On the first day after winter break, at recess, Denise met me in the staircase. We still didn’t know what was behind the door at the top of the stairs, but by that point I’d given up on even checking the lock. I didn’t even go all the way up anymore and had taken to sitting at the bottom of the stairs, to be closer to where Denise would be.

I asked her how her Christmas went, what gifts she’d gotten, but she said she didn’t want to talk about it, as if something horrible had happened, except I was pretty sure nothing horrible had happened to Denise over Christmas break other than being at home with her parents—whom she thought were stupid, who maybe were (she complained they often wore matching T-shirts stating their star signs)—and being forced to eat more than she wanted.

“Isn’t there one thing you like about Christmas?” I asked her. “One food?”

“As far as meals go, I only tolerate breakfast,” Denise said, which would’ve been understandable if she’d been talking about a real breakfast with lots of bread and butter, but I knew she meant fruit and eggs. I knew that was all Denise ate, and that she would only eat it in the mornings, sometimes for lunch if she really had to, but she didn’t understand dinner. Dinner was for her the most useless thing because she said we didn’t need energy before bed. I didn’t know how anyone could elect not to have dinner. I sometimes thought dinner had in fact only been invented to give people a reason to go through the day.

“I don’t know what I would do with myself at night if dinner didn’t exist,” I said.

“That’s because you’ve been raised with dinner as a convention. And you’re a conformist. All children are.”

I took this as an insult but then I realized taking the word conformist as an insult was the most conformist reaction and so I let it slide.

“Did you watch the New Year’s TV movie this year? On Channel One?” Denise asked.

I said we never watched French TV movies in my family. “My brothers and sisters are strongly anti—”

“Right,” Denise said. “I forgot you came from people of taste.” She wasn’t being sarcastic. She didn’t know anyone in my family but for some reason assumed we formed a perfect inverted model of hers, of which she was the only child and the only intelligent member (I wondered if that made me, to her mind, the only dumb member of mine).

“We watch stupid American shows all the time,” I said, to make my family sound more normal.

“Anyway, my parents obviously make me watch the Christmas special every year, and it was really bad once again, but guess what?”

I couldn’t possibly have guessed what Denise would say next.

“Do you remember those videos they showed us in fourth grade?” she asked, knowing I would. “With the kids who’d never seen the ocean?”

“Of course I remember,” I said, a little too enthusiastically. “I didn’t think anyone had paid attention to those videos but me.”

“You did put a lot of money in Miss Faux’s jar back then,” Denise noted.

“You saw me?”

“Everyone saw you. You must’ve dropped like thirty coins in there. Slid them in the slot one at a time, all solemn, like you were saying a little prayer after each coin drop.”

“I wasn’t,” I said.

“You really wanted those kids to see the ocean, I guess.”

Denise was making fun of me. Her mood that day indicated school had just started again. She was always slightly less depressed after school breaks, because she felt she’d broken free from the “parental yoke” and experienced a rare sense of lightness, “like when you bike downhill after a tremendous effort going up,” she’d once explained. The feeling usually subsided by the third or fourth day back.

“Well guess what?” Denise repeated, serious again. “One of the actresses in the Christmas special, the star of it, actually, I swear to God, she was in that video. She was one of the ‘poor kids’ seeing the sea for the first time.”

“Which one?” I asked. “Juliette?”

“Juliette,” Denise confirmed.

She didn’t look surprised that I would remember not only the faces but the names of the kids in the charity video, but I still felt I had to justify it.

“Juliette is actually the only one I remember,” I said. “I had a little crush on her.”

“Me too,” Denise said, and it caught me so off guard that I pretended both our confessions had overlapped and I hadn’t heard hers.

“So she’s famous?” I said. “That’s nice. I bet she’s able to see the ocean whenever she wants to now.”

“You’re not following me,” Denise said. “I think Juliette was never a poor kid who hadn’t seen the ocean. I mean, I guess at some point early on in life, she was, unless she was born on the beach like those turtles or something, but anyway, my point is: I think those videos were entirely scripted. I think the kids in the videos were all fake. All actors.”

“I don’t buy it,” I said.

“You should look her up online. Juliette Corso. You’ll see.”

I went up the stairs to check the door. It was locked.

“It says she was already an actress four years ago?” I asked, and Denise said yes, that she’d spent a while doing research on Juliette these past few days.

“Maybe both things are true,” I said, coming back down the stairs. “Maybe she was a child actor and had never seen the sea, and the charity helped her and her little brother.”

“I guess it’s possible,” Denise said.

I’d often wondered what had happened to the kids in the Let Them Sea video. Despite my donation, I was ambivalent about their work, the work of one-time charities in general, as opposed to the charities that helped people, the same people, over and over, for as long as they needed it. Of course, the one-time charities left you with a memory to cherish, you got to have something for a little while, but then you had to pass it on for the next guy to enjoy, and I couldn’t tell whether it was easier to live without something you’d never experienced or experience it once and go back to living without it. I hoped for the kids in the videos that they’d gotten to see the sea again and again, not just that one time. I realized I hadn’t seen the sea myself since the father had died. It made sense that the father’s being dead meant we would never take a road trip again. My mother hated driving.

“So you like girls?” I asked, because I wanted to think about something else.

“I don’t like anybody,” Denise said.

I decided it was time to focus on school and getting smarter. My German had reached a plateau that year. Herr Coffin was less encouraging than he’d been, even though I was still among his best students. One day after class I decided to speak to him directly, ask him if he thought I had what it took to be a German teacher. I’d never talked to any of my teachers one-on-one before, the way my siblings had done since kindergarten. I believed only great students were allowed to stay in the classroom after the bell to chat with teachers while they packed their satchels. I believed details about the day’s lesson were discussed, points of view exchanged, extra reading suggested. But then in junior high I’d started seeing kids even dumber than me linger around after French or math hours. Did they think they were smarter than they were? Why did teachers allow their five-minute break between classes to be wasted on mediocre students? What did they have to say anyway? I’d asked Simone what she thought about this and she’d said that “regular kids” were only interested in talking about themselves, so she assumed the only reason they went to a teacher after hours was to seek advice about their future in a way they believed to be humble but was in fact a conspicuous play for attention, a way to verify they’d been noticed in spite of their lack of academic promise. “Even worse than that,” Simone had said, “they talk to a teacher in the hope that the teacher’s detected something unique about them. They know they suck, but they’ve been told everyone has a purpose in life, so they want to find out what theirs is. They think teachers have the means to decode the particular ways in which a student sucks and make them correspond to a career path the student should engage in. They think their sucking at something automatically indicates they’ll be good at another thing.”

I didn’t think I fell into the category of students Simone had described. I didn’t suck at German, and I was planning to go to Herr Coffin with a reasonable question, not for a pat on the back. I wanted his honest opinion. As I walked toward his desk, though, after everyone else had left the classroom, I became nervous about what Herr Coffin would say. What if I didn’t have what it took to be a German teacher? What else was I remotely good at?

“Herr Coffin,” I started, and I stopped awkwardly right there because I didn’t know if I should address him in German. He spoke French and allowed it in class now sometimes, when we did translation from German texts into our native language, but still. I would make a better impression, given the question I wanted to ask him, if I put it in German. Or would it just sound like I was trying too hard? As far as I knew, no one had ever stayed beyond the bell to talk to him. There was no precedent for me to refer to. I tried German.

“Herr Coffin,” I started again. “Denken Sie, dass ich einen guten Deutschlehrer werden könnte?”

Herr Coffin looked over his glasses at me.

“Is that what you aspire to?” he replied, not in German. He seemed to be trying to make sure I wasn’t pranking him. “Are there any other lines of work you’re considering?”

“Just German so far,” I said.

Herr Coffin looked down at his satchel like I’d just delivered very sad news.

“When did you know you wanted to be a German teacher?” I asked him.

“Me?” Herr Coffin said after realizing there wasn’t a third person in the room, genuinely surprised, it seemed, to be asked a personal question. “I never wanted to teach,” he said. “The vocation of teaching is a rare and precious thing. In thirty-seven years of teaching, I have only met a handful of passionate professors.” He paused there, as if to pay them a silent tribute. “The majority of my colleagues, though, are only passionate about the German language, the way I was. The way I am,” he said, correcting himself immediately.

“So, what is it you wanted to do?” I asked.

“I love German. I wanted to know everything about German, every subtlety, every possible double entendre. I wanted to read Schlegel all day,” he said, assuming I knew what he was talking about, “his own writings as well as his translations of Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and understand why he translated a certain thing a certain way and not another, figure out when it was that the sounds a German sentence made became more important than a word-for-word translation—”

“So you wanted to be a translator?” I said.

“No, not exactly. I just wanted to study, to keep studying. But it is a mistake to think that teaching a discipline is another way to keep learning about it.”

Talking to Herr Coffin was starting to feel like talking to a sister.

“I’m not a good teacher,” he added.

“I think you’re great,” I said.

The silence that sat between us at that point was made even more awkward when we heard one of my classmates, out in the hallway, distinctly call another a “fissured anus.” Herr Coffin played deaf and went back to his satchel.

“I don’t think I am really passionate about German,” I admitted.

“Good,” Herr Coffin said. “Then maybe you’ll like teaching it.”

The only practical advice I got out of Herr Coffin as I inquired about ways to improve my German was that I should look for “conversation partners,” people who were fluent and would help me catch the rhythms of daily German and bask in its melodies.

“School makes you believe one needs years and years of classes to learn a language when what it really takes is a few months’ immersion,” Herr Coffin had said. “Immersion will forge an internal compass inside your brain,” he’d added, moving his index finger left and right in the air to illustrate compass in a way that looked a lot more like metronome. “When the time comes for you to craft a sentence in German, the compass will tell you immediately if you’re heading in the right direction.” Herr Coffin hadn’t offered to be my conversation partner, though, and now that the father was dead I didn’t know anyone who spoke German, so I decided to place an ad on the Internet.

It seemed, however, that all websites that put you in touch with other people were dating platforms. Even those that advertised their goal as “building a stronger community” had pictures of romantic sunsets or older couples holding hands. Some were very specialized, targeted at businessmen and young women who never wanted to work, for instance, or at widows and widowers. At Calvinists, even. I thought maybe the proportion of Calvinists who spoke German would be greater than that of the general population, but the Calvinist website was for dating only, and I didn’t want to date a Calvinist. Not that I had anything against Calvinists, but I’d been told they were serious people, and I didn’t want anything serious. I wanted to focus on my studies.

I picked the website with the sunset. I had to create a profile first if I wanted to see anyone else’s. While I was at it, I thought it would be a good idea to look for “conversation partners” for Aurore as well (she still couldn’t drag herself out of the house). And for my mother too, maybe. By “conversation partners,” I meant boyfriends of course. I set up a profile vague enough that it could work for all of us.

GENDER: n/a

SEEKS: men/women, friendship/casual/lifetime partner/love/conversation

AGE: undisclosed

FIELD OF WORK: other

CARE TO SPECIFY?: humanities

HOBBIES: indoor activities

SMOKING: occasional

DRINKING: occasional

SAY A FEW WORDS ABOUT YOURSELF [200 MAX.]: Hello! Guten Tag! Looking for bilingual friends (German, French) for conversations, and a boyfriend between ages 25 and 60. I would like to meet you if you like talking about life and books, if you speak German, or if you just want to have a good time. I have a yard and a big house. I have no pets but they are welcome if you have them. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Once our profile was set, I started browsing through the people listed in our zip code. Only one person had mentioned speaking German in his profile, and it was Herr Coffin. Herr Coffin was seeking a life partner to have glasses of wine and take strolls with along the river on the weekends. I tried to picture him as a stepfather. I broadened the search to include the five zip codes adjacent to ours—there was a button just for that. While I reviewed the profile of a potential candidate for Aurore, I got my first alert. A red heart-shaped icon with a white envelope drawn inside it started beating in the right corner of the screen. I clicked on it. It was from Alex79#69, the first person I’d added to my favorites (you had to click a thunderbolt icon under the description someone had written of him- or herself if you liked it). “Hi,” the message said. That was it. I said hi back and Alex79#69 responded, “are you a boy or a girl? yr prfile is confusing.”

“Girl,” I said, with Aurore in mind—Alex was a twenty-eight-year-old man, too young for my mother. “24 years old. PhD in history.”

“Wow,” Alex79#69 said, and then he didn’t say anything more.

OscarOscar showed more interest when I told him about Aurore’s academic achievements in first person, but then out of nowhere sent this: “would kill mother 4bj rite now.”

“do you speak german?” I asked OscarOscar, just to make sure I wasn’t letting an opportunity go, though I guessed if he’d been of German descent, he would’ve called himself OskarOskar.

“if u blow me good, i speak all language u want,” he responded.

I decided to call it a day on the conversation partner hunt and looked up pictures of Juliette Corso, the destitute/child actor girl from the charity video, instead. Juliette had her own website but the Let Them Sea campaign was not listed among her “works.” It was a pretty short list, actually, a couple TV movies, one commercial for a soda I had never heard of (the commercial had only aired in Belgium), and the movie Denise had seen her in over Christmas break. Her bio said she was from Clermont-Ferrand but had moved to Paris the year before to pursue her acting career. There was mention of her having a dog but nothing about a little brother.

Simone watched me struggle over math homework one evening and reminisced out loud about how easy life had been when she was in my grade.

“I thought every grade was easy for you,” I said.

“I’m not talking about the work,” Simone said, “but about the decisions that had to be made behind the work.”

“What decisions?” I asked.

“Exactly,” Simone said. “My point exactly. You’re in eighth grade: you have no decision to make. You can just do the homework and not question whether you like it or not.”

“I know I don’t like it,” I said.

I thought our conversation would end right there but Simone had an image she wanted to share with me.

“We’re all in this funnel, see?” she said, and she grabbed my notebook and drew a funnel on a new page. “Here you are,” she said, drawing an X at the top of the funnel and naming it Dory.

“Here I am.” She drew another X a little lower down the funnel.

“What does the funnel represent?” I asked. “School?”

“The funnel represents our lives,” Simone said. “The possibilities, the choices.” She put her pen to where I was on the drawing. “When you’re born, you virtually have an infinity of options, you get to swim at the top of the funnel and check them all out, you don’t think about the future, or not in terms of a tightening noose, at least.” She pointed at the bottom of the funnel. Then back at the top again, at the X that represented me. “You think, if anything, that the future will be even more of that, get you more freedom, more choices, because you see your parents pushing your bedtime farther and farther and you think, Well that’s swell, you think it means being an adult will just be super, but then little by little, you get sucked to the bottom. You don’t realize it at first. It starts with the optional classes you elect in high school. More literature or more physics? Should you start learning a third foreign language or get serious about music? And then choices you could’ve made for the future get ruled out without you knowing it, and you sink down to the bottom faster and faster, in a whirlwind of hasty decisions, until you write a PhD on something so specific you are one of twenty-five people who will ever understand or care about it.”

“PhDs are not the only option,” I said.

“But they’re the slowest possible way down the drain,” Simone said. “They buy you time, they allow you to believe for a while that the amount of specialization of your thesis verges on some kind of universality—and for the best academics, it does, or at least I want to think so—but then in the end it doesn’t matter how brilliant you are, or that you think you can apply that brilliance to other areas of research: academia has already confined you to the one field you picked years before. That’s why Aurore is all depressed. Aurore is reluctant to go there.” Simone pointed at the neck of the funnel and made an X for Aurore right at the threshold.

“Isn’t everybody?” I said.

“Don’t be so sure, Dory. Some people enjoy being trapped. Some people need it.”

The sound of her own words, or the thought of what she was about to say next, made Simone declare we were on to something and she requested that I start recording our exchange for her biography.

“I was working,” I said.

“Let me repeat myself: what you do in eighth grade is of zero consequence.”

“That’s not what you used to say when you were in eighth grade.”

“Well, I know better now. Trust me. That’s the whole point of having a big sister.”

I took the Dictaphone out of my desk drawer and pressed the REC button without even checking whether I wasn’t erasing a previous interview. I didn’t think I would really write Simone’s biography, and the little part of me that thought I actually might also suspected that when the time came, my memory would be of more help than Simone’s half-true recollections and funnel theories anyway. She cleared her throat.

“I think my biography should start with me gazing through the car window on our way back from summer vacation,” she said.

“When you were practicing melancholy?”

“Right.”

“I never really understood what you meant by that.”

“Practicing melancholy meant looking at everything lying in front of me as if it were already belonging to a distant past.”

“Okay.”

“And making up stories in my head of highly unlikely futures. Trying to remove myself from the present at all costs. It’s like the opposite of meditation, in a way.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I still do it.”

“Why?”

“As an exercise. To boost my imagination.”

“You can’t work on your imagination if you’re in the present?”

“Well, to some extent, sure, you can. But you don’t have that much control over the present—say, the weather, or what other people around you will do. You mostly go through the motions, you know? The possibilities are limited. There’s too little room for analysis and most important, too little room for improvement, which is the key to all art.”

“Do you have to imagine sad things to work on your melancholy?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Why do you call it practicing melancholy then?”

“Because what goes on in your head when you step out of the present is always richer and more satisfying than what you come back to when you’re done. That’s the sad part. That’s what’s at the core of melancholy, not the things you actually imagine. The present is disappointing in a way that you can’t act upon while it’s happening. But once you’ve made a memory of something, you can throw away the meaningless parts and write better versions of it.”

“Like Don Quixote?”

“Well I don’t have that kind of imagination,” Simone said sadly. “But sure. Yes. Don Quixote doesn’t imagine sad stuff most of the time. When he thinks he’s being knighted by the innkeeper, for example, that’s not sad.”

“I haven’t actually read it,” I said.

