We thought we’d got over the final hurdle. Two weeks to go. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, all we had to do was lift a finger and any dangers fell away. At school, I no longer knew whether I was protecting her or she was protecting me. Although she was defenceless and I was her shield, her vulnerability had given me something too: for the first time I felt that there was a real purpose to me being at school. For example, if she was asked to read a text it was I who spoke up, but everybody seemed to find it normal, as though we’d fused into one. A bit like Laurel and Hardy. I must say I liked that, to start with. And then, as we got closer and closer to the audition, I felt something I could never have imagined: I began to dread the end of the school year. I didn’t just feel slightly apprehensive, I felt a real anxiety that gripped my throat during the day and made my heart quake at night. This was going to be an immense page that I’d never be able to turn. One day, as we walked towards the music academy, I spoke to Marie about it.
“You see,” I said, “it’s not a great situation. School has always been a disaster for me. Even at nursery school, Dad said I had some trouble fitting in. Then I had to repeat the last year of primary school. And then this year everything changed in one fell swoop. It’s the first time anyone’s really depended on me. And that’s not nothing. I really believe that to be happy in life, you just need to feel useful. You see, it’ll soon be the holidays… You’ll be off to your school for musical geniuses and so on… And me…”
“And you?”
She was looking at me, smiling mischievously, as though I was talking nonsense.
“Well, it’ll be exile all over again… I’ll be on my own. Everything will go back to how it was before. Except that it’s not fun any more, spending my time hiding the toilet paper. They’re all free to take a dump whenever they want, I’ve got other things to think about now. I’ve risen above all that. Sometimes, I swear, I find myself hoping that you’ll fail your audition so that you can stay here with me. But of course it’s not in your nature to fail things, just like it’s not in mine to succeed exactly. My life is like Dad’s, following strange paths that aren’t quite straight. And next year, well, I’ll be the one who’s blind.”