All the Way by Marie Darrieussecq

look of defiance (or pity?):
    â€˜Shit, Solange, do you really think there are people who still believe your father’s a pilot?’
    Her face catches fire.
    â€˜Your father is a porter . Do you think I didn’t know? Rose saw him carrying her bag when she went to England.’
    Suddenly there is no more oxygen in the room. Pretend nothing has happened. Pretend to be what she has always been: the daughter of an Air Inter pilot and a shopkeeper from Clèves-le-Haut.
    The girl who’s having the party is called Lætitia, Lætitia d’Urbide; that means Happiness in Latin. There are at least fifty people, even high school kids and guys from the coast, and punch in salad bowls with ladles.
    Stand up straight, like an air hostess.
    Rose doesn’t seem surprised to see her. Nor embarrassed, or anything. Perhaps she’s already drunk a fair bit. But it’s impossible to have any contact with Rose now. To get anywhere near her, to be in the same space as her. It’s as if a river separated them: Rose and her Parisian cousins and Lætitia d’Urbide on one bank, she and Delphine on the other bank. The same bank as Peggy Salami. With the weirdos, the hicks, the concierges, the badly dressed, the perverse , the squalid, those with big chins, the families with ten kids, the outliers, the people who’ve had the same car forever and a yard full of tyres. Like at the Bihotz place. To be labelled a Bihotz.
    She serves herself a ladle of punch, drinks it in one go and starts to sway her hips. Let’s Dance . She knows the lyrics by heart; she learned them off the record sleeve, at Rose’s, as it happens. ‘That girl is gifted,’ Rose’s mother had said.
    She will never go to Rose’s again. Never again.
    Rose’s father is a teacher and her mother is a sort of assistant art teacher. Sure, they don’t live in a chateau but their house is definitely cool and so, what’s the word, welcoming.
    She wants to cry.
    Let’s Dance.
    Her skirt is falling down, it’s so awkward. First she had put on her shiny gym leggings, and thrown together a very short skirt and a white jersey hooded top, with just a narrow band showing under her V-neck pullover, which she’d worn back to front, and a fake leather belt that sits perfectly on her hips, very Madonna, and some pink spray in her hair and her fake Dockside shoes. And then she took the whole thing off (just as well she’d got started early); she borrowed her mother’s Prince of Wales check skirt, her father’s black Polo shirt, and it ends up being a really fantastic outfit that looks neat, New Wave, with her imitation Docksides and big white clips in her hair to liven up the effect, and black mascara, and she’s teased her hair to give it lots of volume. But in no time it’s all hanging flat again. And the skirt is slipping.
    She bought some Kool menthol cigarettes and managed to get hold of some Get 27 liqueur; they go well together. Perhaps she shouldn’t have drunk it on top of the punch because she’s starting to freak out. Which is bad when you want to have a good time at a party and go really crazy.
    She heads to the toilet so she can hitch the skirt up a bit higher. She is too fat. She makes a solemn resolution, on the spot, to replace a meal a day with cigarettes.
    The d’Urbide parents don’t seem to be at the chateau. They really are called d’Urbide, with an apostrophe—‘fucking toffs,’ says Delphine, who is disgustingly vulgar, a real fishwife. The only adult in the vicinity is Delphine’s mother, who hangs round the whole time, cleaning up glasses. Right now, in fact, she is wiping the floor. Can Delphine do anything she wants in front of her fucking bitch of a mother? It must be difficult. Like when Rose’s father was Rose’s teacher.
    She says hello to Delphine’s mother so as not to appear a snob. Someone has put on Sade, the soft