I don’t quite know what happened then. It was so fast, like a cat that suddenly goes from purring asleep to hissing and scratching in the space of a second. I know that I forked my fingers at her, as Zozie did in the English tea-shop. I don’t quite know what I meant to do; but I felt it fly from my hand, somehow, as if I’d actually thrown something, a little stone, or a spinning disc of something that burnt.

In any case, it acted fast: I heard Suzanne give a scream, then suddenly she was grabbing at her hot-pink beanie, pulling it off her head.

‘Ow! Ow!’

‘What’s wrong?’ said Chantal.

‘It itches!’ wailed Suze. She was scratching her head furiously; I could see pink patches of skin beneath what was left of her hair. ‘God, it itches!’

I felt sick all of a sudden, weak and sick, the way I felt the other night with Zozie. But the worst of it was, I wasn’t sorry; instead I felt a kind of thrill, the kind you get when something bad happens, and it’s your fault, but no one knows.

‘What is it?’ Chantal was saying.

‘I don’t know!’ said Suzanne.

Danielle was looking all concerned, but fake, the way she’d looked at me before asking if Rosette was retarded, and Sandrine was making little squeaking noises – of sympathy or excitement, I couldn’t tell.

Then Chantal began to scratch her head.

‘G-got n-nits, Chantal?’ said Claude Meunier.

The back of the queue laughed at that.

Then Danielle began to do the same.

It was as if a cloud of itching powder had suddenly descended upon the three of them. Itching powder, or something worse. Chantal looked angry, then alarmed. Suzanne was almost in hysterics. And for a moment it felt so good—

A memory came back to me then, of a time I was very small. A day by the sea; paddling in my swimsuit; Maman sitting with a book on the sand. A boy who splashed me with sea water and made my eyes sting. As he passed by, I threw a stone – a small one; a pebble – expecting to miss.

It was just an accident—

The little boy crying, holding his head. Maman running towards me, dismay in her face. That sick sense of shock – an accident—

Images of broken glass; a scraped knee; a stray dog yelping under a bus.

Those are accidents, Nanou.

Slowly, I started to back away. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. It was funny – funny in the way a horrible thing can still be funny. And it still felt good, in that horrible way—

‘What the hell is it?’ yelled Chantal.