Read Bye Bye Blondie for Free Online

hasn’t thought it through properly since.
    â€œYou know quite well where I met him. Everyone knows it, in this stinking town full of hicks with nothing better to do than gossip about everyone.”
    At that moment, she understands what the “id” means that psychoanalysts go on about. Because right now, the id is talking through her. She can hear herself spitting out the words, spluttering as she speaks, aggressive and unhinged. But the moment when she “makes a decision” to express her anger, that exact moment, she can’t quite reach it.
    Once more, Véronique stiffens in her chair, embarrassed to have provoked this reaction. She apologizes: “I’m sorry, it’s none of my business. I was acting like a groupie, it was indiscreet.”
    The nicest people are always the only ones who ever apologize for being annoying. Pity, that .
    But Gloria’s memory is stuck in a groove, she has a flashback to the same image, almost twenty years since it happened, the same image that stays with her: her father is standing in a corridor and watching her disappear. She’s being dragged backward, held up under the arms by two men. Alongside her father are the doctor and her mother.
    They too are looking wretched. The pain spreads around her. As usual, she’s the one causing the pain . . . To get back into her memory, she has to get past the barrier of that image: she’d dropped to the floor screaming, the two men had picked her up and forced her into that place, the institution where they were going to deal with her. For her own good. She’s looking at her father: “No, no, please!” Her screams are hardly noticed. In this place they’re used to them, she finds out later. And he watches her vanishing, his eyes are sad—never has she caused him so much pain. But she’s the one who’s being locked up, and who won’t be able to bear it.
    She must try and keep that image at bay, stop it from turning into a loop, or else . . . But that’s exactly what happens. She holds her head in her hands, the first hot tears burn her eyelids as they well up, then they roll, comfortingly, down her cheeks and fall on the table.
    â€œIt was just after dying that I met Eric.”
    IT WAS IN 1985, days after Christmas. It had been snowing nonstop, the countryside was white everywhere, as it can be in eastern France.
    An acquaintance, a fan of the Cure, always dressed in black, had taken advantage of his mother’s absence to have parties at his place every night. He lived in Jarville, near the railway bridge. Gloria didn’t know him well, but they’d bumped into each other that morning on the twenty-one bus. Impressed no doubt by her look, he’d invited her. Preferring to avoid long negotiations with her parents, she simply didn’t tell them. As usual, and like many other teenagers at the time, she’d climbed out of the window and gone there on foot, it was only five minutes away.
    They were listening to Lydia Lunch. Gloria was wearing a dog collar with a leash, far-out. She’d spent much of the evening walking around a bedroom, listening to the same song on loop. Other kids were out of it on the couch. Two of them were necking, covered with studs and chains, the pair of them, very thin, like two little birds who’d fallen into the water. The bedroom floor was covered with a dark blue fitted carpet, scratchy to the touch, when you put your hands on it. Next door, the TV was on, playing Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.”
    A nice evening, quite calm, until this boy called Léo arrived. He wasn’t from Nancy, she’d never seen him before. In fact she’d never seen anything like him. A punkette’s dreamboat: blond hair, androgynous beauty, but very masculine attitude, like a mischievous pixie. He was wearing a super-tight black biker jacket and short jeans over electric-blue creepers. She could hardly believe her eyes