“Anyway. Most people find it sad that someone would think the present so mediocre that they’d be eager to retreat to a life that is only a figment of their imagination, which is what melancholics do. That’s why they, like you, equate melancholy with sadness, but they’re wrong. Practicing melancholy and being sad are two very different things.” She paused there, before adding: “Also, being in the present sucks because there’s always something sort of annoying going on in your body, whereas if you think in another time dimension, the body becomes less of a problem.”

“What goes on in your body that annoys you?”

“Don’t get me started.”

“What does all of this have to do with the funnel?”

“Everything has to do with the funnel, Dory. We all have to go through the funnel and abandon things on the way down, and I want to be careful about what I leave behind. Lately I noticed I don’t devote quite as much time to my imaginary conversations as I used to. It made me realize I’d gone farther down the funnel than I thought.”

“Is that what you were crafting in your head on the car trips back home? Imaginary conversations?”

“No. The car trips were for imagining implausible futures. Or whole life stories for the people in the other cars. I had the imaginary conversations to fall asleep. I used to have a dozen of them going, and every night, depending on my mood, I’d pick one, rehearse it, polish it…that was the best way to fall asleep. I miss that.”

“Why don’t you do it as much as you used to?”

“I don’t even know. That’s my whole point. The funnel takes things away from you before you know it.”

“Who were your imaginary conversations with?”

“That’s a pretty private question.”

“Don’t you think the readers of your biography will want to know?”

“Well. There were quite a few different types of people. Real people, I mean, people that I knew, famous people, people I made up entirely…Some conversations were aspirational and some pure fantasy. Some I just worked on for a few days—they had to do with world events, you know, like, when they planned new reforms on the education system a couple years ago? I imagined a whole debate with the president on this. I knew the chances I would meet the president on my way to school the next day were pretty slim, but still, I imagined I would, and wrote a whole argument in my head, to be prepared when I did. A pretty powerful argument, as I recall. Some conversations were more plausible, like, when I had a frustrating teacher? A teacher I was smarter than but who pretended not to notice? Well, I imagined a whole conversation where I crushed him in front of the whole class. It was very satisfying. In my head, I had a conversation with Mr. Mohrt every single night of ninth grade, or close to it. I spent so much time on that one I’ll probably remember it on my deathbed. Just talking about it now I have whole portions rushing back to my head.”

“What about the people you made up? Were they like imaginary friends?”

“No, of course not. That would be sad.”

“Who were they then?”

“Interviewers, mostly.”

“Many?”

“Just two different ones. I mean, I didn’t invent much about them to be honest, they were basically faceless, we didn’t have conversations per se, they were just there to interview me. I’d pick one or the other, again, depending on my mood. One of them was just there to make me look good, ask the questions for which I had cool and smart answers. And the other one was more of an opponent, you know? I could just lash out at him and verbalize everything I thought was wrong about the world. They were both a great way to work some of my thoughts out.”

“What kind of interviewer am I?”

“You don’t challenge me much.”

“So I’m the first kind. I’m here to make you look good.”

“Both my fake interviewers made me look good. Those are imaginary conversations I’m talking about. I’m always going to have better arguments than the other guy.”

“Always?”

“Yes, I don’t think there really is a way around that. I tried not to make it too obvious for a while, to leave the other one a chance to say something as smart as me, but it’s hard to be a hundred percent fair in an imaginary conversation, you know? It’s like when you play both parts in a chess game because you can’t find a partner.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I joked. Simone didn’t get it was a joke.

“Right? You’d think because it’s your brain playing both sides, it’s going to be hard picking which side you’d rather see winning, but then as the game goes on, you develop a fondness for the way you’ve been playing on one side of the board rather than the other. And I mean, of course you’re always going to win the argument or have the best lines in your imaginary conversations. What would be the point otherwise? You’re creating them for yourself, for your own personal use, so they should empower you a little. That’s why people have them.”

“You think everyone has them?”

“They have to. With their bosses, wives, everyone. Fictional characters.”

“Dead people?” I asked.

“I don’t know about that,” Simone said. “I tried once. I think there’s not as much satisfaction in it if there is no hope at all that you’ll get to actually have the conversation with the person at some point.”

“What dead people did you try with?”

I thought she would say the father but she said, “Romain Gary.”

The only imaginary conversations I’d had had been reenactments of real ones gone bad, like the one I’d had with Sara Catalano at Daphné Marlotte’s 111th birthday party when she’d called me a perv. I never invented from scratch. What I did sometimes to fall asleep, instead of inventing conversations with actual people, was to make up extra dialogues in the movies I loved. I often imagined having a part in them. But it was hard to write myself in and keep the movies good, so I tried to have a secondary role, minor but efficient, to not alter too much of the plot. I would only be there to change a small little thing that would make the main characters happier. Like, in Return of the Jedi, for example, I was a rebel who’d been made prisoner on the Death Star, and I’d managed to escape from my cell during the panic ensuing from the first rebel-fighter hits on the station. On my way out, I saw Luke dragging dying Vader to safety, and I helped him out with that. Instead of leaving Luke and his estranged father to have a rushed last exchange on the deck of the imperial shuttle, I managed to hurry them on board and save Vader while Luke flew us away from the Death Star. After we landed on Endor, I let them both have the space and time they needed to really make peace—they had a lot to talk about, and it seemed that the few seconds Luke and Vader had been given in the real version of Return of the Jedi didn’t nearly cover everything. While they caught up, I just rested and lay on the grass and looked at the stars, and then when they were done, Luke took Vader and me to the Ewok party, and introduced me to Han and Leia, and then since Leia needed her own time to process the Vader situation, I meanwhile tried to make friends with Han. Han sort of sized me up; he felt a bit threatened (I looked good in the movie), but then I made a few jokes, told him my story, and proved myself to be a nice guy who was just happy to chill after everything he’d been through, and who, if Han wanted, could become a lifelong friend and would never put any moves on his lady. THE END. I say “THE END,” but it was in fact never the end. I got caught up in my dialogue with Han Solo sometimes, and started to write a whole backstory for my character, added him to scenes in the previous two episodes, making room for him to potentially appear in the next ones if there ever were any. Maybe it was as Simone said when she talked about her imaginary conversations and how it was impossible not to keep the best lines for yourself: I guess it was hard, even with my intention to not ruin the shape of the movie, to be such a minor character. But what if my presence in the movies I rewrote in my head made the movies bad? Of course I’d be the only one to know, yet I still felt guilty reshaping perfectly good movies by joining the cast, so I started imagining that the movies could all exist as they were, with all the twists and action the audience needed, while I ran a parallel world where little things could always be adjusted and the characters I loved would come for a while and rest, away from the drama and the tears. It had always seemed unfair to me, the amount of complications and bad luck that writers stuck my favorite characters with. And I understood it had to do with Aristotle’s rules of fiction etc., but still. If I’d cheered and felt sad for a character, he automatically had a place in my parallel world of movies where nothing traumatic ever happened.

That winter, Denise finally lost someone. She couldn’t wait to tell me. Because it was her grandmother who’d died and not someone young, she said it was not such a big deal and fell “within the natural order of things,” but still, she’d been fond of the old lady and was going to put all she had into her eulogy.

“You should come,” she told me. “The funeral is Thursday.”

“I can’t skip school,” I said.

“You skip it all the time to run away to Paris or whatever,” she said, and she was right. I just happened to not be as interested in attending funerals as she was.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

We were at the school cafeteria. Denise had taken up the habit of joining me there, even though she never ate anything. She said she only ate in the mornings, but I think some days she skipped breakfast too.

“You should eat a little before gym class,” I said. I knew her schedule. “Have a bite of my rice.”

“Why would I do that?” Denise said. “I’m fat enough as is.”

“You’re the skinniest person I have ever met.”

“Well, I know I’m not fat relative to the others,” she said. “But I’m still fatter than I’m comfortable with.”

“Don’t you want to have tits and stuff?”

“Am I your girlfriend now? What do you care if I have tits?”

“I’ll come to your grandmother’s funeral if you eat some of my rice,” I said.

“My parents tried blackmail,” Denise said. “Doesn’t work.”

I knew I wasn’t putting enough heart into convincing her. My mind was elsewhere. It seems to me sometimes, when I look back on it, that all I wanted to do in eighth grade, whenever I sat anywhere, was to readjust my boxer shorts, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it casually, the way other boys did, reaching down there unapologetically for quick positional fixes and scratches. Since my conversation with Aurore, I’d been constantly checking my penis for bumps and depressions, but it didn’t seem like Rose had given me any of the sex diseases I’d read about on the Internet. I didn’t really know when I could stop looking for signs and consider myself out of the woods, though. It had been four months.

“Tits…,” Denise said. “What would I do with tits anyway? I get why some girls want them. I mean, Sara and Stephanie, they carry theirs well, you know? It’s not disgusting or anything. But me? What am I supposed to do with tits? Lean against the lockers and wait for a boy to notice them? I don’t think so. No. Doesn’t suit my personality. Tits are not for everybody.”

“My sister says personality is a myth,” I said.

“Which one?”

“All of them,” I said. “All fake.”

“No, I meant, which sister?”

“Oh. Simone,” I said.

Denise only knew my sisters from a distance, of course, like most people, but unlike most people, she had no trouble keeping track of which sister thought or had said what, while even teachers who’d had them all in their classes one after the other talked about them like a three-headed entity, sometimes asking me in a hallway to congratulate Aurore for an article Berenice had written, or telling my whole class how my sister Aurore Mazal had once shared with her own grade incredible mnemonics for the Napoleonic wars (mnemonics that encompassed chronology, outcomes, and even some coalition details all at once) while I knew it was Simone who’d come up with them.

“Did Simone start applying to schools yet?” Denise asked.

I said she had, but only to the best preparatory courses in Paris. Simone still couldn’t tell what she would be famous for, so she’d decided the best thing to do while she figured it out should be the most impressive. The school that impressed her most was the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, but to even try to get in there, you had to go for two years in what was called a preparatory class, whose workload ranked as one of the highest in the world (or at least that’s what the Wikipedia page said). Then you could give the admission exam a shot (it was one of the most competitive exams in the academic world as well). All that to study some more. Simone kept talking about how it was the most prestigious school in the world for humanities, but when people (the butcher, neighbors) asked me what was new with my family and I told them about Simone’s latest ambition, they never seemed to know what the École Normale Supérieure was, and it made me sad that Simone was so delusional about the school’s fame. When I’d told her about the École Normale Supérieure, Denise had said she knew exactly what it was, but I’m pretty sure she’d lied, because she hadn’t expanded any on the subject until recess the next day, when she’d proceeded to list for me all the famous intellectuals who’d studied there, then told me that the workload in the preparatory classes was one of the highest in all the world—these weren’t the kinds of things you’d say unless you’d read them the night before on Wikipedia.

“I’m sure she’ll get in wherever she wants,” Denise said. I said I didn’t think Simone doubted that either.

Denise didn’t eat any of my rice, but that night at dinner, I still asked my mother if I could skip school and go to a funeral on Thursday.

“Who died?” she asked.

“A friend’s grandmother,” I said.

“That Dennis friend?”

“Actually, it’s Denise.”

“Oh, I see,” my mother said. “And did you know Denise’s grandmother at all?”

I lied and said I’d seen her around school a couple of times, a nice old lady.

“And you want to go to that funeral so you can pay your respects to the nice old lady or for moral support of the younger lady?”

I thought maybe Aurore had told my brothers that I’d gone to bed with a girl—they’d been looking at me differently the last few weeks, and now they looked almost interested when my mother said “the younger lady.”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“I don’t think funerals are such great activities for teens, that’s all,” my mother said. “I’m just making sure you’d go for the right reasons.”

“And which of the two is the better reason to go?” I asked. “The dead person or the living person?”

It was a smarter argument than I’d thought. In fact, I hadn’t even thought about it as an argument, I’d just said it mechanically, earnestly, believing there would be a correct answer to my question and that someone around the table would give it to me. But no one said anything, and I realized I’d been deep by accident. I shouldn’t boast, though. I guess pretty much everything one said in a conversation about death came out with extra meaning.

“Maybe if one of your sisters came with you,” my mother ended up saying. “To make sure you’re okay…Aurore?”

Aurore looked up from her plate, surprised, it seemed, to be visible.

“Why would I go to Dory’s friend’s grandmother’s funeral?” she asked.

“Come on,” my mother said. “He went to your PhD defense.”

“I’m not saying I wouldn’t go to Dory’s funeral,” Aurore said.

“I’ll go with him,” Simone offered.

“But the ceremony is going to be in a church,” I told her.

“Of course it’s going to be in a church. Everyone’s bloody Catholic around here. So what?”

“Nothing. I thought you’d mind. You hate churches.”

“I hate the Church, it’s different,” Simone said. “People can go to church though, obviously, as long as they don’t try to sell it to me.” She paused there and added, matter-of-factly, “Mom goes to church sometimes. Who cares?”

My mother didn’t say anything. I didn’t know when her churchgoing had stopped being a secret. Maybe it had never really been one.

We were still eating when Berenice called to say she’d been accepted into a PhD program in Chicago. My mother picked up the phone in the kitchen all cheerful but her face turned to worry right away. “But you already have a PhD,” we heard her say into the phone, in the same tone actors used in movies when their character couldn’t make sense of someone’s death and said, “But he was so young!”

I don’t know what Berenice’s response to that was exactly, we couldn’t hear her part, but the way the phone call was summed up to us when my mother sat back at the table was that Berenice had said American PhDs were much more competitive and prestigious than French ones. Aurore didn’t pick up on that. Leonard didn’t either, even though he was in the middle of writing his own dissertation. There was a moment of silence. We all looked down at our noodles.

“Climbing back up the funnel,” Simone said. She said it to me, specifically, but loud enough that everyone around the table could hear, yet no one asked what funnel Simone was referring to. Maybe they were all familiar with the funnel image and were just picturing themselves in it, how close they were to the noose.

“Why am I still eating this?” Aurore said after a while, under her breath. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

“What time’s that funeral at?” Simone asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Sometime in the morning.”

Simone noted it would be the first time she’d skip school for a reason other than being sick. “I guess it’s about time,” she said.

She only had two months of high school left.

The funerals I’d been to before hadn’t lasted more than half an hour, but Denise’s grandmother’s was near PhD defense in length. Everyone had something to say about her, and then there were prayers and songs. I tried to pay attention when Denise went up onstage for her eulogy, but her voice was so frail, and Simone and I had sat so far back, almost by the church’s door, that it was hard to follow. She talked about how her grandmother would never know the end of a soap opera she’d been watching every day for more than twenty years, and how painful that was to think about. About how no matter how old you were when you died, you always left unfinished tasks behind. I glanced at Simone while Denise spoke, to see whether she was repressing laughter or rolling her eyes. Simone’s physical reactions to speeches usually helped me know what I should think of them. Simone was actually involved in Denise’s words. When Denise said that her grandmother, knowing she didn’t have much time left, had stopped reading new books because she couldn’t stand the idea of dying in the middle of one without ever finding out how it ended, and that she’d spent her last weeks rereading the books she’d loved, Simone even nodded.

When we gathered around the hole for Denise’s grandmother, the grave diggers were on their cigarette break, ten or so graves away, waiting for us to leave to finish the morning job. I wondered if they were ever told about the people they dug holes for—how old they’d been and how they’d died—and if that determined the distance at which they thought it was okay to take their cigarette breaks. They hadn’t stood that close to us at the father’s funeral.

“What should I tell Denise?” I whispered in Simone’s ear as the undertakers lowered the casket with ropes. “Condolences or congratulations on her eulogy?”

“That guy is not doing it right,” Simone said, looking at one of the four pallbearers. “He’s standing parallel to the grave. He should be diagonal. He’s going to throw his back something nasty.”

“How can you tell?”

“Or throw himself down in the hole with the coffin.”

She seemed disappointed when nothing dramatic happened to the pallbearer. She clicked her tongue behind her teeth and glanced at her watch. She could still make it to philosophy class, she said.

“You’re supposed to stay with me and make sure I’m okay,” I said.

“Are you okay?” she asked. I said I was.

After Simone left, I went up to Denise and told her how much I’d loved her eulogy.

“Won’t bring Grandma back,” Denise said. She was in worse shape than when she’d just found out about her grandma’s being dead.

“It didn’t smell like anything,” she said, and at first, I didn’t understand what she meant. “You said there were dead-body smells that came out of the coffin, but it just smelled like church and incense.”

I’d never seen Denise cry and, like I said before, wouldn’t have bet on its being possible. She wasn’t shy about crying though, didn’t wipe her cheeks or hide her eyes—she kept them open and fixed on me. I put a hand on her arm. I could’ve closed my hand around it and touched index finger to thumb it was so thin. She didn’t like the contact and shook it off.

“I thought I saw your sister,” she said.

“She couldn’t stay. She told me to give you her condolences.”

“How sweet of her.”

People started leaving the cemetery but Denise wanted to stay and watch the grave diggers fill the hole. I sat with her on the next gravestone, that of a man who, according to the engraving, had died on a cruise. As the four men shoveled soil into the hole, I noticed Denise’s lips were moving, and when they stopped moving I asked what kind of prayer she’d just said.

“What do you mean what kind?” she said.

“I mean, what was it? What did you ask for?”

“It’s not like that,” Denise said. “You don’t ask for things.”

“I see,” I said, although her answer confused me. I’d always thought the point of believing in God was that you got to ask him things and see if you’d done good by him, if he loved you back and if your faith was real depending on whether he gave you the things you’d asked for or not. I took a little box of dental wax out of my pocket and started to roll some between my fingers. The inside of my lower lip felt ripped, rough and salty; the braces kept getting caught in the flesh.

“Did everyone tell you to be strong, after your father died?” Denise asked.

“No one really told me anything,” I said. Images of the father’s toothless period started rushing through my head. I pushed them away as I stuck the wax to my lower braces.

