On the Advice of her guidance counselor, Hélène chose to specialize in science during her last two years of high school, despite preferring literature and history.
“Students of your ability should always go Bac S,” said Madame Simon as they filled out the forms at the end of tenth grade.
In her junior year, then, she finds herself surrounded by all the bourgeois students, the children of people who know how things work and who planned long ago that their kids would end up in these classrooms preparing to apply for the best schools in the country, aiming for med school…or law school if there was really no other option.
Charlotte chose the same stream, of course, even if it took her father’s intervention to convince the principal, who saw her as more of an economics and social science student.
Charlotte has changed. She’s put on weight, her breasts and hips have grown bigger overnight, and her mother watches her like a hawk now, convinced that she must be raiding the fridge at night. The atmosphere in that big house on Rue des Murmures is not what it was. Charlotte’s older brothers live in Paris and The Hague now, her father works nonstop, and Charlotte has begun to suffer from a curious condition. Every time she gets her period, it’s the end of the world. At first, Hélène thought her friend was just being a drama queen, but the same nightmare recurs every month. Pale as a corpse, Charlotte writhes in bed, sobbing. Her breasts ache. The pain goes down to her belly, spreads to her back, and she feels as if her ovaries have been replaced by big olives. She bleeds too much and sometimes the agony is so bad that she vomits. Nobody knows what to do. Her mother makes her infusions and hot water bottles. The doctors express surprise, but don’t seem to truly believe her, especially the gynecologist, who prescribes acetaminophen and tells her to exercise more. Whatever it is, it’s not going to kill her.
This monthly torture, which transforms her into a delicate porcelain figure, has created a distance between the two girls. Of course Hélène feels sorry for her friend, but it’s a drag, seeing her lying in bed for ages, looking like some ghoul from a horror movie, and having to wait for it to end.
Anyway, Hélène has not felt able to talk to her openly since reading her private journal. She’s started hanging out with other girls—Laurence Lefur, Magalie Conraud, Sonia Hadid—and, while Charlotte still has a place in her heart, she is no longer so central to her life. Their friendship has become less urgent; it has started to feel almost like an obligation, as if the connections they had forged have been replaced by the chains of memory and shared moments. Hélène wonders if her friend is still seeing Christophe, if they still have those hidden hours all to themselves. Sometimes, alone in her bed, she remembers the words in the journal, the ones in red ink, the exclamation points. All this envelops Christophe Marchal in a special aura of mystery and sex, as if he has become a sort of portable idol, associated with silent pleasures and secret encounters. And when she spots him in the playground, or passes him in the cafeteria, her face flushes crimson and she can barely walk straight. Not only that, but the fact that he failed his exams the previous year means Hélène imagines him as someone basic, simplified, a purely physical being. Bizarrely, this reduction enchants her.
The cool thing is that his bitch girlfriend, the haughty punk with the American name, is no longer around to get in the way. She’s gone off somewhere to take her baccalaureate, and good riddance to her. Sometimes Charlotte and Hélène see Christophe passing the smokers’ yard. He’s often alone these days. His friends have left high school and headed off to Nancy, Metz, and Strasbourg, to technical colleges and vocational training courses. And he’s stayed here, with his sweet little mouth, his sherpa denim jacket, and his Vans. He looks like he needs a cuddle. The girls don’t talk about this. For each of them, Christophe is their secret.
One day, by chance, Hélène ends up on the bus with him, on Line 5, the one that goes from the city center to Cornécourt, on the road that runs alongside the Moselle. When he turns in her direction, she makes herself small as a mouse. She has no desire to talk to him. She’s not that interested in the reality. What Hélène loves is staring at him, making up stories about him. Eventually, though, he recognizes her and smiles politely. She blushes so furiously, it’s embarrassing. The next Saturday, she tells her mother that there’s no need to keep driving her to school.
“Oh really?”
Mireille is polishing the surfaces in her kitchen, as she always does at that time, between the end of lunch and the one o’clock news.
“Yeah, I’d rather take the bus.”
“Hmm, that’s new.”
Mireille does not take offense. She dries her hands on a dish towel, which she spreads on a radiator, then carefully folds up her apron.
“All right, then, I’ll give you some money for the fare.”
Mireille has an odd habit of batting her eyelashes very quickly, as if she’s blinking in dazzling sunlight. Arms crossed under her meager breasts, she spends a moment contemplating her only child, sizing her up like a horse dealer: this is her way of loving Hélène, practical, utilitarian. She’s very tall for a girl now, not especially pretty, or rather let’s just say that she’s still at an awkward age, and she’s looked a bit strange ever since she cut her hair short after that vacation she took with those rich folk on the Île de Ré, but she does have very long legs leading up to that giant ass, which she sometimes shows off and sometimes hides, depending on how she’s feeling. Anyway, she’s still shining at school and that’s all that matters to Mireille. At the end of tenth grade, the guidance counselor told her: “Your daughter can go far, you just have to keep pushing her.”
“Can I trust you?” Mireille asks.
Hélène rolls her eyes. This is her mother’s mantra, trust. What does she think is going to happen? That she’ll say no, I want to take the bus so I can have sex with some loser, get pregnant, and screw up my life?
“Ugh, of course, Mom…”
“Oh là là,” Mireille says. “Calm down.”
