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Chapters (45)
  1. Cover
  2. Blame Iton Paris
  3. Copyright Notice
  4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  5. Book One
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-one
  27. Book Two
  28. Twenty-two
  29. Twenty-three
  30. Twenty-four
  31. Twenty-five
  32. Twenty-six
  33. Twenty-seven
  34. Twenty-eight
  35. Twenty-nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-one
  38. Thirty-two
  39. Thirty-three
  40. Thirty-four
  41. Thirty-five
  42. Thirty-six
  43. Thirty-seven
  44. Thirty-eight
  45. Thirty-nine

“I really do!” he said, offended. “It’s bad for it to shave every day!”

I kept laughing.

He looked down at me with a gleam in his eyes and moved closer. My laughter did a little hitch in midstream. “Just trying to make sure everyone has enough room. It’s not fair for us to take up more than our fair share of space.”

“Sébastien,” I said, “where did you get that little scar over your eyebrow and those tiny scars on your knuckles?”

I wasn’t sure he was going to answer at first, but then he did. “From my awful teenage years. Not a good time.”

“Did you get in a lot of fights?”

“I didn’t have much choice,” he said grimly. “When my parents divorced, they both went to live in the banlieue.” Banlieue means, geographically, a suburb of Paris, but that’s not really what it means. A suburb, in American, is a positive word, a safe place to grow up. Banlieue is just the opposite. It’s where beautiful, lovely Paris stuffs all its racism and low-income housing. There are nice banlieues, but when people say, “I grew up en banlieue,” they’re not talking about the nice banlieues. Mathieu Kassovitz did a landmark film on the banlieue situation in 1995. The title was Hate. “Where my mother lived was okay, I guess, but when I went to live with my father when I was thirteen, it wasn’t great.”

And here I’d just assumed that he . . . I don’t know what I’d assumed. Gorgeous Frenchmen came out of Hollywood movies, they didn’t get born and grow up in bad neighborhoods.

He touched the scar over his eyebrow. His mouth twisted ruefully, but his eyes were still dark. “That was actually a knife.” He looked down at the back of his hand. “Probably some of those are from the same fight. I think I could have killed him. I was furious. My friends had to pull me off him.”

He looked up and met my eyes. I’m not sure what he thought he saw there. I was just trying to figure out if this was a true story. I was always telling my brothers to pretend their scars were from knife fights defending a lady’s honor. What were they supposed to do? Admit under questioning that they’d shaken up a beer bottle, tried to explode it with a slingshot, and got struck by the flying glass fragments of their own idiocy?