ON THE OTHER side was the same strange world. The heat was rising, the sunlight pouring down on the paths. Some madman was grilling sausages like it was noon already. Music blared from the loudspeakers: “Top Summer Hits.” Twenty-five songs. I’d noticed it on the first day: the same twenty-five songs were played on a permanent loop, like at a supermarket. Not loud enough to disturb anyone but loud enough that the music insinuated itself everywhere, like the sun, the sand, and the water of the Landes: If you go hard you gotta get on the floor… If you’re a party freak then step on the floor… All around, people were enjoying their vacation. They didn’t want to hear me. Besides, I had nothing to say. I could say: Oscar is dead. But I didn’t even believe it. I tried to think about him, and I could do it only in fits and starts. I could feel his phone burning against my thigh. I could have taken it to the lost property office. But it was a long way. I’d have had to cross the whole campsite, then line up at the reception desk with all the sunburned campers, the lost children, the new arrivals, and the foreigners who didn’t understand anything; I’d have had to wait as the multilingual receptionist was called so that she could explain to them in English, German, Spanish, or Flemish the rules of the campsite and the hours of the water aerobics class, before attaching a little blue bracelet to everyone’s wrist, uniting us all for eternity. I’d managed to cut mine off with a steak knife on the first day.

I collapsed onto a bench. I needed my parents. Maybe I’d be able to tell them. But they probably weren’t back yet. I had no idea what time it was.

I looked around and recognized the playground from the night before. The swing was there with its spotless ropes. Where had I stood to watch Oscar die? I couldn’t remember. I felt like I was looking at another playground, a movie set that had been placed there. Children were playing. Most of them were spinning around endlessly on a merry-go-round in the shape of a crocodile.

“It’s not a crocodile, it’s an alligator,” a girl said to a boy. “A crocodile has a pointy mouth, and an alligator has a round mouth, so this is an alligator.”

She stared proudly at the boy and he shook his head. I examined the alligator, its yellow eyes, its green shell, the metal bar that came out of its mouth so that the children could hang on to it. I felt my lip tremble and tears rise up, like people arriving late for a party. I had not made many stupid mistakes in seventeen years. And nothing really stupid. I’d never cheated, stolen, punched anyone. Only rarely had I insulted anyone. I had accumulated my hate and anger slowly, patiently. It wasn’t an accident. I had let Oscar die. I could have saved him and I hadn’t. And then I’d hidden his body. I couldn’t remember why. I could have just walked away. They’d have found him where he died. They’d have seen the marks on his neck, they’d have measured the alcohol in his bloodstream, they’d have noted the time of his death. A cold wave would have crashed down on everyone in the campsite and they’d all have gone far away from here, me included. But I’d buried him. That was the really stupid mistake. I’d spent the whole night burying a body.

I turned on his phone. I didn’t know the code. I knew nothing about him. All I had was this locked screen with a photograph of a mountain and two missed calls, one from Luce, one from his mother. I remembered his mother. I’d seen her a few times on the beach. People had made fun of Oscar because he was camping with her. Every night she would walk back alone to her bungalow. I remembered the bungalow, too. I could go and look for it; Oscar’s blue towel would be hanging on the guardrail, much too dry by now. I could find his mother and talk to her. She would listen to me.

I started walking toward the bungalows. On the way, I felt my vision blurring, the ground softening. For two weeks I had wandered around this campsite, fleeing the sun, sticking to the shadows cast by trees and tents, killing time. But I didn’t bother with that now. I walked bareheaded in the light. A pleasant numbness enveloped me, preventing me from thinking too far ahead. At the end of a path, I thought I recognized Oscar’s bungalow. The deck was empty, the door open. No one ever closed anything at the campsite. Everyone trusted everyone else. I went over. I climbed the three little steps. A fan stirred the hammock hanging in a corner. There was no one around. A bodyboard covered with sand. Some empty rosé bottles. My vision grew more blurred. Someone was moving around inside. It all happened calmly: I staggered, Oscar’s mother came out, she caught my arm and helped me into the hammock. I let myself be rocked in the gentle breeze from the fan. She brought me a glass of water and sat facing me.

“Feeling better? It’s a hundred and two degrees and it’s supposed to keep getting hotter. Are you friends with Oscar?”

I couldn’t answer. I had come to tell her everything, but I didn’t know how to begin. Just opening my mouth was difficult. So I looked at her—I stared into her eyes like I’d stared into Oscar’s—and I thought about the fact that she was his mother so the nausea would force the words out. She turned away. Leaning on the guardrail, she lit a cigarette. Her dress showed a constellation tattooed on her bare back. She was the kind of person my parents looked down on a little bit.

“What’s your name?”

“Leonard.”

“I’m Claire.”

Claire. I realized I would never tell her anything.

“You’re really out of it, aren’t you? You should rest. I don’t know where Oscar is—he didn’t sleep here last night. Do you want to wait for him here?”

I shrugged. This amused her.

“So what do you think of this campsite?”

“It’s okay…”

“You’re not drinking too much at night?”

“No.”

“Are you here with friends? With your parents? Do you think it’s really horrible, camping with your mother? Is it embarrassing with girls?”

“No…”

“You should tell Oscar that.”

She turned around to smile at me. Oscar wasn’t that good-looking; I remembered his face. He could appear quite handsome from a distance, in the sun, but his features were heavy, and his eyes always looked tired.

“These are the best years of your life, you know—you should make the most of them. We’re leaving this afternoon. We’ll come back next summer, but we’ll bring a tent. The bungalows are kind of a rip-off.”

She smiled at me again and I lowered my head so I couldn’t see her anymore, and also so that she’d question me, shake me, discover the truth herself, since I couldn’t talk or cry and I looked like butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth. I sensed her moving away behind me. She went inside. I was alone again, in the immense silence.

My head tilted the landscape. A conga line was going past. The pink bunny was leading some teenagers toward the beach. They were singing. Sometimes their arms lifted and seemed to point to the sun. They weren’t suffering. The heat had been rising for the past few summers. Every year, it got hot earlier—this year it had been in February—and we had welcomed it without fear, happy to see the end of winter; we’d sat out on café terraces with no sense of foreboding about what it might mean. We didn’t sense the inferno coming. I wondered what temperature would finally be too hot. Everything would flip then. People would flee the campsite like it was a house on fire and the bunny would be left to dance alone. I wanted to move. I hated myself for just lying there doing nothing. But my eyes were closing. Sleep was taking me at last. Nobody ever slept much here. We went to bed late and got up with the rising sun to march side by side with the others, toward joy.