She isn’t really annoyed, though. In fact, things are not so bad at home. She talks about it with Jean sometimes, late at night in bed. When their daughter told them she wanted to take the Bac S, they were against it at first. After all, Hélène’s best results had come in literary subjects and they imagined her having a career as a teacher, or a notary, maybe even a lawyer if she aced her exams. Mireille, naturally, was hoping for the latter possibility. But a Bac S with two modern languages plus Latin…where would that take her? To them, it is a grand, unfamiliar path, its destination unknown. Only two people in their family have ever been to university, both of them women. One cousin became a teacher, and the other works for the Transport Ministry. Those kinds of careers are easy to understand; you can easily imagine what those people do all day. But all that stuff about advanced math, then business or engineering schools, it’s just baffling. In their anxious minds, those words have started to sound like traps.
“Are you sure that’s what you want?”
They did the prudent thing, trying out every dissuasive argument they could think of. What if the level was too high? She’d be crushed, punished for not knowing her place. Maybe it would be better to choose something more attainable. And then the other students, all those rich kids, would she fit in with them?
“We’re not trying to discourage you. But you can’t go in with your eyes closed.”
Besides, youth is for having fun. What was she going to put herself through in those long, dark tunnels, those years of intensive cramming, sacrificing her life, and for what? Just so she could make money? In the Poirot family, they have long known that money can’t buy happiness.
Hélène hates them for this working-class skepticism, their philosophy of the eternally fucked that makes a virtue of modesty, sees servility as wisdom, ambition as arrogance. Hélène wants it all.
After a few days of hemming and hawing, Hélène’s father ends up taking his daughter’s side. He’s naturally more trusting, something his wife often reproaches him for. And, well, you know what fathers and daughters are like…
From the very start of the school year, Hélène shines academically. Everything seems to come easily to this kid, who gets As in math and in German.
“It’s funny when you think about it,” says Jean.
But her brilliance worries them. They are trapped in the dilemma of parents who encourage their kids, who feel like every step forward their child takes will leave them farther behind. On the station platform, they see the train vanishing into the distance, gathering speed. Sometimes Mireille can’t help wishing she could put a stop to that terrifying acceleration. When Hélène shows off her knowledge, correcting the way they pronounce certain words (“socialisT” not “socialiss,” “eXperience” not “esperience,” and let’s not even talk about English—the way that kid makes fun of them when they try to say “Dirty Dancing” or “Star Wars”), or when she interrupts them or quotes Jean-Paul Sartre over dinner or reads Virginia Woolf in the living room, her mother loses it. Who the hell do you think you are? You think intelligent people despise their parents? Hélène says it’s nothing like that, she just thinks things like the truth, accuracy, and education are important, and anyway she’s allowed to express her opinion, isn’t she? But every time she spits her superiority in their faces like that, she sees something vile in the lower part of her face: the jutted chin, the sneering mouth. Such episodes often end in tears, a slammed door. Betrayal is an ugly business.
Even so, Hélène’s parents are proud, and things are not so bad. And Mireille does not have the words to tell other people what a pearl her daughter is, what a miracle, what a prodigy. At the office, her colleagues grimace behind her back whenever she begins a sentence with “My daughter.” Maître Bienvenue, one of the firm’s partners, told her: “You must introduce us one day to your little wonder…” Mireille felt her cheeks burning. One day, Hélène will belong to this world, she thinks, the world of orders and knowledge, people who casually command others and walk around with a folder under their arm, who laugh at incomprehensible things and act with others like adults with children. This revolts and thrills her.
Jeannot vaunts his daughter’s merits too, although he has fewer opportunities at the wallpaper store where he works, particularly since his brother-in-law’s kid is not exactly a straight-A student. But you should see him at dinner, the way he looks at her when she brings home her grades, those eyes of his like a tamed animal. Where did this creature come from, he wonders. And the words in her mouth, the ideas that pass through her mind, her constant dissatisfaction, her inflexible enthusiasm, that desire to see the world, to distance herself from her roots, that urge that sometimes borders on insult? Where does she go to find all of this?
So when their daughter needs money for a class trip or to buy books, Mireille and Jean do not hesitate. They dig into their savings. They do what they must. It is the terrible work of a parent to give their child the means to flee them.
However, this gradual escape does not happen without a few disappointments.
Hélène’s decision to take the bus, for example. The bus stop is almost a kilometer from home, and she must walk all that way with her schoolbag on her back, at night and in the cold from October onward, and carrying an extra bag on Thursdays, when she has sports. For someone who dreams of strolling through life with her hands in her pockets, this is a real pain in the ass. Every time she sees those privileged little misses turning up to the high school—the ones who are lucky enough to live in the city center, who can get an extra hour’s sleep before coming to classes, who never have to brave the crush of public transport, who can travel light because they go back to the house for lunch anyway, all those bitches with their big, chic tote bags—Hélène wonders if she made a mistake by giving up the daily car ride with her father.
Especially since Christophe, who has been given a scooter, never takes the bus anymore.
So, to kill time during those hours on buses and in bus shelters, Hélène reads. Plenty of classics still—Balzac, Zola, Flaubert. But increasingly, it’s the Americans she is drawn to: Dorothy Parker, Martin Eden, Beloved. Then Perfume, which she devours in three days, so enthralled that she forgets to do her math homework, resulting in a mediocre grade that brings tears to her eyes. Charlotte is green with envy: she worked like a dog and got the same grade. Hélène promises herself she will never let this happen again.
One Morning in November, she arrives at the school just before eight, as she does every day, and immediately senses that something unusual is going on. In the playground, the students are gathered in excitable little groups, all of them staring at copies of the local newspaper. Hélène glances anxiously at these clusters of kids, hands hidden inside the sleeves of her Oxbow jacket. None of this means anything to her, all the more so since she is feeling self-conscious: her jeans are too short, revealing a flash of her fancy socks. She complained about this, but her mother didn’t want to know.