“It’s such bullshit,” Denise said. “They say ‘don’t be sad,’ and ‘it’s the way of life’ and all, that I should be strong, and that ‘it’s so easy to let yourself go’ while it takes courage and strength to choose to be happy and hold on to the small pleasures of the present…as if suffering was something weak people did, you know? I don’t get that.”

“They worry about you,” I said.

“Courage my ass. It doesn’t take courage to be in the moment. What really takes guts is to live each day as if you were going to hang around for the next ten years at least. Account for something. Live up to something. Now, that is hard. That requires a little more pondering and reflection, a little more strength.”

The wax provided immediate relief. Not only did it protect my lower lip from more brace spearing, but it numbed the preexisting pain right away. The box said it was the cold-mint flavor of the wax that did that. Very few things in life provided immediate relief, I thought.

“Simone—she also thinks the present is dumb,” I said. I refrained from telling Denise about the funnel theory.

“Of course it’s dumb. What’s there to enjoy?”

“Well I guess you don’t like eating much, so that takes a lot out of it,” I said.

The grave diggers were working at the hole cautiously, like there might be a chance Denise’s grandmother would wake up and complain about the noise.

“You could run away with me next time, if you want,” I said. I didn’t mean it. “We could go to Paris or something.”

“Really? We would stay at your sister’s?”

I tried to drown the offer I’d just made under a lot of words, to divert Denise’s attention.

“Berenice is moving to America next year,” I said. “She’s going to get a second PhD.”

“But if we go to Paris before summer break,” Denise said, “she would still be living there, right?”

“Her apartment is very small. A bedroom, really. She doesn’t have money for more. She lied about having a good job. I mean, she got fired from her good job a long time ago.”

It was the first time I told anyone a secret I’d promised to keep, but I didn’t feel bad about it. My family’s secrets were not really interesting.

“Well, we’ll find somewhere else to stay then,” Denise said. “When are you going next?”

I mumbled something about Easter. It seemed far enough away. I didn’t think Denise would forget my invitation by then but I was pretty sure she would chicken out, realize she needed her therapist and her meds, and in the meantime, there was no harm letting her dream of a Paris trip a little.

“I’m sorry I lied about the smells,” I said.

Most of the replies I got to my Internet ad were from older men who thought the ad was for a whole family to adopt. One of them couldn’t have children, he explained. He’d been left by the love of his life twenty years before because he “couldn’t conceive.” I wondered if that meant he was impotent. It felt insensitive to ask.

His name was Daniel, which I thought was boring, but in a good way, like he would be fine doing the crosswords while my mother read the rest of the newspaper. He wanted to see a picture of her and I described her the best I could—there was a picture of her on the Internet now, because she’d been featured in an article on the city hall website about what people randomly picked on the street thought about the new bike lanes in the center of town, but the picture didn’t do my mother justice, I thought, and I preferred not to send Daniel the link. I told him she was ready to date again but didn’t know it yet, and that he should wait for her outside her office one day (I gave him the address) and pretend he and I had never corresponded. I told him my mother liked orchids, any movie by Jacques Tati, and the color black. The ball was in his court.

Later that week, my mother came home from work with him. I immediately understood that she’d figured I’d dug him out of the Internet and brought him back to teach me a lesson, but Daniel thought she’d invited him over out of genuine interest. He couldn’t believe how well his moves were working.

“Dory, this is my friend Daniel,” my mother said. “Daniel, this is my youngest son I was telling you all about.”

“Very nice to meet you, young man,” Daniel said, and he actually winked at me.

“I invited Daniel for dinner, I hope you don’t mind.”

Daniel looked older than he’d said he was. I guess my mother, to him, was young.

My mother called all my siblings to join us in the living room and welcome our guest.

“Daniel, why don’t you tell my kids all about the book you mentioned working on while I go fix us some drinks?” she said. She disappeared into the kitchen and left us alone with Daniel. Daniel did as he was told and talked about his passion for photography and his ongoing project, a whole book made of pictures he’d taken and compiled over the years of clouds assuming all sorts of poetic shapes.

“What the hell is a poetic shape?” Simone asked, but Daniel only offered her a little laugh for an answer, as if Simone were being cute, too young to possibly understand the term poetic.

“I suppose you must be a great Ansel Adams fan,” Jeremie said.

“Well ain’t that funny!” Daniel marveled. “That is exactly what your mother said! I’d better check that fellow’s work…You gotta keep an eye out for the competition.”

Daniel retrieved a piece of paper from a pocket and seemed happy to take note of the name, unaware that Jeremie’s spelling A-N-S-E-L for him was the last time he would ever hear his voice.

“So when you say you have a passion for photography, you mean you’re passionate about using a camera, the technology of it, but you’re not that interested in the history of the medium,” Leonard said.

As far as I could tell, Leonard wasn’t trying to be mean, but his remark made Daniel uneasy. He glanced at me for support. I had nothing.

“Well I do enjoy the work of certain contemporary photographers,” he said, “like uh, from National Geographic and such.”

“Would you say your approach to photography is more autobiographical or metaphorical?” Simone asked.

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” Daniel admitted.

“Well it’s obviously not documentary oriented. What gets you to take a picture of one cloud and not another?”

Daniel seemed to pull himself back together a bit, like he’d heard that question before and had worked out an answer over time.

“I find myself more attracted to cumulonimbuses,” he explained. “They draw the most dramatic shapes, whole scenes even, sometimes, if you look closely and keep an open mind.”

“So it’s some sort of an imaginary approach,” Simone said, more like a note to herself than anything else. Daniel looked satisfied to have a new word to talk about his artistic process and agreed with her.

“And have publishers shown any interest in your work yet? Galleries?” Aurore asked.

My mother came back before Daniel could answer, carrying a bowl of Provençal olives and a couple of golden drinks. Daniel seemed relieved to see her and moved to his right on the couch as she handed him his drink, to make some room for her, but she didn’t notice and went back to the kitchen to grab two extra chairs, one to serve as a table for the drinks and olives, the other for her to sit on.

Daniel went at the olives like they could provide him with clever answers to my siblings’ questions. Every time he was asked something, he took an olive from the bowl and ate it before he would give a response. He tried to shift the conversation at some point and asked us all if we had boyfriends or girlfriends. He seemed delighted to find out none of us did. It gave him the opportunity to slide in a fact he thought we’d find witty and amusing.

“Aha!” he said. “All smart and good-looking, and yet all single! I guess the great misunderstanding between the sexes hasn’t skipped a generation! Did you know that in some Indian tribes, men and women actually spoke different languages? I’m not kidding you guys.” No one had accused him of such a thing. “They couldn’t even agree on grammar!”

There was hope, I thought. Daniel knew something, and it was something that I’d personally never heard before. Different languages for men and women, within the same society? That sounded quite promising. Maybe we could last all dinner on that topic and have a good time.

“Yes,” Leonard said. “Some tribes do have different languages for men and women. Except they understand each other and the men address the women in the women’s language, which also happens, most of the time, to be the maternal language. The presence of two different languages doesn’t necessarily mean incomprehension between people, or inability to communicate. Think about those regions where everyone speaks two languages, like Catalunya, for instance. Kids are just raised bilingual. If anything, it is a tremendous advantage for them on a cognitive level. And you could actually argue that men and women learning all about the subtleties of the other sex’s language helps them reach a better understanding of each other.”

Daniel grabbed another olive and thought about Catalunya.

“I guess I’d never looked at it that way,” he said.

“Where did you go to school?” Simone asked.

With that, my brothers and sisters regained control of the conversation and Daniel swallowed another olive. The olive situation was reaching a critical point. A few years before, Berenice, who was then already fluent in Spanish, had introduced us to a saying Spanish people had about the last slice of pie in the dish, the last piece of bread on the table, the last olive in the bowl: they called it the slice, or the piece, or the olive, of shame. Shame is what you were supposed to feel if you grabbed and ate the last piece of something, and the only way to make it less shameful was to acknowledge that you were conscious of grabbing the shameful item, or to publicly state your intention to do so in order to allow a chance for someone who wanted it more than you to make him- or herself known, which was something that never happened because most of the time people were happy to let another person deal with the shame. My parents had loved the idea. “Shame is a good thing,” the father had declared, “people should feel more of it more often,” and we’d adopted the Spanish saying without reservation. Something we had only considered vaguely impolite became shameful through the magic of a foreign proverb. One that Daniel was obviously not familiar with. Everyone was looking to see if he would eat the olive of shame without mentioning it. If he asked whether one of us wanted the olive, he would get a pass, I thought, but I wanted him to make a joke about it (the father, for instance, would’ve sliced the olive in two to let someone else get the half olive of shame), because a joke would surprise my siblings and possibly raise my mother’s interest. When he took the last olive in the bowl, he only looked disappointed there weren’t more. Simone shook her head judgmentally, and there were some unspoken I knew its around the living room. All Daniel saw was that the end of the olives meant it was time for dinner.

I didn’t say a word at the table, remaining a silent witness to my siblings’ catastrophic evaluation of Daniel. They inquired about his politics, his taste in books, his hobbies. I wanted Daniel to shine, to have anecdotes about once meeting a famous writer, invent one if needed, but he seemed incapable of sharing anything of interest. I wondered if one could really reach Daniel’s age and not have a single compelling story to tell.

After he left, thanking us for a lovely evening, Simone noted it had been a while since we’d had a condescension fest. I felt I’d been at the center of that particular one.

“Dory really is to thank for tonight’s entertainment,” my mother said.

“How did you meet that guy?” Aurore asked.

“My guess is through the magic of the Internet.” My mother was staring at me. “Am I right, Dory?”

“He looked smarter in his profile picture,” I said in my defense.

“I believe you were fooled by the white hair,” Simone said.

“By the way,” my mother asked me, “how old do you think I am exactly?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“That guy was like seventy years old.”

“He looked like Alfred Stieglitz,” Aurore noted.

“You should’ve told him that.”

“And spelled the name out for him.”

I apologized again.

“It’s all right, honey. At least your brothers and sisters had fun.”

That night, my Internet privileges were revoked indefinitely.

On Sundays, I got bored. Not the way Simone used to get bored as a child (because there was no school on Sundays) but because Sundays made it even more obvious that everyone in our house was capable of finding ways to entertain themselves but me. Years earlier, our mother had tried to get us interested in gardening. She’d failed instantly with my siblings, whereas I’d planted tomatoes to make her happy. “Tomatoes are easy,” she’d said, but nothing had ever come out of the ground. I’d never attempted planting anything again, but I’d maintained the habit of checking the yard on Sunday mornings. I picked up dead leaves, mowed the lawn. I didn’t mow the lawn much, actually. It was hard work, and no one noticed or cared whether I did it or not, but I looked at how much the lawn had grown over the course of a week. Because our yard was the barest one in the neighborhood, save for the cherry tree, which could sustain itself without human help, my weekly inspection was not much more exciting than the indoors boredom I was fleeing. It was equally boring, in fact, but the silence of the yard was less heavy than the one in our house. There was hope it could be broken.

Our yard looked out on a paved alley and then across it onto another yard, in which all sorts of vegetables and flowers grew. The reason I only hung out in our yard on Sunday mornings and not in the afternoons was that I knew the owner of that perfect yard tended to it on Sunday afternoons, and I didn’t want him to see me and be sad for me for having a yard that sucked. I didn’t care that it sucked, and there’s nothing worse than people pitying you for things you don’t even yourself consider upsetting.

There wasn’t a lot of traffic in the alley but to some people it was a shortcut to somewhere, or a way to pay your boy- or girlfriend a backyard visit without the whole town’s knowing about it. The ones who used the alley as a shortcut said hello, and the other ones pretended I wasn’t standing in my backyard and kept on running to their secret destinations, convincing themselves I hadn’t seen them. That Sunday, Porfi approached our fence, waving. Porfi wanted to be called by his last name, Porfi, but his first name was Charles. “Can I come in?” he said.

I walked to the gate, unsure I even knew how to open it. It was locked and there was no key in the keyhole.

“What do you want?” I asked through the bars of the gate. I’d known Porfi all my life, but our only interaction so far had occurred in grammar school, when I’d asked him if he was myopic and he’d gone running in tears to our teacher. “He called me myopic! He called me myopic!” he’d cried. “Well, are you myopic, Charles?” our teacher had asked him, and Porfi’d admitted he didn’t know. “You do wear glasses,” the teacher had observed. “You might very well be. And myopic is not an insult. Not last time I checked it wasn’t.” Porfi had replied that what made an insult an insult was the way it made you feel when you heard it, and the teacher had said, “I really don’t think you’re right about that,” and that had caused Porfi to resent her as much as he resented me. I’d always assumed Porfi hated me because I’d called him myopic that day. He’d always picked a seat as far away from me as possible, within the limited number of seats he and I were allowed to choose from, given we were both myopic and asked by our teachers to sit in the front row with the rest of the vision-impaired.

“Are you and Denise Galet a couple?” Porfi asked me that Sunday without further introduction. There was a combination of fear and immediate relief in his voice as the words freed themselves. He’d done his part expressing his interest in Denise. The next step was for me to handle. That he was in love with Denise came as quite a shock to me. I’d always assumed no one even liked Denise—she openly despised most of those who’d tried to come into contact with her over the years—or even noticed our existences anymore, but I tried not to look too surprised. I didn’t want to risk insulting Porfi’s feelings.

“We’re not a couple,” I said as quickly as possible, in case hesitation on my part could change his mind about loving Denise. I’d gotten to like Denise somewhat, but the idea that someone else wanted to share recess with her, try to make her happier, was a load off my shoulders. Denise could be quite a downer sometimes.

Porfi carried with him a spiral notebook in which he’d glued pictures he assured me were pictures of Denise, but he’d taken them from such a distance, and with such shitty cameras (those disposable ones you could buy for a few bucks at the supermarket, he admitted), that you really had to believe it to see it.

“I took that picture of her just outside school last week,” he said, pointing at a dark shadow the size of my pinky nail that he assured me was Denise leaning on one of the bike racks outside the school’s main gate. “She’s always very early,” he explained. “Even when her first class is at eight a.m., she gets there before the gate is even opened. The janitors never open the gate before seven fifty.”

“Is that so?” I said.

Porfi nodded, a serious nod. He’d learned that fact the hard way. On the next page of his notebook, he’d taped a copy of Denise’s weekly schedule.

Pages of the notebook had titles like “Books Denise Has Read,” with pictures of dust jackets Porfi had likely cut out from catalogs. The “Known Relationships” page only bore Denise’s parents’ names and mine.

“How long have you been in love with Denise?” I asked.

“Almost since I started junior high,” Porfi said. “I spotted her feeding the birds, you know, with you, and I thought it was a very cute thing to do. But I could never talk to her. She’s always running right out of class when the bell rings, to meet you in that staircase, and then she gets back at the last minute. I thought about maybe passing a note to her in class, starting a conversation that way, but I don’t know. It seems corny. And other people could intercept it, and I don’t think Denise would like that one bit.”

“What do you like about her?” I said. “Aside from her feeding the birds and stuff.”

“Well I don’t know. She’s smart, I guess. She reads so many books.”

“I didn’t know you liked reading,” I said.

“Well I don’t. But I like that she likes it. And I’m not as smart as her, but I have other skills.”

“Like what?”

“Like mechanics, electricity. I’m good at repairing things. Do you know if there’s something Denise needs to have repaired? Like a lamp or something? I’m good with lamps. That could be a good way that you could put us in contact,” Porfi said. I admired him for being so open about his feelings.

“She never said anything about a lamp,” I said. “But I’ll ask.”

“Don’t be too obvious about it, though. I don’t want to become a joke between you guys.”

“Why would you?”

“I don’t know. People are cruel. I’m sure you can be too.”

I wondered if he was referring to the day I’d called him myopic. I thought about saying, like I’d said at the time, that I had meant no harm asking about his eyesight but had merely been seeking information since I’d been told myself that I would soon need glasses, but then this guy Victor came out of nowhere on his bicycle and nearly ran Porfi down. The notebook where Porfi had compiled all of his Denise knowledge slipped from his hands and fell to the ground, open.

“What are you guys doing, talking between bars?” Victor yelled at us, although he’d turned around and stopped his bike a mere yard from where we stood. Porfi had managed to pick up his precious notebook without Victor’s seeing what it contained, and he seemed grateful to all gods that the notebook had made it back safe to his arms, as though it could’ve broken in the fall.

“Are you like a couple now?” Victor went on. “Are the bars a metaphor for the prison of gayness you always felt creeping up around you, depriving you of a chance to ever fit in?”

“Get lost, Victor,” Porfi said, and his confidence impressed me, considering the fact he was holding something against his chest, first of all, in a very girly manner, something that, second, could’ve caused Victor to make fun of him for eternity if he ever discovered what exactly it was. Victor was in my German class, because his parents thought he was smart and German was the choice of smart kids, but Victor wasn’t smart.

“Chill out, ladies,” Victor said, “go get yourselves a sense of humor,” and he went on his way.

“Well,” I told Porfi after Victor had disappeared at the end of the alley. “That was brave of you. Not quite sure it convinced him we weren’t flirting, though.”

“It’s fine. I prefer Victor believing I’m gay to knowing I’m in love with Denise. People don’t like Denise very much.”

I wanted to say I would’ve preferred Victor to know the truth than believe I liked boys, but then why hadn’t I said anything in my own defense?

“I guess she’s too…unconventional for people,” Porfi went on.

“She’s unconventional all right,” I said.

“Hold that thought!” Porfi said, licking his index finger to flip through his notebook ’til he landed on a blank page. He took a pencil out of the chest pocket of his overalls; pressed the lead to the top left corner of the page, ready for dictation; and raised his black eyes back to me. There was a minute of silence.

“What do you want me to say?” I ended up asking. “It seems like you know more about Denise than I do.”

