The Rehearsal

leaves gray ovals of damp that pucker and vanish in seconds.
    “This girl, Willa,” Bridget says, “she was in my remedial English last year and heard me say mizled out loud and the teacher told me the right way to say it and we all laughed about it, because it was such a stupid mistake. And then last week we were sitting at lunch, a whole group of us, and Willa starts telling us about how she always thought mizle was actually a word, and she says mizled instead of miss-led . She repeats the whole story back to us as if it’s her own.
    “I watched her really carefully,” Bridget says, “and she was looking at me when she said it, all casual and laughing at herself, and I truly don’t think she knew that she was telling my story. She would have looked guilty or avoided me or something. I think she’d just heard me make the mistake and she liked the sound of it and after a while she made herself believe that the story was hers.”
    “Did you shame her?” the saxophone teacher says. “In front of everybody?”
    “No,” Bridget says. “Everyone would have thought I was lame.”
    “So nobody knew she was lying.”
    “No.”
    “And the next time you say mizled by accident, everyone is going to think you only want to be like Willa.”
    “Yeah,” says Bridget. “If I make the mistake again.”
    “And you know that Willa definitely does not read mizled in her head whenever she sees the word misled .”
    “No,” Bridget says stoutly. “It’s my thing. And anyway she laughed at me in remedial English.”
    “Well,” the saxophone teacher says. “It’s certainly not the most heroic story to poach from another person and call your own. I’m sure I can think of better.” She moves her hand again and the gray finger-spots of damp turn to vapor and melt away.
    Bridget is flushed, unable to voice coherently the indignation and even rage she feels toward this liar Willa, the plunderer, the unashamed thief. Bridget is never rich in tales about herself, however unheroic, yet she is now a fraction poorer, her life shaved a fraction thinner, her mind a fraction less unique, because of this girl’s theft.
    “But now she’s got this memory,” Bridget says, struggling on. “A real memory of it, of every time she’s ever read that word. And she laughs at herself and says, What an idiot, like she can’t believe how silly she is. And she isn’t. Silly. She knew the right way to say it the whole time.”
    “Maybe she’s just a liar,” the saxophone teacher says.
    “But if she doesn’t know that she’s lying,” Bridget says, almost desperately now, “and nobody else knows that she’s lying, and she’s got this real memory in her head—”
    Bridget breaks off, working her mouth like a caught fish.
    “Then it might as well be true,” she says at last, and in her distraction flaps her hands against her sides, once, twice, and then she is still.
    Monday
    “I had Mr. Saladin in fifth form,” Julia says offhand in her lesson on Monday afternoon.
    “Did you?” the saxophone teacher says.
    “For School Cert music,” Julia says. “I always thought he was just a bit of a nerd.”
    “Oh,” the saxophone teacher says in surprise, this concept of a nerdy Mr. Saladin being altogether new to her. She rolls the idea around the inside of her mouth for a moment.
    “She was in my music class that year,” Julia continues, a little dreamily. “Victoria was. That must have been way before they got together—she wasn’t taking woodwind tutorials then. I remembered that the other day, and ever since I’ve been thinking and thinking, trying to recall some incident where I remember the two of them together, some incident that I can extract from the rest of the year and make it mean much more than it actually did.”
    “And?”
    “Once,” Julia says, “once Mr. Saladin said, Victoria, if you touch that recorder one more time in the next hour you are going to meet a swift and untimely death, and don’t you dare test me to see if I mean it.” Julia erects the flat-edged arms on her music stand that hold her music in place. “I should bring it up in counseling,” she says. She snorts inelegantly. “And then I should cry.”
    “What happened in counseling today?” the saxophone teacher says.
    “Criticism is constructive, comparison is abuse,” Julia says. “Like, ‘I find your attitude hurtful’—that’s criticism, that’s okay. ‘I think you are so much like your mother’—that’s