“Your other jeans are all in the laundry basket. You’re growing too fast, that’s the problem—we can’t keep up with you!”
She joins Charlotte in their usual corner, under the bell and near the red ashtray.
“What’s up with everybody?”
“Haven’t you seen?”
“What?”
Charlotte is semi-hysterical too, like she’s just won the lottery or something. She takes the front page of La Liberté de l’Est from her coat pocket and carefully unfolds it.
There’s a photograph of Christophe Marchal, hair drenched with sweat, smile as big as America, with his name in the headline above it.
“He was on the TV news last night too. It’s unbelievable.”
This is how Hélène learns that Christophe scored four goals against Caen in his most recent game. Of course, she already knew—as everybody does—that he has been playing for the first team since he was sixteen, an impressive feat in itself. But until then he has not really shone, and nobody’s talked about him except in terms of the hazing he’s gone through. For his first away game, he spent three hundred kilometers taped to the bus toilet, and when they arrived they had to use a box cutter to free him. But Christophe has proven himself a good teammate and eventually become a regular in the starting lineup. The 1991–92 season ended well too, with Épinal reaching the playoffs for the first time in years and finishing fourth in the D1 championship.
They’re still a long way from the top, but for the first time fate seems to be smiling upon this hardworking, solid little team. At least that’s what it says in the article in La Liberté de l’Est, which Hélène devours that morning. The team’s core players have been working together for the past four years, and there is an almost telepathic connection between them now. In the past there have been some terrible defeats, but this season they seem to have found their groove. The article highlights a friendly game against Megève, during which Épinal was losing all the way through the game but did not give up. Instead, the team continued following its game plan, working as a well-organized unit, before winning the game in the last seconds by nine goals to eight.
The journalist also mentions the fate of Jan Pavlík, the Czech forward who joined the team in 1990. The poor guy played only three games before being diagnosed with testicular cancer. The Saturday after his hospitalization, there was a somber silence in the locker room. Apparently some of the players were in tears, and not necessarily the youngest ones. That night, Coach Villeneuve did not say much in his pregame talk. This wasn’t a Hollywood movie. One of their friends was possibly about to die; he was young, and the father of a four-year-old boy. Under the circumstances, the game they were about to play did not seem very important. None of them felt like goofing around, or even winning. All the coach said was: “Come on, boys.” In the sound of sticky tape being unrolled, a few sniffs, hockey sticks scraping the ground, something took shape.
Now, Pavlík is playing again. He scores in every game, without any big celebrations. He is composed in front of goal, works hard in practice, is focused and conscientious, not very talkative but always smiling. He has become a role model, his impeccable attitude shaming the shirkers who care only about getting drunk after the game. He has brought a professionalism to the team.
Not only that, but Pavlík convinced the club management to hire two of his former teammates, Zlatko Kovar and Bruno Pelc, who played with him in Zagreb before the war. To reach Épinal, they had to travel through Hungary, Austria, and Germany in a Fiat Panda decorated with bullet holes, before finally being arrested at the French border. The club president was forced to abandon his wife and children during their vacation in Juan-les-Pins from July 14 to August 15 so he could rescue the Czech boys from their difficulties. When he saw those two scarecrows, neither of whom had washed for five days, he thought: shit, we’ve been screwed over here. The story spread quickly. At least it was something to talk about.
To celebrate their reunion, the three Czechs went on a three-day bender that climaxed with them swimming naked in the fountain at Place de la Chipotte. And then preseason training began, the dreaded fitness program designed to dust off the cobwebs of summer and build up muscle and stamina. And, right away, the coach sensed that something was happening. In their first friendly game against Dijon, the Czechs proved devastating. Nobody in Épinal had seen hockey like that before: so fluid, so fast. Dijon were completely dismantled. “A Team Is Born,” ran the headline in the Sunday paper.
After that, everything went perfectly. At the Poissompré rink, the supporters were more fervent than ever, and those who had stopped attending games during the past few seasons of mediocrity swarmed back. The press sniffed a comeback story. Sponsors offered money. The VIP seats were packed. And on Saturday night, Christophe Marchal scored four goals in the victory over Caen. This is what everyone has been hoping for: a local boy—someone young, handsome, and gifted—to turn himself into a legend. The people here have so few reasons to be happy: they are miles from the sea and from Paris, God is just as dead here as He is everywhere else, and evenings end at eight o’clock on weekdays and in clubs on weekends.
So, when Christophe—“as seen on TV”—arrives at school that Monday morning, it’s full-on Marchalmania. All the guys want to be his friend; all the girls find him even sexier than before. People want to touch him, hear him speak. He just laughs and scratches his head, but nobody is disappointed. At last the bell rings and he heads toward Building B, followed by half the teenagers in the department. On the way there, his eyes meet Charlotte’s and his smile falters slightly. Charlotte takes a drag on her cigarette, as disdainful as a fallen star.
“What a moron,” says Hélène.
Charlotte doesn’t even bother responding. From that moment on, both girls go to see every game at the rink.
