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.”

Saturday

“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.”

November

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.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS