Isolde says, “You think people worship my sister.”

“Yeah, I do,” Julia says.

Isolde looks sideways at the older girl, and finds that she has nothing to say. She tugs a pale shard of ham out of her roll with her fingers, and nibbles it carefully.

“So what was it like,” Julia says, “with Victoria?” She has unwrapped a cereal bar but is eating it slowly, pinching off the sweaty grains between her thumb and forefinger, and rolling them to a greasy ball, one by one. The girls often eat in this mincing way when they are in nervous company.

“What do you mean?” Isolde asks.

“I just meant—she’s your sister. Did she talk to you about it afterward and stuff? Did you guess, while it was happening? Is she going to be okay?”

Julia’s heart is beating fast. Her instinct is to act tougher than she feels, to make no concessions, to woo Isolde by a kind of reckless baldness, a brash and unapologetic ownership of hard opinion that will make the younger girl look up at her in awe. At the same time Julia is burying a thudding feeling of lonely vulnerability, a simple childlike yearning to be touched, to be gathered up in the other girl’s arms and kissed and crooned at. Even as she speaks aggressively, as she delivers her opinions and shrugs and scowls as if she doesn’t care, a part of her is trying to show the other girl that she could be tender, underneath; that she could be sweet and delicate and thirsty, that the animal precepts of her feminine nature are not quite lost. It’s a strange thing to keep the two in balance: the appearance of hard with the appearance of soft. Julia feels ravaged by the effort, as if she might easily burst into tears at this very moment, sitting here on the grass.

Isolde pinches a half-moon of cucumber with her fingers and licks its dewy edge as she thinks about the question. She is about to reply when a shadow falls across the two of them, and they look up.

It’s the beautiful girls, and they are all smiling, thin little curved smiles that press their lips tight together into a cruel reversal of their usual slack-mouthed pout.

“Got yourself a girlfriend at last, Julia?” the most beautiful girl says. “Going to take her home to show your mum?”

Julia looks up at her and says nothing. Isolde is looking from face to face and trying to decide whether she should smile, even a bit.

“She going to brush away some cobwebs?” the beautiful girl says again. “Clean you out a bit? Is that the idea?”

They snicker. Isolde’s almost-smile fades a little.

“Did you dial her in? Slip her some cash for the privilege?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, are you like twelve?” Julia snaps. She reaches for her headphones and her paperback, and begins packing her bag to leave.

“No,” says the beautiful girl’s sidekick, stepping forward in a moment of rare glory, “but she is, isn’t she?”

She points at Isolde, and Isolde feels herself turn scarlet. She wonders whether she should point out she’s actually fifteen, or whether that would simply give them ammunition for another joke. All the beautiful girls laugh. Julia looks thoroughly irritated at her own mistake, and continues shoving the remains of her lunch into her bag.

“I guess you couldn’t find anyone your own age who was keen,” says the sidekick.

Julia says, “Just fuck off, Tiffany. Whatever you’re trying to do, you’re not doing it. Fuck off.”

“So if she’s the tough one,” the beautiful girl says, turning now to Isolde, “what does that make you? The feminine one? Isn’t that the way it works—there always has to be a man and a woman anyway? Like a big old game of pretend?”

Isolde, nervous and caught between public denial and public defense of something she doesn’t yet understand, simply tries to smile, a nervous tight-lipped smile that the beautiful girls evidently take as a confirmation of the taunt. The leader casts around for something further to say, but ends up just saying “Faggots!” as a way of punctuating the scene, and flounces off with her servants in her wake. The group of them spear across the quad like a tiny blue comet, its head bright and beautiful and its ragged tail getting duller and more ordinary as it trails away.

“Cunts,” says Julia under her breath, and she tugs savagely at the zipper of her schoolbag.

“Sorry,” says Isolde.

“Sorry,” says Julia.

The first bell rings but Julia and Isolde make no move to rise. They sit on the grassy verge side by side and shred grass.

“I heard she had a nose job anyway,” Isolde says. “The main girl. Last year.”

“Can I have a bit of your doughnut?” Julia says, because underneath it all, the ordinary rules of thieving still apply.

Tuesday

The role of Mrs. Bly requires a fat suit, and special latex pouches that slip into either cheek to fatten the jaw. The fat suit is impeccable. It is made mostly of silicone, sculpted especially for the woman’s frame, and it is heavy enough to make her stagger when she walks. She is wearing a tubular denim skirt that buttons up the front, and a gold link necklace with a slender golden charm, and she has rouged her fattened cheeks and sprayed her hair with scented mist. She waddles gracefully into the room and descends upon one of the armchairs, sighing and reaching down to rub her artificially fattened calf. You can’t even tell it’s a fat suit. The saxophone teacher almost forgets to speak, she’s so busy admiring the effect.

“You were recommended to me by one of the Tupperware mothers,” Mrs. Bly says. “She said her daughter swapped over to you after that whole scandal at the school, and she’s been very pleased.”

“I’m glad,” the saxophone teacher says. “Yes, I’ve had a considerable influx of students this year from Abbey Grange.”

“Wasn’t the whole business just terrible,” Mrs. Bly says, and she puckers her lips and squints her eyes and gives a merry chuckle.

“Catalytic,” the saxophone teacher says in pretended agreement, guessing that Mrs. Bly won’t pause for long enough to think about the word. She doesn’t.

“It was just terrible,” she says again. “The girl is ruined. She’s damaged goods now. And all the girls are keeping their distance of course.”

“As they should be,” the saxophone teacher says.

“Because it spreads like a virus, that’s what I said to my girls,” Mrs. Bly says, drawing the vast spread of denim over her knee and puckering her lips to form a little thatched smile that draws all the wrinkles around her lips into a single central nub. “That kind of stain doesn’t come out in the wash.”

The saxophone teacher suddenly feels weary. She sits down. “Mrs. Bly,” she says, “remember that these years of your daughter’s life are only the rehearsal for everything that comes after. Remember that it’s in her best interests for everything to go wrong. It’s in her best interests to slip up now, while she’s still safe in the Green Room with the shrouded furniture and the rows of faceless polystyrene heads and the cracked and dusty mirrors and the old papers scudding across the floor. Don’t wait until she’s out in the savage white light of the floods, where everyone can see. Let her practice everything in a safe environment, with a helmet and kneepads and packed lunches, and you at the end of the hall with the door cracked open a dark half-inch in case anyone cries out in the long hours of the night.”

The spiderweb lasso of creases around fat Mrs. Bly’s mouth loosens slightly.

“The good news,” the saxophone teacher says briskly, turning now to her diary, “is that I have an opening on Wednesday afternoon, if that suits your daughter’s schedule. One of my students was hit by a car.”

“Oh, isn’t it dangerous,” Mrs. Bly says. “I don’t let Rebecca cycle. I flat out refuse to let her cycle anywhere at all. Wednesday afternoon is perfect.”

“At four.”

“At four.” Mrs. Bly chuckles again. “She’ll be so pleased,” she says. “She’s practiced so hard to get her clarinet up to scratch, and she’s wanted this so badly. It’s as if for the first time in her life something has just begun to blossom.”