Until Christmas, The Épinal players win most of their games. They don’t rack up huge scores, but they do enough. Everyone knows their strengths and weaknesses. Now that the element of surprise has been removed, the Czechs do not prove quite so irresistible, but they still play a brand of hockey that blends technique with aggression, and the coach knows he can depend on them. The older players bring their experience to the mix, in particular Papeloux, Giovaninetti, and the captain, Anthony Gargano, who—after a brief spell with Mannheim—has returned to Épinal to finish his career. His knees have gone and his back aches constantly, but a few injections and three physical-therapy sessions per week are enough to keep him on the ice. And in the locker room, everyone enjoys his deadpan humor, his concealed kindness. He is better than the coach at shutting up the big mouths in the squad: Madani, Petit, and the Russian goalkeeper Dimitriov, whom nobody really understands but who loves to grumble in Cyrillic. Gargano also knows how to galvanize the troops when fatigue sets in or when they have to get back on the scoreboard after letting one in.
When it comes to scoring goals, the team’s most potent weapon is Christophe Marchal. Nobody knows exactly how the metamorphosis happened, but he has abruptly changed from being a promising but selfish little jerk into a prolific goal scorer whose elusive movements and laser-sharp finishing sometimes bring an awed hush to the rink.
Sadly, the team is already ageing. It is entirely possible that they will end the season by being promoted into the top division, but will they be able to maintain this level of performance?
For all these reasons, the 1992–93 season is unmissable, an epoch of potential greatness that is also a last-chance saloon. The weight of this expectation can be felt at every game. The greater the hope, the greater the devastation if that hope is shattered. When the winter break arrives, Épinal is in third place behind Megève and Strasbourg.
The games that take place during the holiday season always have a special atmosphere. In the middle of winter, the locals seem to flock to Poissompré in search of the warmth they are missing in their daily lives. They are off work, relaxed. They’ve been drinking mulled wine at the Christmas market, and by late afternoon you can see them walking in procession toward the rink, filling the streets, in their coats and scarves and hats, kids running ahead of them and sometimes starting brief snowball fights. When they get there, the strings of white lights that cover the building’s façade are flashing, and the enormous Christmas tree is decorated with baubles of white and gold, the club colors. When Tino Rossi’s voice emerges from the speakers, singing “Petit Papa Noël,” almost a thousand people outside the rink sing along, shivering and red-nosed, stamping their feet to keep warm.
The first game takes place in Épinal on December 20, and their opponent is Strasbourg. Over the years, the local rivalry between the two towns has accumulated a long list of grievances: the usual mix of bad luck, injuries, and refereeing mistakes. The geographical proximity feeds into this, as does the stupidity of certain supporters. Not to mention the habit that Strasbourg has developed of helping itself to Épinal’s best players once the season ends, nor the efforts of the local press to stoke the fires of this two-bit rivalry. In any case, sparks always fly when the two teams meet.
That night, Hélène and Charlotte have managed to buy a small bottle of rum from the local Monoprix and they drink its contents on the way to the game. At the rink, they meet up with a few school friends who are sharing a bottle of plum punch. The two girls link arms, their faces shining in the light from the Christmas decorations. After a while, Charlotte slips away with Fabrice Scandella, and when she returns she has red eyes and a dry mouth.
“What have you been up to?”
“Nothing.”
“Were you smoking?”
“Whoa, chill out, you’re not my mom.”
Hélène refuses to drink when they pass the bottle of punch. She doesn’t like making a show of herself when there are adults around. She can’t help thinking about her parents. It’s annoying, having to be so disciplined, so worried about tomorrow, such a goody-two-shoes. She wishes she could not give a fuck, like Charlotte, or like that slut Caroline Lambert who hangs out with college students in Nancy and goes clubbing every weekend. For her part, Hélène stays strictly on the straight and narrow; not that this prevents her parents from giving her a hard time.
“Come on, don’t sulk,” says Charlotte.
She takes her friend by the arm and nuzzles her neck.
“I’m not sulking,” Hélène replies.
“Could have fooled me…”
Charlotte winks at her, then moves off toward the others. The little gang is growing more and more animated. That idiot Scandella has started singing “We Are the Champions,” and now he’s encouraging people to shout along with him: “Strasbourg! Strasbourg! Up yours! Up yours!” The crowd obediently goes along with this, the kids especially, happy for any excuse to repeat expressions that make their parents frown.
When the rink finally opens its doors, the crowd rushes in and two firefighters have to intervene to calm a few people down. Hélène and Charlotte have managed to sneak in before most of the others and, tickets in pockets, are running to the bleachers to choose their seats. Soon the rows are crammed, and the waiting begins. The whole town appears to be there, everyone looking around excitedly at everyone else.
At last, after a good half hour of this, the players emerge onto the ice to the sound of “We Will Rock You,” amid sweeping searchlights and flashing spotlights. The crowd rises to its feet while the announcer’s nasal voice reads out the team roster. Each player’s name is met with applause and cheers. The bass notes vibrate inside their torsos. When Christophe Marchal’s name is announced over the loudspeakers, Hélène and her friend lose it completely.
“You sound like feral cats,” says Xavier Cuny, the gastroenterologist’s son who already has a car and is famous for eating his boogers in class.
“Oh, shut up,” says Charlotte, looking ecstatic.
“Yeah, shut up,” Hélène choruses.
Xavier Cuny gives them the finger, but the arena is filled with the sound of booing now as the Strasbourg players come out onto the ice. You even hear a few insults—assholes, Krauts, motherfuckers, the usual stuff. Finally, the game starts and time speeds up.
In the third minute, the Canadian player Martial Maxwell scores against Épinal with a perfect shot into the top corner. Stung, the Wolves swarm around the opposition net, but a counterattack by the Schwartz brothers earns the Strasbourg team its second goal, quickly followed by a third, this one scored by a former Épinal player—a guy who had grown up in Épinal, in fact. Gargano’s teammates look stunned. In the bleachers, a sickened resignation has replaced the earlier jubilation and the first break in play comes as a relief. Hundreds of people rise as one to seek consolation at the bar.
