The First Time Christophe sees Charlie, he’s in ninth grade and she is being slapped in the face.
She has just arrived at the Collège Louis-Armand in Cornécourt in the middle of the school year after being expelled from a private school in the city center and, from the start, she has made no attempt to disguise the fact that she considers herself far superior to the rest of them. It’s obvious in the way she walks, the company she chooses, the way she stares at the little kids around her, the way she almost always walks into class with her hands in her pockets.
There are few distractions at that small-town school and no sooner has Charlie come through the gates than she is the center of attraction. Since she was born at the start of the year and she is having to repeat ninth grade, she is sixteen years old and she looks so much more rebellious than her classmates, with her bangs and gray eyes, her swaggering air, the Converse sneakers she wears even in winter, and her black bomber jacket lined with orange canvas. Within days, the rumors are rife. It’s said she was expelled after being caught in a toilet stall with a school monitor, or because she was selling hash, or because she insulted a teacher. It’s also said that she had a fight with a guy who pulled her ponytail on the stairs. It took three people to drag her off him and the guy broke his coccyx when he fell. That very word, “coccyx,” seems to hover above the girl’s head like a heroic, disturbing halo.
She always sits at the back of the classroom, often alone, slumped on her chair or asleep with her head on her crossed arms. Seeing her like that, so young, so female, so masculine, so dangerous and pale, Christophe can’t help wondering. Even the teachers appear worried about her, as if hoping she will be rapidly transferred to another school, one better suited to her needs. Marco quickly notices the curiosity Christophe feels toward this unusual creature, and he is happy to share his own opinion of the new girl.
“She’s a bitch,” he says. “And she’s full of herself.”
The first time Christophe sees Charlie probably coincides with her first day at Louis-Armand, although it’s hard to know for sure. Memory is capricious, and easily overtaken by legend. Anyway, she is facing Monsieur Juncosa, a monitor in his early forties who wears burgundy blazers, creepy transparent pedo glasses, and loafers with a small metal crest on the side, and who has made the surveillance of middle school kids his life’s work. The ink stains on his back testify to the way those kids feel about him.
Christophe spots him lecturing Charlie in the playground and, even if he can’t hear him, he can easily imagine his tight-assed voice and his verbose vocabulary, because Monsieur Juncosa likes to use words such as “flagrant” and “contravention.” Abruptly Charlie frowns, wrinkles her nose, and says something that makes the monitor’s face turn pale. That’s when he slaps her hard in the face before striding away, rummaging in his pockets, and finding nothing to help him. After that, he will never go anywhere without a box of Tic Tacs.
That’s how Charlie is: a trouble magnet. Over time, it always finds her. And if she ever gets bored of waiting for it, she does something to bring it down upon her. She seems to be constantly on the lookout for walls she can crash into. Christophe is still only fourteen and when he looks at her, he feels tectonic movements inside his chest, over which he has no control at all. Often, it feels as if these inner quakes will smash his body to pieces. At hockey practice he loses his ability to focus. He thinks about Charlie all the time. She is present, like background music, even when his mind is elsewhere. At home in the evenings, he is miserable as sin, refusing to set the table, neglecting his homework, and sitting there in front of the TV like he’s taken too much Xanax. At dinner, his mother asks him why he’s not eating and he doesn’t even bother answering. What a pair of sulky teenagers they are, he and Julien.
“Well, this is cheerful,” says Sylvie as Gérard slurps down the remains of his soup.
One day in November, after a particularly soporific math class, Christophe stands next to one of the windows on the fourth floor while he waits to go into German, his forehead pressed to the glass, and drifts into bitter thoughts as he looks down at the ant-like children below. Greg is there too, looking far less despairing, even if he is equally bored by this endless afternoon that will come to an end only after two hours of history and geography. Christophe sighs. And then he sees Charlie walking across the playground. Fucking hell, even from above, she looks bigger than everyone else. He watches her quick, warlike march, her legs like compasses, her ponytail swinging, the Gotcha bag slung over her shoulder. He is powerless to resist.
“All right, let’s go,” he says.
“Huh?”
“Come on.”
Greg doesn’t need a second invitation. He hurtles downstairs after his friend. Unlike Marco, who has an English class at that moment, Greg is not annoying or jealous. And since his parents run a bar and he often steals from the cash drawer, his pockets are always stuffed with money. Consequently, when Charlie dives onto a Line 11 bus, it is Greg who coughs up for two tickets so they can follow her.
Christophe quickly spots her. She’s sitting by the window at the back, headphones covering her ears, watching the landscape flash past. He wonders where she will get off. Greg wonders the same thing.
