“Geese usually rotate, I think,” the saxophone teacher says absently. “I gather it’s quite hard work breaking wind.” She is rifling through a stack of sheet music. The bookcase behind her is stuffed with old manuscripts and bleeding stray leaves on to the floor.
The saxophone teacher would never interrupt Isolde in such a dismissive fashion: that was one of Bridget’s reasons for wanting the role. Bridget remembers all over again that she is pale and stringy and rumpled and thoroughly secondary, and then flushes with a new determination to reclaim the scene.
“So they shuffle in,” she says, “in their V formation or whatever, this gray polyester army all trying really hard not to look at anybody in particular, especially not the big gaping hole next to first alto which is where Victoria usually sits.”
Bridget says “Victoria” with emphasis and evident satisfaction. She looks at the saxophone teacher for effect, but the saxophone teacher is busy shuffling papers with her big veined hands and doesn’t flicker.
“The doors to the practice rooms have little windows of reinforced glass so you can see in,” Bridget says, trying harder this time. Her voice gets louder the harder she tries. “But Mr. Saladin pasted the booking sheet over his, so all you can see is the timetable and little slivers of white light all around the edge if the light’s on inside. When Victoria had her woodwind tutorial all the slivers would go out.”
“Found it!” says the saxophone teacher, and she holds up a handful of sheet music. “ ‘The Old Castle’ from Pictures at an Exhibition. I think you’ll find this interesting, Bridget. We can talk about why the saxophone never really caught on as an orchestral instrument.”
The saxophone teacher sometimes feels disgusted with herself for baiting Bridget in this way. “It’s just that she tries so desperately hard,” she said once to Bridget’s mother. “That’s what makes it so easy. If it wasn’t so obvious that she was trying, I might be tempted to respect her a little more.”
Bridget’s mother nodded and nodded, and said, “Yes, we find that’s often the trouble.”
Now the saxophone teacher just looks at Bridget, standing there all stringy and rumpled and trying so desperately hard, and raises her eyebrows.
Bridget reddens with frustration and deliberately skips all the possible lines about Mussorgsky and Pictures at an Exhibition and Ravel and why the saxophone never really caught on as an orchestral instrument. She skips all that and goes straight for a line she likes.
“They treat it like a dosage,” she says, even louder this time. “It’s like a vaccination where they give you a little slice of a disease so your body can get a defense ready for the real thing. They’re frightened because it’s a disease they haven’t tried on us before, and so they’re trying to vaccinate us without telling us what the disease really is. They want to inject us very secretly, without us noticing. It won’t work.”
They are really looking at each other now. The saxophone teacher takes a moment to align the pile of papers with the edge of the rug before she says, “Why won’t it work, Bridget?”
“Because we noticed,” says Bridget, breathing hard through her nose. “We were watching.”
Julia’s feet are always scuffing, and she has a scab around her mouth.
“They called an assembly for the whole form this morning,” she says, “and the counselor was there, all puffed up like he’d never felt so important in his life.”
She talks over her shoulder while she unpacks her case. The saxophone teacher is sitting in a slice of cold sun by the window, watching the gulls wheel and shit. The clouds are low.
“They started talking in these special quiet honey voices like we’d break if they spoke too loud. They go, You’re all aware of the rumors that have been circulating this past week. It’s important that we talk through some things together so we can all be sure of where we’re at.”
Julia turns on her heel, fits her sax to her neckstrap, and stands there for a moment with her hands on her hips. The sax is slung across her body like a weapon.
“The counselor is a retard,” she says definitively. “Me and Katrina went once in third form because Alice Franklin had sex in a movie theater and we were scared she’d become a skank and ruin her life by having kids by accident. We told him all about it and how scared we were, and Katrina even cried. He just sat there and blinked and he kept nodding and nodding, but really slowly like he was programmed at a quarter speed, and then when we’d run out of things to say and Katrina had stopped crying he opened his drawer and got a piece of paper and drew three circles inside each other, and wrote You and then Your Family and then Your Friends, and he said, That’s the way it is, isn’t it? And then he said we could keep the piece of paper if we wanted.”
Julia gives a mirthless snort and opens her plastic music folder.
“What happened to Alice Franklin?” asks the saxophone teacher.
“Oh, we found out later she was lying,” Julia says.
“She didn’t have sex in a movie theater.”
“No.”
Julia takes a moment to adjust the spidery legs of the music stand.
“Why would she lie to you?” the saxophone teacher asks politely.
Julia makes a sweeping gesture with her hand. “She was probably just bored,” she says. In her mouth the word is noble and magnificent.
“I see,” says the saxophone teacher.
“So anyway they go, Maybe we could start the ball rolling by asking if anyone’s got something they want to get off their chest? And one of the girls started crying right then, before anything had even happened for real, and the counselor just about wet his pants with joy, and he goes, Nothing anybody says this morning will go further than this room, or some shit. So this girl starts saying something lame, and her friend reaches over and holds her hand or something sick like that, and then everyone starts sharing and saying things about trust and betrayal and confidence and feeling all confused and scared… and it’s going to be one fuck of a long morning.”
Julia darts a glance over toward the saxophone teacher to see if the word has any effect, but the saxophone teacher just gives her a wintry smile and waits. Bridget would have balked and fluttered and turned scarlet and wondered about it for a long time afterward, but Julia doesn’t. She just smirks and takes unnecessary care in clipping the slippery pages to the edge of the music stand.
“So after a while,” Julia says, “the counselor goes, What is harassment, girls?, looking at us all eager and encouraging like when teachers are torn between really wanting you to get the right answer but also really wanting you to be wrong so they can have the pleasure of telling you themselves. Then he goes, speaking softly and solemnly like he’s revealing something nobody else knows, Harassment doesn’t have to be touching, my darlings. Harassment can also be watching. Harassment can be if someone watches you in a way that you don’t like.
“So I put up my hand and I go, Does it become harassment because of what they watch? Or because of what they imagine while they’re watching? They all looked at me and I went really red, and the counselor touched his fingertips together and gave me this long look like, I know what you’re doing, you’re trying to sabotage the trust thing we’ve got going here, and I’m going to answer your question because I have to, but I’m not going to give you the answer you want.”
The saxophone teacher stands up finally and picks up her own saxophone as if to say “enough.” But Julia is already saying it, thrust on by a strange sort of red-cheeked momentum.