“I don’t feel good,” says Charlotte.
“What?”
“I think I’m going to hurl.”
Hélène looks at her friend. She’s pale, hair glued to her clammy forehead, eyes glazed.
“Come with me,” Hélène says, grabbing her hand.
And she pushes her way through the mass of bodies to the restroom, where she pulls Charlotte into a stall and locks the door behind them. Charlotte falls to her knees and, hands gripping the edge of the bowl, pukes up her guts while Hélène holds her hair in a ponytail. When her stomach is empty, she slumps onto the floor and leans back against the plywood divider. Her teeth start to chatter.
Hélène hugs her and says: “It’ll be okay.”
She kisses her forehead, rubs her shoulders and her arms. Charlotte is whining and a trickle of saliva is running over her lips, which have turned a weird pinkish color.
“It hurts,” she moans.
“Your stomach?”
Charlotte does not reply. In the distance, Hélène can hear the muffled roar of the crowd, hundreds of feet stamping in time. The game has started again, but the two girls stay there for a moment without moving, like an egg dropped on the tile floor. Charlotte dozes for a while on her friend’s shoulder, and Hélène feels quite good in their shared bodily warmth, despite the smell of ammonia, the cold under their butts, the general filthiness, and the slamming of other stall doors.
Gradually, Charlotte starts to look better.
“How are you feeling?”
“Okay…I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Thank you,” whispers Charlotte.
They look at each other almost like lovers, both of them thrilled to be close friends again. And even if it doesn’t last, who cares?
In The Final period, Épinal is losing five to one and the crowd goes wild, aware though they are the game is almost up, particularly with Strasbourg defending as if their lives depended on it.
“What the fuck, they’ve got four goalies now!” Scandella shrieks.
Christophe comes on with his two fellow forwards to replace the Czech front line and the supporters barely have time to chant his name before he sends a shot rocketing straight at the Strasbourg goalie’s mask. A shiver runs through the crowd, sickened by the precise thud of the puck, which sounds like it smashes against bone. After a brief interruption, the goalkeeper is ready to play again and the game restarts. Papeloux intercepts, passes to Christophe, he passes to Gargano…goal!
Little more than a minute later, Christophe scores, his shot so powerful it almost rips the net. Five to three. The rink is in uproar, packed to the rafters, the atmosphere pulsing with the crazed, unquestioning aliveness of Saturday nights. But Christophe’s forward line has already been replaced. The Strasbourg players, momentarily disoriented, start to misplace their passes and once again lose the puck. The Épinal coach asks for a time-out. His players crowd around him and examine the drawings he’s sketched in green marker on his little whiteboard. Then he says something to Christophe, who shakes his head. There’s a brief altercation between them, with everyone watching, and in the end Christophe theatrically throws his gloves onto the ice before heading back to the locker room.
“What’s he doing?” Hélène gasps.
“What a dick!” says Scandella.
The crowd can’t believe it. A second before, anything had seemed possible, but now the magic spell is broken and fatigue seeps through their limbs. The supporters realize they’ve been yelling too loud and too long, the players that they are getting old and have nothing left to give. The game restarts, but everyone knows it’s over.
In The Next day’s La Liberté de l’Est, the incident is duly blown out of proportion. Christophe is criticized for his immaturity, his selfishness, his diva-like attitude. At the bar, people wonder who the hell he thinks he is. The insolent little fucker, says the club president, though he smiles as he pronounces these words in what sounds oddly like a tone of pride. Christophe does not apologize, but in the return game, won 12–7 by Épinal, he scores three goals. Thus is born the legend of that almost perfect season, with its bouncing Czechs, the rebellious but gifted young forward, the hard-drinking but reliable captain, a team on the verge of terminal decline and yet at the peak of its powers, going all out to seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
After finishing third in their pool, the Wolves move into the playoffs. There, good luck and hard work enable them to overperform, and despite their modest talent levels they are feared. They beat Caen in the quarterfinals, and Lyon in the semis. Each time, it takes them three games to make it through. In Épinal, everyone is starting to believe. The press has a field day, and some of the players are even asked for autographs out in the street. And then there is the final, against Tours. The Épinal team is audacious and alert in attack, and extremely robust in defense. But Christophe delivers his worst performance of the season. He even gets into a fight with an opposition player and ends the game on the bench after being carded. From there, he watches his team lose. An opportunity missed.
So Épinal is promoted to the top division, but two of its most important players, Gargano and Papeloux, hang up their skates for good, while the Czechs are signed up by Chamonix, Gap, and Reims. The dream ends in all-too-predictable bitterness. Even so, at the end of June the club organizes a party to celebrate their semi-success. All the local bigwigs are there, various town councillors and representatives of the chamber of commerce, the sponsors, and the players of course, accompanied by their families and friends, not to mention the usual freeloaders and a few handpicked supporters.
Hélène and Charlotte, as cute young girls, have little difficulty getting into the party, where they knock back a few drinks while listening to bland thank-you speeches. The club president, however, after making the obligatory polite remarks, gets straight to the point.
“And now, I’d like to talk about the future!”
All the girls in the room are staring at Christophe, whom they have spotted next to the buffet, where he and two of his teammates are quietly plundering the food on offer.
“Next year, the Wolves will play at the highest level. Coach Villeneuve and I are already working hard on recruitment. And I have to say that it’s looking promising. I can’t tell you any details right now, but we have targets in Quebec and the Czech Republic. And other ideas, around Valenciennes in particular. But, most importantly, we are holding on to our young players—including this season’s new star. Is he here? Christophe Marchal. Where is he? I know I saw him here earlier.”