“Don’t be so modest. I don’t even know what you guys talk about all the time. Like, what are the topics of conversation that she likes? You have to help me out here.”

I thought about all my conversations with Denise, tried to see a pattern. Porfi mistook the time I spent coming up with one for reluctance to share my knowledge.

“What do you want in exchange?” he said.

“In exchange for what?”

“Tips. To make Denise like me.”

“I don’t want anything in exchange,” I said, and it was the truth. I just didn’t know what to tell Porfi that could help his courtship. There were a certain number of things I knew about Denise—the medication and dosages she took for her depression and anxiety, that she’d had a crush on a girl named Juliette in a video a few years before, that her favorite movie was Au Revoir les Enfants—but it seemed like they would all be turnoffs to Porfi. I was looking for a way to be fair to Denise, and it kept eluding me.

“Come on,” Porfi said. “We all want something. I have a skateboard I don’t use that I could give you. Dirty magazines.”

I pretended to be interested in those because you had to, if you were a boy, but when Porfi listed the titles I lied and said I had them all already.

It wasn’t only that I didn’t want anything in exchange for my tips, I realized. I just wasn’t sure I wanted anything at all, and the thought made me dizzy, the way I felt before a test I hadn’t studied enough for. I looked behind me at the yard as if it could help me figure out what I wanted from life. It didn’t.

“Do you speak German?” I ended up asking Porfi. I was sorry for myself for being unable to think of anything more exciting, so I tried to be mysterious about it. The way I said it, you could have believed I was assembling a team of spies for a secret mission in Germany.

“Of course I don’t speak German,” Porfi said. “I have a little Spanish though. My grandfather was from Argentina.”

“That won’t work,” I said, still looking at the bare rectangle of dirt where I’d once tried to grow tomatoes.

“Does Denise want a German-speaking boyfriend?”

“No,” I said. “I was asking for myself.”

“What do you need a Kraut for?”

I turned my face back to Porfi.

“Would you be interested in skipping school with Denise and me to go to Paris around Easter?” I asked.

Porfi said that anything that could get him closer to Denise, he was ready to try.

“I’ll tell her you want to come with us then,” I said. “I will leave the whole thing about how you love her out of the conversation at first, see how she reacts.”

“Test the waters,” Porfi said.

“Right. I’ll tell you what she thinks.”

“Thanks, man,” Porfi said, and then he extended his hand through the bars of the gate for me to shake.

“Of course,” I said.

“And you know what?” he said as he was getting ready to leave. “That old lady there, Daphné Marlotte. She speaks German, I think. Her husband was a Nazi or something, back in the day. Or she was. If that helps you any.”

“Well obviously, he was kidding,” Denise said after I told her all about Porfi’s visit.

“He looked pretty smitten to me,” I said.

“Don’t use that word. It’s disgusting.”

“Fine. He looked honest. And he had all these pictures of you.”

“That’s so creepy. Tell him I don’t want him to take any more without my permission.”

“So you would agree to having one taken with your permission? I’m sure he would love that.”

“Don’t be silly,” Denise said.

I might’ve only wanted to see things that weren’t there, but it seemed to me Denise was trying to hide being flattered that a boy was interested in her behind her feigned disbelief and her real disappointment that the boy in question was only Porfi.

“What else should I tell him?” I said. “Would you agree to him going to Paris with us?”

“That part’s up to you, really,” she said. “You’re the brain behind the whole Paris operation.”

The rest of recess we talked about Denise’s impression that she had two different heads.

“I often feel like I have a smaller head inside of this one,” she said, “that people don’t see. It is smaller but it has more things in it than the other one and so it keeps trying to repel the outer head and take its place.”

“You’re sure it’s not just a headache?” I asked, because it sounded mostly painful.

“You really can be quite dumb,” Denise said.

“That’s exactly why you should start seeing other people,” I said, and then she told me I had a piece of breakfast stuck in my braces, which I’m not sure was true (Denise used that line any time I said something she didn’t want to respond to). She asked me what I thought happened to kids who died with their braces on.

“Do you think they get buried with them? That seems wrong for some reason, but I doubt they have special orthodontists for the dead,” she said.

I said I didn’t care because I didn’t plan on dying too soon.

“Well I don’t plan on wearing braces,” she said.

“You always manage to keep the mood so light,” I said.

“I was kidding,” she said. “See? You can never tell if someone is kidding you or not.”

“I’m sorry I can’t always tell when you’re seriously suicidal or just trying to entertain me,” I said.

I wasn’t really apologizing, but Denise took it to heart and said it was okay, that she knew she was the one who should be sorry. “I know I’m a nightmare,” she said. She was good at turning a thing you said into yet another example of how complicated she was, but I knew that she didn’t get pleasure in doing that either. I also knew the next thing she would say would be a peace offering, something she didn’t really mean but believed I would be happy to discuss.

“Does Porfi really keep track of everything I read?”

Denise didn’t meet me at recess for days in a row and I thought Porfi had to be doing something right. Either he had built up the nerve to go up to her on her way down to our staircase or Denise, now aware of being watched lovingly, had lingered a little longer than usual in the classroom to make it easier for him and he’d taken his chance. I didn’t want to feel lonely, I just wanted to be happy for them, but it’s not that easy controlling your feelings and I’d gotten used to having someone to talk to, even if only about how little there was to look forward to in life. I wondered if there was a chance I was in love with Denise, but even in the privacy of my own thoughts, the idea seemed ludicrous and I couldn’t consider it seriously for more than a few seconds.

On the third day without Denise, I missed talking to someone so much that I went up to Simone after school to see if she wanted to have an interview. She was working at her desk and dismissed my request. “I appreciate that you’re taking the biography seriously,” she said, “but when I’m busy, you can just do some research. Go interview other people about me. See what they have to say.”

Aurore and my mother were out and my brothers’ door was closed as usual. I stood in front of it and tried to come up with a way to disturb them without their seeing it as a disturbance. My brothers scared me a little. I felt I had to have something important to say if I was to request their attention. From a very early age, my sisters had made me understand that I wasn’t as smart as them but that it didn’t matter, that I had other qualities, whereas I feared the reason my brothers never talked to me was because they didn’t think I was interesting enough. I’m not sure my sisters and I were close, but I knew my brothers and I definitely weren’t, and I couldn’t tell whether we never talked because we had nothing in common, or if it was because we never talked that we never found out if we had something in common. Their school grades seemed to suggest they were as smart as the girls, but they never mentioned their work or shared what they were learning. We didn’t even know what Leonard’s PhD dissertation was about, for instance. He just said he was working in a micro-sociological perspective. Jeremie studied music composition and whenever my mother asked how it was going he would just avoid answering by saying that music was an abstraction and couldn’t be talked about. Most of what they said was said in reaction to something one of my sisters had said, or had been said on TV. I’m not sure they needed attention at all, or that they could understand people who did, and that’s why I had no idea how to get theirs. I decided I would never find a way to sound interesting and found myself knocking on their door without a speech prepared. I couldn’t believe I was doing it. Jeremie sighed a weary “Come in” that suggested people knocked on their door all the time, which was not a thing I could say for sure had ever happened. Leonard and Jeremie were both at their desks, their backs turned to each other.

“Hi, guys,” I said.

They didn’t invite me to have a seat or anything, but I didn’t want to stay on the threshold, so I closed the door behind me and made my way to the center of the room to stand between the two of them.

“What do you want?” Leonard said. He’d rotated his desk chair to face in my direction.

“Well I’m working on Simone’s biography,” I said, “and I was wondering if you had anecdotes or stories about her that you would want to share with me. Or anything. I mean, we can talk about anything you want.”

Leonard squinted as if I’d said something complicated.

“I heard you got laid,” Jeremie said. He was still looking at his computer, and sound waves of different colors, but he’d taken one of his earphones out.

“I did!” I said, and regretted sounding the exclamation mark right away. I was excited that Jeremie was showing interest in something I’d done, but he must’ve thought I was just boasting.

“It wasn’t with a pretty girl, though,” I said in an attempt to undo the exclamation mark.

“Those who lose their virginity to good-looking girls are very rare,” Jeremie said. I thought he would expand on that, but he resumed adjusting sound waves on his screen, and for a while the clicking of his mouse was all there was to be heard.

“What exactly do you want to know about Simone?” Leonard asked me as I was about to sneak out and apologize for having interrupted their work.

“I don’t have specific questions,” I said, “but I think she’d like it if you had funny memories about her to share, how it was to see her grow, things like that.”

“She believed in Santa Claus ’til she was eight years old or something,” Jeremie said. “It must be a kind of record.”

I knew about the Santa Claus thing because the reason my mother had ended up having to tell Simone that Santa was really her and the father staying up late to put the presents beneath the tree was that I’d figured it out before Simone had and my parents didn’t think it was right to let me keep that knowledge from an older sibling. I actually remembered my mother telling Simone the truth about Santa—I’d listened to their conversation through our bedroom door. I’d heard her ask Simone if she was mad that she’d been lied to, and then Simone’s voice come out like a thread you pull from a sweater, like something was being irreparably wrecked in its wake. “My throat is closing,” she’d whispered, “my heart is beating faster. I wish you’d never told me.” I remember it because it was the first time I’d heard Simone express regrets about knowing something. When I’d let her break the news to me later that day (our mother hadn’t told her I already knew; she’d thought letting Simone tell me about it would be a good way for her to get over the lie), I’d responded the way she had, stealing the line “I wish you’d never told me” from her. Simone had shown no empathy and asserted that I was being a pussy and that knowledge was power, which I’d thought sounded good but also puzzled me, given how often she complained about always being looked down upon for being a kid by grown-ups who knew less than her about literature and geography.

I didn’t want to discourage Jeremie from telling me more stories about Simone, so I pretended his Santa Claus bit was helpful, but when I asked if he could think of anything else, I just heard more mouse clicks. He didn’t put his second earphone back in his ear, though, so I assumed he was still considering himself involved in the conversation and just needed a little time to think about my request. I turned to Leonard’s side of the room to see what he had to say, but before my eyes landed on him, they stopped on a black and white picture that was lying on his desk. I didn’t want to be nosy, but even though I couldn’t really see what the picture represented from where I stood, it triggered some sense of familiarity and I understood that it concerned me.

“What’s that picture?” I asked Leonard.

He turned on his chair and handed it to me.

“It’s for my work,” he said.

The picture was a picture of us all, minus Leonard, asleep on different mattresses laid out on the floor, the same floor I was standing on now. I was in the upper left corner, curled up in a ball. Berenice had fallen asleep with a bundle of papers on her stomach, Jeremie with his mouth open to the ceiling, Simone and Aurore top to tail with arms sticking out of the mattress. It looked like we’d all died in awkward positions, like these illegal workers I’d seen on TV who’d been living in a sweatshop and had been poisoned in their sleep by a portable heater. My siblings and I had only all slept in the same room on one occasion: after the father had died. As I was trying to make sense of how that picture could relate to Leonard’s PhD dissertation, I saw him, from the corner of my eye, grab a notebook and write something down, something that I could tell by his eye movement was linked to my reaction to the photograph.

“What exactly are you working on?” I said.

Leonard took the time he needed to complete the thought he was writing down before he answered.

“I’m studying the variety of processes and strategies through which a family unit reorganizes itself after the disappearance of one of its members—in my case, the main household provider and paternal figure.”

“The father,” I said.

“In other words, yes: the father,” Leonard said.

I still wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the father or the concept of a father.

“Our father,” I said.

“That sounds interesting,” Jeremie said, apparently finding out about the topic of Leonard’s research just as I was.

“Wait,” I told Jeremie, “you didn’t know his dissertation was about us?”

“It’s not about us,” Leonard objected, “it’s about the redefinition of the group members’ positions within the group after a death, about structural and behavioral changes, about how the ordinariness of a situation becomes salient once it has been disrupted…it’s not about you or me as individuals.”

“But that’s a picture of us,” I said.

“I’m not gonna use it as an illustration in my dissertation or anything. It’s just a visual reminder. Like a field note, if you wish.” Leonard opened his top desk drawer and took out a folder in which he kept pictures of different rooms of the house.

“I’ve never seen you take a picture in my life,” I said.

“I just took them a couple of days after the father died, to see if over time we started changing the way we organized objects, furniture. I’m not the best at noticing that kind of stuff.”

“Did we change anything?”

“Not that I can see. I know Aurore reorganized her bookshelf alphabetically instead of chronologically, but I think that had nothing to do with her mourning. It was more of a post-PhD-defense ritual.”

Jeremie put his second earphone back in. Our conversation must’ve disturbed his concentration without providing enough interest in exchange.

“But I guess my whole research has gotten to be more language oriented. Mostly, I look at how we changed the way we spoke of certain things,” Leonard went on.

“But we never talk about the father,” I said.

“That is actually one of my angles. How certain topics have become embarrassing, or how Mom and Aurore started talking like they’re carrying heavy things—I call it sigh-speak—when they want to get off of a subject. You know, our avoidance strategies.”

“Avoidance strategies,” I repeated. “Is that what we do?”

“All the time. Defensive processes, protecting strategies, preventive avoidance…”

“I didn’t know there were words for all that.”

“Well I won’t be so naive as to say there is a word or group of words for everything, but the beauty of being an academic is that you get to invent some for the things you’re working on.”

“Did you invent these?”

“Of course not.”

“Did you invent any?”

Leonard looked either insulted or chagrined by my question.

“That’s not the point,” he said.

I didn’t know there had been a point to our conversation or why we couldn’t stray from it. I still didn’t understand, at the time, that I had as much a right to decide what the point of a conversation was as anyone else participating in it. I looked at the picture of us some more, trying to find a question there that would be more in line with Leonard’s view of our point.

“Did you notice any changes with me?” I asked. “After the father died?”

“I noticed you stopped rubbing the couch.”

“That’s because you guys made fun of me,” I said.

“I noticed you started reading to Mom at night. I noticed you looked for a boyfriend for her. That gave me a lot to work with, by the way. Everyone’s reaction to that guy…Daniel. That was really interesting.”

I waited for Leonard to thank me but he didn’t.

“Do your professors think you’ve got a worthy research topic?”

“It’s wildly unconventional,” Leonard admitted. “Most studies in micro-sociology are still pretty ill considered, and I’m sure I’ll have a couple of assholes on my jury who will deem it scientifically irrelevant, but my adviser thinks I’m doing some groundbreaking work with this.”

We heard Jeremie laugh in the background, but it wasn’t at what Leonard had said. Jeremie laughed at music sometimes; certain arrangements of notes could be as funny as jokes to him, and he’d just heard one of those in his earphones.

“I can’t believe Jeremie didn’t know that’s what you were working on,” I told Leonard. “You’re practically living on top of each other.”

“Are you kidding? No one in this house cares about what I do. And look at him!” Leonard lifted his chin in Jeremie’s direction. Jeremie’s shoulders were now moving to the rhythms he was controlling. “That’s what he does all day. Never asks a damn question.”

“He asked me if it was true I’d gotten laid,” I noted.

Leonard didn’t seem to think it counted.

“Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to ask us questions anyway?” I said. “I thought sociologists did interviews with the people they wrote about.”

“My research is purely observation based. If I had told you that I was observing our family, your behaviors would’ve changed, and my work would’ve been compromised.”

“So if we’d asked more precise questions about your dissertation, you wouldn’t have told us anyway.”

“Probably not.”

“So why are you complaining that we didn’t?”

“It doesn’t matter now. The research phase is over. I’m almost done writing my first chapter.”

“Can I read it?”

“No.”

“Can I keep the picture?”

Leonard went through his file of photographs and laid out seven pictures on his desk that looked exactly like the one I was holding. He stared at them and at the one I was holding and then at the other ones again.

“I guess you can,” he said.

Often, I dreamed the father wasn’t dead—he’d faked his own death to protect us from the international villains he’d been secretly fighting his whole life, or they’d made a mistake at the hospital and we’d buried someone who looked like the father while the father had coincidentally been made a secret prisoner somewhere far away, or he’d been resurrected, no specific explanation for it. The scenarios varied but the conclusion was always the same: the father was back, and even though I was aware while dreaming it that a dream was all it was, I still enjoyed the chance I was given to see him again, and I woke up sad that dreams had to be so short, hopeful that in the next one (soon, if I was lucky), I would be better at controlling the setting and what the father and I would talk about. I’d read on the Internet that some people knew how to control their dreams. I don’t really want to say it, but there was a part of me that thought that if I could control the dream, I’d maybe be able to bring the father back from there to real life.

Not long before I found out about Leonard’s research, though, I’d started growing ambivalent about those dreams where the father wasn’t dead. I’d started dreading them. See, the more time passed in real life, the more it did in dream life as well, and even in dreams, I’d gotten used to the idea that the father was dead, and the thought of his being resurrected had become discouraging, because if he wasn’t dead, I thought, it meant he had yet to die, and I to go through all the steps of grieving him, and I didn’t know if I could do it again. I felt guilty inside those dreams, selfish, and worse than that, obvious, like the father knew I didn’t really want him to come back with me to real life anymore, the way sick people know, when you visit them in the hospital, that they don’t look as good as you say they do and that you can’t wait to leave. I was still sad waking up from these dreams, but the relief was new. I didn’t tell Leonard about that. Maybe if he’d asked us questions, I would’ve. But I guess it wasn’t part of the observable world he was interested in anyway.

The next time I saw her in the neighborhood, Daphné Marlotte confirmed she spoke German. I didn’t ask her right away under what conditions she’d learned the language, if she’d been a Nazi or not. I wanted to save it for a lull in the conversation.

She understood what I meant when I talked about looking for a conversation partner and invited me for tea and cookies, or as she put it, “für Tee und Kekse,” which immediately made me realize how much I would learn from her, given how Herr Coffin had never thought it useful to teach us how to say cookies in German.

