Apocalypse Baby. Виржини Депант

she can’t stand up straight, and if you’re at a party, no prizes for guessing you’ll have no fun, you’ll end up carrying her out to the taxi, and then she’ll be sick all over it, and then you’ll have to help her get up the stairs at home. See what I mean? A drag.”

      The Hyena is nodding her head all this time, looking around at them in turn, then suddenly asks, “And what about boys, what’s she like with them?”

      A tall gangling youth with a long, horsey face replies.

      “She can come on to you just like that, saying ‘Wanna blow job? If you want one, just tell me.’ Well, that’s what she used to do, when she first got here. Boys she liked, she’d go up to them, and, pow! Just like that, she’d come out with it. But she calmed down. In fact lately, she didn’t seem to bother with us.”

      The brunette takes up the story again. “Say you go out in the evening with a few guys, well honestly, you feel ashamed for her. When she drinks, she’ll do anything with anyone. But I think in the school she was in before, the girls were all like that. Or so she said.”

      “So you got fed up going out with her, that it?”

      “Yeah . . . and she can be pretty wild too. She comes out with really mega awful stuff.”

      “Like what?”

      “Oh anything, if it can upset someone. If you’re a blonde, it’s something bad about dumb blondes, if you’re Jewish, it’s anti-Israel, if you’re black, she’ll talk about banana trees, if you’re gay, it’s about AIDS, and so on. Valentine’s always got an insult for everyone. And in the end you can’t take it anymore, you just want a quiet evening.”

      THERE ARE FEW reactions around the table. Their apathy hasn’t been disturbed. A girl who was kind of okay, not too many problems. Nothing out of the ordinary. The more I see of this generation, the more I imagine how they’ll be as adults and the less I want to make old bones.

      “STILL, SHE ISN’T the local clown. When she’s sober, she’s even rather quiet . . . And she’s good at classes. When she got here, we were very impressed by her level.”

      “She’s good at everything, she reads books and all. But she’s good at math too. And chemistry. Yeah, everything really.”

      “The teachers like her fine. But she misses too much school. That’s why she was sent here. She’s been chucked out of all her other schools.”

      “She cuts class.”

      “Valentine doesn’t care about grades, her dad’s this writer. When she wants to work, he’ll pull strings for her, that’s all, that’s how it goes.”

      Three of them are doing the talking, the brunette and the two boys. The two other girls are holding back, laughing at the right moments, but saying nothing for now. The Hyena asks, “But the boys she was interested in, where did they come from, then?”

      “When we were still friends, she liked heavy metal. She didn’t miss any concert by PUY, she was very in with them . . . Well, you know what I mean . . . she was a groupie. I didn’t want to go with her to see them, it was around the time she was giving me too much grief with all this acting like a slut.”

      “PUY?” The Hyena gets out her notebook.

      Amandine confirms: “Panic Up Yours, hard rock, heavy metal. I don’t know, it’s not my scene really.”

      “I think I’ll remember the name.”

      “I don’t know if she was still hanging around them, because she changed, Valentine did, over the year.”

      “Did she talk about her parents? Her home, at all?”

      “Not a lot, no.”

      “I know she adores her father.”

      “But the stepmother not so much, normal, isn’t it? She doesn’t have to sleep with her.”

      “What did you think, when you heard the news she’d disappeared?”

      “We flipped, we were worried for her.”

      A blonde girl, with a nose so tiny that you wondered how she got enough oxygen, dressed like a Roma but every garment must have cost a fortune in the Marais, speaks up for the first time. “We thought something horrible had happened, of course. When a girl goes missing, you’re always afraid they’re going to find her dead in a ditch, beaten up.”

      “None of you thought she might have run away?”

      This option shocks them more than the dead-in-a-ditch version. “Run away?” Leaving behind the PlayStation 3, the fridge full of food, the domestic help, Daddy’s credit card . . .

      “Yeah. Could be, of course. She’d changed a lot lately. She changed the way she looked, she wasn’t so much fun, more distant . . . She could have been planning something. You could tell, couldn’t you?”

      The girl who said this was drop-dead gorgeous: all the time we’ve been sitting in the bar her face has been so radiant that it’s as if the sunlight was falling only on her. She has the look we used to call BCBG when I was a kid, bon chic bon genre, rich girl, good home, blue, white, and beige, which she wears just the kind of casual way that makes her look fantastic. She’s tall and slender, elegant figure, the perfect image of the kind of bitch the aristocracy turns out best. This femme fatale speaks incredibly slowly, she must have been smoking joints all day. The Hyena gives her an odd look.

      “And you talked about it with her, when you thought she’d changed?”

      “No. We weren’t friends, actually. But I could tell by looking at her. She looked different.”

      “Yeah, it was obvious that she’d let her appearance go, these last months.”

      “Perhaps she was depressed, heading for a breakdown? She wore a lot of black, but like Noir Kennedy, vintage gear, sort of I’m-giving-up-on-life black.”

      “Yeah, that’s right, she stopped wearing designer stuff. But before, she used to like it fine.”

      “Yeah, before, she liked to dress cool.”

      “Then after a bit, not to be bitchy, but she had a bit of a punky look, like when you listen to Manu Chao?”

      The drop-dead beauty shrugs. “Yeah, I think she wanted to be distinctive.”

      These kids around the table are actually pretty easygoing, compared to the ones I usually meet. They tease each other, but they’re not aggressive. There’s no obvious tyrant among them, and they haven’t got that arrogant manner you generally find in rich little Parisians. When they talk about Valentine, I find they sound quite calm. Still, that kind of sex-mad girl isn’t usually so popular nowadays. These kids are resigned to never really being part of the elite. They’ve all dropped out. They don’t have that juvenile effervescence that their equivalents in a swanky suburb like Neuilly would have. They’ve already tasted failure. They have all seen in their parents’ eyes the disappointment at having to enroll them in a private school for children who are not making the grade.

      WE GO BACK to the car. The Hyena is concentrating on one precise point. “The pretty girl, back there, I couldn’t work out if she was a baby dyke, or whether I just found her so stunning I mistook my desires for realities.”

      “Is that all you really care about? Come back to earth, she’s way too pretty to be a dyke.”

      I regret saying this the minute it’s out of my mouth, because it seems particularly insulting, but she just stares at me for a couple of moments, then bursts out laughing.

      “You know, your mind is like Jurassic Park live.”

      “Well anyway, she’s sixteen at most. You’re interested in her?”

      “I’m interested in all girls. That’s simple, easy to remember, even you can do that. Right, now I’m off to see Antonella, the woman I sent