“My goal for today,” he says smoothly, “is to talk about the ways in which I can help you guys to learn to take control. Does anybody want to say anything before we kick off?”

They all shake their heads and smile at him, shifting in their seats like roosting hens. Then Julia says, “I do.”

Everyone except Isolde turns to look at her in a rustling swoop. Julia blinks calmly and says, “I don’t agree that Mr. Saladin wanted to gain control.”

The counselor frowns and reaches up to tug a tuft of hair at the nape of his neck. “You don’t,” he says.

“No, I don’t,” Julia says. “Gaining control isn’t the exciting part. Sleeping with a minor isn’t exciting because you get to boss them around. It’s exciting because you’re risking so much. And taking a risk is exciting because of the possibility that you might lose, not the possibility that you might win.”

The girls look her up and down, and marvel with a collective disgusted fascination. Their expression is the expression of any popular girl who takes time to regard an unpopular girl while she is speaking. They watch Julia as if she is a carnival act: intriguing, but it might make you feel a little sick.

“It’s like gambling,” Julia says, even louder. “If you make a bet that you’re almost positively certain you’re going to win, it’s not going to cost you much adrenaline. It’s not that exciting and it’s not that much fun. But if you make a bet where all the odds are against you and there’s just a tiny, tiny glimmer of a chance that you might make it, then you’re going to be pumping. There’s a higher possibility that you might lose. It’s the possibility you might lose that gets you excited.”

The girls start to shift and mutter, but Julia’s gaze stays fixed on the counselor, her eyes shiny and narrowed and hard. The counselor is looking at his shoes.

“The fact that Victoria was underage and virginal or whatever wasn’t exciting because he could exercise more power over her,” Julia says. “It was exciting because he stood to lose so much more if anyone found out.” Julia has a way of cocking her head to emphasize the shock value. “He wouldn’t just lose her,” she says. “He would lose everything.”

There is a small pause and then another rustling swoop as all the girls turn back to look at the counselor. He looks up, tugs again at his tuft of hair, and sighs.

“I think we’ve deviated from the point,” he says. “What we’re concerned with here is the power imbalance. We’re concerned with the fact that, as a teacher, Mr. Saladin abused his position of power by seeking out a relationship with a student.”

“We’ve only deviated from your point to my point,” Julia snaps. “And anyway, isn’t every relationship a power imbalance in some way?”

The counselor quickly turns back to the group before Julia can open her mouth to say more. “What do you guys think?” he asks, trying to make eye contact only with the least combative and least articulate girls in the room. “Any thoughts? Agree? Disagree?”

A few girls raise their hands and begin to speak, and Julia loses interest immediately. She scowls at the counselor, and then fishes a biro out of her pocket and begins to doodle on the back of her hand as if she doesn’t care. After a while she looks up, and to her sudden thudding surprise Isolde is looking at her. Her expression is no longer childish and candied. Her head is turned slightly so she is looking half over her shoulder like a cold and careless queen with her neck all standing out in ropes.

Julia flushes under her collar and censors herself too late. Her heart is beating very fast. All of a sudden she feels too big for her own body, clumsy and stupid and lumpish, and the feeling washes over her all at once in a horrible thrill.

They hold each other’s gaze for a moment, and then Isolde looks away.

Saturday

Isolde and Victoria are watching television. Isolde is curled in the cat-furred hollow of the armchair with her legs hugged to her chest and her head upon the arm. Victoria is lying on the sofa with one leg cocked and the remote control held lightly between her finger and her thumb. Their father has just come through the room and crumpled Isolde’s toes in his big hand and said, Goodnight, slugs. Their mother has just called out from the stairway, Bed by eleven please. Their counterpointed footsteps, light and heavy, have just dwindled away up the stairs, and they have just shut their bedroom door with a faint and knuckled click.

Victoria says, “What about that group of boys you used to hang out with? Are they still pissing about with you guys?”

She speaks with the unrequited prerogative of an older sister’s demand for the whole truth. As the elder, Victoria’s perspective on her little sister’s life is always that of a recent veteran, knowing and qualified and unshockable. It is as if, at each new stage, Isolde merely picks up another hand-me-down costume that Victoria has grown out of and cast behind her, and as she struggles with the arm-holes Victoria is entitled to enter the dressing room and watch. When Isolde gets her first period, fits her first bra, plants her first kiss, chooses a dress for her first ball—at all these milestones Victoria is, or will be, present. If not, the elder sister is then always entitled to ask, Why didn’t you tell me, Issie, why?

By contrast, little Isolde would never dare ask Victoria what really happened behind the tiny pasted window of the rehearsal-room door. She would never dare ask for details—the life under his clothes, his breath, the touch of him. She would never ask, Was he nervous, Toria? or Who reached out first? or Did you talk together first, for weeks and weeks—about yourselves, about what you wanted and what you didn’t have? All these are questions Isolde is not allowed to ask. She could not ask, Why didn’t you tell me? when Victoria snared her first lover, began her first affair, broke her first promise, or shed, for the first time, tiny blossom-drops of virgin blood, for all of these slender landmarks are part of a terrain in which the younger sister does not yet belong.

Later, when Isolde is Victoria’s age, and Victoria is still two steps ahead, at university maybe, and living elsewhere, smoking her first papered twist of weed, walking home from her first one-night stand with her sandals slung over her wrist, for the first time deciding what, in truth, she is going to be—then, perhaps, Victoria might tell her what really happened. Not every detail, because by then Victoria will be airy and deliberately removed, waving her hand and saying, “I just think Mum and Dad were cunts about that whole thing,” or “God, that was ages ago.” She might say, “We were going to run off together, but in the end he went back to his old girlfriend. I ran into him on the street a few months ago. He’s fatter than he was.”

But speaking of it now would be impossible. Isolde thinks that it would be like flipping a chapter ahead in a book that she was reading, to press Victoria for a detail, or an answer, or a map. Victoria’s life will always be two paces ahead, now and forever, and if Isolde saw the road before she had to walk upon it herself she would simply be a cheat.

“Yeah, but it means you’ll never make the same mistakes as me,” Victoria says, unwilling to let Isolde feel she has the poorer lot.

“No,” Isolde says, “I will make the same mistakes, but by the time I do they won’t seem interesting because you’ll already have done it, and I’ll only be a copy.”

“Yeah… no,” says Victoria. “You’ve got it better. Mum and Dad are way stricter with me than they are with you. They waste all their energy on me and by the time you come along their standards have dropped and they can’t be bothered any more.”

“Yeah… no,” says Isolde. “I have to pretend to be the baby, and that sucks.”