The Rehearsal

FOURTEEN

“Preliminary thoughts?” the Head of Acting says in the foyer, as the two of them slap their ticket stubs against their wrists and gaze over at the crowd around the drinks counter. “Or apprehensions, even?”

“Only apprehensions,” the Head of Movement says. He doesn’t smile.

“They’re a motley bunch, this year,” the Head of Acting says in his darting, distracted way. “I am definitely ready to be surprised.”

“What was their prop? The playing card,” the Head of Movement says, answering his own question and rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. “It’s too easy. The aesthetic is half the battle in devised theater anyway.”

“I’m still prepared to be surprised. Let’s go in.”

The heavy doors of the auditorium have opened finally and the flush bolts are being drawn down by a skinny porter, an underling from Wardrobe who has been dressed as an Ace of Spades. He is stiff in his painted sandwich board and careful face-paint as he bends down to clip open the door. He shoves the bolts into their flush sockets and then straightens and adjusts his headpiece, a tight black bonnet that fits like a swimming cap around his skull. He smiles carefully. The tutors hand him their pink-edged stubs, and one after the other pass under the arch and into the stalls.

“Thank you all so much for coming,” the saxophone teacher says into the dark. Her voice is higher than its usual pitch, and oddly strained, although she does not look nervous and her hands at her sides are still. “It really is wonderful you’ve all made the time to come.” She looks down to draw a breath, and then continues.

“Like all the thirsty mothers present,” she says, “tonight each of you will see exactly what you want to see and nothing more. Even now you will be aching for me to leave the podium so your daughters can file onstage and each of you can have the great comfort, one by one, of seeing your existing attitudes confirmed.”

Out in the dark someone coughs, giving confidence to someone else, who clears their throat in a relieved echo of the first.

“I like to encourage all the parents to think of a recital as a public display of affection—you’re familiar with the term—in the sense that the performances can never be any more than an indication or a hint,” the saxophone teacher says. “But I must impress upon all of you that it would be invasive and wrong to expect to truly see your daughter when you attend this recital. As mothers, you are barred from sharing in the intimacy and privacy of her performance.”

The saxophone strap around her neck is caught on the side of her collar, tugging it outward and downward to show the thin milky skin of her chest.

She says, “If you were not the mothers of these girls, you might be able to see them differently, as both a person and a kind of a person. If you were not mothers, and if you were looking very carefully, you might be able to see a role, a character, and also a person struggling to maintain that character, a person who decided in the first place that that particular character was who they were going to be.

“There are people who can only see the roles we play, and there are people who can only see the actors pretending. But it’s a very rare and strange thing that a person has the power to see both at once: this kind of double vision is a gift. If your daughters are beginning to frighten you, then it is because they are beginning to acquire it. I am speaking mostly to the woman beneath Mrs. Winter, Mrs. Sibley, Mrs. Odets, and the rest,” she adds, “the actor I pretend not to see, the woman who plays all women, all the women but never the girls, never the daughters. The role of the daughter is lost to you now, as you know.”

She is gesturing with one hand cupped and empty and upturned. The mothers are nodding.

“Let me introduce my first student now,” she says, “a student of St. Margaret’s College who has been studying with me for almost four years. Please let’s put our hands together and welcome to the stage Briony-Rose.”

“Stanley?” the boy Felix says, pausing at the door of the Green Room and looking in with an air of officious concern. “Are you all right?”

“I’m going to bail,” Stanley says into the mirror. His face is white. “I can’t do this. The girl’s parents are in the audience. I can’t do it. I’m going to do a runner. I don’t want to be an actor anymore. I can’t follow through. It’ll bugger up the production, but I can’t do it, I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“You’re nuts,” Felix says in what he believes to be a soothing voice. “Think of all the money we’ve spent. If we don’t get box office it’ll come out of everyone’s pocket. Everyone will hate you. You can’t pull out now.”

“I’ll move,” Stanley says. “I’ll move away for a while until everyone has forgotten.” He wants to put his face in his hands, but he has already been through the makeup line and he knows his lipstick and powder will smudge. He howls suddenly and slaps the vanity with both hands. “Why are they here? Why? What kind of sadist parents actually want to see a play about their daughter getting physically abused?”

“What?” Felix says, listening properly for the first time. “You mean the parents of the actual girl? The Victoria girl?”

Stanley moans in reply and kicks the radiator hard. He feels a stab of welcome pain shoot up his calf and linger there.