I’d walked by Daphné’s building almost every day of my life but I’d never been inside her apartment. I’d caught glimpses of her living room now and then, particularly in the summer, when she opened all the windows looking out on the street—she lived on the first floor—but it had always been through her white lace curtains. Seeing those curtains, you’d think they wouldn’t do a great job at concealing, with the hundreds of openings and the thinness of the fabric, but really they made it hard to discern much behind them, unless you stood by Daphné’s window and picked a hole in the lace through which to look at her apartment and stuck your eye to it. Which was something I’d actually thought about doing, except I couldn’t really find a valid reason to proceed.

Her place wasn’t as crumbly and old as I’d expected. The kitchen had been recently remodeled, Daphné explained, by kind people from an organization that made sure older folks didn’t give up on comfort and miss out on the newest home improvement technologies.

“It’s very nice,” I said, knocking on the imitation-marble counters as Daphné made us tea.

“I think it’s too tacky, honestly,” she said. “I don’t like it one bit. But it was free, you know? Charity. I shouldn’t complain.”

She repeated the exact same thing in German.

It was weird being alone with Daphné. She seemed to have grown shyer inside her own home. She spoke more softly, like we might wake someone resting in the other room. I said I wasn’t used to speaking everyday German, that my teacher was more into the nineteenth-century poets. She said it was all right, that I could speak to her in French and she would respond in German and that little by little, I’d grow confident enough to try out some words and, eventually, whole sentences.

We took our teas to the living room and sat there quietly for a minute, pretending that having to blow on our smoking cups prevented us from talking. It felt rude mentioning the fact that there were no cookies when she’d promised me some. I looked around the room for pictures to start a conversation about but there weren’t any.

“You don’t have pictures,” I said.

Daphné smiled and said something in German that I didn’t understand. I didn’t know if you were supposed to have your conversation partner repeat what she’d said if you hadn’t understood it, or just go with the flow.

“We don’t have pictures either,” I said.

She said something else, in which I recognized the words for memories and sad and wall, but I don’t know if she said it was sad that she hadn’t taken enough pictures to save and display good memories on her walls or if such a display would amount to building a wall of sadness.

“Maybe we should try the way we did it in the kitchen,” I said, “when you first said the sentence in French and then repeated it in German?”

Daphné agreed to my suggestion but didn’t offer a new topic of conversation.

“So,” I said. “I’ve always wondered: do you still get excited for your birthdays?”

I had wanted to avoid the subject of her age, given it was what people always talked to her about, but apparently, I was no better than anyone else. Daphné had made good progress on the scale of old people over the past year: she was now the third-oldest person in the whole world. Two women had to die in India and she would be number one. People in town hoped that this would happen before her next birthday, to make it a national event, have the president come and celebrate with us, and I wondered if Daphné felt more pressure than usual to stay alive.

“It would be nice to meet the president on my next one,” Daphné said, by which she admitted without actually saying the words that she wished those two old Indian women dead.

“Do you like him?”

“Not particularly. But I’ve never met a president. I don’t get to have that many new experiences, you know?” She laughed a little and then translated what she’d said in German and laughed again. Her laughter was the same in both languages.

“Why do you want to learn German, little man?” Daphné asked me. “It is such a hideous language.”

“It’s pretty when you speak it,” I said, which I didn’t think was actually the case, but the father always said that those who believed German was an ugly language had probably never heard a kindhearted person speak it. I tried to remember other things the father used to say in defense of the German language, but nothing else came to mind.

“It’s so rigid,” Daphné said. “It’s not a playful language. German puns suck.”

“Well I was thinking I could be an interpreter or something,” I said, ignoring her criticisms.

“For whom would you interpret? There are not that many German celebrities people care about outside of Germany, have you noticed?”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” I said, after trying to come up with names to prove her wrong.

“And most Germans know their language is useless anyway, so they all speak English nowadays.”

“You don’t think German is useful at all?”

“If you plan to live in Germany, it is most definitely useful,” Daphné said. “Or if you fall in love with a German girl.”

“Did you fall in love with a German boy?”

“I did,” she said, “a long time ago. That’s the only reason why I speak this horrible language.”

“Was it your husband? People say your husband was a Nazi.”

“I suppose those people you’re talking about still haven’t registered how old I actually am. I was already old when the Nazis started rising to power. My husband had died. He couldn’t have been a Nazi even if he’d wanted to, poor Thomas darling. Not that he would’ve wanted to be a Nazi, of course, that’s just a way of speaking. He was a German deserter from the First World War, that’s how old I am. But maybe they don’t teach you about the First World War in school anymore.”

“They do,” I said in a senseless attempt to defend my education, given I knew next to nothing about the First World War. “The First World War was with the trenches and the Second with the concentration camps.”

“How specific,” Daphné said.

“They do spend more time on the Second World War,” I admitted. “We watched Night and Fog in history class.”

“Well that didn’t tell you much about the Occupation, did it?”

I’d fallen asleep during Night and Fog. I always fell asleep when we had TV time in school.

“Forget about it. I didn’t mean to say you were poorly educated,” Daphné said. “I apologize. Entschuldigung.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“What I meant to say is that teachers probably make it look a little too easy nowadays, am I right? Especially around here. People take pride in the fact that there were a lot of famous members of the resistance in the area, but at the time, it didn’t feel like it, I can tell you that much. Doesn’t mean the rest of us were Nazis, but people have a great ability to go on with their lives no matter what, and I happened to be quite busy back then, with work, and my second husband dying on me. The Germans didn’t come down here before 1942, but when they did, they came to my bar—I tended the bar at La Fontaine, did you know that? They came to La Fontaine because I spoke German, and I served them, what else could I do? I don’t think that makes me a collaborator. They tipped better than the French. They were the ones with the money, I suppose.”

Daphné had started telling her story, pausing after each sentence to translate it into German, but she got carried away at some point and went ahead in German. Reversing the order of the languages seemed to happen quite naturally for her, but not having the French version first made it harder for me to pick up new German words and match them with what I’d just heard.

“Didn’t you meet a nice one?” I asked in French, hoping to put her back on the right track.

“Of course I met nice ones. You always meet at least one nice person in a bar, but that’s neither here nor there. They’d ask how René was doing—René was my second husband—and when he died, they brought flowers and drank and tipped double. But they were still the enemy. That never once slipped my mind. Even when I laughed at their jokes.”

“What was their best joke?”

“How old are you now?”

“I’ll be fourteen soon,” I said.

“I suppose that’s old enough. So they had this joke about nuns. One morning in the convent, Mother Superior comes down to the commons to announce what the nuns will have for dinner that night. ‘Tonight, carrots!’ she says, and all the nuns are really excited and go, ‘Ooooooh!’ but then Mother Superior specifies, ‘Grated!’ and all the nuns go, ‘Boooooo!’ ”

“That was their best joke?” I said.

“It was a pretty good one in the forties,” Daphné said. “Risqué.”

The tea had infused too much and tasted like coins dipped in grenadine. I considered gulping the whole of it down and excusing myself—it was going to be dinnertime at home. Daphné must have felt her grated carrots joke hadn’t won me over.

“Don’t leave me just yet,” she said. It was obvious she’d hoped to have come up with a reason why I should stay before she’d be finished saying “Don’t leave me just yet” in two languages, but she hadn’t, and I politely waited for her to figure one out.

“You could be a spy,” she ended up saying. “That would be more interesting than interpreter. I thought about becoming one, during the war, but I didn’t know where to go or who to offer my services to. I thought if they needed more spies, they’d find me, ’cause people knew I spoke German. But no one ever came, so I guess they weren’t looking for spies in my corner of the world. But it’s easier in times of peace, I would think, to make your ambitions known. You probably just have to send a letter to the DGSE and say you want to join their intelligence service, and they schedule an appointment. You would need to learn another language or two though, on top of German. Spies are polyglots. Maybe learn Arabic. Or Russian. I know a Russian lady who could be your conversation partner.”

“My father knew many languages,” I said. “Do you think he could’ve been a spy?”

“Your father? Your father’s German was so precious, dear, it was like talking to a doily. When he spoke to me, I couldn’t help but picture that horrible Fragonard painting, you know? The rosy-cheeked girl on her swing? All the pink taffeta and the layers in her dress? He would’ve needed to update his vocabulary and structures a bit if he’d wanted to make it into twenty-first century espionage, believe me.”

I could picture a book spine that said “Fragonard” in brown letters on our living room shelves, where the art books were, but not a painting by him. If I could have, I would have been even more pissed at Daphné’s words.

“And even leaving his German aside,” she went on, “your father wasn’t a double-life kind of man. He always looked so overwhelmed with just the one.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, I saw him around. It seemed every situation made him uncomfortable. Wouldn’t you say? Bumping into people, ordering a coffee…I mean, you can’t be unsettled by a postal worker giving you a choice between regular and express mail and be a spy at the same time. It simply doesn’t figure.”

“Maybe that was part of his civil-life persona,” I said.

“Maybe,” Daphné said. “Vielleicht.” She didn’t believe it for a second.

“There was no need to say it in French first,” I said, more angrily than I’d wanted. “I know how to say maybe in German.”

“I’m sorry if I offended you, mein Herr,” Daphné said, but she wasn’t. She thought I was overreacting.

“At least he loved German,” I said. “At least he didn’t just use his knowledge of German to get better tips from a bunch of Nazis.”

“Oh yeah? And what did he use his precious knowledge for?” Daphné was done translating now. “Business meetings? Dinners? To bore an old lady stiff with his Goethe quotes just because she was nice enough to encourage him the first time?”

Drool started accumulating at the corners of Daphné’s mouth as she spoke ill of the father, and I thought it was unusual considering how often she’d had to pause over the course of our conversation just to moisten her lips or sip some tea in order to go on.

“Are you all right?” I said.

Daphné said something in German, or maybe it was French and I just couldn’t make sense of it—she could barely articulate. Her features, her whole face, seemed to be pulled down toward the ground by an invisible flesh magnet.

“Let me call 911,” I said.

I left my argument with Daphné out of the story I told the paramedics. Not that they asked anything—I guess a stroke at Daphné’s age was nothing unusual. They congratulated me for calling them so promptly. My mother did too, when I came home. She was convinced it had been too much emotion for Daphné, having a nice lively guest like me at her house instead of the routine nurse or a fellow old lady, and that it must’ve been the thrill that had caused her stroke. She told me I was a kind soul. I thought maybe she would reinstate my Internet hour, but she didn’t mention it. She called the hospital every hour to get an update on Daphné, and when I woke up the next day, she told me that the doctors had been able to remove the clot in her brain and Daphné would only be partly paralyzed. She seemed to think it was good news.

“What a bunch of pricks,” Denise said. “They only want to keep her alive to break some kind of record.”

Denise had resumed meeting me on the staircase. She’d offered no explanation for her absence the previous days and didn’t mention Porfi.

“You shouldn’t have called 911,” she went on. “You should’ve just let her die there. Poor woman. I’m sure she would’ve preferred that.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She sounded pretty excited for her birthday.”

“She has to pretend she is, with the kind of parties the mayor has been throwing her. Can you imagine? Having to be grateful all the time? What a nightmare.”

Denise was looking nowhere in particular, pulling hangnails off her fingers with her teeth. She usually flicked the little bits of skin down the stairs after tearing them, but that day she’d decided to swallow them. She asked what else was new and I told her about Leonard’s writing his dissertation on us.

“So you guys are gonna be famous?”

“No one reads sociology dissertations,” I said.

“But dissertations get published, right?”

“Berenice sold like forty copies of hers, I think. Aurore is supposed to edit her manuscript for publication, but I don’t get the impression she’s doing much of that lately.”

“To be a character in a book,” Denise said. “You must be pretty thrilled.”

“Leonard says it’s not really about us but about processes and strategies and language.”

“That’s just like when writers say one of their stories is about coming of age in a post-capitalistic world as well as an exploration of what it really means to get an education when all it is is a self-aggrandizing account of their first trip to a whorehouse.”

“That’s a very specific example,” I said.

“Well I just made it up.”

I wanted to tell Denise I was responsible for Daphné’s stroke, that Daphné had compared my father to a Fragonard painting and that I’d gotten upset, but it seemed like a silly reason to almost kill someone, even by accident.

“The cool thing is,” Denise said, still processing the news about Leonard’s dissertation, “once your whole family is famous, you can build a career on that and write biographies for each one of them, not just Simone. And then you’ll get famous both for being in your brother’s book and for your own work as a biographer. You could write biographies of everyone you know after that.”

“I see what you’re getting at,” I said. “You want me to write your biography too.”

“That would be one very short, very boring book,” Denise said, and I felt a wave of cold rush through my body.

“Would Porfi get his own chapter?” I asked.

Denise looked at her watch.

“Nine minutes,” she said. “You held out nine whole minutes without mentioning Porfi. I’m impressed. I thought you would harass me with questions right away.”

“Did you fall in love with him yet?”

“Honestly, I’m not sure I would recognize him on the street,” Denise said. “He’s so shy. He can’t stand up straight and look at me. Although I guess there’s a bit of progress: last time he spoke to me, he looked at my shoes instead of his.”

“That’s good,” I said.

I thought about what Porfi had told me about people not liking Denise. Maybe Porfi was more embarrassed about being seen with her than shy.

“You should go out for coffee with him,” I said.

“Why would I do that? I don’t like coffee.”

“It doesn’t have to be coffee, you know? Maybe he’s ill at ease courting you at school, maybe he wants the romance to stay private.”

“There’s no romance to speak of.”

“But you like him.”

“He’s nice, I guess. He keeps asking if there’s something he can do for me. He really wants to show me how good he is at repairing stuff, but I can never think of anything that he could help me with, so I asked him if he knew how to pick a lock and he said he did. I told him to come down here one of these days, open that door for you.”

Denise turned her face to the door at the top of the stairs.

“Except I didn’t tell him it was for you. I told him I was interested in knowing what was behind it.”

“Why?”

“I’m always sort of embarrassed to admit I’m not interested in anything. I mean, I’m used to it, and I’m the person who should be most bothered by it, right? But when other people ask what I like and stuff, I feel like I should spare them the truth, that they couldn’t bear it if they knew how little interest I had in life. And Porfi’s so eager to find a way to make me like him, I feel like I have to pretend that there’s something he could try, you know? Give him a glimmer of hope.”

“Maybe if you keep pretending things interest you,” I said, “you’ll end up really caring about them.”

“That’s what my therapist used to say.”

“And what does he say now?”

“He’s clueless. I tried all possible meds. He says I should attempt meditation. That sounds like what you recommend when there’s no hope left at all, don’t you think?”

“I think if you’re still able to lie to people in order to protect them, there’s hope,” I said.

“You should write for French TV.”

“You don’t want to go to Paris anymore?” I asked.

“Of course I do,” Denise said.

“Are you lying to me right now?”

Denise looked at me like I’d asked a trick question when she was literally the only person on Earth who could’ve answered it.

“I’m not lying,” she said. “I do want to go to Paris. I’ve never been.”

“Have you thought about things you’d like to do while we’re there?”

“We could go to a couple bookstores I guess. Porfi said he wanted to hit the Eiffel Tower.”

“Forget about what Porfi wants. Bookstores for you. What else?”

“Maybe we could hang out in Juliette’s neighborhood,” Denise said tentatively, like she was ready to discard the idea right away if I found it ridiculous.

“Do you know where she lives?”

“Well I don’t have her address or anything, but there’s an interview on her website where she talks about how much she likes this one café on the Saint Martin Canal. I thought maybe we could check it out. Maybe she’ll be there.”

“That sounds great,” I said, and it did. If we saw Juliette, we could finally ask her if she’d been an actress in the Let Them Sea video or a real kid who’d never seen the ocean.

“What do you plan on doing in Paris?” Denise asked me, just before the bell rang.

“I thought I would go see what the DGSE buildings look like.”

“The intelligence agency? What for?”

“I’ve never seen a spy,” I said. “I just want to see what the people who walk in there look like.”

“Well those who just walk in through the front door will probably not be spies,” Denise said.

“I know,” I said. “But maybe one of them will.”

Denise was unconvinced but humored me anyway.

“Whatever you want,” she said. “You’ll be our Paris guide, we’ll just follow you around.”

We got up to join our respective classrooms and I noticed as I walked down the stairs behind her that Denise was wearing perfume. The air carried whiffs of orange blossom after she’d passed through it.

“Do you think Porfi will let me watch how he picks a lock?” I asked.

“He’ll do anything I ask him,” Denise said, unfazed by the power she’d just recognized in herself.

On the second anniversary of the father’s death, I received a letter from Rose:

Dear Isidor,

it said,

Two years already and the memory of your father’s sodden death still haunts me.

After you left, my parents figured we had made love and you were not a penpal…it is ironic I think because you actually are! But I didn’t tell them that. I guess I am the only one who writes anyway, you never answer (and it’s fine, I mean, I’m writing to express sympathy and share your pain about your father) but anyway if you ever want to write me a letter, you better not do it here because they have me on close watch! They were really mad at me for lying to them, so if I were you I wouldn’t come back to my house next time you runaway.

I broke up with Kevin after you left. I don’t think I’m in love with you but I did like your penis more than Kevin’s. Kevin’s is very long but it is a bit too thin in comparison with yours, and it didn’t feel right when we had sex the next time after you. He never gave me an orgasm. Not that you did either, I think we really didn’t make love for long enough, but I think maybe if it had lasted longer it could’ve happened. I have never had an orgasm in my life and I am already 18 so I am starting to freek out a little. All my friends say they have orgasms ALL the time. Maybe they are lying. I feel stupid talking about your penis, but it is part of the things of life, so I should not be ashamed, and you, most importantly, shouldn’t be embaraced that I talk about it, you should be very proud of it. It is important to be proud about things you have going for yourself. I am sure it is something your father would’ve told you if he hadn’t died when you were so young.

