She walked over. Her mother took her hands. The hands were rough, calloused, but they held Aurélie’s as if they were made of glass.
“I said, you’re too quiet.”
Aurélie nodded back.
Aurélie’s throat tightened.
She walked to school. She did not sit behind the gymnasium. She walked into the cantine. She sat down at a table where a quiet boy named Philippe read science fiction novels and never spoke to anyone. He looked up. He did not smile. He nodded once, almost imperceptibly. Les 14 Ans D--Aurelie -1983-
The hyphen in the title was not a typo. It was a stutter. A pause. The kind of breath a person takes before stepping off a cliff.
Françoise finally looked at her. Really looked. Her gaze traveled from Aurélie’s too-large cardigan to her bitten nails to the dark circles under her eyes. Something flickered in Françoise’s face—recognition, perhaps. The memory of her own fourteenth year, 1961, another hardscrabble town, another absent father, another girl who learned to disappear. She walked over
Outside, the summer of 1983 burned on. Unemployment rose. The Cold War shivered. But inside the cantine of the Collège Jean-Jaurès, a girl with uneven hair and a Walkman in her pocket took the hyphen that had been her prison and made it a door.