The Girl Who Was Saturday Night Read Free

time like a war hero. Until he finally ended up being sentenced for eight whole months.
    To say that Étienne’s fame had gone to his head would be an understatement. He really believed that he had a higher calling. I think he ranked himself up there with Jesus, and I’m not even exaggerating.
    Oh and, how could I forget, in the middle of all this he had two kids who became famous too because Étienne always brought them on stage and on talk shows with him. He would make us come out and wave wildly at the audience and blow kisses and say adorable things that he’d written for us to the hosts. We were known by everyone as Petite Nouschka and Petit Nicolas.

C HAPTER 4

The Old Man and the Spaghetti Jar
    I HURRIED HOME . I WANTED TO SEE N ICOLAS SO that I could tell him about the janitors singing Étienne’s song. I was feeling lousy about it, but he would laugh it off.
    It was only about a twenty-minute walk back to our building, across the street from an old theatre that now sold electronics. The building was falling apart but the wooden doors were still painted gold every year. Sticking out above the door was a neon sign that wasn’t ever lit up and said CHOW MEIN . There used to be a Chinese restaurant in one of the apartments. Pigeons sat on the sign, crammed together like a group of teenagers making trouble on a bench. The noise they made sounded like a marble rolling across the floor all day, every day.
    A girl with messy blond hair was standing in the lobby. She had on a white raincoat and sneakers. She gave me a sad look. I knew she was hoping to run into my twin brother. She reminded me of the Little Mermaid, right before she was going to have to throw herself back in the water because the prince had rejected her. Lonely, crazy girls always thought that Nicolaswas going to save their lives. He gave off that impression. Lord knows why. He had probably already slept with this girl, but I knew he wouldn’t have any interest in her now. I smiled and ran past her up the one step and down the hall.
    Our apartment was on the ground floor and it was small. There was yellow wallpaper with canaries in the hallways. There were old-fashioned lamps on every surface. There were second-hand paintings all over the walls. There were a lot of sailboats. There was a painting of Jesus rolling his eyes up at the sky in every room.
    Nicolas and I had been raised by our grandparents since we were babies. Our mother had left us on their doorstep, so to speak. Our grandmother had died when we were five, so actually we’d more or less been raised by our grandfather. His mother regretted naming him Léonard only five minutes after she did so, and no one had ever called him by his real name. Everyone just called him Loulou.
    Loulou was in the kitchen wearing an old suit jacket over an undershirt. He had fixed a hole in the sleeve of the jacket with a staple gun. He wasn’t wearing any pants. His undershirt was tucked into his boxer shorts, which were covered with little golden paisleys. They looked like goldfish that were all dressed up for church. He was always crapping his pants, so he stopped wearing them at home. It just made life easier. He crapped his pants every time he smoked a cigarette.
    Loulou’s nose was big, a family trait, but then what old man didn’t have a huge nose. His ears were enormous too. He had blue eyes and his eyebrows were wild. It was impossible to know anymore what he had looked like when he was young.
    He had a pair of dentures, but they were too big for him and made him have to grin ludicrously when he was wearingthem. Loulou once told me that it was perfectly acceptable to slap a man in the face for being forward when he was young. That’s why men of his generation lost all their teeth, because the roots were weak from having been slapped all the time.
    “Bonjour, Loulou!” I said.
    “Where have you been?”
    “Out slaying dragons.”
    “There were still dragons when I was little. They were a