It’s not that I’m shy. I like people. I get on with them. I like to talk, or play tag in the playground; I’m not like Claude, who’s too shy to say a word to anyone and who stutters whenever a teacher asks him a question. I’m not touchy like Suze, or snobby like Chantal. I’m always here to listen if someone’s upset – if Suze gets into a quarrel with Lucie or Danielle, then it’s me, not Chantal, she comes to first – but just when I think we’re getting somewhere, she goes and starts some new thing, like taking pictures of me in the changing room with her mobile phone and showing them to everyone. And when I say, Suze, don’t do that, she just gives me that look and says it’s only a joke, and so I have to laugh, even when I don’t want to, because I don’t want to be the one with no sense of humour. But it really doesn’t feel funny to me. Like the tennis-ball game, it’s only funny when you’re not It.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking as I came back on the bus, with Suze and Chantal giggling on the back seat behind me. I didn’t look round, but pretended to read my book, although the bus was bumpy and the page blurred into nothing in front of my eyes. Actually my eyes were watering a bit – and so I just looked out of the window, though it was raining and nearly dark, and everything very Paris-grey as we approached my stop just after the Métro station by Rue Caulaincourt.

Maybe I’ll take the Métro from now on. It’s not so close to the school itself, but I like it better: the biscuity smell of the escalators; the rush of air when the trains come in; the people; the crowds. You see all kinds of strange people in the Métro. People of all races: tourists; Muslim women with the veil; African traders with their pockets filled with fake watches and ebony carvings and shell bracelets and beads. There are men dressed as women, and women dressed as film stars, and people eating strange food out of brown paper bags, and people with punk hair, and tattoos, and rings in their eyebrows, and beggars and musicians and pickpockets and drunks.

Maman prefers me to take the bus.

Of course. She would.

Suzanne giggled, and I knew she’d been talking about me again. I stood up, ignoring her, and moved towards the front of the bus.