The Rehearsal

compelled by shame to say. They come to believe that their needs are simply keener, more specialized, more urgent than the needs of the girls who queue outside the chippy and tuck the greasy package down their shirts for the walk home. They do not regard themselves as privileged and fortunate. They regard themselves as people whose needs are aptly and deservedly met, and if you were to call them wealthy they would raise their eyebrows and blink, and say, “Well, it’s not like we’re starving or anything, but we’re definitely not rich .”
    This stubborn dance of entitlement, aggressive and defensive, does mark a real fear in the collective mind of the Abbey Grange girls who have moved through the years of high school in an unchanging, unitary pack. Always they fear that one of them might at any time burst out and eclipse the others, that the group might suddenly and irreparably be plunged into her shadow, that the tacit allegiance to fairness and middling equality held by them all might come to nothing after all. In a group their economic differences even out to an ordinary average, and their combined mediocrity becomes something a little like power, each of them with a specialized function that defines her territory within the whole. But if one of them should burst out and shine, the remaining girls would wither. They are mindful of the threat, clinging to each other’s elbows and clustering bluishly in the corridor and reining in any girl who threatens independence—any girl who looks as if she might one day break free and have no need of the rest.
    It is just such a group that Victoria rent apart and destroyed when she peeled off to pursue a love affair in such a selfish, secret way. In usual practice, boys are privately met and managed but always remain the collective property of the group: afterward, a girl might talk only to her best friend—or perhaps a close few, according to her own network of allegiances and feuds—but it is at least accepted that she will tell somebody , that the boy will remain an object beyond the myriad confidences of the group, a thing to discuss but never confide in, never to trust. Victoria’s violation of these rules is crippling and total. To have conducted an entire relationship in secret, to have invented commitments and appointments and, above all, to have trusted in Mr. Saladin over this nuggeted faction of girls who depend so utterly upon togetherness: her betrayal weakens the kaleidoscope stronghold of the group, leeches everything of joy and meaning, punctures every illusion of unity and might. The girls begin to shrink away from each other. Even the St. Sylvester boys seem tame and foolish, like dress-up soldiers waving cardboard swords.
    “It isn’t fair,” is what the girls are thinking, all the left-behind eclipsed girls who squat in the dark of Victoria’s shadow and stew. “What she stole from us. It isn’t fair.”
    Monday
    Isolde wonders whether what she is feeling is merely a kind of worship, a fascinated admiration of an older girl such as she once bestowed upon Victoria and her scornful train of friends: forever desperate to please them, clinging to their ankles like a foreshortened afternoon shadow, and breathless with the impossible hope that they might one day count her among their closest. Is Julia really only a mirror image of the person who Isolde aspires to be—worldly, senior, brooding, debonair? Is this all her attraction is—a narcissistic self-congratulation, a girl captivated by the image of a girl? Does falling in love with Julia require Isolde to fall, to some degree, in love with herself?
    All she has is one uncertain evening of stalls and snatches and trailings-off, a lone flare of something bright that sent her heart thudding and the blood rushing to the thin skin over the bones of her chest, and then days and weeks of lonely conjuring, a paralytic limbo of self-doubt which seems to shrink Julia to an impossibility, a freak, a daytime wander that recedes in the rear-vision mirror of her uncertain mind.
    She thinks vaguely about how nice it would be to be persecuted. She thinks about the two of them parading in defiance in front of her parents, holding hands maybe. She thinks about watching her father pick at his red throat with his finger while he shakes his head and says, Issie, don’t close off your options, honey. You never know, it might just be a phase. She thinks about her mother—her shrug, her careful smile. She thinks