The Rehearsal

whether her parents would ever find cause to attend so closely to her . She applied herself gravely to her parents’ distress and watched Victoria from a careful distance, but she did not think to ponder or picture Mr. Saladin as he paced his camel-cream apartment and handed in his hangdog resignation and in shame telephoned his family to confess.
    Even now Isolde has only a dim and tangential perception of Mr. Saladin. She remembers him suited and conducting the orchestra at the end-of-year showcase concert, and once she saw him jogging from the music department to the staff car park with his necktie whipped over his shoulder and a sheaf of papers in his fist. She vaguely remembers him slouching on stage at the first assembly, running a hand through his hair and furtively checking his watch as the third formers were welcomed at length into the school. She recalls that he used to call his students Princess, in a teasing despairing sort of way, as if to say that there was nothing to be done.
    Isolde tries to imagine Mr. Saladin in a sexual context, and falters. She casts about and tries to place him among his peers. Mr. Horne with the cellulite smear of acne scarring on both cheeks and the chalky fingerprints around his pocket rim. Mr. Kebble who teaches maths and musty French, his underarm sweat-stains blooming like secret bruises. Mr. MacAuley from the bursar’s office who is pert and brisk and shines like an apple from behind the sliding glass. She imagines unbuttoning them and tugging their shirttails from their trousers and pushing them hard against the music-cupboard door. She imagines smiling at them in lessons and making their hearts race. She imagines saying, How about lunchtime? and, I like the shirt with the stripes better. She imagines saying, I don’t believe you that it doesn’t fit. I saw Miss Clark put one over her whole shoe.
    Isolde is lost in this contemplation when Julia looks up and meets her gaze. It takes a moment for Isolde’s trance-glazed eyes to focus, and then she suffers a swoop in her gut, panicking for an instant in case the subject of her thoughts was in some way visible. Her heart begins to pound. Again Isolde thinks about the rumors that shadow Julia everywhere she goes, and suddenly she feels a little frightened, as if she has just made herself terribly vulnerable in a way she can’t quite understand. She panics and turns away. The counselor is talking again, and all around her the girls are nodding, full of contentment and pity and a deep satisfied peace.
    Isolde’s heartbeat returns to normal. Julia’s words return to her in a late echo, washing over her with sudden volume like the unexpected slapping rush of a spring tide. I don’t agree, she said, that Mr. Saladin wanted to gain control. Isolde slithers down her seat in confusion and shame, and when the bell rings she slips out of the room without looking back.
    Wednesday
    “Bridget,” the saxophone teacher says, “I told you that if you didn’t play that bar perfectly first time I was going to scream.”
    “I know,” says Bridget unhappily.
    “Did you want me to scream? Did you imagine the sharp edge of each wrong note stuck like a little barb into the side of my face? Is that what you wanted?”
    “No,” says Bridget.
    The saxophone teacher draws out the silence between them for three minim rests, the metronome on the piano keeping dogged time. “Are you under pressure at home?” she asks. “Or at school?”
    Bridget’s eyes fill with tears. “Did my mum call you?” she asks, dreading the inevitable. “She said she wouldn’t. She always says she won’t and then she does.”
    The saxophone teacher looks her up and down, and then she asks, “Does your mother lie to you, Bridget?”
    Bridget falls into miserable silence as she ponders the question.
    Whenever she is bullied or short-changed or mistreated in any way, Bridget’s first panicked thought is always that she must make sure her mother doesn’t find out. Bridget’s mother marches into the school administration block almost fortnightly, complaining or querying or demanding on behalf of Bridget, always on behalf of Bridget, who trails in her mother’s righteous wake and once heard the secretary whisper, “That girl has got her mother wrapped around her little finger. Wrapped around.”
    “Please don’t come in to school,” Bridget said in dread alarm last week, when her mother discovered she’d paid twice the cost of her sax rental for the