The Rehearsal

and how he teaches senior jazz band and orchestra and senior jazz ensemble, all on Wednesday morning one after the other. I won’t have him till sixth form, and that’s if I even want to take jazz band, because it clashes with netball so I’ll have to make a choice.
    “Dad’s looking at me with this scared expression like I’m going to do something insane or really emotional and he won’t know how to deal with it. So I go, How do you know? And he goes—”
    She crouches down beside the chair, speaking earnestly and spreading her hands wide—
    “Honey, from what I understand of it, he started off real slow, just resting his hand really lightly on her shoulder sometimes, like that .”
    Isolde reaches out and touches her fingertips to the upper end of the saxophone, which is lying on its side upon the chair. As her fingers touch the instrument a steady pulse begins, like a heartbeat. The teacher is sitting very still.
    “And then sometimes when no one was watching he would lean close and breathe into her hair—”
    She puts her cheek against the instrument and breathes down its length—
    “—like that, really tentative and shy, because he doesn’t know if she wants it yet and he doesn’t want to get done. But she’s friendly because she kind of likes him and she thinks she has a crush on him, and soon his hand is going down, down—”
    Her hand snakes down the saxophone and trails around the edge of the bell—
    “—down, and she sort of starts to respond, and she smiles at him in lessons sometimes and it makes his heart race, and when they’re alone, in the music cupboard or after school or when they go places in his car, which they do sometimes, when they’re alone he calls her my gypsy girl—he says it over and over, my gypsy girl, he says—and she wishes she had something to say back, something she could whisper into his hair, something really special, something nobody’s ever said before.”
    The backing music ceases. Isolde looks at her teacher and says, “She can’t think of anything.”
    The lights come up again, as normal. Isolde scowls and flops down on to an armchair. “But anyway,” she says angrily, “she’s run out of time, it’s too late, because her friends have started to notice the way she is sometimes, the way she puts her chin down and to the side like she’s flirting, and that’s how it all starts to come undone, crashing down on itself like a castle of cards.”
    “I see why you haven’t had time to practice,” says the saxophone teacher.
    “Even this morning,” Isolde says, “I went to play some scales or whatever before school, but when I started playing she was all like, Can’t you at least be sensitive ? and ran out of the room with this fake sob noise which I knew was fake because if she was really crying she wouldn’t have run off, she would have wanted me to see.” Isolde digs the heel of her kilt pin into her knee. “They’re treating her like a fucking artifact.”
    “Is that so unusual?” the sax teacher asks.
    Isolde shoots her a vicious look. “It’s sick ,” she says. “It’s sick like when kids dress up their pets like real people, with clothes and wigs and stuff, and then make them walk on their back legs and take photos. It’s just like that, but worse because you can see how much she’s enjoying it.”
    “I’m sure your sister is not enjoying it,” the saxophone teacher says.
    “Dad said it would probably be years and years before Mr. Saladin gets properly convicted and goes to jail,” Isolde says. “All the papers will say child abuse, but there won’t be a child any more, she’ll be an adult by then, just like him. It’ll be like someone destroyed the scene of the crime on purpose, and built something clean and shiny in its place.”
    “Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says, firmly this time, “I’m sure they are scared only because they know the sin is still there. They know it snuck up inside her and stuck fast, wedging itself into a place nobody knows about and will never find. They know that his sin was just an action, a foolish deadly fumble in the bright dusty lunchtime light, but hers—her sin is a condition, a sickness lodged somewhere deep inside for now and for always.”
    “My dad doesn’t believe in sin,” Isolde says. “We’re atheists.”
    “It pays to be open minded,” says the saxophone teacher.
    “ I’ll tell you why they’re so scared,” Isolde says. “They’re scared because now