“Rubbish,” Felix says. “How would they even know about it? Nobody knows what it’s about. It’s opening night. Not even the tutors know. Where did you hear that?”

Stanley turns doleful eyes to Felix and then shakes his head. “I’ve seen them,” he says. “In the foyer. With her little sister.”

There is a pause. Then Felix says, “What kind of sadist parents—”

“She’s come to see me,” Stanley says. “Isolde’s come to see me. As a surprise.”

“Who?” Felix says, by now thoroughly bewildered.

“Isolde,” Stanley says. “Oh, God. And she brought her parents. She doesn’t know what it’s about, she doesn’t know about Victoria or any of it, and they’re just about to—oh, God. I can’t do it. Not in front of them.”

There is a glimmer of panic in Felix’s eyes as it dawns upon him that Stanley might really make good his word and run away. He looks quickly over his shoulder down the dressing-room corridor, and then says, “Your parents here tonight?”

Stanley gives another howl. “My dad,” he says. “To make matters a whole fucking lot worse. My dad.”

“Mine too,” Felix says. Then he says, tentatively, “If the girl’s parents really are here, Stanley, they’ve got to be prepared to be shocked. You can’t actually buy tickets to a show like this and expect to keep your… your innocence. You can’t. They must know what they’re in for. And they’re not kids.”

“But they don’t know what it’s about yet,” Stanley says. “It’s opening night. Where in the fucking program does it say that this is a play about their daughter? It doesn’t. They’re coming to see me, as a surprise.” He looks again at himself in the mirror. The makeup artist has done a good job, powdering over his blond eyebrows and drawing in black arches that are higher and more angular than his own. He has a little red pout, and all the natural shadows of his face are thickened with gray: the creases around his mouth, the hollows of his cheeks, under his chin. His eyes are ringed with black.

Felix is still looking thoroughly confused. “On the bright side,” he says, trying hard to reclaim the situation, “you’re absolutely unrecognizable in your costume and everything. If that’s what you’re worried about. With the parents.”

“Yeah,” Stanley says. Underneath his makeup his jaw is set and his eyes are red and his face is pale, but in the mirror the pouting caricature that is Stanley’s reflection twitches his head and even seems to smile.

Isolde and her parents are already on stage when the lights come up, Isolde on the far end of the settee and leaning still further outward, over the arm, every inch of her body craning away from the other two figures on stage: a stout mustached father and a bony mother who buttons all the way to the top.

“What you need to understand,” Isolde’s mother says, “is that this little taste of what could be is inside you now. You’ve swallowed it up, like candy from a brown paper bag.”

“What you need to understand,” Isolde’s father says, “is now that we know about it, it won’t happen anymore.”

“Remember that the only difference between you and any of the others,” Isolde’s mother says, “is at what price, and under what circumstances, you are prepared to yield.”

Stanley and his father enter, through the frosted French doors in the middle of the false backdrop, preceded by Victoria who has her palm out like she is showing the way.

“He’s here,” she says unnecessarily, making more of the line than she ought to, because it is her only one and she wants to be seen. The mother makes a flapping motion with her hand and Victoria exits, walking with the pursed self-conscious walk of an actor who has too small a part and so has practiced a single move to excess.

The group stand stationary for a moment, Stanley and Isolde looking at each other with an intense smoldering glare that is lost to everyone in the upper circle and in the restricted-viewing sections of the stalls.

Then Isolde’s father says stiffly, “I was just about to say, now that we’re here, let’s sort this out in a civilized way, like adults. But just as it was on the tip of my tongue I realized that the word adults wasn’t entirely appropriate, given the circumstances.”

There is a silence. Stanley’s father is the first to sit down.

“The purpose of this recital,” the saxophone teacher says, “is really to let the students speak for themselves, as it were. It is really just a vehicle to let them voice their own growth, their own awakening, lay it bare like a virgin at an altar for all of you to see. While you are watching tonight, a good question to ask yourselves might be, What is this performance telling me about the performer? What naked shape emerges out of the rarefying mist of this girl’s music? What private things are being offered, and what private things are being betrayed?”

Julia is sitting in the second row with her sax held loosely on her lap, waiting for her cue to rise and take the stage.

