The Rehearsal (29 page)

The richer girls are made to feel ashamed of their parents’ wealth by these subtle insidious means, and so they begin to overcompensate
in justifying the incremented luxuries of their lives, defending each indulgence in terms of sole necessity. “We have to have
fresh stone fruit because of Mum’s diet plan,” they say, or, “I have to have my own car because Dad’s away on business so
much,” or, “We only had the spa put in because Dad’s got a bad back.” The repeated validations become their mantra, and soon
the richer girls begin to believe the things they are 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.”

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 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.

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.

“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 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 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.”