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cold water and puts a soluble aspirin on it. It’s a trick : the bubbles dissolve the blood. (‘A tablet that can produce blood,’ mother Bihotz used to say.)
    â€˜The first time I got mine, I was doubled over with pain,’ her mother told her.
    â€˜It’s not easy for boys either,’ her father told her.
    Do their dicks peel? She’s heard about a boy who had to have an operation. Maybe it’s like a snake: the skin doesn’t grow, so it falls off in the process, and sometimes the sloughed skin stays stuck on the body? Perhaps they find bits of bleeding skin in their underpants? The idea that it’s also difficult for boys helps a bit. Otherwise she’s just too furious about the whole thing.
    She squeezes her legs together as she walks. On the scale of pain, hers is fairly high: she’s getting flashes of light in her eyes. The sanitary napkin is scratchy and keeps getting stuck. It’s totally impossible to think about anything else.
    Her father told her about Anne Chopinet, an engineering graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique. And Jacqueline Dubut who was the first woman pilot. One of his colleagues.
    â€˜You could be a pilot too, later on.’
    Has Jacqueline Dubut got this? How can she concentrate on being a pilot? Did Anne Chopinet get it when she was in the 14 July military parade on the Champs-Elysées, carrying the Polytechnique’s flag in front of everyone, a pad between her legs?
    What does her teacher think about all this? How can she go to school with blood stuck there, and not knowing when it will stop (because she understands now: it’s not going to stop).
    â€˜I’ve never seen him with a girl, never. And I mean that’s ever since we moved in, when Solange was born and he was still in vocational training.’
    Her father is drinking rosé with Georges on the terrace. She is drawing flowers in the condensation on the bottle. The droplets run down in long vertical stems.
    â€˜Whenever you’ve got a woman who won’t let go of her son’s balls, you’ll always end up with a faggot. And if she dies, he’s screwed for good.’
    â€˜I’m telling you,’ says Georges, ‘faggot or no faggot, he’s pretty dodgy.’
    â€˜It’s not an illness, being a faggot. And it’s not something you’re born with. It’s more subtle than that. If you want to know what I really think,’ her father continues, ‘faggots are super-nice people, especially with kids. What on earth do you think he could possibly do to my daughter? He changed her nappies, just like he changed his mother’s nappies. If he ever saw my daughter’s pussy, all he’d see is a disgusting crack.’
    She figures that, anatomically, it’s quite logical; intellectually it makes sense; when she thinks clearly about it, it adds up: men have a bit that hangs out, girls have a hole. They fit: one into the other.
    In A Life , by Maupassant, she reads: ‘All of a sudden she was gripped by a sharp pain; and she started groaning, writhing in his arms, while he possessed her violently.’ Rose’s mother is the one who makes them read it. André Sallenave says it goes in the belly button, but that’s completely stupid. Except that, from what she’s seen, like in old paintings, it will never fit. Not in hers anyway. It must hurt like hell, and there’s no way she’s being possessed . You possess an object or a house. Her intelligence is coming to her rescue.
    She pushes the sentence round in all directions—‘he possessed her violently’. Something clicks in her head and she’s electrified: what she has between her legs will impel her to possess the world.
    Concepción is having a party, a New Year’s Eve party. The shutters are closed and the music is loud and Concepción’s mother is smoking in the kitchen and her daughter is screaming at her in Spanish (apparently