“I mention this,” the saxophone teacher is saying, “because my next student has had a very difficult year. Many things have happened to complicate this girl’s life this year, and if we are very lucky we will see some of these tragic and beautiful things reflected in her performance tonight. Through her misery, every note she plays for you will become a lyric, and she will conjure up much more than a sense of longing and of loss. If we are very lucky, and this is my hope, then we will be able to see the vast extent of the hardship she has endured this year: we will see the unspeakable incest of two women together, played out before us like a rare recording stolen from a vault. You will have to listen carefully.”

Julia’s palms are cold and sweaty, and she wipes them roughly on the knees of her trousers.

“And just before I welcome Julia to the stage,” the saxophone teacher says, “can I just thank all the mothers here tonight for allowing me the strange satisfaction that is got by saying something that nobody hears.”

“You didn’t say he had the main part, Issie,” Isolde’s father says. He points to the program. “Look, his name’s right at the top.”

“He hasn’t told me anything,” Isolde says. “He even said don’t bother coming. I guess he was nervous.” She is looking up at the stage, tense with vicarious pre-show nerves. The lights are on in the orchestra pit and she can see the musicians emerging from the hidden half-door in the wall to take their places in front of their instruments. As they sit down they disappear from Isolde’s view.

“Queen of Spades,” Isolde’s father reads out loud, and then takes his reading glasses off and says “What about this, eh?” and elbows Isolde in a jovial sort of way.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have come on opening night,” Isolde’s mother says, tucking her knees sideways to let a young couple pass. “If he’s nervous.”

“I told you, he doesn’t know I’m coming tonight anyway,” Isolde says. She is craning around to look at the crowd. She watches a throng of senior students from the Institute flood into a wedge of seating in the rear of the stalls and suddenly feels foolish that she has brought her parents with her. The acting students are all clasping each other and hugging and gesticulating madly as they talk amongst themselves. Isolde imagines pushing her way backstage to surprise Stanley at the end of the night, knocking on his dressing-room door and waving shyly as she stands on the threshold with the actors shrieking and shouting up and down the corridor behind her, and all at once she suffers a horrible feeling of dread.

“We don’t have to go backstage,” she says out loud, to reassure herself. “I can just call him tomorrow.”

She hasn’t spoken to Stanley since the fight on the side of the road.

“Isn’t it posh,” Isolde’s father says. “Look at that plasterwork on the arch. That’s a beautiful job.”

The band starts up and the house lights begin to fade.

“I wish I’d got some mints now,” Isolde’s mum says. “I hope there’s a half-time.”

“It’s always—and only—vicarious,” the Head of Movement is saying, drumming his fingers impatiently on the glossy cover of the program that is lying on his knee. The cover shows a caricatured girl in pigtails and a school uniform, and the title of the play: The Bedpost Queen. The Head of Acting is craning around to look out over the crowd, and isn’t really listening, but the Head of Movement is speaking with a strange tight urgency that cannot wait for an audience, and anyway the words are mostly for himself. He says, “You never get around that aspect. Even at your most effective, your most vivacious and inspirational, you’re always just… looking on.”

“Do you know something?” Stanley’s father says, leaning down the couch toward Isolde. She turns her head, so they are profiled there against the cream: her delicate upturned pout, his sunken cheek and lantern jaw.

“When I do a group therapy session,” Stanley’s father says, “for my work—say if I have six or seven or more clients in a room, maybe a whole family if that’s what I’m working on—my policy at first is to say absolutely nothing. I ask questions, invite people to speak, bring up issues, but I say nothing about what I think. I don’t even hint. I do this for the first session, and the second.

“By the end of the second everyone’s itching. They want to know who this guy is, this psychologist who only listens, sits and listens and sometimes asks a question, always a mild question, never provocative, never acute. I cost too much, I’m too well known, just to listen. They become wary of me. They bicker among themselves and then look sideways, daring me to act.

“I leave early, always. I never stick around. I never invite them to know me better. I hold them apart, away from me, and by the third session when I walk into the room they’re like mice. All their dissension has melted away and their attention is focused entirely on me, on me absolutely. And then—” Stanley’s father pinches his fingertips together and then releases them like a puff of smoke. “After that, I can say anything,” he says. “The third session is golden. They listen to whatever I say. They hear me.”

“Does this story have a moral that has something to do with virginity?” Isolde says, a little nervously.

“No moral,” Stanley’s father says. “I don’t do morals. I do dirty jokes, and I do stories to pass the time.”

“Good,” Isolde says. She turns away, and the shadows on her face disperse as she is swallowed by the glaring fog of the footlights and beyond.