“How far are we going?” he asks, one hand hanging from a ceiling strap as his body sways gently from side to side.
“I dunno.”
“And what are you planning to do? Ask her out?”
“Shut up…”
The bus moves through pedestrianized streets, across the covered bridge, out toward Saint-Laurent, and as it gradually empties it becomes harder to disguise their voyeuristic presence. Finally, Charlie stands up and her gaze passes over them unseeingly. Leaning against a handrail, she waits for the bus to sigh to a halt. The doors open at last and she jumps off, leaving the two boys standing there like idiots, too cowardly to follow, watching meekly as she enters a bar on the street corner, Les Mousquetaires. They get off at the next stop and walk back toward the bar. Outside the door, Christophe hesitates. Neither of them is old enough to go into a bar. Thankfully, Greg doesn’t care about stuff like that. He lights a cigarette and opens the door, as if this is his parents’ place. Christophe has no choice but to follow him.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen!” the bar owner calls out.
There aren’t many customers, so the owner was always going to notice them. He is a middle-aged man in a V-neck sweater and a striped shirt that make him look like a catalogue model. Greg orders a coffee and a glass of water, and Christophe says, “Same.” Through the serving hatch behind him, the boys can see a smoky game room where customers armed with pool cues are coming and going amid the clicking of balls and the electric clatter of pinball machines. They drink their coffees and wait. Then Greg climbs off his stool.
“Come on, let’s take a look,” he says.
“Where?” asks Christophe, already anxious at the fact that he’s under age.
Without answering, Greg walks around the bar and, impassive as a gunslinger, pushes through the saloon-style swing doors to the game room. Christophe smiles at the bar owner, swallows his saliva. Then he in turn gets off his stool.
“Hey, young man…”
The teenager freezes, already imagining the worst—police, parents, scandal—but the man just gestures to the wallet Christophe has left on the countertop. He gives an awkward little laugh and picks it up.
“Thanks.”
Of course, the owner knows full well they are too young to be there, but since his bar is halfway between two high schools, one public and the other private, he sees youngsters coming in all the time, pretending to be older than they are. Occasionally he will ask for an ID, just so he can say he’s done it, but he can’t spend all day checking people’s birth dates and he would soon ruin his own business if he did. There aren’t enough drunks in the area to keep the bar in business, so he’s dependent on these high school kids ordering flavored beers and coffees, playing a bit of pinball and smoking a lot of cigarettes, chatting and flirting, with their long hair, scrunchies, and duffle coats. For twenty years he has been watching them with unruffled stoicism, the teenagers unvarying from one generation to the next, always making out, cramming for tests, yelling at one another, messing around. Making one drink last three hours while they put the world to rights. But from his observation point, the world does not seem to change that much. His customers are always seventeen years old and worried about their exams. The owner of Les Mousquetaires turns on the TV and lights a cigarillo, only his second of the day.
Christophe, meanwhile, has just discovered the miniature Las Vegas of the adjoining room: three pool tables, a flashing, beeping electronic dartboard, and an equally noisy Gottlieb pinball machine. A handful of high school students and a few older men stand nonchalantly around, cues in hand, cigarettes dangling from mouths, their voices curiously muffled by the green felt covering the walls. On the bar tables, half-empty glasses jostle for space with blue cue chalks and enormous Johnnie Walker ashtrays.
Christophe goes over to Greg, who has expertly assembled the red and yellow balls inside the triangle on a pool table. Straight from the break, he sinks a red in one of the side pockets. Two others follow before Christophe gets a turn. But Greg signals to him. Charlie has just appeared, accompanied by a cute blonde girl with a doll-like face, very long hair, and a black leather jacket, her hands invisible under its sleeves. The two girls walk past without glancing at anyone, almost in slow motion. All of this is engraved into the boy’s memory: the light, Charlie in profile, her bangs, the perfect line of her face, her cool indifference, the flashing stars on the pinball machine behind her, and the cheerful ding-ding of darts thudding into the electronic board.
“Have you got a cigarette?” Christophe mutters to his friend.
“You smoke?” Greg asks, surprised.
He does now.
The girls go through the swing doors, then stop at the bar. The blonde asks the bar owner, who is her father, to give them two diabolos and they start chatting half-heartedly, looking totally bored, taking care to not even touch their glasses. Charlie is so pretty, and so obviously couldn’t care less about how pretty she is, that Christophe would be willing to jump out of a fourth-floor window to get her attention. In the meantime, he takes a drag on his cigarette: always a good option.
