Read Online The Girl Who Was Saturday Night by Heather O'Neill - Free Book Online

for our supper, trying to distract the city from how we had come into this world. I suddenly remembered the film crew and how enraged Nicolas would be if he knew of it.
    Our father never cared about anything other than his career. The only time he had any use for Nicolas and me waswhen we added to his TV performances. Étienne bought me a little black beret to wear and gave me a daisy to hold in my hand. He was going for the look of Faye Dunaway in
Bonnie and Clyde
. Étienne was a master of image manipulation. It was a gift. Or maybe it was a side effect of being one of the most shallow men to walk the face of this earth.
    Étienne would get me to read a poem that I had written. The audience would ooh and aah, and sometimes they would laugh their heads off. Delightful, how delightful, talent certainly runs in the family.
    But Nicolas often refused to go on. He was unpredictable. Once he styled his hair with Crisco at the last minute and nobody could get it out. Once he went on wearing a T-shirt that he had custom-made himself, with lightning bolts on it. Once he said he would only go if he could demonstrate his karate moves and be given six Milky Way bars. Étienne could tell right away that Nicolas was too difficult to work with and stopped having him on after a while.
    Nicolas would give long-winded answers to the interviewers that would break off into lies and silly flights of fancy. He liked to complain about all sorts of things. The audience would go wild when he complained about how our gym teacher made us do running backwards laps. Nicolas thought they were all beneath him, laughing at his idiotic jokes.
    “I would like to either drive a snowplow or be a politician,” Nicolas said.
    “And what does a politician do?”
    “They meet with the foreign ambassadors. They make it so that Québec can be our own country. I think that will be a very good thing because we will make our own laws.”
    Nicolas became a favourite with separatists because of theopinions that he voiced when he was seven. René Lévesque quoted a line from one of my poems in a speech on Québec separatism and then we were immortal.
    Back in the seventies, Étienne thought that if Québec separated from Canada, it would infuse his career with new life. He thought that he would be able to write the new national anthem. He spent weeks working on a victory song. People would stand in the streets and sing his song the day after the referendum. It would be the first song to be sung in a free Québec.
    But we didn’t separate. And then the next year, Étienne got arrested for having an affair with a fourteen-year-old girl named Marilou, who was round and plump and blond like a baby and who nobody on earth could resist. She was on the front page of the newspaper. She was trying to parlay the scandal into a modelling career. She ended up in a root-beer commercial and Étienne had to serve eight months in prison.

C HAPTER 11

Papillon
    T HE NEXT MORNING, WHEN I WENT INTO THE kitchen, I saw that Nicolas had cut out the photograph of me from the front page of the newspaper and had stuck it up on the fridge with magnets on every corner. He had written, “Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!” all around the photograph.
    I knew that the crew would for sure be going to see Étienne. My father would not turn his back on them. He would be ecstatic and want to expound all his ridiculous thoughts until the tape ran out. He would show them baby photos of us if he had them, but I was quite sure that he did not.
    I was distracted from these thoughts as the day unfolded. Something much more interesting happened. I saw Raphaël three times that day.
    In the morning, as I was about to leave the lobby of my apartment, I noticed him through the glass door, sitting on the front stoop of his mother’s building. He looked like he hadn’t washed his hair, because it stuck straight up above his head. He was wearing a suit jacket but no shirt underneath and purpletrack pants with yellow