Stanley’s father looks at her with compassion and says, “Virginity is a myth, by the way. There is no on–off switch, no point of no return. It’s just a first experience like any other. Everything surrounding it, all the lights and curtains and special effects—that’s all just part of the myth.”

Isolde turns back to look at him and all the shadows return, flooding back to fill the dark side of her face so she is once again halved, like a waning moon.

Stanley’s father smiles. He says, “Stop believing.”

“But still the counseling sessions persisted,” Julia is saying, “clinging to the school calendar like a baked stain that nobody was willing to chip away. Still we met to discuss the dubious rape of the girl who unbuttoned her shirt collar right down to the central white rosebud of her bra. We sat together and talked about the girl who sucked on a red lollipop at lunchtime rehearsal and let the boiled candy ball tug her lower lip down ever so slightly, so her mouth opened and you could see the moist rolling of her tongue.

“And Mr. Saladin,” she continues, relentlessly. “Mr. Saladin, who need only have waited for the midnight stroke in five months’ time, the stroke that would transform Victoria from a child into an adult as surely as a carriage into a pumpkin, or a saddled horse into a dirty common kitchen mouse. It could have even been a birthday present, if he had only waited. At our counseling sessions we learned that Mr. Saladin’s crime was, first and foremost, impatience. We learned that the moral is: They stumble that run fast.”

The mothers are captivated.

“No, we didn’t,” Julia says. “We didn’t learn that at all.”

She speaks like a magician or a ringmaster.

“We learned that everything in the world divides in two: good and evil, male and female, truth and falsehood, child and adult, pleasure and pain. We learned that the counselor possessed a map, a map that would make everything make sense. A key. Like in a theater program where you have the actors’ names on one side and the list of characters on the other—some neat division that divides the illusive from the real. We learned that there is a distinction—that there is always a distinction—between the performance and the performer, the reality and the lie. We learned that there is no middle ground.”

Julia surveys her audience.

“Only those who watch,” she says, “and those who suffer being watched.”

The mothers don’t dare to rustle.

“But the counselor lied,” Julia says. “You lied. You lied about the pain of it, the unsimple mess of it, immeasurably more thorny and wretched and raw than you could ever remember, with the gauze veil of every year that passes settling over your eyes, thicker and thicker until even your own childhood dissolves into the mist.”

The saxophone teacher is watching Julia from the side of the stage. She has a lump in her throat and a tight aching feeling in her chest. It might be pride.

“Just think,” Julia is saying, “Victoria is probably with Mr. Saladin tonight, right now, laid out in an adolescent flush of pleasure somewhere, while her sister and her parents sit in the bruising dark of an auditorium on the other side of town. She is probably naked and crooning and stretched over him with her body limp and butter-slick. He is probably whispering into her hair the dwindling number of days until she becomes her own self, the day when her body becomes her own, the day when her body becomes his own. He is probably stroking her with the callused heel of his weathered adult hand.”

She looks at the mothers.

“And you wish you were there,” Julia says softly. “You wish you were there.”

Isolde and Julia are alone against the black cloth of the stage. There is no set or scenery. They are both wearing their school uniform, but differently: Isolde’s is clean and pressed, and Julia’s is limp and darned and grubby and artful. They look across at each other.

Isolde says, “Is it because I didn’t learn to love myself that I chose to bury myself instead in the reassuring strangeness of a body that was without that essential similarity which would force me to compare? With you I would have been doubled, intensified, mirrored back. With him our differences canceled out to nothing.”

“Yes,” Julia says. “But that’s only part of it.”

Isolde says, “Is it because I was scared, then? Is it because there wasn’t a template for it, and the unexpected hugeness of my innocence, the sheer and terrible abyss of my unknowing, was simply too alien, too frightening? It was just too big for me—too big for me to hold inside myself, like something perfect or tragic or sublime.”

“Yes,” Julia says.

“I’ve never felt like that before, Julia,” Isolde says. “Scared like that.”

“Don’t worry,” Julia says. “You never will again.”

The lights change.

“I remember being in your car outside my house,” Isolde says, “both of us sitting there in the pale gray of the streetlight with our seat belts holding us apart, our seat belts crossed over our chests, strapping us against the crocodile vinyl, holding us flat. And you turned to look at me and gave a little bit of a laugh, like you were really nervous, and you bit your lip and let some of your hair fall across your face and you didn’t tuck it back. And then you said, Can I just…? and you let the question die and you reached up your hand to cup underneath my chin, reaching right over, straining against your seat belt that was pulling you back, reining you in, holding you there. I was so scared. I remember licking my lip. I remember my mouth was dry. I remember you kissed me.”

