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.”

Friday

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.

Monday

“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.