Maybe when you grow up we should try to hang out more. I will go to university next year. I didn’t get into med school but I will still study biology I think.

Cordially,

Rose

I wanted to be aroused by Rose’s letter, but she made it very complicated. She was just mixing too many different topics in too few lines.

“Knock knock,” I heard Jeremie say through the bedroom door, interrupting my rereading of Rose’s letter. I said come in and asked him why he said “Knock knock” instead of actually knocking.

“I don’t know,” Jeremie said. “Why did you say ‘Come in’ instead of actually coming to the door to open it?”

“I would’ve had to get up from my bed,” I said. “Knocking requires less energy.”

“It still requires some,” Jeremie said, and he sat on Simone’s unmade bed and said nothing for a while.

“Did you come to see Simone?” I tried to guess. “She doesn’t get off school before five on Thursdays.”

“No, I came to see you,” Jeremie said. “I just wanted to tell you that I think it was unfair of Mom to forbid you access to the Internet. I do think it was stupid of you to look for a boyfriend for her without taking her criteria into account, but nevertheless, I believe it came from a good place and you shouldn’t have been punished that hard for it. None of us ever got punished for anything before, as far as I can remember—none of us ever took any kind of initiative of that sort, either—and maybe Mom was disconcerted as to how to react to your mistake and ended up being a bit heavy-handed.”

“Thanks,” I said. “The whole Daniel fiasco was a few weeks ago, though, so why are you telling me this now?”

“Well, I wanted to come to you first thing to offer you access to my own computer—I wouldn’t tell Mom you’d been on the Internet, of course—but I had very important work to do with it myself, so I couldn’t just invite you to use it.”

“But you’re done with your work now?”

“For the most part, yes.”

“So I can come and use your computer anytime?”

“Well, obviously not any time,” Jeremie said. “When I’m not in my bedroom, say. You should feel free to use the computer then.”

“But you’re kind of always in your bedroom,” I said.

Jeremie didn’t respond to that. I said I appreciated his offer.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

I thought that would be the end of our interaction, but he just stayed there on the edge of Simone’s bed, looking around our room like he’d never seen it before. Which in fact was not far from the truth.

“Have you read any of Leonard’s dissertation?” I asked him.

“I look at what’s on his computer screen when he goes to the bathroom sometimes,” Jeremie confessed. Aurore had lent her own computer to Leonard for him to type his dissertation on.

“What does it say?”

“All I saw was a breakdown of the household budget before and after the father’s death, reorganization of family expenses after the loss of the main source of income and with Mom’s widow’s pension, things like that. Nothing too interesting.”

I’d never thought about the consequences of the father’s death for the household budget. Since he’d died, we’d pretty much lived the same, I thought, except that we knew we’d never see him again. We ate the same things, rented the same number of movies.

“Are we poor now?” I asked.

“Of course not,” Jeremie said. “If we were poor we would all be looking for jobs instead of getting PhDs or applying for second PhDs.”

“Are you going to go for a PhD next year?”

Jeremie was just finishing his master’s that year. He’d skipped one grade fewer than the others.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Why not? Are you just going to write music from now on?”

“Have you noticed that all of them, Berenice, Aurore, Leonard, went into getting a PhD thinking they’d get answers to all of their questions, but what it did to them instead is it made them need more and more time to answer simpler and simpler questions? Rather: that it made them need to break simple-seeming questions down to a multitude of subquestions in such a twisted way that they can never find their way back to the original question?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought they’d always been like that.”

“What I mean is I’m not sure I want to fill my head with more knowledge and theories at this point. It complicates everything. I don’t think it’s good for the art. I think artists shouldn’t be too smart.”

“But you’re super smart already,” I said.

Jeremie seemed a bit insulted by this.

“What makes you say that?” he said.

“You’re getting a master’s in both physics and musicology,” I said.

“Well that’s just fun,” he said. “Master’s are for fun. PhDs require intellectual commitment. It’s like dating versus getting married.”

“And you don’t want to commit to anything but music,” I said.

“I don’t.”

“Because making music gets easier with time whereas academic research just gets more and more complicated.”

“I never said music got easier with time,” Jeremie said. “That whole thing people say about the hardest thing for an artist being his first novel, or first movie, or first opera, or whatever…well that’s just nonsense. I believe if you’re doing it right, the hardest thing to do for an artist should always precisely be the one he’s working on.”

“I don’t see how it’s different from getting a PhD then, if art doesn’t get easier either.”

“Who would want a thing that only got easier with time?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” I said.

“What do you know about difficulty? You’re in tenth grade.”

“Eighth,” I said, and Jeremie must have detected a little shame in my answer—there was—because his tone softened.

“I guess certain things do get easier,” he said, but he didn’t give any examples.

“Do you know how to break up with a girl?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Jeremie said after thinking about it some. “I believe, when I’m with a girl, that it’s always clear from the get-go that we’re not engaging in any kind of relationship.”

“Have you been with many girls?”

“Not that many, no. Ten, twelve.”

“Do I know any of them?”

“The last one was Ohri’s fiancée, Carla. I don’t know that you ever met her.”

“Did she and Ohri break up?”

“Not that I know of,” Jeremie said.

“So how come you slept with her?”

“Berenice asked me if I could do it. I think she was trying to get back at Ohri for something without him having to know about it necessarily.”

“How can you get back at someone if he never knows you did anything to get back at him?”

“It’s just personal satisfaction, I guess. You get the satisfaction of having gotten back at the person without actually having hurt anyone. I think it’s pretty healthy.”

“So you had no interest in Carla but you slept with her for Berenice’s satisfaction.”

“You make it sound incestuous, Izzie.”

“Sorry. What I meant to ask was if it was better to sleep with a girl when you were actually in love with her.”

Jeremie plainly ignored my query.

“Who do you need to break up with anyway?” he asked.

“Just this girl,” I said, tapping Rose’s folded letter against my palm.

“The same girl you first had sex with? I didn’t get that you were a couple.”

“We’re not, actually, but she still sends these letters and they make me uncomfortable.”

“Letters? Aren’t you in school together?”

“No,” I said. “She lives in a different city.”

“How did you meet her? We never go anywhere.”

“She was Simone’s pen pal.”

“That girl Rose?” I was surprised Jeremie remembered her name. “God, she was thick.”

“Well, don’t tell anyone, okay?”

“I won’t if you show me what kind of letters she sends you.”

“I don’t know which is more embarrassing,” I said.

Jeremie gave me some time to think about it and started drumming on his thighs with his fingers. He had these very long fingers that people always said, as he was growing up, were perfect pianist fingers. Jeremie was indeed a very good pianist, but he didn’t like to hear he had the hands for the job. He thought it minimized his achievements and all the hard work he’d put into mastering the instrument. I showed him Rose’s letter.

“She does talk about your penis a lot,” is all Jeremie said once he’d read it. He handed me the letter back. No question about my running away or mention that today was the anniversary of the father’s death.

“So how do I break up with her?”

“Tell her you got into an accident and your cock shrank?”

“Seriously,” I said.

“Oh, you’re fine,” Jeremie said. “She lives far away. You don’t have to do anything. She’ll forget all about you eventually.”

“But if I were to write her a response, what would I say to suggest she shouldn’t write to me anymore without hurting her feelings?”

“She can’t even spell your name, how could you hurt her feelings?”

“Feelings don’t depend on literacy,” I said.

Jeremie didn’t look convinced.

“Just tell her you fell in love with someone else then,” he said. “Girls respect that kind of honesty. Better than boys at least.”

Jeremie got up from Simone’s bed and readjusted his pants at the waist. I wanted to ask him if he’d had or was still having problems finding comfortable underwear, like I did, but I thought he would just make a joke about the size of my penis.

“Do you know if Leonard is close to finishing his dissertation?” I asked him instead, as he went for the door.

“He talked about defending in the fall,” Jeremie said, and then he made this grunt, this sort of maimed-animal grunt he had whenever our mother asked him to do something he didn’t want to do but knew he had to, like renewing his insurance card at the beginning of a school year. “Sometimes I wonder if the father didn’t die when he did just to avoid all the PhD defenses,” he said.

In April, the two Indian women died within days of each other and Daphné Marlotte became the oldest person in the world. The journalist who wrote the article about it seemed to be walking on eggshells, though, not ready to cry victory too quickly. Daphné was still in the hospital recovering from her stroke and word had started to spread in town that the death of seniors of humanity went in threes and that Daphné might only have a few more days to live. I don’t know if my mother believed that but she wanted to visit Daphné in the hospital and she wanted me to come along. I told her hospitals made me uncomfortable, even though I couldn’t remember ever being in one. My mother didn’t pick up on the discrepancy. She tried to convince me it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, that we could pay a visit to the oldest person alive and then go down a couple of floors and see the newest newborns in the world, appreciate the greatness of the circle of life, and I said I didn’t care, that I was good enough only seeing people in the middle of the life spectrum. She said I was starting to sound like my siblings. This seemed to worry her.

Denise and Porfi and I had planned to run away to Paris after school on a Friday, and for Porfi to pick the staircase-door lock before that, as a prelude to our adventure. I’d stuffed my backpack with the usual runaway accessories, and I’d made a list of useful items for Denise, telling her to share it with Porfi, but when he met us at the top of the staircase to pick the lock, his bag didn’t look any more stuffed than usual.

“How come your bag is so slim?” I asked him. Porfi said there was no use in loading oneself like a mule when one knew where one’s parents hid their cash and could just travel with a few wads and buy things whenever one needed them.

“Clever,” Denise said.

I was uncomfortable with this. I didn’t think running away with your parents’ money counted, but I didn’t say. I wanted to see how Porfi picked the lock before I’d engage in any kind of moral argument with him.

“Look what else I got from my mother!” he said, rummaging through his pocket to present us with a black bobby pin.

“Is that all you need to pick a lock?” I asked.

“Just watch and learn,” he said.

Porfi opened his mother’s bobby pin at a ninety-degree angle and placed the wavy side inside the lock.

“The key, if I may say, is to keep that part at the bottom of the lock,” he explained, and then he started wiggling the flat part of the bobby pin left and right.

“Do you also know how to open dial combination safes just by listening to the mechanism?” I asked.

“Of course,” Porfi said. “I’ll show you if you want.”

I just nodded, trying not to show my excitement too much. It seemed, from what I’d gathered in movies at least, that the spy apprentices who showed too much excitement didn’t end up being as good as the placid ones.

“Okay,” Porfi said. “I found the soft spot.”

He looked nervous, and I thought it was because he was scared of what we would find on the other side of the door.

“How do you know you found it?” I said.

“You can tell the pin has slid between the latch and the plate.”

“Can I feel it?”

“I’m scared if I drop it, I’ll lose it,” Porfi said.

Denise and I were holding our breaths, each leaning over a different one of Porfi’s shoulders.

“What are you waiting for now?” Denise asked him after a minute where nothing had happened. Porfi let go of the pin and looked up at Denise.

“I’m worried that if I open this door for you now,” he said, “you’ll throw me out of the whole Paris thing. I want guarantees.”

“Why would we throw you out?” Denise said.

“Because you would have gotten what you wanted from me.”

“Are you kidding me? I don’t even care what’s behind that goddamned door,” Denise said, and then she looked at me. “He does.”

“What kind of guarantees do you want?” I asked Porfi, who glanced at me for a second before he went back to Denise.

“I want to know that we’re a couple,” he told her. “And to seal it with a kiss.”

“To seal it with a kiss?” Denise said. “Who even says things like that?”

Porfi didn’t let this get him down.

“I want a kiss with the tongue,” he said.

“Are you going to add a condition every time I think something out loud?”

For a second, it looked like Denise wouldn’t have minded Porfi’s adding as many conditions as he wanted.

“Do you guys want some privacy?” I said.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Denise said, looking at me like everything that was happening was my fault, which I guess was the case.

“I’ve never kissed anyone,” she told Porfi.

“Me neither,” he said. “But I practiced on my hand, and I think I’m pretty good.”

“Lucky me,” Denise said, and she took a pack of gum out of her pocket. She always had gum in her pockets. She would chew one or two sticks at lunchtime instead of eating. She put one in her mouth and offered Porfi a piece.

“What flavor?” he said.

“Peppermint.”

He took it and Denise offered me one too. The three of us chewed for a few seconds without talking.

“What now?” Denise asked.

“You have to close your eyes,” Porfi said.

Denise rolled her eyes and shut them. Porfi cleared his throat. I didn’t know if I was supposed to watch them or not. I looked down the stairs. I didn’t hear their mouths touch but I saw a group of six or seven kids tiptoe over and form a line at the bottom of the stairs, Victor in the middle of them all. The way they laughed and pointed in our direction, I knew Porfi and Denise were at it.

“What are you looking at?” I yelled at Victor. “Get the hell out of here!”

Victor and his followers started clapping their hands and woo-hooing at Porfi and Denise, but I still didn’t understand at that point that their presence down at the bottom of the stairs didn’t owe to pure chance.

Then behind my back, I heard Porfi telling Denise he was sorry. She didn’t ask what for, she’d put two and two together. Porfi was already walking down the stairs anyway, to meet his new crew.

There were a certain number of things one had to do to become a part of Victor’s crew, and those things, I’d heard said, varied wildly, depending on Victor’s inspiration on the day he gave his assignments, but all were aimed toward making the candidate feel lousy. Kissing Denise was supposed to be a ritual humiliation for Porfi, not her. I wasn’t sure that she saw it that way. I was pretty sure I shouldn’t help her to.

Victor high-fived Porfi as Porfi descended the stairs. Kissing Denise with tongue must have been the last part of his hazing. All the kids went the way they’d come without another look at us.

“He didn’t even open the fucking door,” was the first thing Denise said.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She was still chewing her gum.

“Of course I’m okay,” she said. “That prick just took me for a ride, that’s all. No need to dwell on it.”

I could tell she was embarrassed to have been played like that, but it was hard to determine whether she was also hurt, because she always looked hurt. She was staring at the bobby pin Porfi had left behind, still dangling out of the unpicked lock.

“Do you still want to go to Paris after school?” I asked.

She did not.

Back home, I found Simone lying in bed on her stomach, swinging her legs back and forth at a pace I knew meant she was in a good mood. The leg movements drew half circles in the air, connecting her ass cheeks and the mattress—the knee joints being the center of the circle.

“Will you hand me the cold cream?” she said without even looking at me as I came into our bedroom. The cold cream was on the nightstand between our beds, closer to her than to me at this point, but for some reason, Simone always wanted me to hand it to her. I suspected she waited hours sometimes, in desperate need of the cold cream she could see but not reach without interrupting her reading, until I would come into the room and pass it to her.

Simone slathered her elbows with cold cream about a million times a day. Her elbows were constantly frayed and reddened from the amount of time she spent rubbing them against carpets and bedsheets while she lay on her stomach reading. She tried other reading positions now and then, to give her elbows a rest, but she always ended up on her stomach a few minutes later. She couldn’t help it. For a whole month, she’d thought she’d solved the frayed-elbows problem altogether by buying a pair of those elbow pads that roller skaters and cyclists wear, walking around the house with them at all times, taking them off only for school, shower, and bed, but she’d developed an allergy to the neoprene that lined them. “There goes my roller skating career,” she’d said after her dermatologist appointment, and resumed usage of the good old cold cream. I liked the way the cold cream made our bedroom smell, even though I pretended to find it too sweet and girly. I handed her the tube.

“I got a letter this morning,” Simone said as she rubbed the cream into her cracked elbows, and for a second I thought the letter would be from Rose. “I got into the prep school I wanted in Paris.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Looks like you’ll have the bedroom all to yourself next year.”

I didn’t know if Simone wanted me to be happy about that or start reciting a list of all the things I would miss about her constant presence. She had a way of making me feel like I was being tested sometimes.

“Looks like it,” I said conservatively.

“What are we going to do about my biography?”

“I guess you’ll have to send me written reports of prep school life,” I said.

“What about calls? Do you think I could call you, like, every week or so?”

“I thought prep school was all about work work work,” I said. “You might not have that much to report.”

“Will you miss me?”

“Of course,” I said. “I miss Berenice.”

“But Berenice has been away more than half your life at this point,” Simone said, apparently offended. “You’re not as tight with her as you are with me! I think it is going to be way harder for you than you think when I’m gone.”

I started unpacking my school bag on my desk, all of it, the cans of beans and the cookies and the kitchen knife. It didn’t matter that Simone saw it.

“Did you run away for like five hours again?” she asked.

“I wish,” I said, and then I crawled into bed, planning to only get back up when my mother called us down for dinner.

“What’s wrong with you, Dory?” Simone asked.

I told her about how Porfi had made Denise believe he was in love with her only so he could kiss her in front of Victor and his minions as a dare and how humiliating it all was for Denise, even though she hadn’t said anything about being humiliated. I said people like Victor were the dregs of humanity.

“Actually,” Simone said, “the most horrible people really aren’t the ones the majority would recognize as objectively horrible. I think the worst are those who look up to objectively horrible people.” Then she thought about it a second and added that the same exact thing went for dumb people.

“So Porfi is the worst guy in this story?” I said.

“Well yeah. He didn’t even come up with the idea to break that poor girl’s heart, he just thought it was worth his time and went along with it.”

“But you could argue that because it wasn’t his idea, and because he might never have come up with such a mean prank in the first place, then maybe he’s inherently less bad than Victor, who was the brains of the operation.”

“At least the other one had a brain,” Simone said. “Even if a fucked-up one.”

“So the problem with any dictatorship,” I said, following Simone’s argument, “is never really the dictator himself but the people who agree with him.”

“Exactly,” Simone said. “There could potentially be a good dictatorship—I don’t see why the public could only be sheep for horrible leaders—but the problem is that good people never want to be dictators.”

“That’s a bummer,” I said.

