Jeannette smiled, thinking about the excitement at Katherine’s party. It had been a much more interesting way to spend those hours than minding her younger brothers or stacking bricks in the front courtyard for her father’s business. Living here was such a bore, she thought from her perch hidden in the tree. If she lived in Auxerre, say, or even in the market town a few kilometers away, there would be more traffic, more people walking around, people who didn’t know her and wouldn’t automatically yell “Stop that, Jeannette” when an apple or a hen’s egg hit their windshield or the ground in front of them.
She dangled one long leg down from the branch and leaned back against the trunk. Two adult dogs lay panting at the foot of the tree, and she could hear her younger brothers teasing the puppies, who barked incessantly back at them. Summer afternoons were so dull, nothing but the sounds of the kids and her father’s rock-cutting tools in the quarry, and Emile singing to himself as he fished under the bridge. The only part of the day she liked was hearing Michael play the guitar in his yard.
Michael, she had decided long ago, was sexy for an old guy, with a way of looking at you that said he noticed you in particular. He dressed chic, in jeans and boots with a real cowboy hat and an Indian belt buckle with stones in it. Everyone knew he was a rock star, living here to get away from his American fans.
Katherine was okay too, and sometimes gave her little presents, although it was easy to fool her. Katherine thought Jeannette needed a mother, which was ridiculous since she was almost fifteen. Jeannette liked being free to come and go. Her father told her he didn’t want the authorities coming around asking questions, so it was her job to make sure the boys had food, slept in their own beds, and wore shoes to school. Other than that, he didn’t much care how she spent her time. She was used to having no mother. It hardly bothered her to hear her school friends talk about going places with their families, or how their mothers were always wanting to know what they were doing. Who needed that?
She heard the harsh sound of metal clunking against pockmarked pavement, a stuttering noise coming closer and closer until it rounded the corner. It was the American, Brett, on his skateboard. Was he coming to see her? She flushed and scrambled out of the tree, brushing crumbs of bark off her shorts and yanking at her tight T-shirt. Brett Holliday was the coolest, well, the only cool thing in her whole summer, a stranger who had dropped into her village when she thought she would go crazy with nothing to do. He was living with his parents in the fancy converted barn on the outskirts of town. Brett was the handsomest boy Jeannette had ever seen and the most sophisticated. It was cool that his father was a record producer and his mother, even though she was really old, was a famous singer. He was nearly eighteen, and she thought he liked her.
“Hey,” he said, jumping off his still-moving skateboard and catching it with one hand as he stopped in front of her.
“Hey,” she mimicked in the same bored tone, carefully picking the green polish off one fingernail. The dogs stood up slowly and padded back to the courtyard.
“What’s up?” He spoke in a lazy voice that made her heart turn over. He flicked his long dark hair off his face and looked at her from under thick black brows.
“Rien, nothing,” she said with a shrug. “It’s hot.”
“Wanna ride my board?”
“Sure. Where?”
“Same place we did last time, the castle driveway.”
Jeannette hesitated. M. and Mme Bellegarde did not like them to play in the driveway, but it was the best place in the entire village for skateboarding, a long, curving slope with hardly any traffic and better paving than everywhere else. M. Bellegarde was rich and had the whole driveway paved last year, all except for the circle in front of the château’s old wooden doors. Her father said it was a waste of good money and that M. Bellegarde had too much money for one man. But Jeannette knew he was mainly pissed that the old man hadn’t brought the whole job to him, only the part he told her father needed to be reproduced with local quarry stone as close to the original as possible, the carriage entrance.
“We can look if they are home,” she said, concentrating to get the English right. Brett had no French, and Jeannette couldn’t wait to tell her friends how her English had improved because she had an American boyfriend this summer. They would look at her with respect and envy.
“The château is open for tourists only some days. Other days, they go for the lunch or for visiting the other châteaux, and sometimes all the way to Paris.” If they were gone today, she and Brett could skateboard all they wanted. You could hear the old people’s Mercedes coming through the village and hide in the little forest that started right next to the château and they would never know. Jeannette thought the forest was the best hiding place in the whole village, better even because it backed up onto the quarry, where you could lie on flat rocks on the hottest days and get a tan.
“Okay, let’s go,” Brett said, looking around. “Got your bike?”
