“She sounds like a bitch,” says first alto, voicing what they are all thinking anyway.
“I went to see Mr. Partridge about an extension after school yesterday,” Isolde says. “He was in his office, and when I came
in he sort of exploded out of his desk and said, Let’s talk in the hallway, come on, out. They all do that now. They’re afraid
of enclosed spaces.”
The saxophone teacher watches her and thinks, This is the dawn of a new Isolde, a hardened deadened Isolde who has witnessed
the dirty and perverted glamour of the world but still
nurses a tiny kernel of doubt because she has not yet felt what she
has heard and seen.
“Anyway we went out into the hallway,” says Isolde. She swings her saxophone around so it is hanging limply off one shoulder
like a schoolbag, both hands at her shoulder holding the strap. She shifts her weight to the other leg and sticks her hip
out and blinks her big eyes, converting in an instant into a sweet and undeserving victim. The lights change, becoming duller
and more diffuse, until Isolde is standing in the creamy lilac light of a late-afternoon school corridor with all the lockers
hanging empty and open and the chip packets scudding across the floor like silver leaves.
“So I go, I was just wondering if I could get an extension or whatever, because things have been so hard at home—”
And she seamlessly slides her sax off her shoulder and into her arms, holding it loosely underneath the bell with both hands,
and pressing it flat against her pelvis in a casually protective way, as a man might hold a folder against himself, standing
in a corridor with a student in a shaft of creamy lilac light after all the others have gone home.
The saxophone teacher reflects how much she enjoys these changes, when Isolde slips out of one person and becomes another.
Bridget is good at voices, but with Isolde the performance is always physical and total, like the unexpected shedding of a
skin. The saxophone teacher shifts in her chair, and nods to show she’s listening.
“And he shakes his head at me,” Isolde says, broadening now, rocking back on her heels and sucking in her belly so her chest
inflates, “and he goes, Isolde, I am not the kind of teacher who ingratiates myself with my students in order to gain their
love. That is not my style. I am the kind of teacher who gains popularity by picking a scapegoat. I do this in each and every
class I teach. If I was to grant you an extension I would be a hypocrite and I would undermine my own methods.
“He goes, Isolde, when I set out to gain the love of a student, I do not begin by granting them an extension when they don’t
really need one. I begin by cultivating a culture of jealousy in my classroom. Jealousy is a key component to any classroom
environment, because jealousy means competition and competition means excellence. It is only in a jealous classroom that a
true and fervent love can blossom.
“It is only once I am sure my students are well placed to become very jealous of each other that I pick my scapegoat. Picking
a scapegoat is not easy, Isolde. It is not as easy as granting an extension to a student when they don’t really need one.
Picking a scapegoat is a very difficult and delicate task. The trick—” and she brandishes her saxophone now, jabbing it into
the air to emphasize what she is saying “—is not to pick the girl that everybody already genuinely dislikes. This will induce
the other students to pity the scapegoat, and to become contemptuous of me because I am being cruel. I don’t want to be cruel
to my students.
“The trick is to pick the least original girl in the room. You want someone unoriginal because you want to be sure that they
will behave exactly the same way every time you use them. You want someone unoriginal because you need them to be dull enough
to believe that they are being singled out on the strength of their own comic merits. You need them to believe that the laughter
you generate is inclusive laughter.
“Isolde, he goes, I am a good teacher who is loved by my pupils. I gain their collective love by choosing a sacrificial victim
on behalf of them all, not by currying favor with every individual student. It is a good method and I am a good teacher. I
don’t want to give you an extension because your sister had sex and everyone found out and I feel sorry for you. I’ve explained
my reasons. I’m sorry.”
The lights fade back in. Isolde comes gracefully to an end and reattaches her saxophone to her neckstrap, ready for the lesson.
“So you didn’t get an extension,” the saxophone teacher says as she rises.
“No,” Isolde says. “He goes, What you need to learn, Isolde, is that life just isn’t fair.”
