The Pantomime

The Pantomime is the fragile social performance by which Bret Ellis and his friends keep acting as if nothing has happened. In the days after Bret sees Susan Reynolds with Robert Mallory in Palm Springs, the group resumes its familiar routines: conversations in the school courtyard, physical education, talk of parties, and plans for a birthday dinner. But these gestures no longer mean what they appear to mean. Bret knows that Susan and Robert’s connection has been concealed from him, suspects that Debbie Schaffer may be testing what he knows, and struggles to conceal both his hurt and his desire for Robert. The Pantomime gives their shared silence a social form, but it cannot make the underlying tensions disappear.

The Performance and Its Premise

The Pantomime begins with an apparent agreement to treat the weekend in Palm Springs as erased. When Bret greets Susan at school, their eyes reveal nothing; she is calm, and he registers that neither of them is acknowledging what happened. The silence is not simply a lack of conversation. It is a shared pretense that the encounter—and the knowledge it carries—will not interrupt the normal school day.

The morning continues through ordinary activities that seem to confirm the performance. Bret walks with Susan to assembly in the courtyard below the Pavilion, and Debbie kisses him lightly. He notices that Thom Wright’s absence is not especially conspicuous. After assembly, the students chat, as if the familiar social arrangement can continue without explaining what has changed. Yet Bret’s attention keeps moving beyond the routine: he sees Robert and Ryan Vaughn walking together and talking animatedly, and feels an acid pang in his chest while trying to focus on Debbie.

The performance depends on uncertainty about who knows what. Debbie reminds Bret about her father’s Saturday-night party at the mansion on Stone Canyon, then asks what he did over the weekend and why he ignored her calls. Bret cannot tell whether she knows that he went to Palm Springs and saw Susan with Robert. He reasons that Susan would have told her if she knew, but also wonders whether Debbie is testing him. Their exchange makes the group’s apparent ease feel like a maze: each person must decide whether to ask plainly, lie, or act as though no question needs answering.

School Routines and Private Distance

The school day gives the Pantomime its staging. For physical education, the students change into red shorts and Griffins T-shirts, then gather at Gilley Field. Bret waits alone in the boys’ locker room until he believes Debbie has gone ahead. Sitting on a bench after the other boys have left, he stares at Thom’s locker and touches its small silver padlock. The gesture briefly breaks through the public script: Bret recognizes that Thom will never understand the tenderness he feels for him.

Outside, the tennis courts and track arrange the friends into a picture of casual normality. Susan, Debbie, and Robert stand talking as though it were the previous month, with nothing to signal that a dramatic event is developing among them. Bret describes them as actors in a play: Thom is gone, yet the others remain careful. The scene’s ordinary details—the coed class, students playing tennis, and classmates lounging on the bleachers—surround an absence that no one publicly addresses.

Bret intends to sit in the bleachers and read Joan Didion, but approaching Robert produces a dizzying mixture of apprehension and desire. That desire persists despite what Bret believes Robert did to Matt Kellner. The social performance therefore does not merely conceal a secret between Susan and Robert; it also forces Bret to manage the contradiction between suspicion, attraction, and the outward appearance of belonging.

Ryan offers Bret another version of that appearance. Alone with Ryan at the field, Bret says he understands that they are friends and that things should stay that way, then asks whether they are cool from now on. Ryan agrees and thanks him. Bret suddenly suggests that they see a movie. Ryan accepts, but jogs away without further conversation. Their exchange restores a friendly label while leaving the distance between them largely intact: the agreement is a performed settlement, not proof that the relationship has returned to ease.

The Group’s Script

As Bret approaches the tennis courts, the conversation among Susan, Debbie, and Robert stops. They look at him and smile benignly. Their matching red shorts, Griffins T-shirts, and Wayfarer sunglasses make the group appear almost theatrically composed. Bret joins them with deliberately loose enthusiasm, says they all look good, and asks what they were discussing, though he feels neither casual nor genuinely interested. The friendliness is visible; its sincerity is harder to determine.

Susan supplies a harmless subject: Terry Schaffer’s party on Saturday, who will attend, and whether Bret is coming. Bret says that he is. Debbie leans toward him, and he lets her. The conversation offers a ready-made public scene—friends in school clothes discussing a party—while the question of Palm Springs remains unsaid. Its banality is part of the concealment: everyone can keep participating without having to establish whether the others’ smiles mean trust, suspicion, or simple convenience.

Bret’s account also shows how carefully he monitors the performance from within. He notices the moment the conversation stops, the characters’ expressions, and the way his own words fail to land naturally. Even his attempt to sound engaged becomes an action he evaluates. The social world is no longer a setting he can inhabit without effort; it is a scene whose entrances, lines, and reactions he watches as he takes part.

The Dinner and the Strain Beneath the Surface

At a later meeting with Ryan and Robert, Bret first retreats to the men’s room, clutching and unclenching his fists as he tries to steady himself. He has experienced a level of fear and panic that he has never felt before. When he returns downstairs, Ryan and Robert are already seated together in a red booth by a window overlooking Weyburn. Bret suspects that Ryan has fallen under Robert’s spell, but also recognizes the oddity of trying to impress Robert by discussing a film: in the manufactured dream they inhabit, the apparent social meanings of their behavior do not settle into a coherent truth.

Rather than remain silent, Bret criticizes Chariots of Fire as boring and anticlimactic, and mocks its religious element. He treats the criticism as a performance that requires physical commitment and leaves him exhausted. Robert laughs now and then; Ryan jokingly defends the film. For a while, the three can sustain the conversational scene, and they discuss Terry’s party. Ryan will not attend, while Bret and Robert will. The apparent ease is provisional: it rests on Bret actively performing a version of himself, not on the disappearance of his fear or resentment.

The conversation changes when Robert invites the group to dinner for his eighteenth birthday, which is two weeks away. He names the intended guests: Thom, Susan, Debbie, Bret, Jeff, Tracy, and Ryan. He says the dinner will be at Le Dome and that Susan suggested the restaurant. That detail breaks through the surface of the invitation. Bret’s rage returns, and he asks whether Susan is throwing the birthday dinner for Robert, pretending to be curious. A social plan that might have passed as ordinary hospitality instead exposes the very connection Bret has been trying to contain.

Meaning and Limits

The Pantomime is not a single coordinated deception so much as a shared, unstable way of getting through school while important facts remain unspoken. Bret wonders whether Debbie is testing him, avoids the script he associates with Susan and Debbie, and then joins the group anyway. He reassures Ryan that they are friends, stages an energetic film discussion, and accepts the invitations that bind him to the same circle whose apparent ease unsettles him. Each action both sustains the ordinary surface and registers the effort required to sustain it.

The metaphor of acting is grounded in concrete social behavior: a stopped conversation, benign smiles, matching clothes, small talk, an invitation, and a deliberately false air of curiosity. Bret’s narration repeatedly distinguishes what the group says from what its conduct may conceal. In this way, the Pantomime makes uncertainty itself part of the social order. The students can continue to appear together, but the performance does not resolve the absences, private knowledge, desire, or suspicion beneath it. When Susan’s role in planning Robert’s dinner becomes explicit, the surface holds only long enough for Bret’s anger to return.