Billie Read Online Free PDF Page B

pain in the ass Camille with her mania for crucifixes.
    I hadn’t intended to end up there, but really, it turned out well . . .
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    I don’t know if it was the location, if the dead had decided to give me a little help because they were bored and wanted to kill time, but I still can’t get over how quickly and easily I learned my lines.
    Since I kept the old book with the play safe and sound, I ended up re-reading our scene for fun and, each time, I had to pinch myself to believe it. How did we do it? How did I do it? I, who still don’t know the multiplication tables and who was at a loss as soon as a teacher asked us to learn five lines by heart?
    I don’t know . . . I think it was in order to be worthy of Franck Muller . . . So I wouldn’t let him down . . . to thank him for having spoken to me so nicely the first day . . .
    That’s silly, isn’t it?
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    And then . . . I would be incapable of explaining it properly, but it seemed to me that I had gotten my lousy revenge on a world and on people who, in reality, had ignored me for so long.
    I had nothing left to prove to anyone.
    Nothing.
    I just wanted to make Franck happy and to escape.
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    I was too young at the time to understand and I don’t have words enough to articulate it today, but I had the impression—when I was curled up in my crypt learning the lines of this girl who wouldn’t stop nagging and nagging and nagging some more, to get an answer to the crazy questions that were eating at her—that I was taking advantage of it too. Yes, that I was worming my way into her obsessive mind so that I could steal a little bit of her courage and get the hell away by following her example.
    What I must have told myself without knowing it is that if I gave the right answers and in so doing allowed Franck Muller to perform his role as well as possible, well, I would no longer be from the Morels.
    I would be . . . my own person. Just me. I would be from this abandoned crypt. From my minuscule chapel.
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    Yes, I was hidden there, sitting in the middle of the rubble, listening to the delirium of this little bourgeois girl who had never suffered and who wanted everything, who wanted to take the whole kitty before even playing a hand, or who preferred not to play, or rather who preferred not to live at all than to live like the others, and all I had to do was hold her close so she could help me reach her outsized desires.
    Because even if I didn’t agree with her obsessions, I admired her.
    I knew she was wrong. I knew that the good nuns had brainwashed her and that it suited her, because she was afraid to go out into the unknown. I knew she would let her pride get the better of her and that she was going to screw up her life because of her lousy, stubborn prudishness about sex. I knew that if she, like me, had just taken a little detour to the Morels she would have calmed down right away and would have imagined her life with more humility, but in the meantime, for that reason precisely, she was the best teammate I could hope for in order to escape.
    She was so stubborn and uptight that she would never give up and if I took care of my side, everything would work out.
    Yes. Two people as stubborn as mules, we were going to do it, make our fucking getaway.
    Of course, none of this was conscious, but I was fifteen, little star . . . I was fifteen years old and I would have grabbed on to anything to get away.
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    Yes. I could spend the whole night telling you about this, but since I don’t have the time, I’m going to speed up and include only two important moments from this little adventure.
    The first is the discussion that we had after his reading the first day and the second is what happened after our “performance.”
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    By the way, are you still there, little star?
    You’re not dying on me, right?
    When you’re fed up with my stories, just