“So, are you going to play or what?” Greg asks.
“Yeah.”
But he doesn’t. He has moved to get a better view through the serving hatch. He is separated from Charlie by maybe three meters, but it feels like the other side of the world. And then their eyes meet. A glint of mischief in the girl’s look. He could swear she smiles, even though not a single muscle in her face moves a millimeter. Christophe blushes. It was hardly anything, just a glimmer in her eye. And yet it will last him twenty years or more.
That Moment In the poolroom has various effects on the boy’s existence, some happy, some less so. First of all, his schoolwork becomes suddenly insignificant. And he wasn’t exactly a diligent student beforehand.
Next, he begins to cultivate a space inside himself where he can nurture his secret thoughts and obsessions, stuff he won’t talk about to anyone, not even Greg and Marco. To start with, Charlie occupies that entire space, especially in the evenings when he is in bed with his headphones.
Lastly, hockey becomes an absolute necessity, a chance to purge his emotions, a release valve, and the source of big ambitions. Until then, what he liked most was skating, the feeling of speed, seeing his friends, getting away from his family. But now that Charlie rules his heart, everything has changed. Christophe needs to shine, and since he can’t really depend on his academics for that (not that she would care if he did), nor on his guitar-playing, hockey is the most obvious outlet. Christophe decides to become an elite athlete. He wants to play for the French national team, and one day perhaps go abroad to play in Germany or Canada.
The whole family joins him in this fantasy of sporting glory. He and his brother set up hockey goals at the back of the garage. That’s where he has shooting practice when he’s not training at the Poissompré rink. Pretty often, the pucks hit the back wall and leave a mark in the insulation panels. His father comes down occasionally to check the damage by sticking his finger into these tatty wounds, frowning and muttering.
“Oh là là! I don’t believe it. You’re destroying the house.”
But he still lets them play.
One day, Julien has the idea of fastening saucepan lids to the top corners of the goals. The longer Christophe trains, the more often he makes those stainless-steel discs sing. It’s muscle memory: he must bind his body to the puck’s trajectory, repeating the movements so many times that they become subconscious, intuitive, drawing an unswerving line from his gaze to the nets. And during these hours of training, Christophe tells himself, over and over, the same dramatic stories of impossible comebacks and last-second goals. Inside his skull, crowds of strangers stand up and shout out his name.
Sometimes, Sylvie will come down in her bathrobe to watch her sons, the big one in goal and the younger one shooting. Her two boys…She blows on her herbal tea, smokes a cigarette, and—after reminding them yet again to be careful, because they don’t want to end up at the emergency room—she goes back upstairs.
On the ice, however, things are not so easy.
“Head up! Look around! Look!” the coach yells.
Squatting on his heels, Gargano explains things to the players gathered in a circle around him. With a finger, he draws shapes and patterns above the ice. He tries to teach them dummy moves, combinations, vision.
Now and then, Christophe has the feeling that he’s grasped some secret element of the game, and for a minute or so everything seems clear. Reflexes click into place, every movement makes itself, and, briefly, he feels like he could practically play with his eyes closed. But it is always a fleeting sensation, a momentary grace that is stolen away almost immediately, like a word on the tip of your tongue that vanishes before you have time to pronounce it.
In the winter of 1989–90, the players’ parents spend a weekend organizing a small tournament in Morzine. Christophe and Marco make the trip, but Greg—who has dislocated his shoulder—stays home. The competition features six teams, among them the impressive Chamonix and Grenoble. Monsieur Müller, the recently elected mayor, rents vehicles to transport the players, among them his son Lionel. He takes the Mercedes MPV for himself, while Christophe’s father finds himself driving the far less sexy Fiat Ulysse.
It’s a six-hour drive to Morzine and by the time the Fiat arrives, the Mercedes has already been there for twenty-five minutes, which naturally results in a certain hostility between the people emerging from each vehicle. Not only that, but they have to play Morzine right away and the kids, who have spent the trip listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and No One Is Innocent while stuffing themselves with candy, are all on the verge of puking. They head out onto the ice in a daze, irritable, sullen, almost shivering, while the local families boo them for a laugh. Monsieur Müller and Gérard Marchal know they’re in trouble even before the team has finished warming up, and any remaining hope is soon killed by the seven goals they concede in the first period.
In the locker room, Gérard tries desperately to galvanize the troops, but his B-movie speech goes down like a lead balloon. The players want only one thing: for this to be over as quickly as possible. When Christophe stands up to go to the bathroom, Madani deliberately leaves his stick lying across his path. So Christophe smashes it in two with his skate.