It is a new and popular tradition at this secular school to purchase short-snouted plastic Coca-Cola bottles from the tuck
shop, and then retrieve with a fingernail the little blue disc with a stiff rim that sits snugly on the underside of the bottle’s
cap. The girls hold this blue disc up to their lips and with their front teeth they bite a hole in the greasy plastic center
to pierce the flesh. They are then able to rip out the middle of the disc so that only the rim remains. Gently they tug at
this little translucent hoop of plastic, turning it around and around in their hands, pulling at it tenderly so it stretches
wider and wider and the thin hoop becomes a pale band of ribbon through which they can slip their hand. The girls then wear
these plastic ribbons on their wrists.
Popularly they are known as “Fuck-me bracelets.” It is a mark of a girl’s daring to fashion such a bracelet for herself from
the aqua seal of a Coca-Cola bottle neck, for whoever breaks the bracelet, however accidentally, thereby enters into a contract
with the wearer. Sometimes at parties a boy will lean over to kiss a girl and with his free hand he will scrabble at her wrist
to try to break the Coca-Cola seal. Most often the girl will feel him trying to snap the bracelet and she will pretend to
struggle, knowing what the breaking of the seal will mean: she will feign resistance and twist her wrist away from him to
make the bracelet snap the sooner. Once it has snapped they know that they must go through with it to the very end.
It is a shameful thing to break your own bracelet. The girls
snicker at the prospect, and alienate anyone clumsy enough to
catch the side of the thin plastic band on a doorframe or on the buckle of her backpack so it snaps.
One of the girls says, “They found a Fuck-me bracelet in Mr. Saladin’s tutorial room. Under the piano. It was broken.”
This isn’t true.
“Thanks all for coming in, people,” says the counselor above the scraping and shuffling, raising 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.”
Julia is sitting at the back, low down in her chair, with her arms folded and her ankles crossed and her hair falling across
her face. She watches as the other girls trip in from the cold, linking arms with their favorite friends so they advance across
the room in a rectangular squadron of favorites. They negotiate seating with whispers and nudges and a desperate narrow-eyed
panic, always fearful of one day occupying the terrible seats on the periphery which force you to lean across and be forever
asking “What? What’s so funny? What did she say?”
Julia watches them slot into place around the current locus of popularity and wit with a feeling of contempt and mild jealousy.
Most of the girls are seventh formers, contemporaries of the violated girl and infected only by vague proximity. The rest
are the music students, more critically infected and so personally summoned by a solemn pink slip photocopied over and over
and signed by the counselor in a delicate whispery hand.
The door opens and Julia sees to her surprise the sister of the violated girl holding her pink summons gingerly in her fist
and checking the brass numeral on the plate above the doorknob.
Isolde is only in fifth form, too young for jazz band and
orchestra and senior jazz ensemble, and as she enters the room she nods at a few of the girls who must be her sister’s friends.
The counselor smiles approvingly as she enters, showing them all that he is terribly proud of her, in the way that one might
be terribly proud of a mascot or a flag.
Watching Isolde tuck her hair behind one ear and cast around sourly for a seat, Julia feels a flicker of interest in this
girl, now thrust forever into her sister’s arched and panting shadow, and wonders what she’s thinking.
As Isolde sits down, the girl sitting behind her leans forward and gives her shoulders a squeeze, slipping her thumbs into
the hollows of Isolde’s collarbones and whispering, You okay? in a hot pitying whisper. Isolde squirms away from the girl’s
hands, nodding, and says something in reply that Julia can’t quite hear. The girl shakes her head, gives Isolde a pat and
retreats with a motherly sigh. She turns immediately to pluck at the sleeve of the girl on her left, who is already leaning
in to listen.
Julia watches the breathy whispers gather and spread up and down the row behind Isolde, and studies the hard impassive look
on Isolde’s face.
