The Lollipop Shoes (6 page)

My school in Lansquenet had forty pupils. This has eight hundred boys and girls; plus satchels, iPods, mobile phones, tubes of underarm deodorant, schoolbooks, lip salves, computer games, secrets, gossip and lies. I have just one friend there – well,
almost
a friend – Suzanne Prudhomme, who lives on the cemetery side of Rue Ganneron and who sometimes calls in at the
chocolaterie
.

Suzanne – who likes to be called
Suze
, like the drink – has red hair, which she hates, and a round, pink face, and she is always about to begin a diet. I actually rather like her hair, which reminds me of my friend Roux, and I don’t think she’s fat at all, but she complains about these things
all the time. She and I used to be really good friends, but she can be moody nowadays, and sometimes says quite nasty things for no reason, or says she won’t talk to me any more if I don’t do exactly what she wants me to.

Today, she wasn’t talking to me again. That’s because I wouldn’t come to the pictures last night. But the cinema’s expensive enough already, and then there’s popcorn and Coke to buy – and if I don’t buy any, Suzanne notices and makes jokes at school about my never having any money – and besides, I knew that Chantal would be there too, and Suzanne’s different when Chantal’s around.

Chantal is Suzanne’s new best friend. She always has money to go to the cinema, and her hair is always perfectly neat. She wears a Tiffany diamond cross, and once, at school, when the teacher told her to take it off, Chantal’s father wrote a letter to the newspapers saying that it was a disgrace that his daughter should be victimized for wearing the symbol of her Catholic faith when Muslim girls were allowed to get away with those head-scarves. It caused quite a fuss, actually; and afterwards both crosses and headscarves were banned from school. Chantal still wears hers, though. I know because I’ve seen her with it on in gym. The teacher pretends not to notice. Chantal’s father has that effect on people.

Just ignore them
, Maman says.
You can make other friends
.

Don’t think I haven’t tried; but it seems that whenever I do find someone new, Suze finds a way to get to them. It’s happened before. It’s nothing you could put your finger on, but it’s there all the same, like a perfume in the air. And suddenly the people you thought were your friends start avoiding you and being with her; and before you know it, they’re
her
friends, not yours, and you’re alone.

So all today Suze wouldn’t talk, and sat with Chantal in all her lessons, and put her bag on the seat next to her so that I couldn’t sit there, and every time I looked at them they seemed to be laughing at me.

I don’t care. Who wants to be like those two?

But then I see them with their heads together, and I can tell from the way they’re not looking at me that they’re laughing at me again. Why? What
is
it about me? In the old days at least I
knew
what made me different. But now—

Is it my hair? Is it my clothes? Is it because we’ve never bought anything at the Galeries Lafayette? Is it because we never go skiing to Val d’Isère, or to Cannes for the summer? Is it some kind of a label on me, like on a cheap pair of trainers, that warns them that I’m second-rate?

Maman has tried so hard to help. There’s nothing unusual about me; nothing to suggest we haven’t got money. I wear the same clothes as everyone else. My schoolbag is the same as theirs. I see the right films, read the right books, listen to the right music. I ought to fit in. But somehow I still don’t.

The problem is me. I just don’t match. I’m the wrong shape, somehow, the wrong colour. I like the wrong books. I watch the wrong films in secret. I’m different, whether they like it or not, and I don’t see why I should pretend otherwise.

But it’s hard when everyone else has friends. And it’s hard when people only ever really like you when you’re being someone else.

When I came in this morning the others were playing with a tennis ball in the classroom. Suze was bouncing it to Chantal, who was bouncing it to Lucie, then across to
Sandrine, and around the class to Sophie. No one said anything as I came in. They all just kept playing with the ball, but I noticed that no one ever passed it to me, and when I called out –
over here!
– no one seemed to understand. It was as if the game had changed; without anyone actually saying so, now it was about keeping the ball away from me, yelling
Annie’s It
, making me jump, spinning it wide.

I know it’s stupid. It’s only a game. But it’s like that every day at school. In a class of twenty-three, I’m the odd number; the one who has to sit on her own; the one who has to share the computers with two other pupils (usually Chantal and Suze) instead of one; who spends Break alone, in the library or just sitting on a bench while the others go around in groups, laughing and talking and playing games. I wouldn’t mind if someone else was It sometimes. But they never are. It’s always me.

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.

It was then that I saw Zozie, standing in the aisle. No lollipop shoes for her today, but a pair of purple platform boots with buckles all the way up to the knee. Today she was wearing a short black dress over a lime-green roll-neck
pullover; her hair had a bright pink streak in it and she looked fabulous.

I couldn’t help it. I said so.

I was sure she would have forgotten me by now, but she hadn’t. ‘Annie! It’s you!’ She gave me a kiss. ‘This is my stop. Are you getting off?’

I looked back and caught Suzanne and Chantal staring, forgetting even to giggle in their surprise. Not that anyone would have giggled at Zozie. Or that she would have cared if they had. I could see Suzanne with her mouth hanging open (not a good look for Suzanne); next to her, Chantal was nearly the same shade as Zozie’s pullover.

‘Friends of yours?’ said Zozie as we got off the bus.

‘As if,’ I said, and rolled my eyes.

