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you.” Maman shouted up from the living room without moving from the couch.
    “Who is it?”
    “Houston.”
    “Tell him I’m busy.” Five minutes later Maman knocked on my door. I was staring at a page in a Superman comic instead of studying math. Let me take this opportunity to mention once again how very much I hate math. It is supposed to be logical, but nothing in life is logical. I also hate math class because Houston sits right in front of meand he spends every possible second clowning around for Caroline’s benefit. All that stupid childish stuff was getting on my nerves.
    Maman opened my door carefully, as if she was afraid it might be booby-trapped.
    “Are you mad at Houston? He’s called five times in the last two days, and you always say that you are busy.”
    “I don’t want to talk about it.”
    “Houston was your best friend. Now you won’t talk to him or anyone else. What happened?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Did you have an argument? Did he say something?”
    “There’s nothing wrong! Leave me alone.”
    She shut the door quickly. From behind it, she said:
    “Well… I don’t know what to say…. If you want to talk to me, you know that you can, sweetheart, Maman is here. I love you, honey.”
    Of course I knew that I could talk to her, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to cry in front of her. I thought that if I cried, she would too and we’d never stop. The plain truth was that I didn’t want to talk to Houston because he loved a good laugh, and because he still had his father.
    I was walking around with this big ugly thing inside my chest that actually hurt. Whoever came up with the image of being brokenhearted really knew what he was talking about. A nice twist of the knife is, that just when you need to distract yourself with books or with music orwith movies or with your friends, you can’t. The pain fills up every nook and cranny of your mind, and you can’t focus on the things you used to enjoy. You end up feeling completely alone.
    I wasn’t about to dump any of this sick stuff on Luc. He was just a baby. As long as he had
Sesame Street
and Sputnik and Aunt Sophie he seemed to be fine, but who knows? My friends didn’t get it either. Here’s what my friends knew about pain: not much. Caroline’s idea of pain was having a crush on a person who was obviously much more interested in being a moody poet in a black turtleneck and who listened to Bob Dylan than he was in her. Houston’s emotional state rose and fell with the fortunes of the Montréal Expos. As for Eric, who was a short redhead with a pug nose and braces, in his heart he was a Mississippi blues man who carried the woes of the world on his shoulders. But he had no idea about loss. Even the dog he got when he was a little kid was still alive. As for Melanie, it’s hard to know what went on in the mind of Serial Giggler. She could laugh for Canada. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some kind of monster who wanted my friends to suffer. I knew in my head that I used to have a riot with them, but it was like someone drained all the color out of being in their company.
    You’d think that in the Larger Fish Tank of School, there’d be other kids in my boat, but I didn’t know any. There was a girl, Sydney, in my biology class, whoseparents got a divorce that was so ugly it made the newspapers. There were other kids whose parents had divorced in a less dramatic way, but I didn’t know anyone whose father or mother had died. I was ashamed to say that my father was dead. I was ashamed to say he committed suicide. I didn’t want to be seen as an extraterrestrial of some kind.

    Here’s some advice: steer clear of canned Christmas cheer if you’re feeling down. It will kill you. Right after school on the first Friday of December, I went to the mall. It was lousy with Christmas cheer. Over the loud speaker Bing Crosby sang “White Christmas” three times in a row. I was walking down the electronics aisle at Canadian Tire