The Rehearsal

up, sees her approaching and tugs her headphones out of her ears.
    “Hey man,” she says, and Isolde waves her paper bags and says, “Hey.”
    “What have you got?” Julia says.
    “Just a roll and a doughnut.”
    “You can sit down if you want.”
    Isolde crosses her legs at the ankle and descends into a sitting position in the fluent scissor-action of girls long practiced at sitting cross-legged, her free hand tugging at the doubled fold beneath the silver kilt-pin so it covers the bare skin of her knee. Julia shifts her ankles to make room. The horizontal gash along the length of Isolde’s filled roll is stained pink from the beetroot. Isolde wipes her finger along the seam to collect the mayonnaise and licks her finger carefully.
    “You know what I think is shit?” Julia says suddenly, arching her back and reaching over to yank a tuft of grass from the ground to shred. “That they make you come to those counseling sessions about self-defense or teacher abuse or whatever.”
    “But I’ve learned so much,” Isolde says, blinking. “Like my body is a temple. And we were all abused as children probably; we only need to work hard to remember it.”
    Julia laughs and shreds her grass even smaller.
    “But you were brilliant,” Isolde says. “Standing up to him like that. Like you did.”
    “He’s scared of me now.”
    “So is everyone, after what you said,” Isolde says, meaning it as a joke, but Julia frowns and shakes her head.
    “I was paraphrasing, anyway,” she says. “It’s not like I made it up. Dumb shits. Not you.”
    “Oh, no,” Isolde says quickly. Her nervousness has given way to a kind of giddiness, a reckless charged feeling that is keeping her heartbeat in her throat and her vision sharpened in awareness of Julia’s total proximity, the fall of her hair around her face and the every movement of her hands as they pick away at the yellow balding patch of lawn. Julia’s hands are thin and reddish, with nibbled patches of dark nail polish in the center of each flat-nibbed nail. She has a few loops of dirty string knotted around her bony wrist, and on the back of her hand a few notes to herself in blue ink, several days old now so the ink has furred out into the web of tiny creases on her skin. Even looking at Julia’s hands seems unbearably sensual to Isolde, and she quickly draws her gaze away, out across the quad where a group of girls are clapping a rhythm as they rehearse a set for the school dance challenge.
    “We’re the ones with the power,” Julia is saying. “That’s the real lesson from this whole Mr. Saladin thing. The lesson they don’t want us to learn.”
    “Oh,” Isolde says, looking again at Julia’s hands.
    “It’s because of where we are in the power chain. We can be damaged, but we can’t damage others. Well, I suppose we can damage each other, but we can’t damage our teachers or our parents or whatever. They can only damage us . And that means we get to call the shots.”
    “What does calling the shots mean?” Isolde says.
    Julia tosses her head in a brooding way. “Everyone worships the victim,” she says. “That’s all I’ve learned from this place, victim-worship. In fourth form I rowed for the coxed quad in the Nationals, right? We turned up and we were clearly the worst team in the tournament. We just didn’t have good enough gear, the quad was really old and heavy, we hadn’t been training for long enough. But because we were the underdogs we really believed we were going to win. Because that’s what happens. In the last ten seconds, the underdogs pull through and win by a canvas, and good triumphs over evil and money doesn’t matter in the end. I remember sitting there in the boat before the race with my oars ready and waiting for the buzzer and thinking, We’re really going to show them when we win.”
    “But you didn’t.”
    “Course not,” Julia says. “Some rich school with a flash fiberglass boat won by about a mile. We were the last team over the finish by at least forty-five seconds. But I’m just pointing out the victim thing. If you’re the victim, you really do believe you’re going to come out on top. It’s what we learn here. Worship the victim. The loser will win.”
    Isolde looks puzzled. She’s a little in awe of the way Julia spits out her opinions, little rehearsed pieces that she delivers with her eyes flashing and her head cocked. Her opinion is more like a challenge than a point of view.
    “You