Billie Read Free Page A

guy’s name—a guy with a bad reputation—I never had the guts to contradict her. Anyway, don’t count on me to badmouth her. It’s true she’s a bitch but it’s not really her fault. Plus this evening, I’m not here to talk about her. We all have our shit to deal with.
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    So, voilà, little star, that’s it for childhood.
    Franck rarely speaks about his and when he does, it’s only to distance himself from it. And as for me, I didn’t have a childhood.
    The fact that I still like my first name, given the circumstances, is quite an achievement, I think.
    Only the brilliant Michael Jackson could perform such a feat . . .
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    Franck and I went to the same junior high. But it wasn’t until our last year there, the only year we were in the same class, that we spoke to each other. Since then we’ve admitted that we noticed each other the morning of the first day of our first year. Yes, we picked each other out immediately, but unconsciously we avoided each other all those years because both of us sensed that the other was in such a sorry state and we didn’t want to suffer even one ounce more than we were already.
    It’s true, too, that I specifically sought out the company of girls who dressed like Polly Pocket. All cutesy with long hair, their own bedrooms, packs of fancy cookies, and a mom who happily signed the correspondence that came home from school. I did everything I could so they would like me and invite me home with them as often as possible.
    Alas, there were times when I was a bit less popular . . . in the winter especially . . . I didn’t really understand it until much later, but it was a matter of . . . of a hot-water tank . . . and also of . . . uh . . . odor . . . of . . . fuck . . . but hey, I’m thinking about it so much that I’m starting to get embarrassed again. Okay, let’s move on.
    All this time, I lied so much about my story that I had to write down the main points in order not to mix up one school year with another.
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    At my place, I behaved like a hungry animal who smelled bacon next door but couldn’t have any since no one was bringing it home, but at school, I was always calm. At any rate, I wouldn’t have had the necessary energy to be on the defensive twenty-four hours a day. You have to have experienced it to understand, but those who have, they know exactly what I’m talking about: on the defensive . . . always, always . . . And especially when things were calm. Calm moments, they were the worst, they . . . no, never mind . . . nobody gives a damn.
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    One day, in my social studies class, the teacher, Monsieur Dumont, without realizing it, taught me something about my life. The underclass, he said. The teacher said it just like that, like exportation of wealth or the silting of Mont Saint Michel, but I remember, my face turned bright red with embarrassment. I didn’t know there was a word in the dictionary invented specifically to indicate where I came from. Because I was well placed to know it, this milieu; it’s not necessarily apparent to the naked eye. The proof is in the fact that social workers have never shown up . . . If you don’t stick out and you go to school every day, that safe haven of childhood, you get by easily, and my stepmother, I won’t say that she looked bourgeois, but really, people would treat her with respect when she went to the supermarket, they said hello, how are the kids? And so on.
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    I never knew where she bought the oil for the furnace.
    The oil was there, maybe it was little mice or Santa’s reindeer, but for me, the great mystery of my childhood would remain those fucking empty bottles of oil.
Where
did they come from? Where?
    The great, great mystery . . .
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    * * *
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    It wasn’t public school that got me out of there.