“Hey, what the hell’s wrong with you?” yells his father.
“You son of a bitch…” hisses Madani.
The game continues amid an atmosphere of crumbling team spirit, ending with a score of 16–3. A thrashing.
The players are off duty for the rest of the day, and they take advantage of this by sitting at the edge of the rink, vaguely watching the other games, smoking cigarettes when the adults’ backs are turned, and losing their temper over the smallest slights, to the point that they almost come to blows on several occasions.
For dinner, the mayor of Cornécourt has negotiated a set meal with the hotel management: a starter of grated carrots, a main course of roast pork with noodles, and chocolate mousse for dessert. Around the table, the morning’s animosity has not faded. You can feel it in the air like gas fumes and, confronted with this ambience of prepubescent aggression, Gérard and the mayor decide to keep their spirits up. The former orders a bottle of Burgundy and the contents disappear so quickly that the latter asks the waiter for another one. The two of them are soon in a very good mood, two men making the most of the moment, just as they should, agreeing on pretty much everything: the benefit of sports for young people, how the Left and the Right are as bad as each other. Monsieur Müller ran for mayor as an independent, something he explains repeatedly to his dining companion, although naturally that position does not mean he lacks convictions. He needs people like Gérard on his team—sensible people well-known in the area. Christophe’s father is flattered by this entreaty and clinks his glass against his new friend’s. Then the two of them, with Carolingian expressions and a sparkle in their eyes, contemplate the table where ten exhausted young boys are sullenly stuffing themselves, looking about as athletic as a tapioca pudding.
“We should get them to bed, don’t you think?”
“Let’s have a digestif first,” suggests Gérard.
“With pleasure!”
Christophe is Sharing a double room with Marco, who falls fast asleep without even brushing his teeth. He stands in the bathroom, staring at himself in the mirror. This is a new habit. In his own room, he spends a considerable amount of time examining himself from every imaginable angle. Thanks to all the physical exercise he does, he has manufactured a pretty good body: a V-shaped torso, muscular shoulders, thighs that are practically like a man’s. On the other hand, he’s not a fan of the zits that cover his jaw and the sides of his nose, and he squeezes them one by one. Leaning on the sink, he considers his reflection. He thinks about Charlie. About how badly his team played earlier that day. About his dad and Monsieur Müller. About fat Marco in the room next door. He finds all this abruptly depressing.
In the shower, the hot water crashes down on his head and shoulders and he starts playing with himself with his right hand, hardly even aware of what he’s doing. At least this way, he can end the day with a pleasant feeling. His dick gets hard very quickly, as usual, the veins swelling, the balls retracting, and Christophe closes his eyes to summon the best images. All that time he spends sniffing out sex at the newsstand, in magazines like Lui and VSD, a pair of tits, preferably big ones, an ass, ideally in a G-string, and the aisle of X-rated movies at the video club where he and Marco go to rummage around, giggling, the two of them belching weakly as they point out the dripping covers, the full-frontal images, the intimidating size of those mutant dicks, black or pink, all of them scary, this whole disgusting and magnetic display, and yet the desire keeps drawing him back, the beast inside him insatiable. He and his friends watch the VHS videos that Greg’s dad hides in his nightstand. Greg even took out his cock once, couldn’t help himself, and the other two yelled at him, What the fuck, are you crazy or something? In privacy, though, they’re all the same, just wild animals, dreaming of women in fragments, constantly hard, the victims of urges that make them act like morons and always end in the same way, a sudden emptiness, the bleakness of paper towels, once the desire has passed and nothing remains but the shame of the open magazine and their sticky fingers. And then two hours later: rinse and repeat.
Christophe would never dare think about Charlie when he touches himself, though. For him, sex and emotion are still separate things. Love is a sort of bromide, and Charlie remains on a pedestal, reduced to perfection, an untouchable dream.
So, there in the shower stall, Christophe puts together the pieces of a jigsaw-puzzle woman…Let’s say she lives in the house next door, wears a silk bathrobe with a dragon on the back like on those René Chateau covers, let’s make her older, huge breasts, a redhead, or maybe a brunette, he’s not sure about that, but he sees the deep shadow line of her cleavage, her throat, how soft and enveloping she looks, it’s coming, he speeds up the movement, and just then there’s a knock at the hotel room door.
He turns off the water and quickly dries himself while the knocking continues. When he opens the door, he finds himself face-to-face with Madani, Monsieur Müller’s son, and Michael Santander, all of them red-eyed and in their boxer shorts standing outside the door to his room.