The guests look at one another questioningly and their eyes scan the room, but number 20 has disappeared. In the end, Papeloux goes off to search for him. And Charlotte follows, quickly telling Hélène: “I’ll be back.”
“Sure you will,” says Hélène.
“I will.“
Hélène watches her friend head toward the bathroom. The president’s speech drones on for another minute or two with promises of great victories to come, a few touching tributes, and a toast to the club’s health. Hélène raises her glass along with everyone else, feeling vaguely disgusted. It’s not the first time Charlotte has played this trick on her. She goes outside to smoke a cigarette and sees that her friend’s scooter is no longer in the parking lot.
Walking Back Home, Hélène’s heart is heavy. Five kilometers on foot gives her plenty of time to think. She will turn seventeen a month from now, and her mother is constantly telling her that these are the best years of her life. This does not seem promising for the rest of her existence. As far as she can tell, being a sixteen-year-old consists mostly of being bored out of your mind because you’re not allowed to do anything. And even when her parents do let her go out, she has to be careful, keep an eye on the time. Pretty often her mother will sniff her breath after she comes home from a night out with friends. So, in the end, her pleasure is spoiled by an excess of fear and precautions. She was once grounded for two weeks just for smoking one measly cigarette.
And everything is like that: negotiated, arbitrary, whittled down. Apparently, it’s for her own good. But Hélène no longer believes this. She senses something else behind the tight rein her parents keep her on. As if her mother fears what she might become: a beast, a woman, maybe a rival. Hélène doesn’t make a fuss, though. She doesn’t want to give them the satisfaction. She just slams doors and locks herself in her bedroom to seethe in silence. I’m going to get out of here, she thinks, just you wait and see. One day I’ll be able to do anything I want.
This is why she spends all her time studying, why she’s top of her class in every subject. Because she has a plan: get the best grades she can, then get as far away from this place as possible.
In class, while others crumble under the weight of all their work, Hélène sails through.
“Fuck me, we’ve got math homework, an essay to write, and the whole of the First World War to learn,” Charlotte moans. “Are they literally trying to kill us or what?”
“I can show you my math if you want.”
“Sure, but what about the essay?”
“Well, I can’t write it for you.”
“Are you sure?”
On her report card, the math teacher writes: “Hélène is a machine.” And it’s true. She’s methodical, fast, organized, and she has an unbelievable memory. Her only problem is impatience. Sometimes she finds the teachers mediocre, her parents completely stupid. Now and then, she will sigh so loudly in class that the teacher, busy writing proper nouns or equations on the blackboard, will turn around.
“Is there a problem, Mademoiselle Poirot?”
“No, monsieur.”
“Am I not going fast enough for you?”
“It’s okay.”
“You are not the only person in the world, you know.”
“So it seems…”
“I am going to write to your parents about your attitude, young lady.”
Hélène’s attitude has already been brought up during the third-quarter parent-teacher night, and it is the reason she did not receive the best possible grade for behavior. Madame Collard, her French teacher, did everything she could to screw up Hélène’s student file. She reproached her for her arrogance and described her and Charlotte as disruptive to the harmony of the class, and even “subversive.” The two girls were thrilled by this last word, giggling over it for days. They found out about it from another teacher, who summoned Hélène to her office. Madame Clair is a small, round woman with very long hair who sometimes wears a tie and almost always a hideous, copper-buttoned blazer. She teaches math to the Bac S students, and is so highly qualified that the school allows her to get away with certain eccentricities, such as playing the musical saw in class, or forcing rowdy students to stand on their desk with their hands on their head. Anyway, she really likes Hélène.
“You know, I come from a very modest background too.”
Hélène grimaces. She hates it when adults look at her as if seeing their own youth reflected back at them.
“For the competitive exam, you need a solid student file. Madame Collard is nuts, she’s hysterical. I’m going to make sure she doesn’t cause you too many problems. But you absolutely must stop behaving that way in class.”
Hélène rolls her eyes.
“Yes, that is a very good example of the kind of behavior I’m talking about.”
Madame Clair summons her on several occasions to her shabby little brown-and-yellow office full of moldering archives, far from the agitation of the school itself, almost in the basement in fact. At ten in the morning, when a beam of spring sunlight shines through the window, Hélène can see half a century’s worth of dust shining golden in the air. Each time, her stomach writhes in anxiety as Madame Clair closes the door, sits down, and confides in her.
“I had incredible abilities too, you know. I finished second in the national schools competition.”
Forty years later, she harps on about this almost-success and various others—taking the exam for the École Polytechnique, a brief appearance on the TV game show Des Chiffres et des Lettres—before discussing other frustrations: her difficulties with the administration, the growing stupidity of students, her aching feet. But the most important thing is that Hélène has a promising future, and she refuses to see it ruined. She also insists that Hélène should enter the national schools competition. Hélène does not see the point.
“It will be good for your student file,” Madame Clair tells her, almost pleading.
Of course she understands that Hélène is bored, that she finds adults lacking and life too constrictive. And the copper buttons on her sleeves jingle in the pinkish-gold rays of that April morning.
“You’re right,” she says. “This place is too small for you. You’ll be better somewhere else.”