“All good people want is to be left alone and help those around them. The problem is good people lack ambition.”

“You don’t lack ambition,” I said.

“Well, I’m not sure I qualify as a good person,” Simone said, without any kind of emotion. “I don’t have much patience.”

She was still massaging the cream inside the cracks of her elbows. They were so red.

“Maybe you should be the dictator,” she said, like it was the best idea she’d had in a while.

“I wouldn’t know what to do with power,” I said.

“I’d help you! I have a few ideas for a better society.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said, “but how would you telling me what to do be different than actually being the dictator yourself?”

“Dictators have advisers, you know? No one would expect you to come up with all the laws.”

“What do you think should be my first measure as a dictator?” I said.

“If I were your adviser,” Simone said, “I would make commenting on the Internet illegal. I don’t think people should express themselves as much as they think they should.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

“Obviously, you should leave this exchange out of my biography.”

Denise didn’t meet me in the staircase the next day, or the one after that, but this time I knew she couldn’t be flirting with Porfi and I got worried. I walked by the classroom where she had Chinese lessons in the mornings and took a look at the attendance sheet each teacher had to fill out at the beginning of their classes and stick outside the door for the monitors to collect and bring to the principal’s office. Denise’s name was in the “Absentees” column. I rushed to my own classroom before Herr Coffin would mark me as missing, but he hadn’t yet taken attendance—he often forgot and the monitor had to interrupt our class for him to do it. Herr Coffin was trying to interest my fellow Germanists in a Hofmannsthal poem when I walked in.

“Who can think of another way the word Erlebnis could have been rendered by the translator of this poem?” he asked. No hands were raised.

Coffin was of the opinion that a translation, when well done, could be better than the original version. He said that the original contained the idea of what the poem aspired to but could never fully be, whereas a translation of said poem went straight for its essence and could carry out its potential while getting rid of the first empirical layer—whatever that meant—in the process, bringing it closer to its “truth.”

To me, in German or French, Hofmannsthal made no sense at all.

“Herr Mazal?” Coffin asked as he handed me a Xerox of the poem we were looking at. “Do you know of any other ways to translate the word Erlebnis?”

I looked down at the sheet of paper in case the answer had been written on it.

“ ‘Adventure’?” I tried.

Coffin was pleased, and I thought he would leave me alone for the rest of the hour. Except I was the only one who had any interest in German, and when Coffin was tired of attempting to catch the others’ attention, he pretended the class was just composed of the two of us.

“And why is it you think the translator decided to translate Erlebnis as ‘experience’ and not ‘adventure’ here, in the particular case of this poem?”

“I would have to read the whole poem,” I said, “to get some context.”

“Please do,” Coffin said.

I scanned through the poem, trying to spot the verbs first. Filled, seeping, glowing (twice), fathom, sailing, gliding. Not a single useful verb. Not one verb that helped me see what Hofmannsthal was talking about. Then nouns: valley, dusk, chalice, lilac. That’s why I wasn’t making any progress, I thought. Daphné Marlotte was right. Poetry was of no help when you wanted to learn actual German.

“I think adventure would have implied that something in the poem was going to happen,” I said, “whereas all the narrator talks about here are sensations and feelings and images. So the word experience, being more static, was more appropriate, I suppose.”

“You do not think death could be referred to as an adventure?” Coffin said, and I read the poem again. I guess Hofmannsthal was indeed talking about dying, but he wrapped it in so many flower names I had been confused.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if death should be called an adventure or an experience. I guess the fact that one only dies once would tip the scale in favor of adventure, in a way, because the word adventure implies a sort of uniqueness, when an experience can be repeated many times. Potentially.”

“I think experience is just more poetic sounding,” I heard Victor say from the last row. “And Hofmanstool was a poet, so he had to use the most poetic words. Adventure sounds more like it would be for an action movie title, maybe.”

“Action movies were not too popular in Hofmannsthal’s time,” Herr Coffin said. “And we’re talking about the translator’s choices here, anyway, not the poet’s.”

“Oh,” Victor said. “Right. Entschuldigang.”

“Sure,” Coffin said. “No problem. Let’s take a look at the first verse now.”

He went to the blackboard and wrote down a couple of words I knew from previous poems we’d studied but he thought maybe the rest of the class had forgotten.

“We’ve been over these words already,” I said, and Herr Coffin turned and looked at me above his glasses.

“Repetition is at the root of all worthy pedagogy,” he said, and he went back to dusk and valley.

“I just can’t think of a way I could use these words in a normal conversation,” I interrupted him. I felt a wind of energy rise in the rows behind me, as if my classmates had been woken from an enchanted sleep: something was actually happening in German class. Coffin walked to my table and took his glasses off, which I knew was something old people did sometimes to see better.

“And what words do you think might be more suitable to a normal conversation?” he asked me. I looked down at my table and proceeded to list what was on it.

“Pencil,” I said, “pencil case, pencil shavings, eraser, graffiti.”

“Well these sound like the roots of a very promising exchange, don’t they?” Coffin said. The whole room laughed politely, which encouraged him to keep going.

“I didn’t know you were such a conversationalist, Herr Mazal. You must have many friends.”

“He doesn’t!” Victor said, in an attempt, I assumed, to get my roast under way and waste a few more minutes of German class, but which had the opposite effect of putting Coffin back on my side (Coffin couldn’t have had that many friends growing up) and his glasses back on his nose.

“Enough already,” he yelled Victor’s way. Herr Coffin never yelled, and I understood why when he did. Someone must have told him how his yelling sounded like an old lady’s as she was being mugged. He turned back to me and forced his voice down to a deeper pitch than usual.

“And what do you suggest would be a proper vector to teach you more ‘normal’ words, Herr Mazal?”

“Maybe we could watch movies?” I said. “Movies in German?”

Coffin didn’t reject the idea right away but didn’t seem to know what I was talking about either.

“Movies,” he repeated, as if the word represented some complex concept he was trying to remember from college.

“Yes,” I said, “movies where people have everyday conversations.”

“Like Dirty Dancing!” said Emilie, who sat next to me.

“That doesn’t sound very German,” Coffin said.

“Does it have to be?” Emilie bargained.

“I can’t see what the pedagogical use would be otherwise.”

“Maybe the movies would only have to be dubbed in German?” she said.

I thought this would ruin any chance we would ever have of Coffin’s agreeing to show us a movie in class, but it got him thinking. He admitted he hadn’t seen a new movie in a long time, and that he didn’t even know who today’s stars were (Coffin called them “idols”).

Emilie started naming movie stars, and Coffin stopped her at Brad Pitt. He didn’t believe Brad Pitt could actually be anyone’s name. He thought we were pulling his leg. I wondered what Coffin did when he was alone. Several of my classmates confirmed Brad Pitt existed, but Coffin looked at me for confirmation. “It really is a name,” I said.

“Has he been in any good movies?” Coffin asked.

“Legends of the Fall,” Victor said, which surprised me a little. I wouldn’t have gotten away with Legends of the Fall, but Victor was a popular guy, so no one made fun of him.

“Well I’ll tell you what,” Coffin said. “If all of you participate in class today, and by participating, I mean saying something not too dumb about this Hofmannsthal poem, and trying to do so in German, I will look for a version of Legends of the Fall dubbed in German.”

Everyone suddenly had something to say about Hofmannsthal, and I thought they would all thank me for coming up with the watching-a-movie idea, but after class, the boys gathered around Victor and the girls around Emilie to show gratitude and share their excitement about Legends of the Fall.

I called Denise’s house. Her mother said she couldn’t come to the phone. I asked what was wrong, if Denise was sick. Her mother said, very politely, that Denise had anorexia and depression, like I might not have noticed. It felt insensitive to tell her I knew all that already and ask if there wasn’t anything new with her daughter. It seemed like enough illnesses for one person already.

“Will you tell her Isidore called?” I said.

She said sure and thanked me for calling, and for my concern, which would make Denise very happy. I knew it wouldn’t, and for a second I understood why Denise’s mother drove her so mad.

I didn’t like calling people. I was okay with picking up the phone (I liked it, actually; Simone said I’d make a great receptionist) but I thought I had to have a very good reason to be responsible for a phone ringing in someone else’s house. I think it is because the ringing of our own phone seemed to bother our mother immensely most of the time. She’d sigh and say, “Who the hell?” when it rang, but then she always picked up with a warm hello. I thought a ringing phone had to annoy everyone as much as it did my mother, and that there would be no way to know that you’d annoyed them because, like her, they would always pretend they were happy to answer. I’d pondered calling Denise for a while. I’d decided that if I could come up with four questions to ask her and a story to tell that she might find entertaining, it would be enough to justify a call. I’d struggled to find four questions but I hadn’t given up, which I thought meant I really wanted to call Denise. My story was going to be that of having convinced Herr Coffin to show us Legends of the Fall in German class. I’d written all of it down, the questions and the key story points, on a piece of paper. I wondered if I could reuse it as a model for future phone calls. I wondered if I was the only one who needed excuses to call a friend.

From the living room where I sat I heard Leonard come down the stairs and rummage through our walk-in pantry.

“I killed the Oreos,” I said, in case that was what he’d been looking for.

He came into the living room.

“I thought you were watching your weight,” he said.

“Not really,” I said. “Berenice says I won’t grow much if I diet in my teenage years. I don’t want to be a midget.”

“When did you drop the diet?”

Leonard asked this with what seemed like scientific interest more than sheer curiosity.

“Is that relevant to your academic research?” I asked. “Do you think my losing weight was a mourning strategy?”

“Forget about it,” Leonard said.

“Are you going for a swim?”

“Yes,” he said, looking down at the duffel bag he’d once let a wet swimsuit go moldy in. “I’m going crazy up there writing all day. I need to spend some energy.”

I apologized about the Oreos and he left. I realized Jeremie was at symphony practice and that I could go upstairs and use his computer now—and without having Leonard watching over my shoulder.

The boys’ bedroom smelled like old water in a vase. On Leonard’s desk, one of his many notebooks had been left open. I knew I wouldn’t dare to turn the notebook’s pages—my siblings had a secret way to know if someone had been through their things—so I hoped Leonard had left it open to an interesting one.

study of symbolized/institutionalized relationships between individuals within more or less complex contexts, for which the groups studied by the first ethnology give us paradigmatic examples, or, to speak as Durkheim and Levi-Strauss after him, elementary. (Augé)

Role reassignment

[The family’s father has been dead eighty-six days]

At a party the whole family is attending (a town event) (all minus my middle sister), my youngest brother tries to initiate a conversation with a young girl whom he’s probably interested in on a sexual level. I spot him from the other side of the room. Our eyes meet, and before I can think about it, I give him the thumbs-up, which is not something I can remember ever doing before. As I do it, I wonder about the reasons behind this unprecedented gesture. I can’t decide whether I adopted a fatherly posture toward my youngest brother (encouragement of his attempt at establishing contact with the other sex) because our father’s passing has made it my role to take certain of his duties upon myself, or if that was only me acting as an older brother. The rupture caused by our father’s death has made salient certain things we had taken for granted so far; it revealed our previous routines and “ordinary” (cf. Chauvier’s definition of the term) at the very same time that it made it an obsolete frame of reference. My posture within the family group has to be redefined.

TV night

[Same day]

Our predictions regarding the plot have become a less systematic exercise. I sense hesitation on my siblings’ part now when the time comes to share their guesses relative to

I didn’t turn the page. As I sat at Jeremie’s computer, I tried to think about ways in which Leonard’s “posture” had changed since the father had died. He hadn’t become a more caring older brother, I didn’t think. He hadn’t started doing the dishes on weekends, like the father used to. He hadn’t found God or a steady girlfriend. The only new thing he’d done was that he’d turned our family from a model of academic achievement into the subject of his own academic achievement. I guess, knowing him, it was the best he could have done with a family tragedy.

I logged in to my dating website account. There was a message from Daniel, apologizing for his performance at dinner with us a few weeks before, asking if we would consider coming to his house so he could treat us all to his specialty, duck in a raspberry-vinegar sauce. The date and time on top of the message indicated that Daniel had sent this a few minutes after having gotten back home from the condescension fest my family had held at his expense. I deleted the account. A window popped up to tell me Rare Pearl was sorry to see me go, and that they hoped this only meant I had found that special someone.

I wasn’t comfortable using the Internet when my mother had expressly forbidden it, so I wanted to make it quick (she would be back from work soon) and efficient. I meant to fix all the mistakes I’d made. I took a minute to look up strokes, see if it was possible I’d made Daphné’s happen or if she’d had it coming anyway. All three websites I checked seemed to agree that she’d had it coming, and maybe my presence at the very moment it had happened had been a good thing in the end. I hoped Daphné saw it like that. Browsing medical websites took a weight off my shoulders. As did getting rid of Daniel. The Internet was going to help me free myself of all responsibilities. Contrary to Leonard, who needed to see sociological problems behind everything, including the death of the father—as if it weren’t in itself problematic enough—I wanted to simplify my thoughts. And my thoughts had been clouded by the idea that I might have caused Daphné’s stroke and Denise’s heartbreak. There wasn’t much to do about Denise, though. I didn’t know how to make someone fall in love with her for real, and I certainly couldn’t fall in love with her myself, but I thought I could try to take her mind off school and the Porfis of the world for a minute. I went on Juliette Corso’s website and clicked on the “Contact” tab. Juliette said she loved hearing from her fans and gave an address at which one could write to her. There was also a gallery of pictures from which one could choose a photo that Juliette would sign for a mere five euros plus shipping fees. I took note of the address, picked a picture of Juliette I thought Denise would like, wrote the reference number down, and walked away from my brothers’ bedroom as my mother was coming home. I borrowed Simone’s calligraphy set from her top desk drawer (it had, on top of deep black China ink and all sorts of quills, these thick sheets of paper like tapestry that I thought were very refined, and a line guide to help you not write all crooked on them) and applied myself.

Dear Juliette,

I wrote,

I am writing to you on behalf of a friend, who has been a big fan of yours since you appeared in the video for the Let Them Sea campaign when you were probably twelve to thirteen years old (we watched it in school at the time). The reason why I’m writing and she’s not is because she has depression and can’t find much interest in life, and when she does (she’s interested in you!), she can’t seem to get herself to do anything about it. So I was wondering if maybe you could send her (through me) an autographed picture (reference number 808578). I think this might help her see that life can be nice sometimes. I think it would make her happy, or at the very least less depressed. Her name is Denise Galet, but maybe if you just wrote “For Denise,” it would feel to her more personal and warm.

My own name is Isidore. I wouldn’t mind an autographed picture as well, but your website says you only send one picture per fan mail, so maybe I’ll write my own letter later. What I am most interested in, actually, is knowing whether the Let Them Sea campaign video that you were in was candid footage, or if it was work for you as an actress. In other words: Had you seen the sea before the day you shot the video? Did you have a little brother who had never seen the sea either? If not, if it was all “fake,” can you tell me how you got the idea to look at your brother/actor the way you did in the video, instead of looking at the sea yourself like anyone would expect a girl who’d never seen it before would do (and like all other kids in the video did)? I thought it was very moving. You’re either a very good person or a very good actress. Maybe both!

Thank you for your answer,

Isidore Mazal

I felt good about the letter when I was done, as good as I felt whenever I put some order into my bedroom. Or rather: my side of the bedroom. I felt as good as I did whenever I put some order into my side of the bedroom and before I looked at Simone’s. Simone’s was always in disarray. Her bed was unmade at all times. I don’t think she’d ever folded a piece of clothing in her life. I always hoped tidying my side of the room would inspire her to do the same with hers, and since it kept not happening, I’d once taken it upon myself to do it for her. I’d heard about it for weeks. “What the hell have you done?” she’d complained. “I can’t find anything anymore!” She’d said her apparent disorganization was how she kept things organized, that she’d mapped it all out in her head, and that I should never again mess with other people’s messes. I didn’t think I had messed with Denise’s mess by writing a letter to her childhood crush. But the more I grew up, the harder it became to tell the difference between what was mine to organize and what wasn’t any of my business at all.

Berenice came to visit for my birthday in May. She got me a bilingual edition of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which I knew right away I would never read and bequeathed back to her when I updated my will later that night. I also included Denise in the new version, extending my will to people outside the family for the very first time. Denise would get my backpack if I died. There was nothing special about my backpack. It was a black version of the same backpack almost everyone had at the time, but Denise had mentioned liking it once, and Denise never really mentioned liking anything. She’d said she liked that it was black and unaltered, when all the other kids picked weird colors or added stickers and pins to theirs to express their uniqueness. She’d missed school for two weeks already. When I’d called her house again, after mailing my letter to Juliette’s fan club, Denise’s mother had told me she might not come back at all the rest of the school year. They’d had to commit her to a clinic so she would gain a little weight, she’d told me. The teachers had stopped marking her as absent on their attendance-control sheets.

Berenice was supposed to only stay for my birthday weekend, but Monday came and went and she didn’t head back to Paris. My mother asked if she didn’t have a job to get back to. Berenice didn’t say exactly what had happened with her contract, her school, just that she couldn’t work there anymore. I assumed that meant her superiors had confirmed her suspension and cut away all forms of income, but she presented her situation as an affair that had everything and nothing to do with her at the same time.

“I might be too charismatic to teach,” is what she said.

“Are those your superiors’ words?” my mother asked. “Did students complain about your charisma?”

Berenice dismissed questions about her charisma by saying she was tired of explaining, as if she’d had many other people to explain her problem to over the previous days. If she had, we’d never heard of them.

At night, she often went out with Aurore, and they would come home tiptoeing and whisper-laughing in the wee hours of the morning and fall asleep in Aurore’s bed. Aurore had defended her PhD almost six months before, but she didn’t seem to be looking for a teaching job. I think Berenice was trying to convince her to get a second PhD instead.

