Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow (3 page)

Apparently, the super's racist. Hamoudi told me. Me, I wouldn't know, seeing as I've never spoken to him. He kind of scares me. He's always frowning so he's got two lines sticking up in the middle of his forehead, like the number eleven.

Hamoudi told me how back in the day, before this guy was our super, he fought in the war in Aunt Zohra's country, in Algeria. Maybe that's why he hasn't got any earlobes and he's missing the thumb on his left hand. I don't think the war's fully over for him yet, and I think the same goes for plenty of other people in this country too...

Mme Burlaud
just suggested something crazy weird: a skiing trip organized by the city. She went on and on about how it'd be really good for me, how I'd meet some people, get away from the neighborhood. She said it might help me open up.

I don't want to go because I don't want to leave my mom on her own, even if it's just for a week. Anyway, a group vacation with people I don't get to choose, no way! Even just the ride ... not in your dreams. Eight hours in a bus that reeks of puke, where everyone's singing songs from the eighties and we take piss stops every half hour? Forget it.

At first, Mme Burlaud thought I didn't want to go because of the cash.

"You know how it works. The trip's funded, we've already talked about it. It won't cost your mom anything, if that's what's worrying you..."

Whatever, skiing sucks. It's like sledding, except you're standing up wearing a silly hat and a big fluorescent fat suit. I know, I've seen ski competitions on TV.

I'm sure Mme Burlaud spends some time every winter at the ski resort, but she never actually does any skiing. She just lounges around on the patios with a hot chocolate, a pink pom-pom hat, and her husband nearby taking photos with a disposable camera. Come to think of it, does she even have a husband? Never thought about that. That's what's so tired about psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and all things that start with
psy
... They want you to tell them your life story, but them, they don't tell you one thing about themselves. Mme Burlaud knows stuff about me I don't know about myself. After you realize all that, you don't want to talk to them anymore. It's a rip-off.

Now, our social worker, though, she'll take any excuse to tell you her whole life story. I found out through Mom she was getting married. And so right off I'm thinking, why did she need to tell her that? We don't give a shit if she's getting married. Yeah, OK, so she's lucky. We get the picture, no need to make a big deal about it. Still, at least now she'll actually have a reason to be smiling all the time. So that'll get on my nerves a lot less.

Yeah, all right, so maybe I'm jealous. When I was little, I used to cut the hair off Barbie dolls because they were blond, and I chopped off their boobs too because I didn't have any. And they weren't even real Barbie dolls. They were like poor people's dolls, the kind my mom bought me at that cheapo discount store Giga. Crappy dolls. You played with them for two days and they looked like land-mine victims. Even their first name was total shit: Françoise. Not exactly the kind of name that little girls' dreams are made of! Françoise—that's the name of a doll for little girls who don't even dare to dream.

When I was younger, I dreamed of marrying a guy who'd make everybody else look like losers. Regular guys, the ones who put two months into making shelves from a kit or do a twenty-five-piece puzzle
with ages 5 and up on the box, no thanks. I saw myself more with MacGyver. A guy who can unclog your toilet with a can of Coke, fix the TV with a Bic pen, and give your hair a perfect blowout with his breath. A human Swiss Army knife.

I'm picturing a super wedding, an all-out reception that would make people dizzy, a white dress with tons of lace all over, a beautiful veil and a long train, at least fifty feet. There'd be flowers and white candles. My witness would have to be Hamoudi, and the bridesmaids would be those three little sisters from the Ivory Coast who're always playing jump rope in front of our building.

Trouble is, the one who leads me down the aisle is supposed to be my asshole of a father. But since he won't even be there, we'll have to call the whole thing off. The guests'll take back their wedding presents and snag food from the buffet to take home with them. Anyway, who gives a shit, before you start thinking about a wedding it helps to find a husband.