She simpers, sad-eyed, like a spaniel. Hélène promises to behave better and, in the privacy of her bedroom, continues to work hard every day, pursuing her studies with a seriousness that only increases as her friend gets on her nerves, as her parents bore her to tears, as boys seem more and more like a total waste of time. Hélène sinks into the consolation of effort. She normally starts with memorization—history, languages, the long lessons—but things stick in her mind as soon as she hears them and she has no difficulty reeling off dates and definitions, German vocabulary and grammar. Then she moves on to the sciences. In addition to the problems and exercises that everybody has to do, Madame Clair also gives her a few little treats that will not be on the curriculum until the following year. Integrals, derivatives, vector geometry.
“Whatever you do, don’t get sucked into their nonsense about computers and calculators. This is where math happens,” she says, tapping her forehead with an index finger.
Hélène takes an almost physical satisfaction from all of this. The possibility of establishing some kind of truth in this ill-conceived world is not only a comfort, but a pleasure. When she reaches the end of an equation, by calculating a derivative or by tracing a curve on graph paper with the tip of her Criterium, and at last comes up with an irrefutable answer, she feels euphoric. The temporary solidity of mathematics becomes her refuge.
Sometimes her mother finds her working late at night, bent over in the light from her desk lamp, hair scraped back in a ponytail. She sits on the edge of the bed, close to her, and watches.
“What are you doing?” Hélène asks.
“Nothing.”
Mireille is prey to contradictory feelings: admiration and anxiety, a mother’s amazement at seeing her baby become this tall, self-conscious teenager with a woman’s hips and a child’s reactions, with her fiery Mary Magdalene hair and her bitten nails, who lazes around in bed and has ambitions to go to a grande école, who quotes great writers and still can’t manage to put her dirty clothes in the laundry basket, whose vocabulary is stuffed with obscure words and who sniffs her T-shirts to decide whether she can wear them for another day, who sometimes eats noodles with her fingers, her mind elsewhere, and who stretches like a cat at the end of a meal after wiping the sauce from her plate with a slice of bread, a kid who wants high heels and the pill. She watches her, caught in a mix of hopes and fears.
Because both she and Jeannot know they cannot do much more for her. They act as if they can, but in reality they can’t make decisions for her anymore. They are reduced to trusting her, crossing their fingers, hoping that they’ve brought her up right and that this will be enough.
Adolescence is premeditated murder, planned long in advance, and the body of their family as it used to be already lies dead by the side of the road. Now they must reinvent roles, accept new distances, to deal with the horror and the sudden kicks. The body is still warm. It twitches. But what used to exist—childhood and its tender moments, the unquestioned reign of adults with the kid at its center, cocooned and protected, vacations in La Grande-Motte and family Sundays at home—all of this has died. It will never come back to life.
So Mireille watches her daughter. She envies her, resents her, she wishes she could touch her. The love inside her hurts. She thinks: little idiot, my love, stupid numpty, my darling, who do you think you are, don’t leave us. She is so proud. Letting go is so hard. Her eyes well with tears. Oh great, this is all she needs. If only she could go back in time, follow the thread to its beginning. When Hélène was ten, six, three. Even before that: her little body wobbling on two feet, the tiny robot with a runny nose, the voice repeating each word, the chubby little fist holding the spoon and banging it against the tray of the high chair, the gap-toothed smile, the wrinkled nose, that other Hélène who was all hers.
“Are you working?”
“Yes,” her daughter replies.
“That’s good.”
The Year Passes, easy and painful at the same time. Naturally, Hélène passes her baccalaureate with flying colors. In the written section, she chooses to do the literary commentary on a boring Julien Gracq text and is given a score of seventeen out of twenty. At the oral exam, she gets Baudelaire’s L’Invitation au voyage, and the astounded examiner asks her: “What do you plan to do after your exams?”
“HEC Business School.”
“Ah…Well, I’m going to give you eighteen anyway.”
Charlotte doesn’t do too badly either: twelve for the written test, seventeen for the oral. The school year is over, just in time. In May, Hélène played hooky for the first time. Her academic abilities saved her, but the truant officer explains to her that life doesn’t work that way. Arms crossed and chewing gum, Hélène barely listens. The truant officer holds the trash can in front of her and she spits the gum into it. He knows her type: super smart, already looking way past school and regarding her classes as supermarket aisles, taking whatever she likes and forgetting the rest. In five or six years, Hélène will undoubtedly earn more than he does. This does not make it any easier for him to admonish her.
That year, Charlotte did not invite Hélène to go on vacation with her family to the Île de Ré, and that’s good too. They have been a little cold with each other since Charlotte left her friend in the lurch at the hockey party so she could sneak off with Christophe. And then Hélène got a job at a summer camp for young musicians. In the mornings, the kids have to practice their instrument, and in the afternoons they do the usual camp stuff: pony rides, rock climbing, archery, swimming in the Serre-Ponçon lake. She’s heard the camp is full of little geniuses, rich kids who are often a little eccentric but very affectionate.
In the meantime, she is preparing for the big post-exam blowout. Charlotte has heard about a party organized by seniors near the Stade de la Colombière, in the hills just outside Épinal. The two girls have decided to attend. When Hélène talks to her parents about it, they pretend to give her permission, but the truth is that they have no choice: if they told her she couldn’t go, they know perfectly well she would sneak out anyway. And they can hardly tie her to the bed.
“You will be careful, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Protect yourself.”
Hélène rolls her eyes.
When the big day comes around, Charlotte turns up thirty minutes late, looking gaunt, her shoulders slumped, shoulder blades sticking out like cuttlefish bones.
“What’s up with you?” Hélène asks, grabbing her motorcycle helmet.
But she already knows the answer.
“I ache all over. It’s like someone’s stabbing needles in my belly. Honestly, I almost didn’t come at all.”
