” Theo said; again the note of approval. He’d been appreciatively nodding through all the monologues we’d heard, cheering loudly after they’d stepped down. “Last year,” he told me, “they split the part of a manservant. Getting their feet wet. Good sense of humor on Teo, and Elio’s great. Brought snacks to rehearsal all the time last year. Good guys.”
Quigley and Larkin consulted; Teo and Elio were allowed to perform together. They were passable actors, but barely. I wrote snacks in my notebook. I noted Theo’s hand on the armrest between us, his eyes drifting down to the notebook in my lap, like a lion lazily regarding his prey.
I did not like sitting next to him. I didn’t like it at all.
I should mention that, as usual, I was writing in my own shorthand, one I had developed as a child; it borrowed something from calligraphy, something from number substitution. Any notes I was making would have looked like scribbled abbreviations to a pair of prying eyes. And Theo’s were.
Rupert leaned over. “I like your doodles.”
“Nervous hands,” I said with an apologetic smile. “‘Doodles’ is a generous description.”
Theo had been so long-limbed and casual, so utterly fixed on the stage, that I was surprised when his name was called next. He jogged down the aisle to a flurry of high fives; he was well liked here, despite his seeming tendency to isolate himself from everyone but Rupert and Anwen. Trauma could do that, I knew.
So could guilt.
And perhaps that’s what he drew on for his monologue, that snarl inside him, the wanting to shove it all into a container that could fit it. “I’m doing a monologue from the Scottish play, as the main . . . Scottish character,” he said, and there was a titter through the audience.