The Rehearsal

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 know,” Julia says. “Back in the day, schools would have special desks for the brainiest kid in the class. But the brainiest kid isn’t set apart anymore. Instead we have the remedial block, and the special needs block, and the careers and counseling building. They’re the ones who are set apart from the rest.”

Isolde says, “You think people worship my sister.”

“Yeah, I do,” Julia says.

Isolde looks sideways at the older girl, and finds that she has nothing to say. She tugs a pale shard of ham out of her roll with her fingers, and nibbles it carefully.

“So what was it like,” Julia says, “with Victoria?” She has unwrapped a cereal bar but is eating it slowly, pinching off the sweaty grains between her thumb and forefinger, and rolling them to a greasy ball, one by one. The girls often eat in this mincing way when they are in nervous company.

“What do you mean?” Isolde asks.

“I just meant—she’s your sister. Did she talk to you about it afterward and stuff? Did you guess, while it was happening? Is she going to be okay?”

Julia’s heart is beating fast. Her instinct is to act tougher than she feels, to make no concessions, to woo Isolde by a kind of reckless baldness, a brash and unapologetic ownership of hard opinion that will make the younger girl look up at her in awe. At the same time Julia is burying a thudding feeling of lonely vulnerability, a simple childlike yearning to be touched, to be gathered up in the other girl’s arms and kissed and crooned at. Even as she speaks aggressively, as she delivers her opinions and shrugs and scowls as if she doesn’t care, a part of her is trying to show the other girl that she could be tender, underneath; that she could be sweet and delicate and thirsty, that the animal precepts of her feminine nature are not quite lost. It’s a strange thing to keep the two in balance: the appearance of hard with the appearance of soft. Julia feels ravaged by the effort, as if she might easily burst into tears at this very moment, sitting here on the grass.

Isolde pinches a half-moon of cucumber with her fingers and licks its dewy edge as she thinks about the question. She is about to reply when a shadow falls across the two of them, and they look up.

It’s the beautiful girls, and they are all smiling, thin little curved smiles that press their lips tight together into a cruel reversal of their usual slack-mouthed pout.

“Got yourself a girlfriend at last, Julia?” the most beautiful girl says. “Going to take her home to show your mum?”

Julia looks up at her and says nothing. Isolde is looking from face to face and trying to decide whether she should smile, even a bit.

“She going to brush away some cobwebs?” the beautiful girl says again. “Clean you out a bit? Is that the idea?”

They snicker. Isolde’s almost-smile fades a little.

“Did you dial her in? Slip her some cash for the privilege?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, are you like twelve?” Julia snaps. She reaches for her headphones and her paperback, and begins packing her bag to leave.

“No,” says the beautiful girl’s sidekick, stepping forward in a moment of rare glory, “but she is, isn’t she?”

She points at Isolde, and Isolde feels herself turn scarlet. She wonders whether she should point out she’s actually fifteen, or whether that would simply give them ammunition for another joke. All the beautiful girls laugh. Julia looks thoroughly irritated at her own mistake, and continues shoving the remains of her lunch into her bag.

“I guess you couldn’t find anyone your own age who was keen,” says the sidekick.

Julia says, “Just fuck off, Tiffany. Whatever you’re trying to do, you’re not doing it. Fuck off.”

“So if she’s the tough one,” the beautiful girl says, turning now to Isolde, “what does that make you? The feminine one? Isn’t that the way it works—there always has to be a man and a woman anyway? Like a big old game of pretend?”

Isolde, nervous and caught between public denial and public defense of something she doesn’t yet understand, simply tries to smile, a nervous tight-lipped smile that the beautiful girls evidently take as a confirmation of the taunt. The leader casts around for something further to say, but ends up just saying “Faggots!” as a way of punctuating the scene, and flounces off with her servants in her wake. The group of them spear across the quad like a tiny blue comet, its head bright and beautiful and its ragged tail getting duller and more ordinary as it trails away.

“Cunts,” says Julia under her breath, and she tugs savagely at the zipper of her schoolbag.

“Sorry,” says Isolde.

“Sorry,” says Julia.

The first bell rings but Julia and Isolde make no move to rise. They sit on the grassy verge side by side and shred grass.

“I heard she had a nose job anyway,” Isolde says. “The main girl. Last year.”