Bye Bye Blondie by Virginie Despentes Page A

mind school, but she preferred it in town.
    Her parents hadn’t made a fuss, not the way they would have before the hospital interlude. In the family, these days, everyone avoided making scenes. They had enrolled her next in the Lycée Chopin, not far from the city center. You had to take two buses to get there, it meant getting up rather early. But this was a lycée with no lodge at the gate, so the pupils could come and go without reporting to anyone. Gloria loved this. And the lycée was a little way off center, so the local bars were mostly full of high school students. Better and better, as she told herself.
    She hadn’t written to Eric to tell him about her latest escapades. She had stopped opening his letters, which were forwarded from the boarding school. She just piled them up, unopened, one on top of the other. Category: the past.
    One Saturday afternoon, not long afterward, the whole gang was at the Foy. A chic bar,with windows looking onto Place Stanislas. Leather banquette seats, marble tabletops, glittering chandeliers.
    As usual, the proprietress was sulking, wondering, as she did every day, what she had done to turn her establishment—normally catering to tourists and the well-off—into the rendezvous of choice for all the local punks.
    Gloria was drinking shandies, because at the time, although she liked getting drunk, she didn’t like the taste of alcohol, preferring sweet things.
    There were a whole lot of them in the bar that day: Victor, shaved head, gray jacket, fan of German bands. Mathilde, a divine anorexic, eyes entirely redesigned with eyeliner, thirty centimeters of black hair impeccably gelled up on top of her head. Léonore, a punkette with a shaved head, blue eye shadow, long nails, very short skirts. Little Lorelei, scarlet hair, crucifixes everywhere, a walking religious festival, wearing her crosses right way up, upside down, in her ears, around her neck, on her wrists, green miniskirt, red tights with black stripes, two front teeth missing. Poulbot, a tall girl with curly fair hair, a friendly face, a big mouth, and a long skirt, thirties style. Plus a big guy called Herbert and his mate Roger, not what you would call intellectuals, in their green bomber jackets and rolled-up jeans. At the time, there weren’t so many punk rockers in Nancy that it was worth picking fights with skinheads. They left that kind of thing to the Parisians, not enough talent locally.
    Night was falling when Ratus arrived, looking the worse for wear. Ratus, an authentic punk rocker, way ahead of everyone else. Seniority among punks was a sign of street cred, it gave you prestige and various advantages. One of the rare points in common between punk and the civil service.
    The story was that Ratus had run into a gang of neo-fascists, a mixture of mods plus two skinheads with southern accents. When they saw him, they’d started insulting him, calling him a filthy stinking punk. He had advised them politely to go fuck themselves, and they had all fallen on him.
    He’d hardly finished telling his tale than everyone was on their feet—apart from a few girls with overcomplicated outfits, and the odd boy who wasn’t keen on a fight. Once they’d paid—this took a good twenty minutes, what with finding enough coins between them—the gang was on its way, determined to persevere all night if they had to, to find the motherfuckers and give them hell.
    They cheered each other on with howls of laughter. Their bad luck, eh, Ratus, they didn’t know who they’d picked on, or they’d have stayed home with their mamas, doing their nails. Herbert was carrying a small police baton inside his jacket—just in case, he said, and now the moment had come. One of nature’s vigilantes. He ended up, poor dope, spending ten years in prison, what a waste. Roger had gone to fetch a pickax handle from his car—again, you never knew, might come in useful. And Victor