When she is thirteen years old, a boy French kisses her at a party. Over the moon at being chosen, she applies herself until her tongue aches and her lips are chapped, but soon enough she gets bored. She writes him passionate notes that go unanswered, blind to the discrepancy between her enthusiastic words and the tension in her jaw.

 

She is very close to her sister, who is three years older. On some nights she helps her sneak out of the house, distracting their parents at the crucial moment while her sister slips from the piano to the front door. She wakes up when her sister comes home, cuddling up in her bed to hear about the evening; the tricks used to get into a nightclub despite being underage; the other girls’ outfits, the boys; the hookups and breakups, the excuses of the heart.

 

She takes drama classes, and gradually develops a passion for the theater, telling anyone who will listen that she’s going to be an actress when she grows up. Onstage, she can have a thousand faces; she doesn’t have to pretend a thing. She throws herself wholeheartedly into the role of another person; she embodies herself. Onstage, she experiences an intensity and a clarity that she cannot find anywhere else, but which is nothing more, perhaps, than the warmth of being alive.

 

She doesn’t collect words anymore; now, in her ancient Greek class, she learns to analyze them, to follow their roots, which are tangled up with the history of mankind.

One day, stunned, she suddenly understands the meaning of pedophile. Someone who is friends with a child. A phrase that bursts violently back into her memory, a phrase like a punch in the gut, a phrase the wrong way around. A phrase uttered by the man in the stairwell.

I am your friend.

 

She wants to smash apart her desk, burn the dictionaries, scream out how words lie—but this time, as so many others, as quickly as the fire roars up inside her, she tamps it back down. She is too frightened by these instances of sudden rage to spend time trying to understand them; she stifles them as soon as they appear and then hurries to the kitchen or the nearest bakery, to smother them between two slices of bread.

Though she knows, now, that some things mean the opposite of what they claim to mean, she doesn’t yet wonder why someone would choose to use precisely those words.

 

During the Easter holidays, her family takes a vacation to the recently reunified Eastern half of Germany. They spend a day at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and as she reads the survivors’ accounts, the comforting illusion that malice and brutality are specifically masculine crumbles and falls away. Reading only about the wars waged by men in her school history books, she has naively shielded herself from violence by considering it an exclusively masculine domain. At Ravensbrück, the tales of the cruelty and perversity of the female guards make her blood run cold. Maybe it isn’t Satan whispering those filthy ideas in her ear, after all—maybe she is really Satan, herself.

 

Sometimes, sitting silently on her bed, legs stretched out in front of her like foreign objects, she studies this body of hers perplexedly, pinching it as if the pain will prove that it really belongs to her. She doesn’t recognize it.

And often, when her mind is on something else, she sees him. He’s on the floor a few meters away from her, a pile of detached body parts. These images don’t frighten her; she doesn’t question them or wonder about them. She simply copes.

 

During PE, her body weighs her down. She hates the taste of blood in the back of her throat when she runs; she hates her flushed cheeks; she hates it when her mind is too overwhelmed with physical sensation to think of anything else. She almost never manages to catch a pass; when she sees the ball coming toward her, she freezes. In dance class, her mind is so often elsewhere that she can never memorize the choreography, so she slips to the back of the class where no one will see her copying others’ movements.

When they go out to the athletic field—I should mention that this is a private Catholic school where girls make up the vast majority of the student body, and the few male students are treated like demigods—on the edge of the Bois de Boulougne, it’s usually the same two or three exhibitionists who come and expose their cocks to the rows of young girls.

On those days, she prays that there won’t be an endurance race; that the teacher won’t start the class with an embarrassed muttering of Okay, okay, okay, finish the race, all the way now, just don’t look. Because then, with every stride that brings her closer to them, imagining their eyes on her, imagining them because she can’t see them, because her gaze is firmly fixed on the ochre-colored ground of the track, she feels dirty; so dirty, her flushed skin sizzling, signaling it to everyone, to them, the ones licking their lips. Here comes the first curve; she hasn’t raised her head, it’s a major achievement that she’s even still breathing. She passes in front of them; she can feel, all over her body, their menacing eyes their hard hands their sweaty penises, but they haven’t moved, they’re still on the other side of the fence. She keeps running; she feels like she’s moving in slow motion, like she has to wrench the soles of her shoes off the ground. Another curve; she hates her thighs for trembling so much, for giving those men something to watch, and the further away she gets, the more easily she can breathe. Another curve, and another, and it all starts over, going past them again and again. Soon she can’t feel anything at all anymore, and she wonders how her legs can keep running without her.