Our generation's lucky because you get to choose who you're going to love for the rest of your life. Or the rest of the year. Depends on the couple. In
Forbidden Zone,
Bernard de La Villardière was talking
about the divorce problem. He was explaining why it was on the rise. Only reason I can see for this is
The Young and the Restless.
In that TV series, they've all been married to each other at least once, if not twice. The story lines are totally crazy and my mom, she's been following every plot twist since 1989. All the neighborhood ladies are so into it. They meet up in the square to get the full lowdown on episodes they missed. They're way worse than that shameful boy band phase, when we were all fanatics. I remember a girlfriend giving me a poster of Filip from 2 Be 3 that she'd cut out of a magazine. Crazy happy, I stuck it on my bedroom wall. In this photo Filip was almost too much, with ultrawhite teeth that were practically see-through they were so clean, and he was shirtless with a bulging six-pack straight out of a cartoon. That evening my dad came into my bedroom. He lost it and started ripping down the poster, shouting: "I won't have any of this trash in my house, it's the devil's work, it's Satan!" It's not exactly how I'd pictured the devil, but there you go ... On my empty wall there was just one tiny scrap of poster left with Filip's nipple on it.

On the school front
, the trimester ended as badly as it started. It's a good thing my mom can't read. Well, you know, I mean as far as my report card goes ... If there's one thing that bugs me, it's teachers who get all competitive about who writes the most original report-card comments. End result: They're all as screwed up and stupid as the others ... The worst I ever saw was Nadine Benbarchiche, our physics and chemistry teacher, who wrote: "Exasperating, hopeless, the kind of student who makes you want to resign or commit suicide." She must have thought she was being funny or something. I'll give her that. It's true that I'm useless, but, really, there's no need to cross that line. Whatever, I don't give a shit. She wears thongs. So, anyway, the kind of comments I keep getting, the ones I call skip-repeat comments, are stuff like: "seems lost" or "seems somewhere else," or, worse, really pathetic lines like: "Get your head out of the clouds! Earth to Doria!" The only one who wrote anything nice about me was Madame Lemoine, the drawing teacher, oops, sorry, make that Plastic Arts. She put: "Malleable skills." Yeah, OK, it doesn't really mean anything, but it was nice of her anyway.

Even though I've got my malleable skills, a friend of Mom's suggested that her son help me with my homework. According to her I'll get better than As, because her son Nabil's a genius. I pointed out that Arab mothers usually think that way about their sons. But Nabil's mom, she's way over the top. She thinks he's the Einstein of the projects and she's always going on and on about him to everybody. And he plays into it, all just because he wears glasses and knows a little about politics. Sure, he's probably got a vague idea what the difference is between right and left. Luckily, my mom didn't exactly say yes. She played that wildcard, aka "inshallah." It doesn't mean
yes or no. The real translation is "God willing." But, thing is, you can't ever know if God's willing or not...

Nabil's a nobody, a loser. He's got acne and when he was in elementary school, almost every day at recess he got bullied into handing over his snack. A big fat victim. Me, I prefer heroes, like in the movies, the kind of guy girls dream about ... Al Pacino, I'll bet you nobody could take his snacks. Straight up, he'd pull out his semiautomatic and blow your thumb off, so you couldn't suck it at night before you fell asleep. All done.

So for the past few weeks, Nabil's been coming over to my place every so often to help me with my homework. This guy, he talks about himself way too much! Thinks he knows it all. Last time, he laughed in my face because I thought
Zadig
was a brand of car tire. Yeah, OK, so now I know it's this Babylonian satire by Voltaire. But he kept snickering for like forty-five minutes just because of that ... At one point, he saw it didn't make me laugh one bit, and he said: "Aw, no worries, I'm only kidding. You know it's no big deal, in life there are intellectuals and there's everyone else." Fool. His mother just dumped him on me. Bet she just wanted to get rid of him...

But fine, I'll give Nabil credit for extenuating circumstances because it can't be easy dealing with his mom every day. She's always on his case. At first I thought Nabil's name was "Myzon" because that's what she kept calling him and all the time she'd be petting his head. Word is, she watches over him like her life depends on it, wants to know everything about his girlfriends, his private life, etc. Yeah, OK, so he hasn't got a private life, but, still, it's kind of unfair. Even when he was little, she'd show up at break to hand him sugar cookies through the school railings. Everyone in the neighborhood says at their house the mom is the dad, and the kids never stop giving him shit.

"Hey, Nabil! Your dad does the dishes, right! And your mom wears the boxers!"

