The Rehearsal

“And they all came in together to say it, all in a pack or whatever, breathing together, quick breaths in and out, with their eyes back and forth sideways, and the principal at the front to break the wind, like the chief goose at the front of the V.”

“My dad doesn’t believe in sin,” Isolde says. “We’re atheists.”
“It pays to be open minded,” says the saxophone teacher.
“I’ll tell you why they’re so scared,” Isolde says. “They’re scared because now she knows everything they know. They’re scared because now they’ve got no secrets left.”

I’m sure they are scared only because they know the sin is still there. They know it snuck up inside her and stuck fast, wedging itself into a place nobody knows about and will never find. They know that his sin was just an action, a foolish deadly fumble in the bright dusty lunchtime light, but hers—her sin is a condition, a sickness lodged somewhere deep inside for now and for always

“—down, and she sort of starts to respond, and she smiles at him in lessons sometimes and it makes his heart race, and when they’re alone, in the music cupboard or after school or when they go places in his car, which they do sometimes, when they’re alone he calls her my gypsy girl—he says it over and over, my gypsy girl, he says—and she wishes she had something to say back, something she could whisper into his hair, something really special, something nobody’s ever said before.

Her hand snakes down the saxophone and trails around the edge of the bell—

“Dad’s looking at me with this scared expression like I’m going to do something insane or really emotional and he won’t know how to deal with it. So I go, How do you know? And he goes—”

The overhead lights have dimmed and she is lit only by a pale flicking blue, a frosty sparkle like the on–off glow of a TV screen. The saxophone teacher is thrust into shadow so half her face is iron gray and the other half is pale and glinting.

“You and I, Mrs. Winter, know what it feels like to hold a life in our hands. I don’t mean ordinary responsibility, like babysitting or watching the stove or waiting for the lights when you cross the road—I mean somebody’s life like a china vase in your hand”—she holds her saxophone aloft, her palm underneath the bell—“and if you wanted to, you could just… let go.”

Kiss-kiss-kiss goes the snare drum over the silence