“No, my brother borrowed it to do some errands for Papa,” Jeannette said. “I can walk.”
They set off, Brett riding slowly on his board, pushing off only enough to stay even with Jeannette. As she fiddled with her hair, she saw him looking sideways at her breasts. She knew they showed through her shirt. She was conscious of her bare legs. Did he think she was pretty?
Brett had told her he argued with his parents when they told him they were spending the whole summer in France and that he couldn’t stay home by himself. His father had reminded him about a time last winter when Brett offered to sell marijuana to a man who turned out to be a flic. Brett laughed as he told Jeannette the story. Of course his father talked the cops out of pressing charges. “My dad’s kind of a big deal back home,” he said, shrugging. “I’m still a juvenile, technically, so the cops were more into scaring me, anyway.” Until he ran into Jeannette, Brett said, he had done nothing but lie around the pool house next to his parents’ recording studio, watching DVDs. He had looked at her in a special way when he said it.
Jeannette knew what boys wanted. They bragged about it in school. “Ooh la la,” she could imagine Brett saying to his friends when he got home. “There was this French girl I did it with.” Her face got hot thinking about the implications. Did she want to “do it” with Brett? She had a feeling she was going to have to decide one day soon, which made her heart—or was it her stomach?—flip over again.
* * *
A half hour later, they were sitting on a bench at the top of the driveway. Jeannette was spitting onto her finger and patting the moisture on the outside of her elbow, which was bright red and had a raw patch. “Ce n’est rien, it’s nothing,” she said. “Only the little sting, you know?” She smiled at Brett, who was checking his board for damage. “I think I did better this time, non?”
“Wanna go again?”
She wanted to do whatever Brett wanted, was floating and a little dizzy with the pleasure of having him hold her around the waist and push her hip out to show her how to balance on the board. When she fell, he grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet after catching the board, and this last time, he bent his head down to look at her elbow and his hair grazed her chin. She breathed in the scent of him through her open mouth and was about to say yes when she heard the deep sound of the Mercedes diesel engine.
“We’d better get out of here. Come on, viens ici, this way.” Jeannette scampered into the heavy brush at the far side of the driveway, waving her arm at Brett to get him to move quickly. They disappeared into the tangle of rhododendrons and walnut trees a few seconds before the Bellegardes’ car rounded the bend and pulled into the gravel courtyard. From their hiding place, Jeannette and Brett could see the Bellegardes struggling with plastic bags from the supermarché, talking in low tones to each other as they crossed the courtyard, hauling the groceries in through the ancient wooden doors to the château.
Jeannette tried to guess what might be in the bags. They ate weird things, she knew from the time she found the sitting room’s French doors unlocked and snuck into the pantry. Jars of bright red cabbage that had German-language labels she couldn’t read. A tin of foie gras, which she knew was expensive and which she would have liked to take except it was the only one, and if they noticed it was gone they’d be more careful about locking doors and then she’d never get back in to look around. She had taken one of a stack of small tins of fish and had opened it with the little key that was attached to its lid when she had climbed back into her hiding place in the tree. But she spat out the fish, which was oily and pickly at the same time, and which looked like something that had been lying around in the mud by the river too long.
Jeannette became aware of how close Brett was. Their arms were touching and his skin was warm. Suddenly, he shifted his weight and leaned forward and across her, bumping her chest with his shoulder. She stepped back abruptly, looking quizzically at him and then in the direction he was facing. “I thought I heard something,” he whispered. But the bold way he stared into her eyes made her blush for some reason.
“Where?” she whispered back. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Oh, it’s gone now, I guess,” Brett murmured. “Probably a cat.”
“Ah,” Jeannette said breathlessly, her breast still tingling where he had brushed against it. “We can go now. The sign on the driveway says they will be opening for tours in an hour, so they’re probably getting ready.”
“I went on the tour. Well, part of it. The tower sounded cool, but the stairs were shut off, so I bailed.”
“The stairs are the best part; they’re rounded, you know, and very steep. But the rest is boring,” Jeannette said, not sure what “bailed” meant but confident that Brett hadn’t enjoyed it any more than she had when her school group went. “Monsieur wants you to look at the stones and pictures of Madame’s great-grandparents. There are some old guns and ladies’ dresses that I sort of liked, but that’s it.”
