I Love You Too Much by Alicia Drake

Author:Alicia Drake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

I’d never had a friend like Scarlett before, someone who really cared. I’d had guys who hung out with me, who went to the cafeteria with me or who sat next to me in lessons, but Scarlett was different.

Every day, by the time I woke up there were seven messages waiting from her. She sent me tons of stuff—jokes and films, photos, texts. She sent cute pictures of puppies wearing Christmas hats, videos of white fluffy kittens hanging off branches, photos of chimpanzees hugging. Constantly. She sent me videos of cars upside down and on fire, police helicopters circling housing projects, faceless guys in hoodies hanging out in the black of night.

Too cool, she wrote beside the videos she sent me.

Look at this, with masses of exclamation marks.

I think she dreamed of finding those guys we had seen, of joining their gang, of running through the streets, throwing gasoline bombs through the air. That is what she wanted.

We hung out every break time. The guys in my class asked if I was going out with her and when I said I wasn’t, they called me gay. A week after we’d been to the chapel and seen the rioters on the boulevard Saint-Michel I asked Scarlett if she wanted to come back to my apartment and she said yes.

Gabriel was there when I opened the door; I wasn’t expecting to see him. He was lying on the sofa in the living room, drinking a bottle of beer and playing on my Wii.

“Hey, Scarlett,” he said as we walked in. “Nice hat.”

She was wearing a knit beanie with the word Queen embroidered in black across the front. She turned to me and said: “Where’s your bedroom, Paul?” She was chewing gum.

“Don’t you guys want to watch me play Federer?” Gabriel asked.

“Nope,” she said.

She walked ahead of me into my bedroom. She lay down on my bed and did stuff on her phone. I don’t know what she did. She took photos of herself, I know that, she was always taking photos of herself that she posted or sent around. I don’t know who she sent them to.

She spent forever on her phone and I sat playing on mine. Then all of a sudden she looked up and said: “I stopped eating last summer.”

“What?” I said. I remembered the cookies and salami piled up on her breakfast plate in La Baule. “What did you do that for?”

She shrugged. “I wanted to see if anyone would notice.”

“How come you didn’t die?”

“Well, I did eat half an apple a day, half a Granny.” That’s what people call Granny Smith apples in France.

“What happened?”

“I got really thin and after a while I wasn’t hungry anymore. The emptiness felt good, like I was winning. But then my parents stopped me.”

She said her parents took her to a doctor and the doctor made her go to a psychiatric hospital in the 16ème. She told me she lay in a bed under a blue light for two weeks and then they told her to go home.

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