“What do you want?”
Madani has already shoved him inside and the three visitors crowd into the entryway while Santander closes the door behind them.
“Your father can go fuck himself,” spits Madani, grabbing him by the back of the neck.
Christophe isn’t sure how to respond to this somewhat enigmatic witticism. The intruders are clearly drunk, and all three are older than him. So he doesn’t resist, only holds as tightly as he can to the towel tied around his hips. Madani squeezes his neck.
“You understand?”
Behind him, his two stooges are blinking in the fluorescent light. They are dry-mouthed and they instinctively turn their eyes from the light, looking like they have been dragged there against their will.
“Maybe we should go,” suggests Santander.
“Shut your mouth!” Madani barks.
In a single movement he yanks away the towel. Christophe stands there completely naked, hands covering his crotch, at their mercy. Madani clumsily attempts to knee him in the balls, then grabs Christophe by the throat and slams him against the wall. The small painting hung on the wall goes crashing to the floor, where it breaks into pieces. The carpet is now covered with shards of glass. Christophe looks at the mountain landscape lying at his feet, its narrow sky and craggy peaks, its reassuring hideousness in which he can make out the tiny figure of a chamois staring into the distance. He feels Madani’s fingers dig into his throat.
“Let me go,” Christophe grunts, grabbing his attacker’s wrist.
Madani gives him a little headbutt. But he and his friends don’t really know what to do now in this brightly lit entryway. Their revenge mission is losing momentum. Christophe is still naked, defenseless, ridiculous, on the verge of tears.
“Well…” says Müller. “I think he’s got the message…”
Madani raises a hand and slaps Christophe hard across his temple. The blow is so violent, so unexpected, that his two sidekicks look startled.
“All right, that’s enough,” one of them says.
But Madani’s mind is made up. This time, he’s going to hurt him. His resentment has been festering for a long time, imprisoned inside a jar of self-control. With his free hand, he is now trying to grab his victim’s genitals, while Christophe—dazed, eyes glistening—does his best to evade him.
“Stop it,” he gasps.
Madani does not stop. A strange desire is visible in his eyes. It’s a pathetic sight: the wriggling naked body and that hand fishing for its most vulnerable part. Christophe’s fear grows. He tries to catch the eyes of the others, who look as helpless as he feels. There’s no heckling anymore. Something definitive is about to happen.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
Marco has just appeared in the hallway, still half-asleep and wearing pajamas.
“Fuck off,” hisses Madani.
Marco sniffs. He’s over six feet tall, in his Red Bulls tank top. He sizes up Madani, looks at the two stooges. Then, throwing his head back, he starts to roar:
“Aaaaaarrrrgggh!”
“Shut up, you dick!” shouts Madani, suddenly panicked.
But Lionel Müller has already opened the door and is bravely slipping away, quickly followed by Santander.
“AAAAARRRRGGGH!” yells Marco, mouth wide open, neck tensed, like a hunting horn.
Voices are audible in other rooms, recriminations.
“What’s going on?” someone shouts.
“You’re a lucky little fucker,” says Madani, giving Christophe a little slap on his forehead before escaping.
The two friends stand there in the room’s entryway while, in the distance, they hear stampeding feet and muffled laughter, followed by a conversation between an angry adult and some boys trying to play it down. Christophe grabs the towel with one hand to cover himself and Marco locks the door.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
Then the noise outside fades and the two boys go to bed without a word, in that boxlike hotel room.
“Good thing you were there,” says Christophe in a low voice.
“No problem.”
Soon the only sound is the rustling of sheets, the other boy’s breathing, close by. Christophe listens to the strange silence that has fallen between them and that feels like a sort of waiting. His panic has gone, and gratitude has filled the space left behind, a soft and generous gratitude that rocks him like tiredness.
“Hey…”
“What?”
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” Marco replies.
It must be late now. Their voices are mere whispers, the brushing of skin against the velvet of insomnia.
“I was totally freaking out.”
“I know. Get some sleep.”
And Christophe reaches out with his hand, through the gap between their beds.
“Hey,” he says again.
The mattress groans as his friend shifts his weight. Marco’s hand finds his. And they stay like that for a moment, in the silent hotel.
The next day, Épinal will lose to Saint-Gervais and Orléans. On Sunday they will be defeated by Megève before narrowly beating Grenoble. On the trip back, Christophe will pretend to sleep. As for Marco, he will always keep, in a drawer at home, a matchbook bearing the crest of the Hotel Alpina in Morzine.