“Have you taken anything?”
“Advil.”
“You’d better not drink.”
“I don’t think I’m even going to stay.”
Mireille spies on this scene through the half-open shutters. Jean goes over and kisses her hair, caresses her arm. Below them, the scooter whines as it stutters into life. Hélène’s parents watch as the two girls ride off into the distance, narrow-shouldered, long hair flying from under their helmets. Mireille feels very old. Her husband tells her it’ll be okay, and this irritates her. Of course it’ll be okay. It couldn’t be any worse than this.
The girls ride through Cornécourt, deserted at that time of day. Already the setting sun is blurring edges, turning streets an oily golden color. It’s one of those aimless weekday evenings when everyone stays home, enjoying their yard or watching the local news on TV, waiting for the winning lottery numbers to be announced. When a traffic light turns green, only one car sets off. Some young morons on a motorcycle have begun their usual patrol and, on the highway in the distance, the girls can hear the sound of 750cc engines, those catastrophic satellites that orbit endlessly around small French towns. Meanwhile Hélène and Charlotte continue sputtering toward their destination. On the back of the scooter, Hélène smokes a cigarette. Her heart feels so light. The school year is over and she has a week of total laziness before she leaves for the summer camp. She will do nothing but read and wait, masturbate whenever she feels like it, maybe go for a bike ride now and then, or go into town to see what Charlotte’s up to. Together, the two of them will chill out on the terrace of Le Commerce, maybe head over to the skate park, share the usual complaints about how little there is to do in this shitty town. But Hélène isn’t fooling herself: the future is wide open and just up ahead. And that evening, her chest is filled with the glory of an unending dawn.
A half hour later, reality slaps her in the face.
Charlotte, doubled over in pain, says: “I can’t handle this anymore. I’m leaving.”
Hélène is pissed. They’ve only just gotten here, and it took them ten minutes to find the place where this party is supposed to happen: a crappy soccer field surrounded by remnants of woodland with, at one end, an unimpeded view of the town’s less salubrious neighborhoods. For now, there are only about fifteen high school kids drinking beer and trying to light a fire. Apart from Nirina, a tall girl in her English class, and a few vaguely familiar faces, Hélène doesn’t know anyone there.
“Well, I’m staying,” she says.
Charlotte stares at her for a moment, disappointed. Tiny beads of sweat are visible on her pale forehead. With a sigh, she slowly straightens up.
“If you see Christophe…” she begins.
Hélène tries to remain impassive. That pathetic secret, which has been between them for so long. But Charlotte changes her mind.
“No, forget it.”
She just raises the seat of her scooter and grabs the six-pack of beer inside it.
“Here.”
“Thanks.”
Another moment, looking at each other, not saying anything.
“Well.”
“Yeah.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
Hélène watches her friend ride away, wobbling over the bumpy ground, half bent over with pain. Then she carries the six-pack over to where Nirina is standing.
Two hours and five beers later, Hélène drunkenly begins wandering from group to group, can in hand, feeling pleasantly lethargic, sweatshirt tied over her shoulders, barefoot inside her sneakers. She’s happy. She feels free, enjoying this perfect little interlude, when the year is over and all that remains of it is this suspended moment, this temporary island of neutralized summers, days of pure relaxation, no kids, no worries, no wrinkles, nothing but her summer job and those two months of largesse that we think will always come back. Against the velvet canvas of the high sky, she sees constellations glinting only for her. Head thrown back, mouth open, teeth exposed, she feels like she could eat the whole universe. Her stomach would hold it, that’s for sure.
Around eleven, Christophe turns up with his friends on motorcycles, the usual gang of macho show-offs, making too much noise and acting like the kings of the world. From a distance, Hélène watches them as they laugh around the fire that the others finally got burning between two cinder blocks. There’s a hint of contempt in the way she looks at them, but behind it that other desire still pulses. The flames redraw Christophe’s face in thick black and bright lines, and he becomes a sort of miniature sound and light show, with laughter, the sound of engines roaring and fading as people come and go, the rotating shadows that seek and sway. She finishes her beer, then makes a decision and heads straight for Christophe.
“Hi.”
He turns to her, surprised, his friends snickering, but Hélène doesn’t care.
“Can I talk to you?”
“About what?”
“A thing.”
The boy turns to his friends, who feel they have the right to be even more stupid than usual.
“Who’s that?”
“Does she want some sugar?”
Christophe shrugs and nods, though, and they walk off, leaving the taunts and monkey noises behind them. Hélène shivers slightly, although it’s not really cold. After a while she feels the back of her hand touch the boy’s skin and that sensation goes straight to her heart.
“So where are we going?”
The girl stands still. A little dazed, she turns to face him.
“I wanted to tell you…”
They are standing at the edge of the trees now, far from the others, reduced to two vague, faceless shadows. Her heart is pounding inside her chest. She swallows.
“Charlotte had to leave,” she says.
“What?”
“Charlotte. She wasn’t feeling well.”
“Ah.”
She needs to do something now or she will miss the boat. He’s there, so real. All it takes is some courage.
“She had a stomachache.”
“Okay.”
Two seconds longer, then the boy takes a step to the side. Hélène grabs his arm and kisses him randomly, her lips finding only his chin. Without a word, he frees himself and she’s left alone with nothing but the memory of her ridiculous move. Already he’s rejoined his friends around the fire as it dances in the perfect night, silhouetting images that she will never forget. Hélène hears their laughter and the crackles of the blazing wood. Tomorrow she will be seventeen. The best years of her life.