Laurent gave his habitual grunt—mweh! —and fingered out the correct change. He has not yet spoken to me of my defection, though I know he resents it, thanking me with exaggerated politeness as I hand him the box.
I have no doubt as to the meaning of Laurent’s sudden interest in giftwrapped chocolates. He means it as a gesture of defiance, indicating that there is more to Laurent Pinson than meets the eye and warning me that if I am fool enough to ignore his attentions, then someone else will benefit in my place.
Let them benefit. I sent him away with a cheery smile and the spiral sign of the Hurakan scratched onto the lid of his chocolate box with the pointed tip of a fingernail. It’s not that I bear any especial malice toward Laurent—although I’ll admit I wouldn’t grieve if the café were struck by lightning, or some client got food poisoning and sued the management. It’s just that I have no time to deal with him sensitively at this time, and besides, the last thing I want is a love-struck sexagenarian following me around, getting in the way of business.
I turned as he left and saw Yanne watching.
“Laurent Pinson, buying chocolates? ”
I grinned. “I told you he was sweet on me.”
She laughed at that, then looked abashed. Rosette peeped out from behind her knee, a wooden spoon in one hand, a melted something in the other. She made a sign with her chocolatey fingers.
Yanne handed her a macaroon.
I said, “The homemade chocolates have all sold out.”
“I know.” She grinned. “Now I suppose I’ll have to make some more.”
“I’ll help, if you like. Give you a break.”
She paused at that. Seemed to consider it, as if it were something much more than simply making chocolate. “I promise you, I’m a fast learner.”
Of course I am. I’ve had to be. When you have had a mother like mine, either you learn fast or you don’t survive. An inner-city London school, fresh from the ravages of the comprehensive system and packed with thugs, immigrants, and the damned. That was my training ground—and I learned fast.
My mother had tried to teach me at home. By the time I was ten, I could read, write, and do the double lotus. But then the Social Services got involved; pointed out Mother’s lack of qualifications; and I was packed off to St. Michael’s-on-the-Green, a pit of roughly two thousand souls, which swallowed me up in less than no time.
My System was still in its infancy then. I had no defenses; I wore green velvet dungarees with appliquéd dolphins on the pockets, and a turquoise headband to align my chakras. My mother picked me up at the school gates; on the first day, a small crowd gathered to watch. On the second, someone threw a stone.
Hard to imagine that kind of thing now. It happens, though—and for far less. It happened here, at Annie’s school—and for nothing more than a head scarf or two. Wild birds will kill exotic ones: the budgies and the lovebirds and the yellow canaries—escaped from their cages, hoping to get a taste of the sky—usually end up back on the ground, plucked raw by their more conformist cousins.
It was inevitable. For the first six months I cried myself to sleep. I begged to be sent to some other school. I ran away; I was brought back; I prayed fervently to Jesus, Osiris, and Quetzalcoatl to save me from the demons of St. Michael’s-on-the-Green.
Unsurprisingly, nothing worked. I tried to adapt: changed my dungarees for jeans and a T-shirt, took up smoking, hung out with the crowd, but it was already too late. The bar had been set. Every school needs its freak; and for the next five years or so, I was it.
It was then that I could have used someone like Zozie de l’Alba. What use was my mother, that second-rate, patchouli-scented wannabe witch, with all her crystals and dream catchers and glib talk of karma? I didn’t care about karmic retribution. I wanted my retribution to be real: for my tormentors to be laid low, not later, not in some future lifetime, but paid back in full, in blood, and in the present.
And so I studied, and studied hard. I made up my own curriculum from the books and pamphlets in Mother’s shop. The result was my System, every piece honed and refined and stored and practiced with only one objective in mind.
Revenge.
I don’t suppose you’ll remember the case. It made the news at the time, of course; but there are so many similar stories now. Tales of perennial losers armed with handguns and crossbows, blowing themselves into high school legend in a single bloody, glorious, suicidal spree.
