Julia thinks, Seducing Isolde isn’t just a matter of behaving as attractively and as temptingly as possible, and trusting that Isolde will bite. If, instead, she were faced with the prospect of seducing a boy, then such a simple formula would probably work. The mere fact of Julia’s anatomy would be enough. She would herself be the temptation—her body, the whole of her. But seducing Isolde requires forcing the younger girl to come to regard herself in a new way: only after Isolde has come to cherish her own self, the concave yin of her feminine skin, will Julia have a hope. Isolde must come to cherish herself, first and foremost. The seduction must take the form of a persuasion, a gradual winning-over of her mind.

Julia thinks of all the usual gifts of courtship, like flowers in homeroom or stones thrown at her window at midnight or a patient watcher at the school gates, waiting with a bicycle to walk her slowly home. All of them seem grotesque. She imagines sending Isolde flowers in homeroom, and all she can think of is the girl’s horrified face as she peers over the lip of the red cluster of tissue, the card already plucked off in embarrassment and crumpled to a nub. She imagines a bouquet too big and too fragile to be shoved into the bottom of Isolde’s bag, and the beautiful girls all laughing and shouting, What’s his name?

Julia is overcome by a fit of melancholy now, and drives her pen savagely through the margin of her homework sheet, causing the paper to rip. She thinks, What’s the likelihood? That the one girl who makes my heart race is the one girl who wants me in return? That the accident of my attraction coincides with the accident of hers? She thinks: can I trust in something chemical, some scent or pheromone that will ride on the current of my walking and come to kiss her as I pass her by?

Julia distrusts this chemical, this invisible riptide that sucks away at all her shores. She thinks: I cannot rely on the chemical. I cannot rely on the accident of her attraction. I must seduce her, actively pursue her and persuade her. I must appeal to the questionable autonomy of a teenage girl whose mind is still not rightfully her own.

Tuesday

“Hey Isolde, want to play?” someone calls out, and Isolde looks up. She is walking back from the tuck shop with a brown paper bag pinched in each hand, the icing slowly leaking through the paper and darkening the pale in greasy spots of gray.

“No, thanks,” Isolde says, and holds up the paper bags as an excuse.

The questioning girl smiles and returns to the game. Isolde watches as she walks past: four or five of them are attempting to play hacky-sack in their thick-soled school shoes and drooping gray socks, hiking up their school skirts with both hands to show the winter white of their dimpled knees. She rounds the corner of the school library and continues on.

Isolde weaves her way around the groups of girls sitting in their impenetrable circles around the quad, and then to her surprise she sees Julia sitting in a rare patch of sun on the grass on the far side of the paving. She is wearing her headphones and squinting in a cross kind of way into a paperback novel. Shyly Isolde makes her way toward her. Her heart begins to hammer.

Julia looks up, sees her approaching and tugs her headphones out of her ears.

“Hey man,” she says, and Isolde waves her paper bags and says, “Hey.”

“What have you got?” Julia says.

“Just a roll and a doughnut.”

“You can sit down if you want.”

Isolde crosses her legs at the ankle and descends into a sitting position in the fluent scissor-action of girls long practiced at sitting cross-legged, her free hand tugging at the doubled fold beneath the silver kilt-pin so it covers the bare skin of her knee. Julia shifts her ankles to make room. The horizontal gash along the length of Isolde’s filled roll is stained pink from the beetroot. Isolde wipes her finger along the seam to collect the mayonnaise and licks her finger carefully.

“You know what I think is shit?” Julia says suddenly, arching her back and reaching over to yank a tuft of grass from the ground to shred. “That they make you come to those counseling sessions about self-defense or teacher abuse or whatever.”

“But I’ve learned so much,” Isolde says, blinking. “Like my body is a temple. And we were all abused as children probably; we only need to work hard to remember it.”

Julia laughs and shreds her grass even smaller.

“But you were brilliant,” Isolde says. “Standing up to him like that. Like you did.”

“He’s scared of me now.”

“So is everyone, after what you said,” Isolde says, meaning it as a joke, but Julia frowns and shakes her head.

“I was paraphrasing, anyway,” she says. “It’s not like I made it up. Dumb shits. Not you.”

“Oh, no,” Isolde says quickly. Her nervousness has given way to a kind of giddiness, a reckless charged feeling that is keeping her heartbeat in her throat and her vision sharpened in awareness of Julia’s total proximity, the fall of her hair around her face and the every movement of her hands as they pick away at the yellow balding patch of lawn. Julia’s hands are thin and reddish, with nibbled patches of dark nail polish in the center of each flat-nibbed nail. She has a few loops of dirty string knotted around her bony wrist, and on the back of her hand a few notes to herself in blue ink, several days old now so the ink has furred out into the web of tiny creases on her skin. Even looking at Julia’s hands seems unbearably sensual to Isolde, and she quickly draws her gaze away, out across the quad where a group of girls are clapping a rhythm as they rehearse a set for the school dance challenge.

“We’re the ones with the power,” Julia is saying. “That’s the real lesson from this whole Mr. Saladin thing. The lesson they don’t want us to learn.”

“Oh,” Isolde says, looking again at Julia’s hands.

“It’s because of where we are in the power chain. We can be damaged, but we can’t damage others. Well, I suppose we can damage each other, but we can’t damage our teachers or our parents or whatever. They can only damage us. And that means we get to call the shots.”

“What does calling the shots mean?” Isolde says.

Julia tosses her head in a brooding way. “Everyone worships the victim,” she says. “That’s all I’ve learned from this place, victim-worship. In fourth form I rowed for the coxed quad in the Nationals, right? We turned up and we were clearly the worst team in the tournament. We just didn’t have good enough gear, the quad was really old and heavy, we hadn’t been training for long enough. But because we were the underdogs we really believed we were going to win. Because that’s what happens. In the last ten seconds, the underdogs pull through and win by a canvas, and good triumphs over evil and money doesn’t matter in the end. I remember sitting there in the boat before the race with my oars ready and waiting for the buzzer and thinking, We’re really going to show them when we win.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Course not,” Julia says. “Some rich school with a flash fiberglass boat won by about a mile. We were the last team over the finish by at least forty-five seconds. But I’m just pointing out the victim thing. If you’re the victim, you really do believe you’re going to come out on top. It’s what we learn here. Worship the victim. The loser will win.”

Isolde looks puzzled. She’s a little in awe of the way Julia spits out her opinions, little rehearsed pieces that she delivers with her eyes flashing and her head cocked. Her opinion is more like a challenge than a point of view.

“You know,” Julia says. “Back in the day, schools would have special desks for the brainiest kid in the class. But the brainiest kid isn’t set apart anymore. Instead we have the remedial block, and the special needs block, and the careers and counseling building. They’re the ones who are set apart from the rest.”