“Did anyone laugh?” the saxophone teacher says.

“Oh, yeah,” says Bridget. “Yeah, everyone likes her a lot.”

“So they laughed. They laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of it. The prospect that Mrs. Jean Critchley might seduce one of you, might draw any one of you toward her by subtle and insidious means, might push one of you against the music-cupboard door and press her cold cheek against yours so her lips are almost touching the feathered lobe of your ear. The prospect that one of you might want her, even, and pick her out as an object and a prize. That one of you might blush every time she looks at you, might stammer and stumble and take every opportunity to divert through the music block in the hope of brushing past her in the hall.”

“Yeah,” Bridget says. “She blew it all out of the water, so we could get on and make some music and have some fun.”

“So you got on and made some music and had some fun.”

“Yeah,” Bridget says again.

“And Mrs. Jean Critchley suggested that you play this piece like an ice-cream jingle.”

“She didn’t say that.” Bridget senses she’s winning, in some obscure way, and draws herself up a little higher. “She just said, Sometimes it’s not about originality. Sometimes it’s just about having fun.”

The saxophone teacher is frowning. Inside she asks: does she feel jealous? She reminds herself that Bridget is her least favorite student, the student she mocks most often, the student she would least like to be. She reminds herself that Bridget is lank and mousy, with a greasy bony face and a thin hookish nose and pale lashes that cause her to resemble a ferret or a stoat.

She is jealous. She doesn’t like the idea of Mrs. Jean Critchley, who is jovial and flat footed and forever appealing to her students to just have fun. She doesn’t like the idea of Bridget having a basis for comparison, an occasion to see her, the saxophone teacher, in a new and different light. She doesn’t like it.

“Let’s move on,” she says. “I think it’s time to try something new. Something a little harder, that will make you struggle a little more and re-establish which one of us is truly in control out of you and me. Okay?”

“Okay,” Bridget says.

“Let me find a Grade Eight piece,” the saxophone teacher says. “One that Mrs. Critchley won’t have any cause to comment on.”

Friday

Isolde falters after the first six bars.

“I haven’t practiced,” she says. “I don’t have an excuse.”

She stands there for a moment, her right hand splayed over the keys and damply clacking. The shifting tendons in her hand make her skin stretch white and purple.

The sax teacher looks at her and decides not to fight her. She moves over to the bookshelf and lifts the plastic hood off the record player. “Let me play you that recording, then,” she says. She selects a record from the pile and says, “Tell me what happened at school today.”

“They wanted to cancel Sex Ed,” Isolde says gloomily. “In light of recent events. They took Miss Clark out into the hallway, and the principal was there and we could hear the whole thing. We’re not supposed to call it Sex Ed. We’re supposed to call it Health.”

The saxophone teacher lowers the needle with a crackle and a low hiss. It’s Sonny Rollins playing “You Don’t Know What Love Is” on tenor sax. The record trembles like a leaf.

“What is it that you learn in Health?” asks the saxophone teacher as they sit back to listen.

“We learn about boys,” says Isolde in the same flat voice. “We put condoms on wooden poles. We learn how to unroll them so they won’t break. Miss Clark showed us how much they can stretch by putting a condom over her shoe.”

Isolde lapses into silence for a moment, remembering Miss Clark struggling to stretch a condom over the toe of her sensible flat-soled shoe, hopping and red-faced and puffing with the effort. “There it goes!” she said triumphantly in the end, and wiggled her foot so they could all see. She said, “Never believe a boy who says it won’t fit. You say to him, I saw Miss Clark put a condom over her whole shoe.”

The music is still playing. Isolde is only half-listening, looking out over the rooftops and the chimneys and the wires.

“We don’t really learn much about girls,” she says. “Everything we learn about boys is all hands-on 3-D models and cartoons. When we learn about girls it’s always in cross-section, and they use diagrams rather than pictures. The stuff about boys is all ejaculations, mostly. The stuff about girls is just reproduction. Just eggs.”

In truth the classes are patched and holey, hours of vague unhelpful glosses and line drawings and careful omissions which serve to cripple rather than assist. Most of the girls now lack a key definition in this new and halting lexicon of forbidden words, some slender dearth of understanding that will later humiliate them, confound them, expose them, because it is expected now that their knowledge is complete. They envisage rigid perpendicular erections and a perfect hairless trinity for the male genitals, groomed and gathered in a careful bouquet. They have not heard of the glossy sap that portends the rush of female drive. They know ovulate but not orgasm. They know bisexual but not blow. Their knowledge is like a newspaper article ripped down the middle so only half of it remains.

“Is it useful?” asks the saxophone teacher. “Do you learn things you didn’t know before?”

“We learned that you can only feel one thing at one time,” says Isolde. “You can feel excitement or you can feel fear but you can never feel both. We learned why beauty is so important: beauty is important because you can’t really defile something that is already ugly, and to defile is the ultimate goal of the sexual impulse. We learned that you can always say no.”

The two of them sit in that self-conscious half-profile demanded by music-lesson etiquette. Facing each other squarely feels too familiar and standing side by side feels too formal, as if they are amateur actors onstage for the first time, fearful of turning their faces away from the auditorium lest their performance be lost. So they position themselves always at forty-five degrees, the angle of the professional actor who includes both the stage and the audience and holds in delicate balance that which is expressed and that which is concealed.

The Sonny Rollins track has the thin gritty sound of an old recording.

“You can take the record home if you think you’d find it inspiring,” the saxophone teacher says kindly. “I really think you’d suit playing tenor.”

“We don’t have a record player,” Isolde says.

FOUR

October

The gymnasium was not a gymnasium but a fluid space, a space that seemed to inhale and exhale and settle around the shapes and figures on the floor. There was a giant accordion made of steel that compressed the plastic bleachers against the wall, and dusty heavy drapes that could divide the space into thirds and quarters and fifths. The stage was formed of many chalky footprinted podiums that could be rearranged or stacked or upended or tiered, depending. Today the drapes were all pushed to the sides and the podiums stacked against the wall in a hasty barricade. The space was clean and full of light.