Read Online Billie by Anna Gavalda, Jennifer Rappaport - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Anna Gavalda, Jennifer Rappaport
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according to the others, it was as though they had missed an Olympic competition in which France took the gold.
The miles of ridiculously ornamental sentences that bratty girl from the trailer park just barely managed to perform, Franck Mumuâs anger when he explained in a killer voice how a woman tears you apart with love, and our super beautiful made-to-order costumes: it became a big deal. I didnât get better grades for all that, nor did Franck make more friends, but okay, instead of insulting us, now everyone ignored us. So, thank you, Alfred de Musset, thank you.
(Though I insist, you didnât need to do in little Rosette to help your cause.) (If all men who were cheated on did the same thing, there wouldnât be many people left on this planet . . . )
Â
* * *
Â
Franck and I didnât become inseparableâtoo much still separated us: his really screwed-up father who had transformed his long-term unemployment into a crisis of extreme paranoia and spent all his time on the Internet exchanging top-secret information with his legionnaire friends from Christendom; his mother who swallowed kilos of Médoc to forget that she was living with such a nutcase; my own father who didnât need a computer to have the impression that he was a type of legionnaire on an official assignment; and my drunk of a stepmother with her pack of male rats, female rats, and baby rats who did nothing but howl all day long. No matter how hard we tried to rise above it, all that shit weighed us down.
Please excuse my vulgarity. In other words, all that misfortune clipped our wings. We were like little birds, dumped in bad nests . . .
Plus, because I was weaker than he, I always tried to join groups and get others to like me, while he was a loner. He was the hero of Jean-Jacques Goldmanâs song: the one about the guy who walked alone without a witness, without anyone, with his steps that ring out and the night that forgives him and all that.
His solitude was his crutch; mine was my gang of lousy girls.
Once or twice, at the beginning, I had tried to go talk to him during recess or to sit next to him in the cafeteria but even if he was nice to me, I sensed that I was upsetting him a little bit
Â
so I stopped trying.
Â
We spoke only on Wednesday afternoons because he went to have lunch at Claudineâs house and because, as a result, I didnât take the bus in order to walk a little way with him.
At first, she invited me to stay, but since I always said no, she finally stopped asking.
I donât know why I refused. Always this story about a gift that was too precious to mess with, I think . . . I was afraid that if I went back to that house I would ruin things. Easter break was my only beautiful memory and I wasnât yet ready to remove it from the display case.
You might not realize it because Iâm the only one speaking now since Francky is comatose and since, in the meantime, Iâve learned to express myself but back then, I was very nervous.
Very, very nervous . . .
Â
It wasnât as though I had been really physically abused during my childhood, to the point of, like, my ending up on page one of
Détective
magazine or something, but I was always slapped around
just a little bit
.
All the time, all the time, all the time . . .
A little slap here, a little slap there, a blow from below, a little kick in the legs when I was in the way, or when I wasnât, hands always raised to make like, wait, Iâm going to give you a smack and all that, and that made me . . . how can I put it?
One day, I remember, I was secretly reading in an employment contract a thing about alcohol that said, of course, you shouldnât drink, but if you got, like, sloshed one night, it was like throwing a bucket of water on the floor: itâs not great, but okay, afterward you mop up quickly, the floor dries, and we forget about it, while alcoholism,
The miles of ridiculously ornamental sentences that bratty girl from the trailer park just barely managed to perform, Franck Mumuâs anger when he explained in a killer voice how a woman tears you apart with love, and our super beautiful made-to-order costumes: it became a big deal. I didnât get better grades for all that, nor did Franck make more friends, but okay, instead of insulting us, now everyone ignored us. So, thank you, Alfred de Musset, thank you.
(Though I insist, you didnât need to do in little Rosette to help your cause.) (If all men who were cheated on did the same thing, there wouldnât be many people left on this planet . . . )
Â
* * *
Â
Franck and I didnât become inseparableâtoo much still separated us: his really screwed-up father who had transformed his long-term unemployment into a crisis of extreme paranoia and spent all his time on the Internet exchanging top-secret information with his legionnaire friends from Christendom; his mother who swallowed kilos of Médoc to forget that she was living with such a nutcase; my own father who didnât need a computer to have the impression that he was a type of legionnaire on an official assignment; and my drunk of a stepmother with her pack of male rats, female rats, and baby rats who did nothing but howl all day long. No matter how hard we tried to rise above it, all that shit weighed us down.
Please excuse my vulgarity. In other words, all that misfortune clipped our wings. We were like little birds, dumped in bad nests . . .
Plus, because I was weaker than he, I always tried to join groups and get others to like me, while he was a loner. He was the hero of Jean-Jacques Goldmanâs song: the one about the guy who walked alone without a witness, without anyone, with his steps that ring out and the night that forgives him and all that.
His solitude was his crutch; mine was my gang of lousy girls.
Once or twice, at the beginning, I had tried to go talk to him during recess or to sit next to him in the cafeteria but even if he was nice to me, I sensed that I was upsetting him a little bit
Â
so I stopped trying.
Â
We spoke only on Wednesday afternoons because he went to have lunch at Claudineâs house and because, as a result, I didnât take the bus in order to walk a little way with him.
At first, she invited me to stay, but since I always said no, she finally stopped asking.
I donât know why I refused. Always this story about a gift that was too precious to mess with, I think . . . I was afraid that if I went back to that house I would ruin things. Easter break was my only beautiful memory and I wasnât yet ready to remove it from the display case.
You might not realize it because Iâm the only one speaking now since Francky is comatose and since, in the meantime, Iâve learned to express myself but back then, I was very nervous.
Very, very nervous . . .
Â
It wasnât as though I had been really physically abused during my childhood, to the point of, like, my ending up on page one of
Détective
magazine or something, but I was always slapped around
just a little bit
.
All the time, all the time, all the time . . .
A little slap here, a little slap there, a blow from below, a little kick in the legs when I was in the way, or when I wasnât, hands always raised to make like, wait, Iâm going to give you a smack and all that, and that made me . . . how can I put it?
One day, I remember, I was secretly reading in an employment contract a thing about alcohol that said, of course, you shouldnât drink, but if you got, like, sloshed one night, it was like throwing a bucket of water on the floor: itâs not great, but okay, afterward you mop up quickly, the floor dries, and we forget about it, while alcoholism,
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