“Yeah? Maybe they’ll let me fire an old musket. Bam,” he said, closing one eye and pulling a pretend trigger.
Jeannette started to laugh, but clapped her hand across her mouth. “Come on, let’s go before they see us.”
Brett tucked his board under his arm and the two of them ran lightly down the driveway. When they were clear of the Bellegardes’ and walking back toward her house, Brett asked, “Do you spy on them or something?”
“I spy on everyone,” Jeannette said, giggling. “I do—have done—it since I was a kid. It’s the only thing to do here. You should have seen the way M. Bellegarde insulted Yves the other day.”
“He yelled at me, too, for nothing. What happened? Were you spying?”
“Mais non, Katherine invited me to lunch and when we were leaving, M. Bellegarde hit Yves over the head with a plate. He broke the plate, too. Oh, it was so funny,” Jeannette said, laughing out loud.
“Why’d he do that?” Brett said.
“I don’t know, but I think Yves slept with his daughter. At least that’s what Papa says. It was so funny to see Yves’s face. I nearly died laughing.”
“Weird,” Brett said. “You’d think old people would be over this stuff. I mean…” He trailed off.
Jeannette snuck a look at him. His face was flushed and his lower lip stuck out. He was angry, which only made him look handsomer. For some reason, her breast tingled again, and she hit it lightly with her own arm to stop the sensation. “Your parents, do they fight?”
Brett snorted. “Well, yeah. All the time. About everything, it seems. Don’t yours?”
“My mother died when I was a little girl. I’m sure Papa would get mad at her if she were here. He is mad at everyone. It is his way, I think.”
Brett didn’t say anything and Jeannette hoped telling him wasn’t a mistake, that he wouldn’t stop spending time with her now that he knew. Hurriedly, she changed the subject. “M. Bellegarde is a Nazi. Mme Pomfort, the lady who owns the church garden, she says so.”
“Isn’t that stuff old history?”
“Sure,” Jeannette said, hoping she had chosen the right word in English. “He’s German, anyway, and Mme Pomfort, she hates all Germans. She says the people who live next to her are German sympathizers, although Papa says she only says that because they are fighting about the church garden.”
Brett picked at the plastic label on his skateboard, a cartoon of a Japanese boy with a cape. “I think we’re going to the beach next week,” he said. “Mom says we need a change of scene, or something.”
“Lucky you. I’ve only been once, with my class. We were studying the war and went on a bus to Normandy. The water was so cold and the wind was blowing. Zut, but it was still fun.”
“We’re going south,” Brett said. “You know, the Riviera? My mom says it’s like San Diego, really warm and sunny. My dad says he’ll rent me a motorbike. It’ll still be a bore. They don’t have surfing, he told me.”
Jeannette wasn’t going to admit she had no idea what San Diego was, so she said, “Lucky,” again and remembered photos of a beautiful blue sea with palm trees and women in bikinis sitting on beach chairs. It was an ad for somewhere on the Riviera and she had promised herself she’d get there someday. And here was Brett, about to go but not at all excited. She had to practice being not excited when something good happened. Sadly, she didn’t have much opportunity.
A car engine sounded somewhere in the village and in a minute, the Hollidays’ SUV pulled up alongside the pair. “Hey, kids,” said Betty Lou, rolling down her window and washing them with cold air and the smell of cigarettes, “what are you doing outside on a hot day like this? Brett, I need you at home to help me with something. Hop in.”
Without a word, Brett opened the passenger door, threw his skateboard over the seat into the back, and climbed in. “Bye, sweetie,” Betty Lou called out to Jeannette as the car pulled away.
Jeannette stood in the road for a moment, unsure. Brett hadn’t said good-bye or that he’d see her tomorrow. She couldn’t decide if he liked her or not. Was she too young for him? Would he like her better if she wore makeup or a push-up bra? She wished her best school friend lived in the same town so she could ask someone. It was hard sometimes not having a mother, although she wasn’t sure this was something girls talked to their mothers about in any case.
“’Nette,” a man’s rough voice bellowed from somewhere out of sight. “Vite, come home and fix dinner, right now. The kids are hungry.”
“Coming, Papa,” Jeannette called, and, shaking off her confusion, she ran down the hill. Sausage and fries, and after dinner they would all watch the dubbed American police show on the new TV her father had brought home.