“Would you jump off a bridge just because your friends were jumping off bridges?” the counselor is saying. It’s his favorite
question and he asks it routinely, his voice ringing and triumphant as if he has just performed a marvelous checkmate.
Julia watches Isolde shift slightly in her chair. She is staring at the counselor dully, frowning but not really listening,
her lips slack and slightly pouted. She has the same round cheekbones and innocent round eyes as her sister, but while Victoria’s
roundness is a fullness, unapologetic and open and challenging, on Isolde it gives her the plump candied expression of a spoiled
child. Isolde wears her own face like it is a fashion accessory that she knows looks better on everybody else.
“For some people,” the counselor is saying, “seduction is a
means of gaining attention. Seduction is a cry for help, a last
and desperate attempt to make a real connection with another human being.” He wags his plump finger at them all, ranged around
him in a tartan half-circle with their neckties loose and their smooth velvet legs crossed at the knee. “These lonely and
damaged people,” he says, “may seek out physical and sexual connections that they do not truly want but they cannot live without.
These are the people you must beware of.” He pauses for effect. “Mr. Saladin was one of these people.”
Julia looks over at Isolde but she is still staring at the counselor in the same blank way. Julia wonders if it is an act.
She tries to think what it would be like to be Isolde, coming home from school each day like an envoy from a forbidden place,
stepping around her sister, watching her across the dinner table as she mashes her potato into a glum paste, walking past
the closed door of her bedroom, still with its faded peeling stickers and strip of stolen security tape, passing her toweled
and dripping in the hall. Julia imagines a pinched weeping mother and a father picking at his tie as if it’s strangling him.
She imagines urgent phone calls and people shouting in whispers and a damp shifting silence. She imagines Isolde in the middle
of it all, trying to watch television or polish her school shoes or pick through the funny parts of the newspaper, alone and
insulated by a patch of dead air like a ship in the eye of a storm.
Julia watches as Isolde examines her fingernails serenely and nibbles at a cuticle.
“This terrible case of child abuse,” the counselor is saying, “is a classic case of how seduction can be wielded as a means
of gaining control. In preying upon this girl Mr. Saladin destroyed her right to the ownership of her own body. He abused
his position of power as a teacher. He wielded his position of power to
gain control
.”
He has moved the lectern aside, and leans casually against a desk edge, one hand in his pocket balled into a fist so it stretches
the fabric across his pelvis and tugs gently at the zipper of his fly. With his other hand he plucks at the air as if he is
conducting a piece that is very modern and very moving.
“My goal for today,” he says smoothly, “is to talk about the ways in which I can help you guys to learn to
take
control. Does anybody want to say anything before we kick off?”
They all shake their heads and smile at him, shifting in their seats like roosting hens. Then Julia says, “I do.”
Everyone except Isolde turns to look at her in a rustling swoop. Julia blinks calmly and says, “I don’t agree that Mr. Saladin
wanted to gain control.”
The counselor frowns and reaches up to tug a tuft of hair at the nape of his neck. “You don’t,” he says.
“No, I don’t,” Julia says. “Gaining control isn’t the exciting part. 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.”
The girls look her up and down, and marvel with a collective disgusted fascination. Their expression is the expression of
any popular girl who takes time to regard an unpopular girl while she is speaking. They watch Julia as if she is a carnival
act: intriguing, but it might make you feel a little sick.
“It’s like gambling,” Julia says, even louder. “If you make a bet that you’re almost positively certain you’re going to win,
it’s not going to cost you much adrenaline. It’s not that exciting and it’s not that much fun. But if you make a bet where
all the odds are against you and there’s just a tiny, tiny glimmer of a chance that you might make it, then you’re going to
be pumping. There’s a higher possibility that you might lose. It’s the possibility you might lose that gets you excited.”
The girls start to shift and mutter, but Julia’s gaze stays fixed on the counselor, her eyes shiny and narrowed and hard.
The counselor is looking at his shoes.