“the pantomime”

“The pantomime” is Bret Ellis’s name for the shared performance of normality that carries him through school after a weekend in Palm Springs and the revelation of what happened to Matt Kellner. It is at once a social routine and a way to avoid confronting what he knows: ordinary greetings and school plans continue, while the people performing them conceal what they have done and what they fear. The performance can briefly make the day manageable, but its calm surface is continually breached by memory, suspicion, and the awareness of who is missing.

The Routine as a Performance

On Monday morning, Bret arrives at school late, still affected by drugs and distracted by the memory of hearing Matt tortured. Before entering Mr. Robbins’s classroom, he sees Susan at the desk beside his usual seat. He does not want to sit near her or risk trouble, yet also does not want to break the dream of the pantomime. He deliberately tries to become a tangible participant, smiles, and takes his seat. The exchange is outwardly easy: he and Susan ask whether the other is all right, and each offers a reassuring answer. To Bret, however, the conversation does not resolve anything. The Saturday night in Palm Springs has been erased between them, and the blank calm of Susan’s face is part of the concealment.

The pantomime depends on small, recognizable social actions. Bret puts his backpack on the desk, opens a notebook, walks with Susan, and joins conversations; the school day advances through classes, assembly, and physical education. He describes the performance as something he and the others help create, then says he floats along with it. Its power comes from repetition: a smile is returned, a question is answered, and a plan for a party is treated as ordinary business. Nothing has to be openly explained for the routine to continue, but its ease relies on everyone leaving the consequential facts unspoken.

At assembly, Debbie kisses Bret lightly. He registers that Thom Wright’s absence is hardly noticed, then participates in the casual conversation after assembly while waiting for Debbie to talk to him. When she asks what he did over the weekend and why he failed to answer her calls, he cannot readily formulate a response. The gap between the simple question and the truth behind it exposes the strain of the performance: even an everyday inquiry threatens to make the hidden weekend speakable.

School as a Stage

The performance has its own social blocking: people move among classrooms, the courtyard, locker rooms, and athletic fields, taking up familiar positions and speaking as if the group’s relationships have not changed. Before physical education, Bret waits alone in the boys’ locker room, staring at Thom’s locker and touching its small silver padlock. His gesture brings the concealed emotional reality into focus. Thom is gone, and Bret understands that Thom will never grasp his tender feelings for him. The pantomime may organize the day, but it cannot supply Thom’s presence or make Bret’s private grief part of the group’s shared script.

At the field, Bret sees Susan, Debbie, and Robert talking casually by the tennis courts, as though nothing has happened. Their red shorts, Griffin T-shirts, and Wayfarers make them look like a coordinated cast in a high-school movie. When Bret approaches, their conversation stops; they look at him and smile. He answers with an easy greeting and a compliment, then asks what they had been discussing. Susan says they were talking about Terry’s party on Saturday and asks whether he is coming. The exchange supplies a ready-made topic and a public-facing plan, while Bret’s attempt to sound engaged is explicitly at odds with how he feels.

His position within this scene is divided. He recognizes the group’s performance and resists the part it offers him, yet he also fears that refusing to join would look strange. Approaching Robert makes him dizzy with apprehension, but desire persists alongside his knowledge of what Robert did to Matt. Bret nevertheless walks over to the tennis courts and joins the conversation. The scene’s tension lies less in any direct confrontation than in this forced proximity: the people who can sustain the appearance of ease are gathered together, and Bret must decide whether to play along or reveal how deeply he is affected.

Concealment and Unequal Knowledge

The pantomime is not simply a mutual agreement to pretend that nothing happened. The characters possess different information, and Bret cannot know exactly what the others know. He believes Debbie knows that Susan and Robert were in Palm Springs, but is unsure whether she knows he was there too. He also thinks Robert may not know of his own presence, unless Susan has kept her promise. Bret decides it may be better, at least for the moment, to play dumb, admit nothing, say his lines, and wait for the next cue. His theatrical language turns concealment into a sequence of actions: speak when prompted, leave the scene, and hold back what could disrupt it.

At lunch, the performance continues at the center table beneath the Pavilion. Bret sits with Susan and Debbie and tries to concentrate on the food Rosa has prepared: a tuna sandwich on wheat bread, Lay’s potato chips, Famous Amos cookies, and an orange. That list of ordinary lunch details contrasts with the thoughts he cannot set aside. He sees Robert and Ryan Vaughn conferring near the courtyard steps and is unnerved by their closeness. It recalls Robert’s past association with Matt and leads Bret to imagine that Ryan could meet a similar fate. Robert then joins the table, and the four engage in the useless banter the pantomime encourages.

Bret’s attention to Thom’s absence grows sharper at lunch. Looking across the other senior tables, he thinks he may be the only one who truly misses Thom and worries about his happiness and future. The performance does not merely conceal a secret; it also leaves Bret isolated with feelings that have no accepted place in the group’s conversation. He tries to compartmentalize his thoughts of Thom and turns instead to a movie he and Ryan might see the next afternoon. That small anticipation shows the routine’s limited relief: another plan can momentarily occupy his attention, even as it cannot undo what he knows.

The Performance Under Pressure

Bret’s effort to behave normally extends beyond school. After the last bell, he waits in his Jaguar on Stansbury for Robert’s Porsche, follows it to the house in Benedict Canyon, and later meets Ryan and Robert at a restaurant. There, Bret recognizes that Ryan may be under Robert’s spell, yet also reminds himself that neither boy is gay and that the situation belongs to their manufactured dream. Rather than remain a passive observer, he decides to be real by criticizing Chariots of Fire: he calls it boring and anticlimactic, objects to its religious element, and keeps up the performance even though it exhausts him. The pantomime is therefore not only quiet compliance; at times Bret tries to force his way out of it through an exaggeratedly real-seeming action.

That resistance does not end the underlying concealment. When Robert says his eighteenth-birthday dinner will be at Le Dome and that Susan suggested the restaurant, Bret’s rage returns. His outward manner has not made the facts disappear; it has only delayed their collision with the group’s talk. The school’s ordinary plans—parties, lunches, movies, and birthdays—become the very settings in which unspoken knowledge presses hardest. In this sense, the pantomime is both a refuge and an instrument of pressure: it keeps the social world moving, but its smooth continuity makes the hidden fractures impossible for Bret to stop noticing.

The motif also gives shape to a wider conflict between performed normality and lived experience. For Bret, school life can look composed even when he is stunned, frightened, jealous, or grieving. His language shifts between dream, script, actors, cues, and offstage movement because he experiences these interactions as roles imposed on a reality he cannot safely address. Yet the performance is not wholly voluntary or wholly shared: each character has different knowledge, and Bret’s awareness of Matt’s fate makes his participation especially fraught. The pantomime keeps the day legible as a series of familiar scenes; it cannot make those scenes innocent again.