The Rehearsal

about her sister, who would fall quiet and look across at them and watch Julia so cautiously, Julia who is properly her equal, her classmate, the girl she once scorned in the netball trials, the girl about whom she whispered once, Doesn’t she know what we all think of her? Surely she knows.
    It would be nice, Isolde thinks, to know that you had become the image you created for yourself. It would be nice to have a reason to act broody and maligned.
    Every one of Isolde’s choices is really only a rephrased and masquerading version of the question, What am I?
    It will be this way for years to come.
    Tuesday
    Sometimes Julia is filled with a kind of rage at the fact of her body, the fertile swell of her hips, her cold freckled breasts, the twice-folded inner pocket of her womb. She doesn’t wish herself different, doesn’t crave a phallus or a mustache or a pair of big veined hands with calluses and blunted nails—she simply feels frustrated that her anatomical apparatus presents such a misplaced and useless advantage. If the other girl’s flushed and halting inclinations tend elsewhere, if Isolde does not seek a mirrored lover but a converse lover, a flipside complement of a lover, then Julia is lost.
    Julia thinks, Seducing Isolde isn’t just a matter of behaving as attractively and as temptingly as possible, and trusting that Isolde will bite. If, instead, she were faced with the prospect of seducing a boy, then such a simple formula would probably work. The mere fact of Julia’s anatomy would be enough. She would herself be the temptation—her body, the whole of her. But seducing Isolde requires forcing the younger girl to come to regard herself in a new way: only after Isolde has come to cherish her own self, the concave yin of her feminine skin, will Julia have a hope. Isolde must come to cherish herself, first and foremost. The seduction must take the form of a persuasion, a gradual winning-over of her mind.
    Julia thinks of all the usual gifts of courtship, like flowers in homeroom or stones thrown at her window at midnight or a patient watcher at the school gates, waiting with a bicycle to walk her slowly home. All of them seem grotesque. She imagines sending Isolde flowers in homeroom, and all she can think of is the girl’s horrified face as she peers over the lip of the red cluster of tissue, the card already plucked off in embarrassment and crumpled to a nub. She imagines a bouquet too big and too fragile to be shoved into the bottom of Isolde’s bag, and the beautiful girls all laughing and shouting, What’s his name?
    Julia is overcome by a fit of melancholy now, and drives her pen savagely through the margin of her homework sheet, causing the paper to rip. She thinks, What’s the likelihood? That the one girl who makes my heart race is the one girl who wants me in return? That the accident of my attraction coincides with the accident of hers? She thinks: can I trust in something chemical, some scent or pheromone that will ride on the current of my walking and come to kiss her as I pass her by?
    Julia distrusts this chemical, this invisible riptide that sucks away at all her shores. She thinks: I cannot rely on the chemical. I cannot rely on the accident of her attraction. I must seduce her, actively pursue her and persuade her. I must appeal to the questionable autonomy of a teenage girl whose mind is still not rightfully her own.
    Tuesday
    “Hey Isolde, want to play?” someone calls out, and Isolde looks up. She is walking back from the tuck shop with a brown paper bag pinched in each hand, the icing slowly leaking through the paper and darkening the pale in greasy spots of gray.
    “No, thanks,” Isolde says, and holds up the paper bags as an excuse.
    The questioning girl smiles and returns to the game. Isolde watches as she walks past: four or five of them are attempting to play hacky-sack in their thick-soled school shoes and drooping gray socks, hiking up their school skirts with both hands to show the winter white of their dimpled knees. She rounds the corner of the school library and continues on.
    Isolde weaves her way around the groups of girls sitting in their impenetrable circles around the quad, and then to her surprise she sees Julia sitting in a rare patch of sun on the grass on the far side of the paving. She is wearing her headphones and squinting in a cross kind of way into a paperback novel. Shyly Isolde makes her way toward her. Her heart begins to hammer.
    Julia looks