My emotions are conflicted. I’m worried for St. Clair’s mother, and I’m worried for St. Clair, but I’m also furious with his father. And I can’t focus on anything for more than a second before my mind whirls back to this:
St. Clair likes me. As more than a friend.
I felt truth behind his words, but how can I overlook the fact that he was drunk? Absolutely, positively, one hundred and ten percent smashed. And as
much as I want to see him, to be assured with my own eyes that he’s stil alive, I don’t know what I’d say. Do we talk about it? Or do I act like it never happened?
He needs friendship right now, not relationship drama. Which is why it’s really crappy that it’s become a lot harder to kid myself that St. Clair’s attention hasn’t been as flattering—or as welcome—as it has.
Toph cal s around midnight. We haven’t talked on the phone in weeks, but with everything happening here, I’m distracted the entire time. I just want to
go back to bed. It’s too confusing. Everything is too confusing.
St. Clair was absent again at breakfast. And I think he’s not even coming to class today (and who could blame him?), when he appears in English, fifteen
minutes late. I worry that Professeur Cole will yel at him, but the faculty must have been notified of the situation, because she doesn’t say a word. She just gives him a pitying look and pushes ahead with our lesson. “So why aren’t Americans interested in translated novels? Why are so few foreign works
published in English every year?”
I try to meet St. Clair’s gaze, but he stares down at his copy of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Or rather, stares through it. He’s pale, practical y translucent.
“Wel ,” she continues. “It’s often suggested that as a culture, we’re only interested in immediate gratification. Fast food. Self-checkout. Downloadable
music, movies, books. Instant coffee, instant rebates, instant messaging. Instant weight loss! Shal I go on?”
The class laughs, but St. Clair is quiet. I watch him nervously. Dark stubble is beginning to shadow his face. I hadn’t realized he needed to shave so
often.
“Foreign novels are less action-oriented.They have a different pace; they’re more reflective. They chal enge us to look for the story, find the story within the story. Take Balzac. Whose story is this? The narrator’s? The little seamstress’s? China’s?”
I want to reach out and squeeze his hand and tell him everything will be okay. He shouldn’t be here. I can’t imagine what I’d do if I were in his situation.
His dad should have pul ed him from school. He should be in California.
Professeur Cole taps the novel’s cover. “Dai Sijie, born and raised in China. Moved to France. He wrote Balzac in French, but set the story in his homeland. And then it was translated into English. So how many steps away from us is that? Is it the one, French to English? Or do we count the first
translation, the one the author only made in his mind, from Chinese to French? What do we lose each time the story is reinterpreted?”
I’m only half listening to her. After class, Meredith and Rashmi and I walk silently with St. Clair to calculus and exchange worried glances when he’s not looking.Which I’m sure he knows we’re doing anyway. Which makes me feel worse.
My suspicions about the faculty are confirmed when Professeur Babineaux takes him aside before class begins. I can’t fol ow the entire conversation,
but I hear him ask if St. Clair would rather spend the hour in the nurse’s office. St. Clair accepts. As soon as he leaves, Amanda Spitterton-Watts is in my face. “What’s with St. Clair?”
“Nothing.” Like I’d tell her.
She flips her hair, and I notice with satisfaction that a strand gets stuck to her lip gloss. “Because Steve said he and Josh were totally wasted Saturday night. He saw them staggering through the Hal oween party, and St. Clair was freaking out about his dad.”
“Wel , he heard wrong.”
“Steve said St. Clair wanted to kill his father.”
“Steve is ful of shit,” Rashmi interrupts. “And where were you on Saturday, Amanda? So trashed you had to rely on Steve for the play-by-play?”
But this shuts her up only temporarily. By lunch, it’s clear the whole school knows. I’m not sure who spil ed—if it was the teachers, or if Steve or one of his bonehead friends remembered something else St. Clair said—but the entire student body is buzzing. When St. Clair final y arrives in the cafeteria, it’s like a scene from a bad teen movie. Conversation screeches to a halt. Drinks are paused halfway to lips.
St. Clair stops in the doorway, assesses the situation, and marches back out. The four of us chase after him. We find him pushing through the school