That wasn’t me at all, of course. Butch and Sundance were no heroes of mine. I was a survivor: a scarred veteran of five long years of bullying, name-calling, punching, thumping, taunting, pinching, vandalism, and petty theft, the subject of much spiteful locker room graffiti and a perpetual target for everyone.
In short, I was It.
But I bided my time. I studied and learned. My curriculum was unorthodox, some might say profane, but I was always top of the class. My mother knew little about my research. If she had, she would have been appalled. Interventionist magic, as she liked to call it, was the very antithesis of her belief, and she held a number of quaint theories promising cosmic retribution on those who dared to act for themselves.
Ah, well. I dared. And when at last I was ready, I went through St. Michael’s-on-the-Green like a December wind. My mother never guessed the half of it—which was probably a good thing, as I’m sure she would have disapproved. But I’d made it. I was just sixteen, and I had passed the only exam that mattered.
Annie, of course, has a way to go. But with time, I hope to make something rather special of her.
And so, Annie. About that revenge.
Monday, 19 November
Today Suze came to school with her head in a scarf. apparently the hairdresser, instead of giving her highlights, has made her hair fall out in clumps. Some reaction to the peroxide, the hairdresser says—Suze told her she’d had it before, but she lied, and now the hairdresser says it isn’t her fault, that Suzanne’s hair was already damaged by all the ironing and straightening she’s done to it, and that if Suzanne had told her the truth in the first place, she would have used another solution and none of this would have happened.
Suzanne says her mother’s going to sue the company for distress and emotional trauma.
I think it’s hilarious.
I know I shouldn’t—Suzanne’s a friend. Although perhaps she isn’t— not quite. A friend stands up for you when you’re in trouble and never goes along when someone’s being mean. Friends put out, is what Zozie says. With real friends, you’re never It.
I’ve been talking to Zozie a lot lately. She knows what it’s like to be my age, and to be different. Her mother had a shop, she says. Some people didn’t like it much, and once, someone even tried to set it on fire.
“A bit like what happened to us,” I said, and then I had to tell her the rest, about how we blew into the village of lansquenet-sous-Tannes at the beginning of le nt and set up our chocolate shop right in front of the church, and about the curé who hated us, and all our friends, and the river people, and Roux, and Armande, who died just the way she had lived, with no regrets and no good-byes and with the taste of chocolate in her mouth.
I don’t suppose I should have told her all that. But it’s quite hard not to, with Zozie. And anyway, she works for us. She’s on our side. She understands.
“I hated school,” she told me yesterday. “I hated the kids and the teachers too. All those people who thought I was a freak, and who wouldn’t sit with me because of the herbs and stuff Mum used to put into my pockets. Asafetida—God, that’s rank—and patchouli, because it’s supposed to be spiritual, and dragon’s blood, that gets everywhere and leaves these red stains— And so the other kids used to laugh at me, and say I’d got nits, and say I smelled. And even the teachers got drawn in, and one woman—Mrs. Fuller, she was called—gave me a talk about personal hygiene. . . .”
“That’s rotten!”
She grinned. “I paid them back.”
“How? ”
“An
other time, perhaps. The point is, Nanou, that for a long time I thought it was my fault. That I really was a freak, and I’d never amount to anything.”
“But you’re so clever—and besides, you’re gorgeous.”
“I didn’t feel clever or gorgeous then. I never felt good enough, or clean enough, or nice enough for them. I never bothered to do any work. I just assumed everyone was better than me. I talked to Mindy all the time—”
“Your invisible friend—”
“And, of course, people laughed. Though by then it hardly mattered what I did. They’d have laughed at me anyway.”
She stopped talking, and I looked at her, trying to imagine her in those days. Trying to imagine her without her confidence, her beauty, her style . . .
