Billie Read Online Free

from the Rungis market, which is at least four times a week, I know exactly where I need to focus on what I’m doing. Yes, there are exactly two places where I completely stick to the road and where I am extremely careful to maintain a safe distance. And do you know why? Because in those spots, between Paris and Orly let’s say, there are two little piles of garbage on the roadside, at street level.
    Fine, it’s true, they’re ugly, but the problem is that they aren’t really garbage in fact . . . No, they’re houses. They’re the bedrooms of little girls who are always on the defensive . . .
    Okay, let’s speed things along. As I said earlier, we all have our shit to deal with. I suffered so much that I became an arrogant monster, and my arrogance is what I can best offer to little Billie from Highway A6.
    Look, little girls, look at me in my old delivery van all beat up and filled with flowers. I’m proof that it’s possible to have a life someday . . .

 
    S o, yes, we noticed each other but avoided contact all that time because we were like the scourge of Jacques-Prévert Junior High.
    Me, because I was from the Morels (no, that’s not the name of a town in the sticks or an area with mushrooms, it’s . . . I don’t know . . . I never knew in fact . . . a junkyard . . . a sort of artisanal realm . . . a type of waste recycling center where nothing is ever sorted . . . everyone says “the Gypsies” but we weren’t Gypsies, there was just my stepmother’s family, her uncles, half-sisters, my half-brothers and all that . . . people from the Morels in other words) and I walked a mile and a half every morning and every evening to go to a different bus stop, the farthest possible from their mess and from my Home Sweet Mobile Home for fear that the other kids wouldn’t let me sit next to them on the bus, and he, because he was too different from everyone else.
    Because he didn’t love girls, only liked them, because he was good at drawing but bad at sports, because he was slight and allergic to anything and everything, because he always hung out by himself and disappeared completely into his own world and because he waited to be last in line at the cafeteria to avoid the noise and the stampede to get through the turnstiles.
    I know, little star, I know, it sounds like a crappy cliché, the way I’m telling it; the sickly little queer and his Cosette from the garbage dump, I admit, it lacks subtlety. But what would you like me to say instead? That I live in a regular house in the winter and add in a moped and two chain bracelets to make it sound less like I come from a lousy soap opera?
    Well, no . . . I would like to but I can’t . . . Because that’s how we are. That’s the story of our early lives. Neverland and Da doo ron ron. Rebels without a cause. But I’m going to force myself to pretty things up so that it won’t sound so sad . . .
    So, Beat It.
    Just Beat It.
    Â 
    And so? It’s not so bad, right? I’m not going to try to convince you I was groped or anything gross like that.
    Luckily, that wasn’t the thing at my house.
    At our house, things were tough, but no one touched little girls’ panties.
    Phew, what a relief, right, little star?
    Â 
    And then, you know, I think it wasn’t all that cliché. I think that in all the schools in France and elsewhere, whether in the countryside or in the towns, the study halls are full of people, like us.
    People who struggle against invisibility, who are disconnected from themselves, who hold their breath from morning till night and who die sometimes, who finally give up one day if no one helps them out or if they don’t manage on their own . . . Plus I think I’m telling the story quite delicately, in fact. Not to spare you discomfort or me any criticism, but