The Rehearsal

FIVE

Monday

“Thanks all for coming in, people,” the counselor is saying as Isolde walks in. He raises his palms like he is a politician or a priest. “I’d really like to build on some of the issues that we raised in our last session. I thought that today we could talk about taking control.”

The room is almost full. Isolde looks around for a seat, nodding tersely at a few of her sister’s friends who look at her with sad round eyes as if they are imagining themselves in her shoes and feeling very sorry for themselves indeed. Isolde scowls. She slips into a chair and tries to scrunch down as low as possible. The counselor smiles at her, a horrible rubbery proud smile that makes Isolde’s skin creep, and she quickly looks away, down at her fingernails and the worn tatty cuffs of her school jersey. She suffers being questioned and patted and caressed by the girl sitting behind her, a stout motherly figure who was Victoria’s tennis partner in intermediate school and once shared a paper bag of sweets with Isolde under the trees at the end of the lawn.

The girl settles back into her chair like a fat tufted hen, and Isolde can hear her say to the girl sitting next to her, “They’re keeping her in the dark I reckon. Makes sense.”

“Who can tell me what the issue is here?” the counselor is saying, spreading his arms to include them all. “It starts with B,” he adds, silencing the girls who are about to volunteer possible answers that do not start with B. The girls lean back and think of all the B words they have heard the counselor use.

“Boundaries,” the counselor croons at last, and there is a collective exhalation. “Boundaries, people.”

Isolde sits very still and gives nothing away, folding into herself and glassing over as if she is pushing her face into a mask. Vultures, she thinks to herself, using her mother’s word. Her mother had said it when she saw the contented headlines in the morning paper. Vultures, she said, and then swooped down and ripped off the front page, but ineffectually so the column headline was vertically halved and the piece that remained read Teacher Sex. Vultures, Isolde thinks now, as the whispers eddy around her and the counselor smiles his plump greasy smile.

The counselor is saying, “Maybe you might let this sort of thing happen because you just don’t know how else to respond.”

Isolde sighs and wishes she were dead.

“Why do I have to go?” she asked her mother last night, slapping the pink form down next to the chopped onions and the flour. “It’s seventh formers and music students and then me. I’ll be the only fifth former there and everyone will know and it’s humiliating. They all pity me and I hate it.”

Isolde’s mother chewed at her lip in the way she did when she knew she was out of her depth.

“I suppose you could refuse to go, honey,” she said distractedly, “but it might end up seeming like you were taking a stand. You might draw attention to yourself, and that might not be what you want. It might be better for you to just go along and put your head down. I’m not sure. You decide.” She smiled in a vague but encouraging way. “Poor lamb,” was the last thing she said before turning back to the onions, her disinterest settling over her daughter like a damp chemical mist over a household fire.

Isolde snatched back the pink form and stalked out of the room. “I have to go to counseling because of you,” she snapped as she passed Victoria in the hall.

“Why?” Victoria asked, stopping and looking thoroughly surprised.

“Because they want to quarantine,” Isolde shouted. “They want to keep us all in one place so the sickness won’t spread and they can figure out a vaccine. They want to put us in a concrete yard and take our clothes off and hose us down and scrub us with sandpaper and turpentine and rags made from old Y-fronts that have turned gray. It’s like you’ve left big inky handprints on all of us, everyone you’ve ever met, but especially me, I’m the most inky, I’m like dripping ink, it’s running down my legs and arms and off my fingertips and pooling wider and wider on the floor.”

Victoria stood there in the hall with the last of the sunlight slanting across her face and didn’t say anything for a while. Isolde breathed raggedly and glared at her, and stood just inside her bedroom door, her hand on the door edge and ready to slam it on cue. Then Victoria said, “Sorry.”

“You bloody aren’t,” Isolde said. She slammed the door.

“Does anybody want to say anything before we kick off?” the counselor is saying now, and one of the girls in the back row calls out, “I do.”

Isolde is still broody and wrapped up in herself and doesn’t turn around when the girl begins to speak. She hears her say, “I don’t agree that Mr. Saladin wanted to gain control,” but it takes a moment before she registers what the girl is actually saying.

The girl says, “Sleeping with a minor isn’t exciting because you get to boss them around. It’s exciting because you’re risking so much. And taking a risk is exciting because of the possibility that you might lose, not the possibility that you might win.”

Isolde turns around to look at her.

The speaker is a seventh former, a hard-edged ink-spotted girl who smokes lonely cigarettes by the goalposts of the soccer field and sits in after-school detention with a satisfied smirk on her face to show that everything is going precisely as she has planned. She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost and pursued by frightened vicious rumors that she is possibly probably gay.

The fact that the rumors about Julia are unsupported by witness or report means that Julia’s sexuality remains an elusive property, threatening but not entirely quantifiable, predatory in an unpredictable, unpreventable way. Julia herself, surly and caustic and isolated by her headphones and her paperbacks and the curtain of hair across her face, never chooses to actively dispel the whispers that shadow her. If she is provoked she might scowl and give the finger, but provocation isn’t in fashion right now, so mostly she is simply left alone.

Now, while the girls watch Julia as if she is a carnival act and the counselor tugs nervously at the tuft of hair at the nape of his neck, Isolde becomes aware that the atmosphere in the room is changing. A cold dawning fear is rising from the girls like a scent. The belated threat posed by the now absent Mr. Saladin is plainly diminished in the face of this more insidious and unnameable threat posed by Julia. It is not simply the voicing of the opinion that frightens them. Julia is an infiltrator, a dangerous and volatile mole who might without their knowledge have a crush on any one of them, who might at any moment be imagining any one of them—there are no counseling sessions to prepare the girls against the advances of one of their own.

“The fact that Victoria was underage and virginal or whatever wasn’t exciting because he could exercise more power over her,” Julia is saying. “It was exciting because he stood to lose so much more if anyone found out.” She cocks her head to emphasize the shock value. “He wouldn’t just lose her. He would lose everything.”

Isolde looks her up and down in fascination. As she contemplates what Julia is saying, she begins for the first time to feel an interest in Mr. Saladin: Mr. Saladin, who saw in her sister something worth pursuing, who whispered things that nobody had ever said before, who risked and lost everything he had.

Why did Mr. Saladin choose Victoria? Isolde finds herself considering the question properly for the first time. She pictures her sister’s round cherry pout and round wide eyes, and the flash of red satin whenever she leans over and exposes the artful low waistband of her school kilt. She pictures Victoria in jazz band, leaning forward to turn the page with her sax slung slantwise across her body, the weight of the instrument pulling the neckstrap downward and tight against her sternum so that the upper end of the instrument lies brightly golden between the blue woollen swell of her breasts. And then Isolde thinks, Why did Victoria choose Mr. Saladin?

In the beginning, watching her parents quarrel over Victoria and clinging to her shoulders like the conscience angels of a morality play, all Isolde could feel was a preemptive stab of injustice as she wondered whether her parents would ever find cause to attend so closely to her. She applied herself gravely to her parents’ distress and watched Victoria from a careful distance, but she did not think to