“A one-off,” Julia says.

“My fall.”

And Julia says, “My fall.”

Isolde says, “What will happen to you now?”

Julia pulls her gaze away from the other girl and looks out over the wraith-faces of the audience. She doesn’t speak for a moment. Then she says, “All I can expect, I guess. Slow fade to black.”

“It’s too easy,” Stanley’s father says as he steps from the taxi. “Oh, Stanley, it’s too easy, and I’m going to say it anyway.”

He steps over the gutter and spreads his arms for a hug, wrapping Stanley up tightly. Stanley can smell the familiar blush of cologne on his father’s shirt.

“What’s too easy?” Stanley says when they have separated, and the taxi has turned the corner and disappeared.

“You’ve improved on my own methods,” Stanley’s father says. “You’ve taken my ideas and run with them, turned them into something I couldn’t have dreamed up myself. I’m flattered and impressed and a little ashamed that you don’t have more sense.”

“Are you talking about the insurance thing?” Stanley says.

“Absolutely I am.”

“Because I rang up the insurance companies,” Stanley says. “I rang up a few. I asked them about your idea to make a million, and it won’t work.”

“Of course it won’t work. I was just having a tease, and shame on you for following through, by the way,” Stanley’s father says. “But this—”

He laughs and spreads out his arms. Above the double doors of the foyer an enormous glossy banner, Opening Night!, snaps in the wind and strains fatly convex against the roped eyelets fixed along the balcony rail. Posters showing a girl in a school uniform coyly sliding a playing card into the pocket of her dress are taped to both doors of the foyer.

“This is brilliant,” Stanley’s father says. “And it’s hilarious. But I’ll be surprised if you last a week in performance. They’ll shut you down tomorrow night probably.”

“That might not be such a bad thing,” Stanley says.

“Are you in trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Need some help?” his father says, for once not using his therapy manner, but instead peering at Stanley with a curious half-smile, as if he is very proud.

“Yes,” Stanley says, more quietly. “I’ve been accused of something.”

“Excellent,” his father says. “You can tell me over dinner. Let’s get Chinese.”

“In your organizer,” Isolde says, “your black organizer with the gold stripe, I found an article snipped out of the front page of the newspaper. The headline read Teacher Denies Sex With Student. Only it wasn’t just the article, it was a photocopy of the article, a photocopy of a photocopy, with key phrases highlighted in yellow, maybe by you.”

Stanley is sitting a little way off, his head in his hands.

“Half of the article was familiar to me,” Isolde says, “the half that had clung to the folded spine of the newspaper when my mum swooped down and tried to rip off the front page, when she said Vultures, Vultures, and she crushed the torn piece into a ball. After she left the room I read the left-behind slice with the headline Teacher Sex and all the words disjointed and coming apart from each other, and piece by piece I tried to put it back together, the sharp-edged fragments of my sister’s love.”

Stanley is unmoving, clutching his temples in his hands and squatting like a boxer resigned to lose the fight.

“So I read the article,” Isolde is saying, “photocopied and whole, with the key phrases highlighted, phrases like Received Special Tuition, and Temporarily Removed From School. I wondered why it was in your organizer, slipped inside with your bus pass and your library receipts and your favorite sonnets written by hand. I decided it was probably an exercise you were doing at school, just an exercise, something about scandal in the news.”

In a sudden fluid motion Isolde draws herself up and pulls her elbows in to her sides.

“But now,” she says, “now I know what really happened. I know now that you saw an opportunity in me. I know now that I am a pawn, a shining pawn advancing all the way to the furry cardboard nether-edge of the playing board to be transformed into a queen—a queen for you, a queen for your performance and your production and your career. I know now that something in me betrayed her after all, some small streak of sameness or familiarity that made you see her when I turned my head and bit my lip and tucked my hair back, and all at once you saw all the things in me that you could use. I know that you thought to yourself, Her proximity to her sister counts for a great deal.”

Isolde draws herself up tighter, as if she is gathering in all the threads of herself, all the fraying pieces, wadding herself up in order to be able to continue. When she speaks her voice is half-stifled with a kind of muted hurt that makes Stanley throb and look away.

