Rat hates what happens to her coast in the summer. All her secret places that are empty year-round are suddenly overrun by tourists. For two, three months you can’t move because the roads are bumper-to-bumper with trailers driven by Scandinavians who don’t know where they’re going. Her favorite beach becomes a nudist camp. And every weekend there are brawls between the Parisians and the local boys, usually over some girl.

“Did you hear what happened to Enzo and Marina?”

“What?”

Enzo and Marina’s mother’s having a romance with a Dutch windsurfer she met at the Sol y Mar. An older guy with a dog. Rich, apparently.

“She’s gone off with him. Just disappeared. Marina came home the other day, nobody there, no note, nothing. She’d disappeared with him, like that,” says Rat.

Jérôme whistles. “So who’s looking after them?”

“I don’t know. Their dad’s handicapped. He had some horrible accident that’s left him practically a vegetable.”

“So what’s gonna happen?”

“I dunno. I guess they’re gonna go into Care. That’s what Cristel says. They’re waiting to see if their grandmother will take ’em, but if not, it’s Care.”

“Putain,” says Jérôme, sobered.

“Care” is the menace that hangs over the more precarious players in Rat’s world. Every kid who isn’t actually stuck to some family unit with Super Glue can in theory be taken into Care. If the teacher notices you’re coming to school with no socks in the winter and hungry as a wolf by lunchtime, if her requests for a meeting with your parents go unanswered too long, it’s Care that sooner or later is going to come knocking at the door, wondering, Who actually is this child’s legal guardian?

Of all the kids she knows in what the teachers call “fragile situations,” only Florian is brazen enough to say, “Fine, let them put me in a Home. That way at least I’d get three square meals.”

“That boy’s still down there. Why don’t I chuck another rock at him?”

“Nah. Let him be.”

“I don’t like him spying on us.”

The fairy lights strung along the trellises of Chez Ernest are twinkling red-green-white. The sky has turned a dark neon blue.

A lady in a sarong comes out onto the patio of Chez Ernest. She calls, “César! Cou-cou! César!”

“She’s lost her dog,” guesses Jérôme. But Rat knows from the way the blond boy below them goes invisible, sinking down into himself, that it’s him she’s calling. The lady’s beautiful, but her son isn’t.

“Is that your name, César?”

The boy doesn’t answer.

“César, isn’t that a dog’s name? I thought she was calling her dog.”