The third time, his parents accidentally locked him out. By the light of his phone he hunted for the key in the bottom of the right terra-cotta pot that stood amid a thousand identical terra-cotta pots in their backyard greenhouse, the one he’d been scared of as a child, the one he was still sort of scared of, honestly, drafty and full of spiders and hiding spots, where anything, or anyone, could be waiting. She’d wrapped her arms around him and kissed the back of his neck, an inch or two west of his right ear, a place on his body he wasn’t sure he’d been aware of until that very moment, a place that he still reaches to touch every now and then, just to make sure it’s still there. He touches it now; it’s part of his walk, and every time he touches it, he imagines his limbs getting lighter, more spring in his step.

Change again, the director says. Move like someone who’s been hurt.

Around him, people drop to the floor. Nina Booker-Pope clutches her leg and starts literally screaming until the director reminds them all that this is a silent exercise, please. Sil is doing kind of a drunken stumble; Audrey crawls, drags one leg behind her. Andrew settles on a plodding stagger, hands in pockets, shoulders around his neck, lifted in a perpetual shrug. He’d had to drag the breakup out of her.

Now the hurt is worse, she says.

Eleven days, two and a half years ago. He’s glad they’re friends. But he wishes he could drink from the Lovesick Falls spring and fall out of love in an instant. Because it hurts to know that he was the only one who fell in love. It hurts to untwist a peppermint from its cellophane shell, to smooth the wrinkles from the wrapper while the candy disappears on his tongue, leaving him sugar-toothed, muck-mouthed.

Andrew runs his tongue over his teeth.

The director speaks again. Move like the person you are when no one else is around.

Andrew can’t help it: He pays attention to what other people are doing. Audrey is running laps around the room. Nina Booker-Pope is doing literal handstands. Jesus Christ.

His reaction is to make himself small.

He is a tiny rolling pebble, somersaulting around.

A rock in dirt.

There are his brothers, so much older, saying, Don’t be such a… He shudders at the hateful word.

There is the fear that maybe, maybe, at the rock and the core, there is something he might not know about himself. Not that he could be gay, but that he doesn’t know. That other people know him better than he knows himself. That there is something about him that people recognize, and it’s not fucking fair. How can parts of yourself be a secret to you but clear to strangers?

Now put on armor, the director says.