“The thing about beauty,” Zozie said, “is that actually it doesn’t have much to do with looks at all. It’s not about the color of your hair, or your size, or your shape. It’s all in here.” She tapped her head. “It’s how you walk, and talk, and think—and whether you walk about like this—”
And then suddenly she did something that really startled me. She changed her face. Not like pulling a face, or anything; but her shoulders slumped, and she turned her eyes away, and her mouth drooped somehow, and she made her hair into a limp kind of curtain, and suddenly she was someone else, someone else in Zozie’s clothes, not ugly, not quite, but someone you wouldn’t turn round to see twice, someone you’d forget as soon as they’d gone.
“—or like this,” she said, and she shook her hair and straightened up and just like that she was Zozie again, brilliant Zozie with her jingling bangles and her black-and-yellow peasant skirt and her pink-streaked hair and bright yellow patent platform shoes that would have just looked weird on anyone else, but on Zozie they looked terrific, because she was Zozie, and everything does.
“Wow,” I said. “Could you teach me that? ”
“I just did,” she said, laughing.
“It looked like—magic,” I said, and blushed.
“Well, most magic really is that simple,” said Zozie matter-of-factly, and if anyone else had said it I might have thought they were making fun of me, but not Zozie. Not her.
“There’s no such thing as magic,” I said.
“Then call it something else.” She shrugged. “Call it attitude, if you like. Call it charisma, or chutzpah, or glamour, or charm. Because basically it’s just about standing straight, looking people in the eye, shooting them a killer smile, and saying, fuck off, I’m fabulous.”
I laughed at that, and not just because Zozie had said the f-word. “I wish I could do that,” I said.
“Try it,” said Zozie. “You might be surprised.”
Of course I was lucky. Today was exceptional. Even Zozie couldn’t have known. But I did feel different, somehow; more alive, as if the wind had changed.
First there was Zozie’s whole attitude thing. I’d promised her I’d try it, and so I did, feeling just a bit self-conscious this morning with my hair just washed and a little of Zozie’s rose perfume on as I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and practiced my killer smile.
I have to say, it didn’t look bad. Not perfect, of course, but really, it makes a world of difference if you stand up straight and say the words (even if it’s only in your head).
I looked different too: more like Zozie, more like the type of person who might swear in an English tea shop and not give a damn.
It isn’t magic, I told myself in my shadow-voice. From the corner of my eye I could see Pantoufle, looking slightly disapproving, I thought, his nose going up and down.
“It’s all right, Pantoufle,” I said softly. “It isn’t magic. It’s allowed.”
Then there was Suze and the head scarf, of course. I hear she’s going to have to wear the scarf until her hair grows out, and it’s not a good look for Suzanne at all. She looks like an angry bowling ball. Plus people have started going Allah Akhbar when she walks past, and Chantal laughed, and Suze was upset, and now they’ve fallen out completely. So then Chantal spent all lunchtime with her other friends, and Suze came to complain and to cry on my shoulder, but I suppose I wasn’t feeling too sympathetic just then, and besides, I was with someone else. Which brings me to the third thing. It happened this morning, during break. The others were playing the tennis ball game, except for Jean-Loup Rimbault, who was reading as usual, and a few loners (the Muslim girls, mostly) who never play at anything. Chantal was bouncing the ball to Lucie, and when I came in, she said, “Annie’s It! ”—and then everyone was laughing and throwing the ball across the room to one another and shouting, “Jump! Jump! ” Another day I might have joined in. It’s a game, after all, and it’s better to be It than to be left out altogether. But today I’d been practicing Zozie’s attitude. And I thought: what would she do? And I knew straight away that Zozie would rather die than be It. Chantal was still shouting, “Jump, Annie, jump! ” as if I were a dog, and for a second I just looked at her, as if I’d never seen her properly before. I used to think she was pretty, you know. She ought to be; she spends enough time on her appearance. But today I could see her colors too, and Suzanne’s; and it was so long since I’d seen them that I couldn’t help staring now at how ugly—how really ugly—both of them were.
