The Rehearsal

month by mistake. “I’ll sort it out at jazz band. Please don’t come.”
    “All right,” her mother said at last, peering at Bridget in a distrustful, grudging sort of way. “But make sure you get a receipt.” Later she doubled back on her way home from the supermarket and went in to the music department after all, before Bridget had a chance.
    “I said I’d sort it out at jazz band,” Bridget said.
    “Gave me a chance to ask what measures have been put in place,” Bridget’s mother said. She eased a puffy foot from her shoe and massaged it slowly. “After this whole Mr. Saladin ordeal, I said, I just want to know what measures have been put in place.” She peered at Bridget, brandishing her shoe in her fist. She said, “ Nothing , that’s what. Nothing is what’s been done.”
    “I asked you not to go,” said Bridget quietly. “They think you’re wrapped around my finger.”
    “Bridget,” said Bridget’s mother, “it’s my money you’re spending on that saxophone. I can manage my money as I please. Plus. It gave me a chance to stir them up a bit. Nothing is what’s been done.”
    The saxophone teacher is waiting quietly for Bridget’s recollection to end.
    “I suppose it is lying,” Bridget says at last. “I suppose she does lie to me.” The betrayal twists sourly in her stomach.
    “It’s undermining,” the saxophone teacher says.
    “I suppose so,” Bridget says. The metronome arm is still swinging back and forth, measuring the space between them.
    The saxophone teacher lets Bridget’s misery weigh heavy for a moment, and then she says, “Your mum did come and see me last week, actually. Just to catch up. She’d had a run-in with one of the teachers at your school.”
    Panic floods Bridget’s face. “What did she say?”
    The sax teacher likes playing Bridget’s mother. She shrinks into herself until she looks pale and stringy and rumpled and slightly alarmed, toying with the end of her scarf in a mincing compulsive fashion, her little eyes darting to the edges of the room as she speaks.
    “Bridget hasn’t had much luck with teachers,” is what Bridget’s mother said. “Teachers just don’t seem to click with her. It’s not that she’s a bad kid—she isn’t a troublemaker at all—and she’s not stupid. But there’s something about Bridget that seems to rub teachers up the wrong way. It seems that she’s just not a likeable girl. It’s not something I understand. How do you make your child likeable? I seem to have missed that opportunity. Somehow it passed me by.”
    It is an accurate performance. The saxophone teacher returns to herself with a pleased expectant expression on her face, as if she knows that she qualifies for full marks but she wants to hear it confirmed all the same.
    “She always says things like that,” Bridget says unhappily. “Talking about me like that. Going to see my teachers and telling them I have ideas, or asking them why I don’t have enough ideas and what they’re going to do about it.”
    “It’s because she wants the best for you,” the saxophone teacher says.
    “No, it isn’t,” Bridget says. “It’s because there’s nothing else happening in her life and she has to stick her nose in or she’d be bored out of her brain.”
    “Come on, Bridget,” says the saxophone teacher in a scolding voice. “All that drama at your school—the sex scandal—it really shook her up. She’s worried about you.”
    This sea change is characteristic of the saxophone teacher’s conversations with Bridget. A sudden about-face always provokes a satisfying wounded bewilderment that clouds Bridget’s face with shame and with the throbbing irreparable guilt of having said too much. The saxophone teacher watches the effect with satisfaction.
    Bridget looks at her music miserably for a moment. Her pigtails are drooping and her ribbons are gray. “She said thank God you’re a woman,” she says suddenly, as if she is contemplating the words for the first time.
    Thursday
    The school that these girls so reluctantly attend is called Abbey Grange, colloquially known as either Scabby Grange or Abbey Grunge, depending on your mood or point of view. The boys from the high school opposite hang from their armpits along the iron fence and shout “Scabby Abbey!” through the bars, and when the girls take a shortcut through the St. Sylvester grounds they always shout out “Syphilis!” or “Saint Molester!” sometimes without an audience,