“I am serving a double purpose for you,” Isolde says. “That kind of unknowing doubleness that halves me down the middle and carves me into two: a benefit and a use. You want to harness my proximity, squeeze me dry, hoard up all the little stained-glass splintered facts about Victoria that make up everything I know. You want the complete story, for yourself. You want my sister, but you don’t want her whole: you want her shadow, her reflection, her image that bleeds out into the newsprint on the front page. You want the air around her and the spaces she moves through and the things that brush her as she passes by. And that’s why you want me.”

“Isolde,” Stanley says in a low voice that is muffled by his hands. “You aren’t being used. Nothing about you has been used, or used up.”

“But I have used you,” Isolde says, trumping him, her voice ringing out clear and bright. “Just as you have used me, I have used you. That’s what I came here to say. You’re a kind of protection for me, that’s all. You’re a kind of proof.”

“Before we close I’d like to say one final thing,” the saxophone teacher says, after the last girl has tripped offstage and returned to her seat on the floor. The sax teacher looks small against the wasteland of the stage. Behind her the Steinway grand is sheathed like a vast canvas-covered tombstone fallen backward and left to lie.

“I’d like to pay a tribute to one of my students,” the saxophone teacher says, “a lank and wilted student who died this year, hit by a car on her bicycle as she was coming home from the late shift at work.”

The room is deathly quiet at once.

“For a long time I have tried without success to see Bridget’s death as a tragedy,” the saxophone teacher says. “Finally I believe I can see it in that way.”

She looks down at the floor to gather her thoughts.

“When Bridget arrived at jazz band on Wednesday,” she says, “the Wednesday next that never was, the Wednesday she never saw, she would have been a celebrity. Pale and stringy Bridget, always the girl of small information and small ideas, always the girl shadowing her righteous flat-soled stalking mother, always the girl a few seconds behind the joke, would have found herself armed with something to offer and something to say. She would have been surrounded and petted and prodded as she relived her brief six minutes of conversation with Mr. Saladin at the video store for everyone to hear. Everyone would have listened. The room would have been utterly still. And she would have been warmed by the first narrow shaft of lighted pleasure she had ever really known. She would have been popular, for an instant, because she would have had real information for the first time in her short unhappy life. Bridget was robbed of this small pleasure. It is for this reason that we can see her death as tragic.”

The mothers are nodding.

“Poor Bridget,” the saxophone teacher says softly. “It is a cruel thing.”

Julia and Victoria are among a drowsy handful of seventh formers sitting in the common room, all of them unfurled and limp in the lapping heat of almost-summer. The lease of their high school years has all but expired, and it is with a fond kind of nostalgia that they look around them at the world that they will so soon leave behind. Through the window comes the sound of laughter and shouting from the girls on the playing field.

Gradually the common room empties, one by one, until the door clatters shut behind the last of them and only Julia and Victoria remain. Julia is bent over her end-of-year clearance form, and Victoria watches her for a moment from across the room.

“Did you have a thing with my sister?” Victoria says suddenly. Her voice is thin. “Earlier this year. Did you two like hook up or something?”

Julia looks up and studies the other girl with an impassive look. “Is that what everyone reckons?”

“Well,” Victoria says, sounding abashed. “Yeah.” She looks smaller than usual. Her lip is thrust forward in a way that makes her look, for the briefest half-second, a little like her sister. It is as if the image of the younger girl flashes across her face for a moment, like a ray through a cloud.

Julia watches the image of Isolde flash by and disappear, and then she says, “Why don’t you just ask her? If you really want to know. Why don’t you just ask Isolde?”

It sounds too intimate, Isolde’s name in Julia’s mouth. They both notice it, and blush.

“I was waiting for her to come to me, I guess,” Victoria says. “I was waiting for her to tell me. Before I had to ask.”

“And she never did.”

“No.”

Julia turns away. “So what’s everyone saying?” she says, with her face turned toward the window and the wall.

“Only that you kissed her, one time.”

“Is that all?”

“And someone found a Fuck-me bracelet in the drama closet, and it was broken.”

“Is that all?”

“Yeah. That’s all. So what happened?”

Julia says nothing. Victoria sits and waits. She has an eager coaxing look on her face, and she is leaning forward slightly so it looks as if her whole body is hoping for an answer. Her eyebrows are up.

Julia is still looking out the window. Outside the girls on the hockey field are cheering and cheering.

Finally Victoria sighs and says, “Julia, I’d be happy if you told me just enough of the facts so I could imagine it. So I could re-create it for myself. So I could imagine that I was really there.”