“Your great-aunt,” sighed her mother. “Is that chocolat, Maximilienne? Don’t ruin your appetite for dinner, now.” (She said this every day when Max made chocolat. Max’s house was like that: most things happened the same way every day, like gently whirring clockwork.)

“Why was she calling?” Max asked.

Max’s mother sighed a second time, even more gustily. “Your great-aunt,” she declared, “is a very difficult woman.”

This wasn’t really an answer. Max was very curious to know what made her great-aunt so difficult, but Max’s mother started loudly tidying things that were already tidy, which was her way of letting Max know that she was asking too many questions. So Max took her hot chocolate, and some tartine to dip in it, and she went up through the house to the attic.

Max’s house was full of thick curtains and dim lamps and soft carpets. It was a nice enough house, but a heavy sort of place. It was difficult to think anything new there, when everything was so sleepy and still and exactly-the-same-as-yesterday. Max had to find her own private places for thinking in. When she was small, she used to wriggle into a gap behind the sofa, but she couldn’t fit there these days; so she had moved up into the attic instead.

No one else ever went up there. There was a skylight, and under the skylight there was an old red velvet chair that was too shabby for the rest of the house, and under the armchair there was a box of Max’s notebooks. Today – like every day – she took out the latest notebook, rested the chocolat in the crook of her left arm, and began to write.

Max had been keeping notes for four years now. They were notes about everything that happened each day – although with things being same-as-clockwork every day there wasn’t always much to report, especially during the school holidays. Max’s father said that she was doing Social History, and her notes could be very important in the Future. Max’s older brother Pierre said she was being weird. Max’s even older sister Claudette was much too old and important to have an opinion.

That day she made her notes, then sat and thought for a while, and watched the clouds shift over her skylight. The slice of sky above always made her feel like she could go anywhere and do anything. She forgot all about Great-Aunt Elodie’s call until dinner.