Trust Exercise

"In addition to crawling, then: touching. Not tolerated but encouraged. Maybe even required." 

This early theater class exercise involves the students crawling around in the dark. This serves as a metaphor for the teenagers navigating the world, which they do without guidance. The touching referred to in this excerpt describes touching between students but can be applied in a larger sense to their experience as performers and as people—they are unsure whether touching, even inappropriate touching, is required but know it is encouraged.

"Remember the impossible eventfulness of time, transformation and emotion packed like gunpowder into the barrel. Remember the dilation and diffusion, the years within days. Theirs were endless; lives flowered and died between waking and noon." 

Choi, narrating as Sarah, describes the emotional intensity of teenage years. This quote illustrates how powerful events happen in a short period of time. In a larger sense, this quote describes the drama even of everyday events in this period, making inappropriate ones harder to distinguish.

"Let me make one thing clear: we can never have ‘too much’ Ego—so long as we’re in control of it." 

Mr. Kingsley describes the necessity of ego for an actor. Nevertheless, his words also inform the reader's understanding of Mr. Kingsley. As Lord, he has allowed his ego to drive his actions, seducing his students. This quote reveals that the character may believe he is in control of his ego, though his actions later cast doubt on this observation.

"Sarah has become the type of Problem they would all like to be." 

When Mr. Kingsley summons Sarah to his office, he singles her out. In a sense, this is a kind of stardom: picking her out of the larger group of students to pay attention to. Nevertheless, it is negative attention, entailing more sinister actions than the first section reveals, including possible sexual abuse.

"Don’t turn away from the pain. When you are older, yes, you will be harder. That is a blessing and a curse."

Ms. Rozot's advice to Sarah acts as foreshadowing. These two sides of distance from pain manifest in the second and third sections. As an adult, Sarah gains some distance from her experiences by writing a novel about them. Similarly, Karen (who may be the same character as Sarah) takes her emotional pain as a result of her affair with an older man and ends up shooting him on stage—she is certainly hardened. 

"So much of what they do, with Mr. Kingsley, is restraint in the name of release. It seems they have to throttle their emotions to have complete access to them." 

The theater students, including Sarah and David, must learn to walk a fine line to master their art. Sarah learns the suppression of emotions referenced here, but she masters this perhaps too well, as it leads her into an unwanted sexual encounter with Liam (and perhaps Mr. Kingsley as Lord). Like much of what the students at CAPA learn, this lesson's consequences affect the students throughout their adult lives.

"They all know the students with whom he is sometimes seen driving away, at lunchtime, in his olive Mercedes; whom he details with no more than a look, as the rest of the class filters out of the room; behind whom he closes the door to his office at lunchtime. They’re the Troubled students, the borderline ones, whose sufferings are eagerly whispered the length of the halls." 

Mr. Kingsley's actions with Sarah are not a unique case. Instead, they are habitual, as this excerpt shows. This indicates that he may have abused both Sarah and Karen, if they are not the same character. Furthermore, the quote shows the extent to which CAPA has normalized this behavior. 

"Acting is: fidelity to authentic emotion, under imagined circumstances. Fidelity to authentic emotion is: standing up for your feelings." 

This acting lesson, which the CAPA students have learned from Mr. Kingsley, can be applied to the novel as a whole. The blurring of characters' identities makes knowing what "truly" happened impossible. However, Choi's narrative is faithful to authentic emotion, applying it to the imagined circumstances of the story.

"In the instant, she'd felt his betrayal, the violation of their special alliance. Now she grasps that he’s mounted a challenge to her mother’s authority. He has intruded for the sake of intruding. How proud she feels, to command his attention." 

One question the novel grapples with is whether students can consent to sexual relationships with older men, particularly their teachers. This quote illustrates the appeal of such a relationship for Sarah. Although in this instance, the intrusion referred to is Mr. Kingsley's call to her mother, the sentiment can also be applied to their possible affair as an explanation for why Sarah would consider engaging in it.

"How does repetition not void all the moments, like a great spreading darkness behind which David hides, safe from all observation, and nursing his hatred of her?" 

The concept of repetition has special significance throughout Trust Exercise, as Sarah, Karen, and Claire all experience forms of sexual assault. Whether they are three separate characters or only two, each has a unique experience, yet these share similarities. In quotes such as this one, Choi emphasizes that this omnipresence is a particularly female experience, as boys like David do not experience similar events.

"In the future, David will be so changed it will be hard to give credence to the David she first knew in these mid-teenage years. It will be hard not to see that young David as a sort of sham, a light-weight cocoon through which the future David, knobby and heavy and hard, is already beginning to obtrude. Or perhaps this younger David really is an insubstantial shell. Perhaps they all are."

One theme Choi addresses in the narrative is the instability of identity. All of the teenagers at CAPA are in the process of figuring out who they are, making the betrayals of their elders all the more egregious. This instance of foreshadowing indicates that David changes into a more unpleasant person as an adult. In the second section, he has taken on some of the traits of the authoritative men in the first section, Mr. Kingsley and Martin.

"Neither Sarah nor Karen could compete with this, nor were they invited. But Karen needed only to train her attention on Martin. He'd cast her in the role of watching him, as he'd cast Liam in his multiple roles, and Sarah in her part as a sort of wordless prop by which Martin could give Liam occasional scoldings." 

