When Morgan finally starts talking, she discovers that his imagination is dark, fearsome, vindictive, that he’s never forgotten a mean look anyone gave him, that for him the world is full of traps, of enemies waiting to humiliate him, cheat him of what’s his. That every time they venture as far as the field behind Mas Cargol, he’s genuinely expecting a lion to spring from behind a rock and devour them. That his bravery is the braver for coming from a bottomless pit of fear.

The first time Rat succeeds in making Morgan crack up laughing—a torrent of helpless squeals that erupt from him, till he falls off his chair and rolls around the floor, clutching his stomach—she’s proud as if he were her own born son.

Chapter 5

Of course, that wasn’t the last she and Vanessa saw of Johnny Cash, the man in black who wanted to know if they were mermaids. Even if the coastal plain and hill country were two different worlds, the Pyrénées-Orientales were still small enough so everyone turned up again eventually. There was nowhere else to go. Drift any farther and you were in Spain.

Rat was eleven the next time they met.

She had started junior high six weeks earlier. She’d moved from village school in Saint Féliu, where she’d been with the same kids since kindergarten, to junior high at Canet. The junior high’s real name was Victor Hugo, but it was known as the Bronx.

There were twelve hundred students, most of whom looked to be on steroids, and she was now among the youngest. You had to go through metal detectors to make sure nobody was carrying weapons. There was a different teacher now for every subject, in a different building, and there were gangs looking out to torture you on the walkways in between.

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.