The Girl Who Was Saturday Night Read Free Page B

that?”
    “How could I forget, he dragged Nicolas and me to all the rallies.”
    “That’s right. You guys used to wave those flags around. Nicolas would really get into it. Man, what a little guy. He was yelling for a free Québec, wasn’t he?”
    “You voted Oui too.”
    “What do I know? When Jean Lesage came into power he took all the electricity companies away from the Anglos and the Americans. Then my heat bill came down. I’ll always remember that the Anglos made me freeze to death. Oh, and everyone in this building was voting Oui. I just wanted to make everyone happy. Who did you vote for?”
    “I was seven years old.”
    “Of course. Did you sign up to finish school?”
    “I signed up without Nicolas.”
    “You were better in school than he was. He was always antagonizing the teachers. It’s good to do something by yourself. I used to beat you to stop you from sleeping together in the same bed, but you still did. You ate out of the same plates. You wore the same clothes. You said the same things at the same time. You took baths together. It was disgusting.”
    I slammed my glass on the table.
    “Laisse-moi tranquille avec ça.”
    Loulou was right about Nicolas never fitting in at school, though. He was diagnosed by the teachers as having every learning disability they could think of. They assigned a different one to him each year. He broke his leg playing musical chairs in Grade Three. He acted like it was the only chance he was ever going to get to win anything.
    Nicolas used to say that he dropped out because the teacher had made him use the word
incandescent
in a sentence. He said that it was emotional abuse. But we just stopped going when he was sixteen because he hated it so much and was failing every class.
    I was able to sit still in class and did okay on my report cards, but I left with him anyways. After that, we were educated by second-hand paperback books and madmen on Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Anyways, even though we were high school dropouts, people still treated us like precocious geniuses just because we’d been on television.
    We had so much fun together during those years. We stayed out all night. We were always drinking. Even when we were teenagers, we would sit in our bedroom and drink until we cried. We would hug our stuffed animals like lovers and pass out in our clothes, with one leg out of our pants and the other leg in.

C HAPTER 5

The Teddy Bears Are Drunk
    I WALKED TO THE BEDROOM THAT I HAD SHARED with Nicolas since I was a baby. On top of the bureau, there was a pile of VHS tapes on how to teach yourself karate. Nicolas had been watching them for years. He was actually really good at a lot of the moves. He looked like he was good at them anyways.
    We never threw anything away. We had Valentine’s Day cards from elementary school. There were storybooks on the shelf next to some of Nicolas’s dirty magazines. There was a
Peter and the Wolf
record. There were action figures on the windowsill.
    There were postcards that Étienne sent us from when he was in prison. We stuck them religiously to the wall, and now the Scotch tape was all yellow and peeling. There was a postcard of a man on a unicycle. There was a postcard of a strongman pulling a bus. There was a postcard of a naked woman completely covered in tattoos. That was particularly horrifying for us as children. We would spend hours looking at it.
    The room had been our dad’s long before we were born. The closet was still filled with his clothes. Grandmother andLoulou never bought us new toys because they figured we could just play with Étienne’s. Our stuffed animals were wretched. They had wanted to retire after Étienne. They had wanted to just chill out at the bottom of a toy box. They could barely hold their heads up and were missing eyes.
    Still, we wheeled them down the street in an old doll carriage. We tied bibs around their necks and stuck empty spoons up to their mouths, begging them to eat. We changed