“Yeah.”
Milo was sitting in front of his computer. Clearly Sylvain was disturbing him.
“Okay...I’ll leave you to it, then. Turn the lights off in fifteen minutes, okay?”
“Don’t worry, I will.”
“Okay, then. Sleep tight.”
“Night.”
As Sylvain was pulling the door closed, Milo added, almost as if he regretted his earlier lack of warmth, “How about you, did you enjoy the evening?”
“Yeah.”
For a brief moment, the two men held each other’s eye, and a glimmer of complicity passed between them.
Chapter 12
As the door closed, Milo slumped back in his chair. It was true, he’d had a really nice evening. Surprisingly nice. He’d been expecting it to be much more awkward, a bit of an ordeal even, but Inès was lovely. And extremely pretty, he had to admit. After the first half hour, which they’d basically spent discreetly checking each other out, they found they had plenty to talk about. They started with Facebook, the way they used the sprawling network that nipped in the bud any sense of solitude. And even if their shared vocabulary didn’t always have quite the same resonance—Inès thought she had a modest number of friends, only 173, while Milo took pride in his 32—they both agreed on how important it was not to think that what they saw on the computer screen bore the slightest resemblance to real life. They talked about a few particularly memorable or funny memes that had gone viral recently, and discovered they had a ton of stuff in common.
Milo was tall for his age; by the time he’d hit adolescence he’d already started to shoot up in a way that seemed almost tyrannical, completely arbitrary and out of control. Curiously, his features had retained a certain regularity, and the hormonal surge barely showed on his face: just a few pimples, if you looked closely. He was turning into a handsome young man. Inès was impressed by the light fuzz on his upper lip: Milo was fifteen, and when she told her friends she’d spent an evening up in her room with a guy that age (information she’d let drop in passing, as if it were a mere detail), they’d swoon with envy.
Léa and Emma. Her partners in crime. They’d been inseparable since kindergarten. The terrible threesome. Angels when they were on their own, devils when they were together. Even Nora sometimes disapproved of their behavior. Inès told Milo about them, her eyes shining with the confidence that true friendship bestows.
“What about you? Who are you friends with?” she asked after she’d recounted a few stories that exemplified the tight bond she had with her two best friends.
Milo didn’t have many friends. Maybe Arthur could be considered a friend, though all they really had in common was that they were both frozen out by their fellow students. Milo liked it that way, Arthur did not. Arthur was heavy, both literally and metaphorically. He was overbearing in group situations, and systematically ostracized, despite his cheery, open manner. He and Milo were in the same grade and had a few classes together, one of which was French. Arthur hung around Milo at recess and in the cafeteria at lunch, boring him with endless risqué jokes whose punch lines were rarely funny. Every so often, Milo would release a torrent of criticism, drowning the poor kid in cruel words before telling him to get lost. Arthur would slink off and find another equally miserable companion until the evening, when a reconciliation would take place on Facebook. Milo let it happen, as much out of weariness as out of need: Arthur’s friendship, however inadequate, filled a solitude that was at times oppressive.
Apart from Arthur, Milo sometimes hung out with a kid called Benoît, who was seventeen and went to the high school across the street from their middle school. They lived in the same neighborhood and often took the school bus together. Milo liked Benoît’s reserve; he wasn’t afraid of silence, unlike most kids their age. They didn’t talk much but seemed to like each other’s company.
Benoît also knew a bit about basketball, which Milo played every Monday evening. Sylvain was his most ardent supporter and, in what had become their weekly ritual, he would drive him to practice, then afterward they’d go to eat at the Ranch, a restaurant specializing in steak, a food that Tiphaine hated with a passion and never cooked. Ever since Milo had taken up basketball two years before, Monday night had become guys’ night out.
Milo had a complicated relationship with the outside world. Life had not been kind to him—by the time he was seven, he’d lost most of the people he was close to in quick succession. The first was Maxime, his brother from another mother, his partner in crime, with whom he’d shared almost everything since early childhood. The next was his godfather, Ernest, an elderly man with a grumpy temperament, a boorish manner, and a florid vocabulary, but who melted every time the child asked him to play or to read him a story.
And then the ultimate tragedy, from which no one ever recovers. The nothingness that devours, the emptiness that engulfs, the dark abyss that sucks everything into it. First bewilderment, then anger, bitterness, and fear. Deep, relentless, unending grief.
Since the tragedy, Milo had become very withdrawn. Suffering had distilled its venom in the little boy’s heart, and he developed the obsessive belief that everyone he loved was doomed to die. In his tormented mind any affection he had for others released a deadly poison that gave them no chance of survival. Without understanding how or why, he was cursed with a mysterious affliction that made his love fatal.
So he stopped letting himself get attached. He learned to bury all his emotion deep within him, leaving room only for polite indifference. He saw it as a matter of life or death.
Loving someone put that person in danger. From then on, withholding affection became proof of his love.
He quickly put this logic into practice: he began by detaching himself from Tiphaine and Sylvain, terrified at the idea that they might die. If he lost them, he’d be all alone in the world. Not only did he reject any gesture of affection from the two of them, he also forbade himself to acknowledge the slightest bond. The first months of their life together were hard: while the new parents lavished the child with all the love they had, Milo was determined to rebuff it. Tiphaine and Sylvain obviously attributed his withdrawal to the trauma he was suffering. With the help of a therapist, they armed themselves with patience and understanding. The early sessions went well, providing the child with the psychological support he so desperately needed, until one day Milo realized that he was growing fond of this attractive, friendly, supportive woman. From one day to the next, he refused to go back.
The next time he found himself in the therapist’s office, having been dragged there by Tiphaine and Sylvain, who were bewildered by the child’s rejection and thought he was merely being capricious, he sat there for the entire hour without uttering a word.
After several fruitless sessions, Justine Philippot decided to put an end to his therapy for a while. Milo breathed a sigh of relief: he had just saved Dr. Philippot’s life. He was filled with a rather gratifying sense of pride.
The phenomenon occurred whenever he felt good in someone’s company: a classmate; or a family member, such as Tiphaine’s nephew, who was two years older than him and got a kick out of teaching him “grown-up stuff”; or one particular colleague of Sylvain’s who, without fail, brought Milo chocolate or cookies whenever he came to visit. As soon as he realized that these people stood out from the crowd of acquaintances, that he was beginning to think of them with pleasure and looking forward to seeing them again, he felt a sense of unease. What if something happened to them? It was perfectly possible. It had already happened, multiple times. Why would the phenomenon suddenly come to an end?
With a heavy heart, but convinced that the only thing to be done was to tear out the evil by its roots, he turned his back on everyone he cared about. Evil was his twin. The child’s only salvation would have been to communicate his fears to someone he trusted, but instead he turned away from everyone.
With time, the fear that he might cause the death of anyone to whom he was close began to subside. No one he knew had died recently, though according to his logic this proved nothing: he no longer had deep feelings for anyone.
But that evening in Inès’s company, with her captivating face and the feelings she provoked in him, awakened his demons.
Chapter 13
