In the short winter months, or when the Tramontane’s too bitter, life moves indoors. They watch cartoons, they play on Jérôme’s father’s computer, Rat pesters Vanessa to take her to the library to get more comic books. She hunts for kindling for the stove, stealing fruit crates from the back of the superette at Saint Féliu Plage. At night, when it’s cold, she climbs into her mother’s bed and the two of them cuddle under Vanessa’s quilt, and fall asleep watching old movies on TV.

Then when the days begin to get longer, Rat and the other kids are back outside again, stealing cherries from the orchard, collecting snails, hunting for wild asparagus, reclaiming their old forts and hiding places.

If it weren’t for school, Rat’s life would be close to perfect. But once she goes through those gates each morning—pried away from her mother’s wiry arms—she enters this alien universe where people call her “Celia” and she doesn’t understand what’s expected of her, how to draw a spiral or distinguish a verb from a noun.

In this world, Jérôme can’t help her. They overlap in the playground or the cafeteria, but the tacit understanding is that at school they don’t fraternize: at recess, Jérôme plays football with the boys, and she plays hopscotch or skip-rope with the girls.

As soon as Rat’s old enough, she will leave school and then she’ll do as she likes. Maybe she’ll work with animals. She saw this woman on television who ran a shelter for birds of prey that had been burnt by perching on electrical wires. That wouldn’t be such bad work, as work goes.

Rat loves to hear the story of how Celia Kidd, her father’s mother, got discovered. According to Vanessa, who read it in a magazine, it all began one afternooon, when Rat’s granny, then eighteen years old and fresh from an expensive boarding school, was strolling along Kensington High Street.

Suddenly this small dark man with a face like a water rat tapped her on the shoulder, all out of breath—he’d been chasing her for miles—and said, “Excuse me, darling, I’d like to take your picture.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘Tell me another one.’”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, that’s a line nasty older men tend to feed girls when they want to get up their skirts. If anybody ever comes up to you and says he’d like to take your picture, well, you say, You’ll have to discuss it with my agent.”

“So what’d Celia say?”

“She said, ‘Sorry, I can’t. I’m late for lunch with my aunt.’”

“And what’d he say?”

“He said, ‘How about after lunch, then?’”

“And?”