As the four go out to dinner, the men relegate the girls to secondary roles. This emphasizes the novel's theme of the power of storytellers: Members of the "Elite Brotherhood of the Arts," like Martin and Liam, are allowed to tell stories, while girls and women like Karen and Sarah are audience members or props. The first and second sections of the novel show their attempts to reclaim this storytelling power for themselves, with varying degrees of success. 

"Nothing could have been less suave—he didn’t touch her so much as he yanked, poked, jabbed, squeezed as if her body were some sort of toy—and yet she heard herself, a rising note of protest or a siren of warning, ‘Noooo, noooo, noooo.’” 

Sarah's sexual encounter with Liam highlights the question of degrees of consent. For most of their encounter, she appears to go along with his advances—if not actively consenting, not fighting back. Nevertheless, Choi does indicate that Sarah does not want to have sex with Liam, most importantly by the inclusion of her "no"s in this section.

"Sarah indeed was too tired to answer or move or to flinch from her bedmate's enveloping touch."

In the final line of Part 1, Choi shows the consequences of the narrative's events on Sarah's conception of her own bodily autonomy. Elli attempts to give her vitamins, to cuddle her, but Sarah no longer has the power to refuse these efforts to control her body from outsiders. The use of the word "bedmate" is notable, as it makes the statement more universal, applying not only to Sarah's encounter with Elli but also to her earlier encounter with Liam.

"'Karen' stood outside the Skylight bookstore in Los Angeles, waiting for her old friend, the author." 

Choi repeats this sentence and variations on it throughout Part 2. The quotes around Karen's name indicate that this is not actually the character's name. As the section continues, then as the reader gains more information in Part 3, even more aspects of the section become questionable: whether Sarah and Karen were really friends; whether Sarah is truly the author; and whether Sarah and Karen are even separate characters. Choi's refusal to answer these questions emphasizes the book's theme of unstable narrators.

"In high school, Karen and Sarah had done everything to their hair they could thing of except take care of it. They had bleached it, shaved it, permed it, dyed it, as girls do when vandalizing themselves seems the best way of proving their bodies are theirs."

This quote highlights the theme of girls' lack of autonomy over their own bodies. To get this autonomy, they must take drastic measures, as evidenced by their "vandalizing" of their hair. Taken to an extreme, Karen and Sarah's sexual affairs with older men is another way of attempting to claim their own bodily autonomy—attempts which fail dramatically.

"David gave a scornful laugh. 'We were never children,' he said." 

Karen's discussion with David indicates how he has become like Mr. Kingsley and Martin. Although she was sexually assaulted by at least one of the older men, he refuses to see her as a victim—instead casting her as an adult capable of consent. This puts him in the role of the storyteller, even though the story is Karen's to tell.

"The third Manuel is not a person but an observation. Is not a salient aspect of this character his special relationship with Mr. Kingsley? Does not this relationship so anger Sarah that she inflicts an unspeakable wound, a strange sort of revenge?" 

"Karen" indicates that Sarah had a relationship with Mr. Kingsley only vaguely. In this quote, she sees Sarah's anger at Mr. Kingsley as an inspiration for the character of Manuel in the first section. However, it is unclear whether Sarah is angry because she had an affair with Mr. Kingsley or because Karen did.

"My memory had been the ultimate proof of any points that she wanted to make, but it strangely disproved any points of my own. I might remember some incident, sure, but I did not understand it." 

Choi again emphasizes the power of the narrator by showing various ways that girls' and women's accounts of their own lives are undermined by different types of people. Here, Karen's mother undermines her accounts of what happened, casting her as an unreliable narrator. As the narrative continues, all narrators are shown to be unreliable, yet only Sarah and Karen are reprimanded for it.

"No, she was not some helpless victim. It wasn't David's business to decide this, but it happened to be true." 

Karen expresses her anger at David's desire to tell her story for her. The second section is her attempt to reclaim her own story, both in her presentation of the narrative and in shooting Martin. This quote further illustrates the complexities of consent; Karen does not see herself as the victim, even though she has been hurt and changed by the relationship she had as a teenager.

"'Mr. Kingsley is part of what happened to you,' Sarah said, as if Karen deserved to be scolded for not holding the past to account.

'And here I thought he was part of what happened to you.'" 

It is unclear whether Sarah or Karen had an affair with Mr. Kingsley/Lord. This quote implies that they both may have—or, perhaps, that they are different aspects of the same character. It further demonstrates the extent to which women critique other women for how they tell their stories.

"'Did you really expect me to go along with your revision? With David it's one thing. He never knew in the first place and somehow still doesn't. But come on. ‘Take five, sweetie’? That's rich, how you kept that and added a bow tie.'"

Karen finally expresses her anger at Sarah's novel directly to Sarah. Here, she shows how Sarah's narrative coincides with her own (as indicated in the quote) but also how it diverges (the bow tie, making Mr. Kingsley seem more affable than Lord). In doing so, she indicates that Sarah had an affair with Mr. Kingsley/Lord. However, Sarah continues to deny this.

"She was, however, sure of how it would feel: the electric shock of being recognized, of being herself the object of a quest, the one thing someone else had been missing." 

Claire wishes to get "The Look," something she feels is missing from her life. This is in part what sends her to look for her biological parents. The need for the Look echoes the CAPA students' need for stardom. Both center around a wish to be seen and desired. Furthermore, both wishes end up opening the door for abuse.