In the afternoons, Berenice monopolized the house computer to look for an apartment in Chicago, where she wanted to move as soon as possible to familiarize herself with American English (hers was British English; I didn’t know what the difference was) and American culture before school would start. She also looked forward to taking advantage of the University of Chicago Library, which she assumed would be deserted in the summer. I was secretly hoping she would never find an apartment and never move away from our house again. She had this mix of older-sibling sweetness and authority (I don’t know if that’s what she called her charisma) that made us all want to be on our best behavior around her. Everyone seemed less sad when she was home.

Denise missed about a month and a half of school and came back mid-June, a week before the end of the school year. She was fatter than I’d ever seen her, which was still not fat at all, but I knew it was too much for her and didn’t comment on it. She had cheeks now, not just cheekbones, and I tried not to stare at them.

“You look good,” I said, slightly worried she might find it insulting, but she thanked me. She sat on her usual step, but then got up right away and said it was nice enough out to go feed the birds. I didn’t expect she would want to expose herself to all the kids on the playground on her first day back at school, but I thought maybe this meant she was cured and I followed her outside. We sat on the bench under the poplar, where everybody could see us, though some, like Porfi, pretended they didn’t. Denise took a chocolate-covered candy bar out of her backpack. It was the first time I’d ever seen her holding such a thing. She usually brought day-old bread when she wanted to feed the birds.

“You’re going to make these pigeons very happy,” I said, looking at the chocolate bar.

“Are you crazy?” Denise said. “Chocolate kills birds. Don’t you know that?”

Then she handed me some stale bread to crumble, unwrapped her chocolate bar, and started sucking on it, as if that was the way people ate them.

“I always wanted to try one of these,” she said.

“What do you think?”

“It’s pretty good. Although I’m not sure it’s worth the amount of calories.” She looked at the nutrition facts on the wrapping paper and informed me that three of those bars contained enough calories to get you through the day.

“You’re supposed to bite through it,” I said, “to get all the textures at once. Try it like that before you reach a final verdict.”

Denise seemed hesitant, as if we were on a plane and I’d just asked her to do a parachute jump. She took the smallest possible bite. It wasn’t even a bite, really, more a careful dissection of the outer chocolate that exposed the layers inside of the bar, none of which had met with her teeth.

“So?”

She brought her hand to her mouth and made a sign like she would answer me once she’d finished chewing, except I didn’t understand how anyone could actually chew so tiny a bite of food as the one she’d taken. I saw Herr Coffin cross the playground, and Victor and Emilie run after him. I assume they asked him if he’d brought us a movie, and I assume Coffin said he hadn’t, because both Victor and Emilie looked disappointed and went their separate ways to bring news to their respective groups.

“It is better that way,” Denise said.

Coffin had gone weeks telling us he couldn’t find a version of Legends of the Fall dubbed in German and that if we kept complaining about how he wasn’t holding to his promise to show us a movie, he would cease looking for Legends of the Fall at once, or worse, bring us an actual German movie of his choosing. He didn’t say “or worse,” but people heard it anyway.

“You know what else is good?” I told Denise. “Ice cream.”

“I remember ice cream,” Denise said. “I think it’s overrated.”

She resumed sucking on her chocolate bar instead of really eating it.

“Have you talked to Porfi recently?” she asked. I said I hadn’t and couldn’t think of a reason to.

“Well I doubt he’ll ever dare talk to me again,” she said, “but if he comes to you, will you please tell him I never gave a shit about him? I would like him to know that.”

“Why don’t you tell him directly?”

“I tried to just catch his eye this morning on the way to class, but he won’t even look in my direction. I think it would be more powerful coming from you anyway,” she said. “Boys never believe a girl when she says she never cared. He would think it’s pride or something.”

“I would believe it,” I said.

“You have many sisters. You don’t count.” She looked pretty certain I didn’t qualify as a boy in this particular instance. “Will you tell him?”

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever you want.”

The birds at our feet didn’t once look up to see where all the bread was coming from, as if crumbs falling from the sky wasn’t a mystery worth investigating. But maybe they already knew that bread crumbs always came from humans and weren’t too interested in figuring out in what specific ways I differed from the others. The monitor who had forbidden us to feed the birds before gave me a look from the other side of the playground but didn’t come our way. The principal had probably instructed him to let Denise do whatever she wanted, and the small privileges her mental illness brought her must have, in his mind, extended to me.

When the bell rang, I told Denise I was glad she was back. I’d pondered telling her I had missed her but decided not to go that far, even though it was the truth.

“I’m glad too,” she said, and then she dumped the rest of her chocolate bar, which was pretty much the whole of it, into the garbage can by the bench.

About ten minutes later, as Herr Coffin was going over the subtleties of the word Geist, I thought about how I should have told Denise to hold on to the chocolate bar. The garbage can on the playground didn’t have a lid, and I feared the birds would dive in and have a taste of chocolate and die from it. I decided I would go down and retrieve the chocolate bar from the garbage can as soon as German class was over, but then I started to worry it might be too late. I was about to ask Coffin for permission to leave the room (at the risk of having everyone believe I had a small bladder) to sneak down to the playground and snatch the chocolate bar when we heard a thud, coming from the main hall. I didn’t think it was a particularly alarming sound, but Victor took it as an opportunity to interrupt Coffin’s class. “What was that?” he said, already up and ready to go out and check. Coffin said it was probably nothing and we ought to go on with the poem he’d brought us that day, but then we heard a woman scream and no one waited for Coffin’s authorization to rush out of the room. Miss Da Ming, Denise’s Chinese teacher, was holding on to the guardrail overlooking the school’s entrance hall four floors down. “Someone call an ambulance,” she said, but everyone wanted to see what an ambulance was needed for before they would do anything. “She just said she needed to go to the bathroom,” I heard Miss Da Ming whisper as I elbowed my way through the students gathered around the rail. Denise was lying facedown on the tile floor thirty feet below, her arms bent at angles they shouldn’t have been. For a whole minute, I think, I wondered how she’d managed to fall over the rail. It wasn’t even a rail, more a concrete wall the height of a rail. “Check out that dent on the lockers!” a kid said. “She must’ve bounced on it on her way down!” “Maybe it softened the fall?” a girl said. I didn’t understand how bouncing on the metal lockers could have softened anything. Denise wasn’t moving, but there was no blood around her or anything. I thought it was a good sign. After the paramedics took Denise to the hospital (she was still breathing), I went downstairs and took away the chocolate bar from the top of the garbage can. It didn’t look like the birds had touched it.

After Denise jumped in the atrium (which is what the teachers started calling the entrance hall that day, as if a suicide attempt created the need to use fancier words, or else, perhaps, to rename everything), classes were canceled for the rest of the day. Berenice was reading on the couch when I came home, and I startled her, as if I’d walked in on her in the middle of a very private activity. Which I guess was how she thought of reading.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” she said.

“No school today,” I said. I didn’t know how to explain that Denise had tried to kill herself after recess without having to have a whole conversation about it. I was still holding the barely eaten chocolate bar. It had melted a bit on the way home. Berenice folded her legs to make some room for me on the couch.

“I found an apartment in Chicago,” she said.

“That’s great news,” I said. I felt like the projectionist had skipped a reel, like a whole scene was missing from between the last time I’d sat on the couch that morning and this one.

“I’ll have to have roommates, though,” Berenice said. “There was no way around it.”

I knew how much the idea of sharing space with strangers made Berenice uncomfortable. “Maybe they’ll be nice,” I said.

“Well, at the very least, they should be smart. That’s no small feat in this world.”

“Are they all PhDs?”

“That’s what they say.”

Berenice picked up the book she’d laid open on her chest and started reading again.

“Do you mind if I watch TV?” I said.

“Of course I do. I’m reading.”

“Maybe you could stop?”

“To watch daytime television?”

“We could go rent a movie or something. I’m sure we could find one that’s set in Chicago. To get you in the mood. Or one where the hero has roommates.”

“Why don’t you go find yourself a book and sit here with me instead? We can have a reading workshop.”

“I don’t like reading,” I said.

“You’re too old to say things like that. It’s not cute. Go get the book I got you for your birthday.”

“It sounds a bit boring,” I admitted, picturing all the shades of brown on the Buddenbrooks dust jacket.

“It’s your fault for being into German culture,” Berenice said. “I would’ve gotten you something less taxing otherwise.”

It became clear to me at that point that I was about to cry. There was this pressure right behind my eyes. It burned, almost, while the rest of my body suddenly filled with a waft of cold air. I didn’t understand how Berenice couldn’t feel it. I always felt it when someone next to me was sad.

“Are you going to eat that?” Berenice was pointing at the chocolate bar in my hand.

I shook my head no and she grabbed the bar and bit through it like a normal person would.

“By the way,” she said, her mouth full of peanuts and caramel and maybe some of Denise’s saliva from two hours before. “There was a letter for you in the mail.”

It wasn’t really a letter. Juliette had just sent an autographed picture, the one I’d requested, of her in a baby-blue dress standing in a field of sunflowers, on which she’d written, “For Denise Galet, With all my ♥♥♥ Juliette Corso.” No note, no answers to my questions about the charity campaign. I wasn’t even sure Juliette had read my letter, or if she had assistants who opened her mail for her and only made lists of the pictures she would have to sign and of the names that should go on them. I put the picture back in the reinforced envelope it had come in, so it wouldn’t bend. There was a tiny chance, I thought, that Denise would be back in school in a day or two.

When school resumed, we were told a psychological support unit had been set up, for those who needed to talk about what had happened to Denise. No one went, and so the day after, the principal made it mandatory for all eighth graders to go talk to the social workers, so they wouldn’t have come all the way there for nothing. We would be called in alphabetical order throughout the next couple of days, the principal said. At recess, I heard two girls, Steph and Jess, go to Sara Catalano to inquire about her meeting with the counselors.

“What did they ask you?” Jess said, like it was all a big school test and Sara could help them score better results.

“They asked how I was dealing with all of it,” Sara said, visibly proud to have had the psychological support unit experience a couple of hours ahead of most people. “They asked if I felt guilty.”

“Really? Why?”

“What did you say?”

“I think I’m not supposed to tell,” Sara said. “There’s professional confidentiality.”

“Well that’s just for them,” Jess said. “You’re not a professional.”

“I guess you’re right,” Sara said. “Anyway. I told them I wished I could’ve done something to help Sunshine out but—”

“Wait, you actually told them Denise’s nickname was Sunshine?”

“No, of course I didn’t,” Sara said.

“Did they know about it, though?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t refer to her as Sunshine.”

They all went quiet for a few seconds, as if they were about to understand something.

“So,” Sara resumed, “I told them I’d tried to reach out to Sunshine in the past, like, I’d tried to show her that life wasn’t all about being miserable and all, so I felt like I had done whatever I could and I didn’t think I was guilty.”

“I didn’t know you’d tried to be friends with her.”

“I didn’t try to be friends, just, you know, see what her deal was.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Couple years ago. Like, after she took all those pills. She came to my mother’s practice for cavities. I saw her come out of the building and I was like, ‘Why did you do that with your mother’s pills?’ like, I really wanted to understand what had gone on, but she told me to mind my own business so I was like, ‘Okay, fine, I tried,’ you know? But then I thought maybe she was being defensive because she didn’t trust me or something and so I told her that if she needed to talk to someone, I was available. Like, not at school, but after school, if she wanted. We live on the same block. She didn’t like that either.”

“What did she say?”

“She told me to go to hell and to take my condensation with me.”

Jess whistled, to signify how harsh she thought Denise’s response had been.

“My mother said her teeth were all fucked up anyway,” Sara added.

“Well they sure are now,” Jess said. “They say her jaw blew to pieces.”

They paused again.

“Did you tell them all that? That she’d turned you down?”

“At first I thought it would be unfair to Sunshine to talk about how she didn’t want my help, but then I figured, what the hell, the more I talk, the more these shrinks feel like their job is important, and the more French class I get to miss.”

“You’re so lucky they called you during French class,” Steph said. “With my luck, I’ll probably just miss civics, which is basically, like, not a class anyway.”

“Can you actually make it last as long as you want?” Jess inquired. “Like, if I start crying or something by the end of the thirty minutes, they’ll have to keep me, right?”

My turn came the following morning. The psych support unit had been set up in the auditorium’s dressing rooms, behind the stage, at the end of a narrow, tilted hallway. I’d never been there before. I’d never even auditioned for a school play. The social workers, a man and a woman wearing jackets in different shades of corduroy, had laid their files on the long table attached to a wall of mirrors where I assumed tissues and palettes of cheap makeup usually went. For a second I thought the mirrors were two-way and that Denise hadn’t really jumped, but that this was in fact a criminal investigation. Only the male social worker talked. I wondered if the woman took care of the girls. She just stared at me the whole time and didn’t say anything.

“Are you close to Denise?” the man asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure what close means.”

“I heard people say she was your girlfriend.”

“I heard people say strawberry was the best flavor of ice cream,” I said.

“Hmm.”

He wrote something down in his notebook and underlined it decisively.

“And what do you think is the best flavor of ice cream, Isidore?” he asked. He waited to be done with his question to look back up at me.

“Is this a new school of psychology?” I said. “Ice-cream preference based?”

He wrote down something else.

“Would you define yourself as skeptical? Do you believe people generally have hidden intentions? That their questions cannot be genuine?”

“Denise told me once that I took things too literally,” I said. “I think she meant I was dumb.”

“Did that hurt your feelings?”

“Not particularly.”

“Where were you when Denise had her accident?”

“German class.”

“Do you like German?”

“It has a few good words,” I said.

“Were you aware Denise was suicidal?”

“Yes. I mean, everybody is. Aware of it, I mean.”

“Would you say you understood what suicide meant before she jumped?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Would you care to expand?”

“I don’t feel guilty, if that’s what you want to know,” I said. “Denise doesn’t like life. Not just her own. In general. It pains her. It has nothing to do with me. Not specifically.”

“Who said anything about guilt? Do you think you’re expected to feel guilty?”

“I think it would be pretentious to feel guilty. It would mean there was something I could’ve done to change her whole worldview and I didn’t care to do it, or just forgot to pull it out of my sleeve. But I had nothing. I still have nothing.”

The social worker nodded.

He asked about a few more things, my health, what kind of lifestyle I led, if I liked team sports. I didn’t understand how that related to anything, but I answered as best I could. When he ran out of random questions, I got up to leave the way I’d come, but the woman social worker stopped me and shook her head no. Her colleague explained the next kid was waiting and we were not supposed to cross paths.

“Why not?” I asked.

“That’s just how it works,” he said, and he pointed at a small door at the other end of the room. “You can exit through here. It’s the artists’ exit.”

I pushed the door open and found myself at the top of the staircase Denise and I had spent two years’ worth of recesses in.

Back home I fixed myself a bowl of ice cream with all the flavors we had in the basement freezer. Some pints had been there for too long and their insides were covered with that thin layer of ice crystals that tells you the ice cream will taste exactly like the cardboard around it, but I scooped some out of those anyway. Our freezer was big enough that we didn’t really ever need to organize it or get rid of anything, even the things we didn’t like. I ended up with thirteen different flavors, cherry, candied chestnut, chocolate chip, coffee, lavender, blueberry, pineapple, rum raisin, nougat, pistachio, speculoos, coconut, and licorice. All the flavors that sounded weird had been bought by the father and were therefore at the very least two years and a couple of months old. I went back up to the living room and turned the TV on. A reality show was playing, introducing people who wanted to be famous for nothing in particular, like Simone but not as smart. One of them was eating ice cream too, out of a pint that had been covered with black duct tape to hide the brand.

“Who do you think will be eliminated next week?” the ice-cream-eating guy asked another guy.

“Geez, I hope Cynthia goes home,” the second guy said. “She gets on my nerves so bad, you know? She’s so negative.”

“Totally, it’s like she doesn’t even want to be here,” the first guy said, “like she can’t see how lucky she is to even be here.”

I thought the audience would be shown a scene with Cynthia next, so they could make up their mind about her, whether she should go home or not, but the two guys remained on-screen and talked some more about how lucky they were to be there, what a great opportunity it was, to be there, to just be, really, and to get all that love from the fans by just being there, being themselves. I started laughing because I couldn’t really believe how much they were using the verb to be. I must have laughed very loud because Simone came rushing down the stairs to see what was up, and in the process of laughing I had spilled some ice cream on the couch, and I thought that was the reason why she was staring at me judgmentally, but then when I looked at the spilled ice cream and invoked laughing as an excuse for it, Simone just said that I had scared her, laughing like a maniac, and who the hell laughed when they were alone anyway? Then she walked back up to our room. The thirteen ice creams in my bowl had started to melt and now swirled together in one of those tie-dye-T-shirt patterns. I considered slurping the whole thing but then I thought it was too pretty to destroy.

I went to the kitchen to get a bucket of soapy water and a sponge to clean the ice cream I’d spilled on the couch before it would dry. While I was at it, I tried getting rid of the old stain, even though I’d tried and failed many times before. I thought maybe old stains could be like people and decide to give up one day, without a reason, to just disappear. This one didn’t. The couch was just big enough for four of us. It had often been a source of conflict, who got to sit on the couch, who took the chair, who had to sit on cushions on the floor. But Berenice was packing to move to Chicago, Simone couldn’t wait to start school in Paris, and the father was dead. Occasions to plead for a spot on the couch had gotten scarce and would only grow scarcer with time, I thought. Yet the repeated fights over who got to sit on the couch had been the best arguments in favor of getting a new, bigger one. From now on, no one but me would ever see the need to get rid of it. I scraped the old stain until it became a hole. Maybe a hole would make my family see that it was time for a change. Probably they wouldn’t notice. When the hole got big enough, I started pulling the wadding out of the cushion. By the time I emptied the cushion entirely, my ice creams had all melted together in a light brown puddle.