I WALKED TO THE BEDROOM THAT I HAD SHARED with Nicolas since I was a baby. On top of the bureau, there was a pile of VHS tapes on how to teach yourself karate. Nicolas had been watching them for years. He was actually really good at a lot of the moves. He looked like he was good at them anyways.
We never threw anything away. We had Valentine’s Day cards from elementary school. There were storybooks on the shelf next to some of Nicolas’s dirty magazines. There was a Peter and the Wolf record. There were action figures on the windowsill.
There were postcards that Étienne sent us from when he was in prison. We stuck them religiously to the wall, and now the Scotch tape was all yellow and peeling. There was a postcard of a man on a unicycle. There was a postcard of a strongman pulling a bus. There was a postcard of a naked woman completely covered in tattoos. That was particularly horrifying for us as children. We would spend hours looking at it.
The room had been our dad’s long before we were born. The closet was still filled with his clothes. Grandmother and Loulou never bought us new toys because they figured we could just play with Étienne’s. Our stuffed animals were wretched. They had wanted to retire after Étienne. They had wanted to just chill out at the bottom of a toy box. They could barely hold their heads up and were missing eyes.
Still, we wheeled them down the street in an old doll carriage. We tied bibs around their necks and stuck empty spoons up to their mouths, begging them to eat. We changed their clothes and straightened their hair. We told them we loved them. They just said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Nicolas and I slept in the same double bed. There was a single mattress by the window, but we just used that as a couch. We slept in our boots some nights under the giant old quilt that was covered in green roses.
I closed the window and the blind and lay on the bed. I started reading where I’d left off in Les Misérables. With the exception of Lucky Luke comic books, Nicolas did not share my fondness for reading. It was hard to concentrate on anything once Nicolas came home with his latest plight and crazy antics.
I was excited that I had signed up for school. I didn’t know why. I felt as if I had had an unusually productive day. He would be very sorry indeed when he found out what kind of day I had had. Wouldn’t he be amazed to find out that I had been nominated queen of the entire city? I couldn’t wait to make him regret having stood me up.
But it got later and later and Nicolas still didn’t show up.
I figured that he was probably at the Polish Social Club. There was a big dance floor there and he really liked to show off with his terrible moves. For some reason girls couldn’t resist him when he was dancing. The visions of what he was doing kept building and building in my head, until I was imagining a whole bar filled with people raising their glasses in the air, toasting him.
I decided that I might as well go out and look for Nicolas.
I put on a pretty dress. It was navy blue and had white buttons in the shape of flowers going down the front and little puffed sleeves. I rummaged through the drawer, pushing Nicolas’s boxers and gym socks out of the way until I found a pair of grey corded tights. I pulled them on. There was only a hole in the left foot where my big toe stuck out and another one behind my right knee. They were practically brand new as far as my tights went.
A cat slipped in the window, lay on the bed and rolled onto her back happily. She had just been impregnated. She lay there on her back with her paws on her chest, reliving the evening nervously in her mind.
I stuck a barrette with a silver star into my black hair. If I was going to be popping my head in and out of bars like a wife who was looking for her husband who had just got paid and was squandering all the money, at least I was going to look unbelievably fantastic while I was doing it. And if I didn’t find Nicolas, I might find someone else to distract me.