See, I'm making like those attorneys in American films who defend a client who's a serial killer, rapist, and cannibal by telling you the whole horrible story of his terribly unhappy childhood. That way the jury feels sorry for him and they kind of forget the fact that sixteen-year-old Olivia's thigh is still in his freezer...

But the way I see it, Nabil should be even nicer to other people. Especially since his mom messed up his life big time and made him read Jesus's biography when he was eleven.

Me, I don't know if I'll want kids later. Anyway, I'd never make them read Jesus's bio, or say hello to old people if they didn't want to, or clean their plates...

And then again, maybe I've already had enough of kids, because in eighth grade our bio teacher showed us a birth, full-frontal, and it seriously turned me off to procreation.

I talked about it with Mme Burlaud last Monday, but that session she was kind of acting weird. She wasn't listening to me too well. I guess she looked preoccupied. I wonder if she sees a shrink. She should, it'd be good for her...

Lately, she's really losing it. She makes me play with Play-Doh. The shapes I make, they don't look like anything, but she smiles:

"Yes, OK, that's interesting!"

"That's interesting" doesn't mean anything. Something trashy can be interesting for its trashiness. This
whole exercise is just for show, too. On the other hand, that's what I like about Mme Burlaud: She never judges. She always takes you seriously, even when you're making an apartment tower out of lilac Play-Doh.

Then we talked about something new that's happened to me. I've got my period. To tell the truth, I was kind of behind the other girls. The school nurse told me it was hereditary. Hereditary means it's your mom's fault. Mom got hers when she was about fifteen too. That must have been too cool for her because back in the
bled
they didn't even have sanitary pads. Before, I used to think periods were blue, like in the Always ad, the one where they talk about menstrual flow and liquids and stuff, the one that always comes on while we're eating dinner.

Mme Burlaud asked me tons of questions. It's like she's completely obsessed with periods. Has she ever had her own or what?

She told me lots of girls are freaked out the first time they start bleeding. And then she explained how periods are only the beginning, I'm going to get chest pains because of my breasts growing, and I'll definitely get zits on my face too. Nice. Why not greasy hair, a gawky body, and glassy eyes like every other teenager? I'd rather throw myself out the window of my low-income housing.

I've noticed people always make themselves feel better by looking at other people worse off than they are. So that evening I cheered myself up by thinking about poor Nabil.

Every year
people start preparing way in advance for the Livry-Gargan summer fair. Parents, kids, and especially the neighborhood gossips, because at the street fair, you can get your gossip fix for sure.

This year there were plenty of games for the kids, food stands with mint tea and sweet Middle Eastern pastries, Elie's barbecued
merguez
sausages and fries (Elie's like our neighborhood social planner), plus a stage with bands playing one right after the other. Local kids from the projects stepped up to rap. They even had some girls singing with them. Yeah, OK, so the girls just joined in for two pathetic chorus lines and the rest of the time, they were kind of stuck there
making fools of themselves, just waddling around waving their hands in the air. But it wasn't so bad really. One more step toward equality...

Mom made me play the fishing game. I did it just to make her happy, but it was way out of hand. Average age of the other players: 7.3 years. And the only prize I could even catch was a one-eyed rag doll with freckles. I was too embarrassed.

Afterward, Mom and me headed over to see Cheb Momo. He's been singing at the Livry-Gargan summer fair every year since 1987, with the same musician, same synthesizer, and, of course, same songs. It's not too bad because everybody ends up knowing all the words by heart, even the people who don't speak a word of Arabic. Plus, what's good about Cheb Momo is that everything's real vintage, like his black jacket with gold sequins. He makes himself out like a real dreamboat and it works! Every year, it's the same ooh-la-la frenzy with all the neighborhood ladies.

I ran into Hamoudi at the fair. When I went over to say hey to him, I noticed he was with a girl. I smiled at her the way girls are supposed to, like I was actually happy to meet her, except I wasn't at all.
Hamoudi grinned at me with his slightly rotten teeth and said:

"Doria, uh ... this is Karine ... and, um ... Karine, this is Doria..." He said it like an idiot, and like he was suddenly thirty years older. Plus, he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that was way too ugly.