The others must have seen something too, because Suze dropped the ball and no one picked it up. Instead I sensed them forming a circle, as if there was a fight in the air, or something extra special to see.
Chantal didn’t like me staring at all. “What’s wrong with you today? ” she said. “Don’t you know it’s rude to stare ? ”
I just smiled and kept on staring.
Behind her, I saw Jean-Loup Rimbault look up from the book he was reading. Mathilde was watching too, her mouth open just a little bit; and Faridah and Sabine had stopped talking in their corner, and Claude was smiling, just a bit, the way you do when it’s raining and the sun comes out unexpectedly for just a second.
Chantal gave me one of her sneery looks. “Some of us can afford to get a life. I guess you just have to make your own entertainment.”
Well, I knew what Zozie would have said to that. But I’m not Zozie; I hate scenes, and part of me just wanted to sit down at my desk and hide myself inside a book. But I’d promised I’d try; so I straightened up, looked her in the eye, and shot them all with my killer smile.
“Fuck off,” I said. “I’m fabulous.” And, picking up the tennis ball, which had come to rest just between my feet, I bounced it—pok!—off Chantal’s head.
“You’re It,” I said.
And, making my way to the back of the room, I stopped in front of Jean-Loup’s desk, where Jean-Loup wasn’t even pretending to read anymore but was watching me with his mouth half-open in surprise.
“Want a game? ” I said.
I led the way.
We talked for quite a long time. It turns out that we like a lot of the same things: old films in black-and-white, photography, Jules Verne, Chagall, Jeanne Moreau, the cemetery. . . . I’d always thought he looked a bit stuck-up—he never plays with the others, perhaps because he’s a year older, and he’s always taking pictures of weird things with that little camera of his—and I’d only spoken to him because I knew it would annoy Chantal and Suze.
But actually he’s OK; laughed at my story of Suze and her list; and when I told him where I lived, said, “You live in a chocolaterie? How terrific is that? ”
I shrugged. “OK, I guess.”
“Do you get to eat the chocolates? ”
“All the time.”
He rolled his eyes, which made me laugh. Then—
“Hold it,” he said and pulled out that little camera of his—silver-colored, and not much bigger than a box of kitchen matches—and cocked it at me. “Gotcha,” he said.
“Hey, stop it,” I told him, turning away. I don’t like pictures of myself.
But Jean-Loup was looking into the camera’s little screen. He grinned. “Look at this.” He showed it to me.
/> I don’t see many pictures of me. The few I have are formal ones, taken at some passport place, all white background and no smile. In this one, I was laughing, and he’d taken the picture at a mad kind of angle, with me just turning toward the camera, my hair a blur and my face lit up—
Jean-Loup grinned. “Go on, admit it—it’s not so bad.”
I shrugged. “It’s OK. Been doing it long? ”
“Since I first went into the hospital. I’ve got three cameras; my favorite’s an old manual Yashica that I only use for black-and-white; but the digital one’s pretty good, and I can carry it anywhere.”
“What were you in the hospital for? ”
“I’ve got this heart condition,” he said. “That’s why I was kept back a year. I had to have two operations and miss four months of school. It was totally lame.” (Lame is Jean-Loup’s favorite word.)
“Is it serious? ” I asked.
Jean-Loup shrugged. “I actually died. On the operating table. I was officially dead for fifty-nine seconds.”
“Wow,” I said. “Have you got a scar? ”
“Loads of them,” said Jean-Loup. “I’m practically a freak.”
And then, before I knew it, we were talking properly; and I’d told him about Maman and Thierry; and he’d told me how his parents had divorced when he was nine, and how his father had remarried last year, and how it didn’t matter how nice she was, because—
“Because it’s when they’re nice that you hate them most,” I finished with a grin, and he laughed, and just like that, we were suddenly friends. Quietly, without a fuss; and somehow it didn’t matter anymore that Suze preferred Chantal to me, or that I was always It when we played the tennis ball game.