The Rehearsal

legs and arms and off my fingertips and pooling wider and wider on the floor.”
    Victoria stood there in the hall with the last of the sunlight slanting across her face and didn’t say anything for a while. Isolde breathed raggedly and glared at her, and stood just inside her bedroom door, her hand on the door edge and ready to slam it on cue. Then Victoria said, “Sorry.”
    “You bloody aren’t,” Isolde said. She slammed the door.
    “Does anybody want to say anything before we kick off?” the counselor is saying now, and one of the girls in the back row calls out, “I do.”
    Isolde is still broody and wrapped up in herself and doesn’t turn around when the girl begins to speak. She hears her say, “I don’t agree that Mr. Saladin wanted to gain control,” but it takes a moment before she registers what the girl is actually saying.
    The girl says, “Sleeping with a minor isn’t exciting because you get to boss them around. It’s exciting because you’re risking so much. And taking a risk is exciting because of the possibility that you might lose , not the possibility that you might win.”
    Isolde turns around to look at her.
    The speaker is a seventh former, a hard-edged ink-spotted girl who smokes lonely cigarettes by the goalposts of the soccer field and sits in after-school detention with a satisfied smirk on her face to show that everything is going precisely as she has planned. She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost and pursued by frightened vicious rumors that she is possibly probably gay .
    The fact that the rumors about Julia are unsupported by witness or report means that Julia’s sexuality remains an elusive property, threatening but not entirely quantifiable, predatory in an unpredictable, unpreventable way. Julia herself, surly and caustic and isolated by her headphones and her paperbacks and the curtain of hair across her face, never chooses to actively dispel the whispers that shadow her. If she is provoked she might scowl and give the finger, but provocation isn’t in fashion right now, so mostly she is simply left alone.
    Now, while the girls watch Julia as if she is a carnival act and the counselor tugs nervously at the tuft of hair at the nape of his neck, Isolde becomes aware that the atmosphere in the room is changing. A cold dawning fear is rising from the girls like a scent. The belated threat posed by the now absent Mr. Saladin is plainly diminished in the face of this more insidious and unnameable threat posed by Julia. It is not simply the voicing of the opinion that frightens them. Julia is an infiltrator, a dangerous and volatile mole who might without their knowledge have a crush on any one of them, who might at any moment be imagining any one of them—there are no counseling sessions to prepare the girls against the advances of one of their own.
    “The fact that Victoria was underage and virginal or whatever wasn’t exciting because he could exercise more power over her,” Julia is saying. “It was exciting because he stood to lose so much more if anyone found out.” She cocks her head to emphasize the shock value. “He wouldn’t just lose her. He would lose everything.”
    Isolde looks her up and down in fascination. As she contemplates what Julia is saying, she begins for the first time to feel an interest in Mr. Saladin: Mr. Saladin, who saw in her sister something worth pursuing, who whispered things that nobody had ever said before, who risked and lost everything he had.
    Why did Mr. Saladin choose Victoria? Isolde finds herself considering the question properly for the first time. She pictures her sister’s round cherry pout and round wide eyes, and the flash of red satin whenever she leans over and exposes the artful low waistband of her school kilt. She pictures Victoria in jazz band, leaning forward to turn the page with her sax slung slantwise across her body, the weight of the instrument pulling the neckstrap downward and tight against her sternum so that the upper end of the instrument lies brightly golden between the blue woollen swell of her breasts. And then Isolde thinks, Why did Victoria choose Mr. Saladin?
    In the beginning, watching her parents quarrel over Victoria and clinging to her shoulders like the conscience angels of a morality play, all Isolde could feel was a preemptive stab of injustice as she wondered