Zozie laughed. She laughs a lot, quite loud, actually, and never seems to mind if people stare. She was very tall in those platform boots. I wished I had some.

‘Well, why don’t you get some?’ said Zozie.

I shrugged.

‘I have to say that’s a very –
conventional
look you’ve got.’ I love the way she says
conventional
, with a gleam in her eye that’s quite different from just making fun. ‘Now I had you down as more of an original, if you get my drift.’

‘Maman doesn’t like us to be different.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Really?’

Again, I shrugged.

‘Oh, well. Each to his own. Listen, there’s a spectacular little place just down the road that does the most wonderful
Saint-Honorés
this side of paradise – so why don’t we just stop by there to celebrate?’

‘Celebrate what?’ I said.

‘I’m going to be a neighbour of yours!’

Well, of course I know I’m not supposed to go off with strangers. Maman tells me often enough, and you can’t live in Paris without picking up a few cautious habits. But this was different – this was Zozie – and besides, I was meeting her in a public place, an English tea-shop I hadn’t seen before which did, as she’d promised, the most fabulous cakes.

I wouldn’t have gone there on my own. Places like that make me nervous – all glass tables and ladies in furs drinking fancy teas in bone-china cups, and waitresses in little black dresses who looked at me in my school clothes with my hair all over the place, and looked at Zozie in her purple platform boots as if they couldn’t believe either of us.

‘I love this place,’ said Zozie in a low voice. ‘It’s hilarious. And it takes itself so seriously—’

It took its prices seriously, too. Way out of my league – ten euros just for a pot of tea, twelve for a cup of hot chocolate.

‘It’s all right. My treat,’ said Zozie, and we sat down at a corner table while a sulky-looking waitress who looked like Jeanne Moreau handed us the menu as if it gave her a pain.

‘You know Jeanne Moreau?’ said Zozie, surprised.

I nodded, still feeling nervous. ‘She was fabulous in
Jules et Jim
.’

‘Not with that poker up her arse,’ said Zozie, indicating our waitress, now all smiles around two expensive-looking ladies with identical blonde hair.

I gave a snort of laughter. The ladies looked at me, then down at Zozie’s purple boots. Their heads went together, and I suddenly thought of Suze and Chantal, and felt my mouth go dry.

Zozie must have noticed something, because she stopped laughing and looked concerned. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. I just thought those people were laughing at us.’ It’s the kind of place Chantal’s mother takes her to, I tried to explain. Where very thin ladies in pastel cashmere drink lemon tea and ignore the cakes.

Zozie crossed her long legs. ‘That’s because you’re not a clone. Clones fit in. Freaks stand out. Ask me which one I prefer.’

I shrugged. ‘I guess.’

‘You’re not convinced.’ She gave me her mischievous grin. ‘Watch this.’ And she flicked her fingers at the waitress who looked like Jeanne Moreau, and just as she did, at exactly the same time, the waitress stumbled in her high heels and dropped a whole pot of lemon tea on to the table in front of her, soaking the tablecloth and dripping hot tea into the ladies’ handbags and on to their expensive shoes.

I looked at Zozie.

Zozie grinned back. ‘Neat trick, hey?’

And then I laughed, because
of course
it was an accident, and no one could have foreseen what was going to happen, but to me it looked exactly as if Zozie had
made
the teapot fall, with the waitress fussing over the mess, and the pastel ladies with their wet shoes, and no one watching us at all, or laughing at Zozie’s ridiculous boots.

So we ordered cakes from the menu then, and coffee from the special bar. Zozie had a
Saint-Honoré
– no dieting for
her
– and I had a frangipane and we both had vanilla latte, and we talked for longer than I thought, about Suze, and school, and books, and Maman, and Thierry, and the
chocolaterie
.

‘It must be great, living in a chocolate shop,’ said Zozie, starting her
Saint-Honoré
.

‘It’s not as nice as Lansquenet.’

Zozie looked interested. ‘What’s Lansquenet?’

‘A place we used to live before. Down south somewhere. It was cool.’

‘Cooler than Paris?’ She looked surprised.

So I told her about Lansquenet, and Les Marauds where we used to play, Jeannot and I, by the banks of the river; and then I told her about Armande, and the river people, and Roux’s boat with its glass roof and the little galley with its chipped enamel pans, and the way we used to make the chocolates, Maman and I, late at night and early in the morning, so that everything used to smell of chocolate, even the dust.

Afterwards I was surprised at how much I’d talked. I’m not supposed to talk about that; or any of the places we were before. But with Zozie it’s different. With her, it feels safe.

‘So with Madame Poussin gone, who’s going to help your mother now?’ said Zozie, scooping froth from her glass with a little spoon.

‘We’ll manage,’ I said.

‘Does Rosette go to school?’

‘Not yet.’ For some reason I didn’t want to tell her about Rosette. ‘She’s very bright, though. She can draw really well. She signs, and she even follows the words in her story books with her finger.’

‘She doesn’t look much like you.’

I shrugged.

Zozie looked at me with that gleam in her eye, as if she was going to say something else, but didn’t. She finished
her latte and said: ‘It must be tough, not having a father.’

I shrugged. Of course I have a father – we just don’t know who he is – but I wasn’t going to say
that
to Zozie.

‘Your mother and you must be very close.’