When you put food in front of Morgan, he ate it. Even if it was something disgusting like squid, he polished his plate, then went and laid it in the kitchen sink. He wasn’t like Solenne or like Cristel’s godson who were always pestering you to put on a DVD or push them on the swing or let them play on Jérôme’s father’s computer. Morgan just sat there like a lump.

At first the other children would ask him if he wanted to come play, but he never did. All he wanted to do was sit in a corner or under the plane tree, clutching some nothing little trinket—a Bugs Bunny key chain from a cereal box, a minipuzzle—that he didn’t want to share with anybody else. He was a hoarder, that kid. And the other children, having got nowhere trying to be friendly to Morgan, let him be.

The first time Souad was in intensive care, Vanessa’s van was being repaired. It took almost an hour, and two buses, to get to the hospital. Every day after school, Vanessa would take Morgan and Rat to visit Souad. Rat dreaded those interminable bus rides through the northern suburbs of Perpignan, across the river Têt, and then winding along Bas Vernet and Moyen Vernet and Haut Vernet past the stadium to the hospital.

She’d look out the window at the projects where Gypsy women in black sat on the sidewalk, men in black talked in clusters. Little girls playing hopscotch. Storefront churches with signs painted by hand, Life and Light, Eternal Salvation. All Rat could think was how much she’d rather be playing hopscotch in the street than going to the hospital, where Souad lay in a ward full of dead-looking people in printed shrouds.

It was late winter, and the mimosas were in bloom, their flowers toxic yellow. Once when they were waiting for the bus, Vanessa had taken Rat’s horn penknife and started hacking away at a mimosa bush by the side of the road. The other ladies at the bus stop clucked disapprovingly.

“Stop it, Mama,” Rat begged.

Vanessa was cheerily unconscious. “It’ll bring a little color to Souad’s bedside.” There wasn’t much besides mimosa that was in bloom in February, she pointed out.

For years afterwards, when Rat saw mimosas, she got this mean flashback to green corridors and death.

Home. Home. Home. All afternoon Rat’s been longing to get home, bottling it up to tell her mother. Angelique’s mother lets her off by the mailbox, and Rat goes storming up the drive.

That morning, Marie-Jo had posted an announcement on the classroom door that head lice were back, and could everybody’s parents please check their children’s heads. At recess, Océane had come up to Rat and started teasing her, saying she was the one who had started the lice.