“It was like my entire face was cast in concrete, and the real me was roiling underneath.” He ran his splayed fingers down his face. “I knew that what I was on the inside and what I was on the outside were two very different things. Separate entities, even. And that’s not even counting what I thought I was versus what I wanted to be versus what I really was. You follow?”

The kids nodded placidly. He went on:

“But people couldn’t see my true self. People couldn’t look past my carapace. And it was incredibly, incredibly frustrating for me, as I’m sure it is for you. They thought I was this dull, well-behaved boy with nothing remarkable to say about anything—if they thought of me at all.”

Mr. Z said he had to “reprogram” his face, doing funny expressions in the mirror every morning and night, massaging his forehead and the areas around the eyes to relax the muscles. There were tongue and mouth-stretching exercises, too. A cheap and chippy chopper on a big black clock . . .

“Think of yourself as a tree. If you let your fears and inhibitions fall away, only then can you start conquering them, picking up each negative feeling like a rotting piece of fruit and mashing it up in your hands.” He was a great mime. Rosemary could almost smell the sourness from the imaginary peach that was macerating between his palms.

She did all his facial exercises in the bathroom for a half hour every morning. They chased away her terror of being in her dad’s death chamber—the grout around the tub was stained tea-brown. After two weeks, Mr. Z told her she had succeeded in smiling with her eyes and gave her two thumbs up.

In the final session before the four East Asians were allowed back into the drama class, he screened the movie Dead Ringers. He asked them to watch how the lead actor—“a Pinteresque British mummy”—released his face during the course of the film.

The movie, directed by David Cronenberg, whom Mr. Z singled out as “the sickest director in the world,” told the story of identical twin brothers, played by Jeremy Irons. Rosemary recognized him as the voice of Scar in The Lion King. The brothers were both gynecologists, and in love with same weird French Canadian lady. But because they had a twisted relationship, one of them dominant and the other submissive, the rivalry for the lady evolved into a deeper psychic battle. There were nude love scenes too bizarre for the kids to find sexy—and none of them were into watching the middle-aged fuck.

Rosemary found the movie spooky and touching but couldn’t quite articulate why, and so kept those thoughts to herself. In contrast, Alicia Hwang paraded her enthusiasm, repeating everything Mr. Z said.