This was how junior high worked: protection. If you wanted to survive the first year, you needed some older friend or sibling watching your back. Sometimes protection involved nothing more strenuous than being told that East-Pak floral-pattern knapsacks were hot, whereas knapsacks on wheels spelled social death. But more often it meant being warned about hidden land mines, such as Mickael Garcia, an annoying little runt in your class who looked harmless enough, but turned out to have two older brothers and an uncle who were all itching to break your legs if you ever looked cross-eyed at him.

Rat had Jérôme, who was okay at helping you avoid a fight, but useless when it actually came to one.

As for the schoolwork, it was like this computer game that had suddenly blipped from Level One to Ultra-Plus Advanced. Rat couldn’t understand a word her teachers told her, but everybody else seemed to follow just fine.

It wasn’t only Rat’s brain that was betraying her. Seemingly over the course of one summer, she’d grown from being this little kitten who could still curl up in impossibly small hiding places into a tall angular person, all elbows and moods. She felt furious that she could no longer run around topless, wearing only a pair of cutoff jeans, that her nipples were starting in the most painful way to swell and her hips to burst through the seams of her shorts. Furious that Jérôme, sixteen months her senior and three inches shorter, was still as free as a dog. And she wasn’t. Partly because adults now treated her differently, in a manner that seemed, to her newly raw-skinned sense of self, somewhere between mockery and reproach.

One day, when her and Vanessa’s favorite song of the moment came on the radio, Rat grabbed her mother and danced her around the room until Vanessa stopped, pulled free, and said, with a strange look on her face, “You know, Flea-bite, it’s time you started using deodorant.” And Rat realized that that acrid animal smell was her.

It was off and on, this adolescence business. Some weeks she’d be back to playing Ninjas with Jérôme, helping him reconstruct their fort after the winter’s ravages. And then suddenly Laurent would make some stupid joke about Rat’s half-baked tits, and when Vanessa joined in the laughter, Rat would stalk back to her house, slamming the front door so hard a pane of glass broke.

Now Rat craved locks on doors, the bathroom to herself, a full-length mirror in which to study these disturbing changes.

Her mother didn’t have a clue. For Vanessa, it was always about her: a loyalty test. Were you her little Ratkin or weren’t you? Did you realize she’d had a lousy day, and needed mint tea and a back rub, or were you a selfish brat? Rat was still jealous of her mother’s attentions, still needed Vanessa’s love, but in a warier, more combative sort of way: love not as baby talk and butterfly kisses and sleepy limbs entwined, but as a hard backboard against which to slam your grievances. Wide-awake love, challenging, that would answer all her whys. For the first time in ages, Rat found herself wishing she had a father.