The Other Story Read Online Free

The Other Story
Book: The Other Story Read Online Free
Author: Tatiana De Rosnay
Pages:
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preparatory courses his mother had brilliantly succeeded in during her youth. In addition to class time and homework, Nicolas spent several hours each week laboriously completing exams and colles (spelled khôlles to look like a Greek word, another “khâgneux” insider joke). But there was nothing remotely funny about the khôlles, which soon became a nightmare for Nicolas. One hour to prepare a short dissertation on a given topic. Then, in twenty excruciating minutes, he had to present his work orally to a scathing teacher. François excelled at the dreaded khôlles, and even the harshest teacher, with the keenest expectations, begrudgingly bowed down to such supremacy. François never showed any signs of discouragement or apathy, contrary to Nicolas, who lost weight, lost sleep, lost his spirits. Like a fighter pilot dodging missiles, François triumphantly angled toward the highly competitive national exam that awaited them, the holy grail of a concours that a tiny elite would pass. Nicolas knew, from early on, that he did not have that ambition within him. François did, and he was aware of being the nugget those schools hungered for, the breed that formed professors, teachers, future Nobel Prize winners. The first time Nicolas flubbed the final exam, not even scraping through to the no-man’s-land of the sous-admissible category, the second-chance gang, François was already embarked on the firmament of the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, nicknamed “Ulm,” for its address on the street that bore the same name.
    The trip to Italy had been their way of patching up, of getting their friendship back on track after the strain of the khâgne and Nicolas’s failure. François earned a salary as a proud normalien, while Nicolas went on struggling halfheartedly, still living at his mother’s place, barely making ends meet by giving philosophy lessons to reluctant students. François remained the one who had succeeded, the one for whom it all seemed easy. But that changed when Hurricane Margaux blew along five years later. Except for François and Lara, the only ones from the past who have remained part of his life, Nicolas’s new friends are from the publishing world—writers, journalists, editors, publicists, booksellers. He sees them at literary events, on TV or radio shows, at cocktail parties, book launches, nightclubs. He has their e-mail addresses, their mobile-phone numbers; he is their friend on Facebook, their follower on Twitter. He hugs them, slaps them on the back, ruffles their hair, but very few of them are truly close. He gets drunk or high with them, occasionally has sex with one or two of the women, but what do they know about him, apart from what they may glean in the papers, or on Twitter? They know nothing. And he knows nothing about them, in return. He is fleetingly aware of the emptiness of his life, of the cruel fact that the entire world has learned his name but that he is, in truth, alone.
    Every time Nicolas thinks of François, like at this very moment, as his eyes roam over the splendid sea, the guests basking in the sun, the servers bringing drinks and fruits, he is confronted with his own inadequacies as a friend. Did he not let François down? Did he not stop calling, meaning to call, always leaving it until the next day, and then simply forgetting to do it in the end? Yet François had been the brother he’d never had, the one he went to judo classes and tennis lessons with, the one he could confide in when girls became an obsession, the one who gave him support when his father died. François had a long, serious, bespectacled face, even as a kid, and adults trusted him. This had proved useful when they were children, indulging in devilish pranks. The “cheese incident,” for example. Nicolas had been punished by their principal, the odious Monsieur Roqueton, for not handing his homework in yet again. During a lunch break, on a stifling summer day, François innocently found his
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