Around Her

By Sophie Bienvenu

In 1996, a 16-year-old girl gives birth to a boy in an anonymous Montreal hospital. Around Her traces twenty years of the lives of Florence Gaudreault and her biological son through the prism of twenty characters who have crossed their paths and who, in turn, tell their own story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Sep 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781772012095

Sophie Bienvenu

Sophie Bienvenu is a Québécois writer. After studying visual communication in Paris, she settled in Québec in 2001 and quickly established herself as a successful blogger. Et au pire, on se mariera (La Mèche) her first novel, was followed by Chercher Sam, translated as Searching for Sam by Rhonda Mullins, and Autour d’elle, also translated by Rhonda Mullins as Around Her. Ceci n’est pas de l’amour (This Is Not Love) was her first poetry collection, published in 2016 by Poètes de brousse. Bienvenu’s writing takes its readers on an emotional journey, an intense exploration of profoundly human characters, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Book preview

1

All to Myself

She’ll say yes. For sure, tonight, she’ll say yes.

For weeks, she has been letting me go a little farther each time. Yesterday, I told her that Marie-Ève does it. And that she wants to do it with me. I actually don’t give a shit about Marie-Ève. Who wants a girl anyone can have? Where’s the challenge in that?

The first time I saw Florence, she was hiding behind her books. She was holding them against her as if they were all that was keeping her from running off. She had a weird headband in her hair with a knot on the side, the neck of her polo shirt was buttoned to the top, and her skirt, which was too big, hung below her knees. It seemed practically impossible. I don’t know how they do it, but normally girls know how to fix themselves up to look good in anything, even a uniform. Not that I mind. But Florence is special. And she may be forever.

The first class of the year had started a couple minutes before when someone knocked on the door. The teacher said Come in, but there was another knock. Come in! he said again, already pissed off. It took a few seconds for the door to open, long enough for the teacher to get his butt off the desk. I didn’t know Florence then; well, I had seen her around, but we had never been in the same class, or I had just never noticed her, but now I know she must have been taking a couple of deep breaths for courage. She’s weird. Cool weird.

She came in and said, Sorry, I went to the wrong room, in a quiet voice, almost a whisper.

The girls laughed, and then the guys did too. Geneviève whispered, check her out … she’s like a doll right out of the box. I felt like Patrick Roy right before he got his second Conn Smythe. It was attraction, excitement, and nervousness all at once. I got a surprise boner and had to adjust.

The math teacher told her to go take an empty seat. Obviously, the only seat left was right in front of his desk. As she sat down, she dropped her pencil case, spilling everything out. Everyone laughed again, except for me. I smiled. I felt like a giant, and I wanted her, all tiny in my arms. She closed her eyes and picked up her things. During class, I kept staring at her neck. Her hair was cut straight across her neck, and normally I like girls with long hair. I imagined myself like an explorer, pulling on her collar to kiss her. Maybe biting her, but not hard.

I went to see her at her locker after class. When I said hi, she just stared at me with big eyes.

Are you scared of me? I asked.

She shook her head.

What are you doing after school?

Going home.

You wanna go for a smoke behind the gym?

My mom doesn’t like it when I get home late.

Mine had split a while ago, so I’m no judge, but that seemed a little intense. Except that it made sense with her, I thought, so I didn’t say anything.

Can I walk you home then?

She nodded.

I’m Étienne, I said.

Me too.

She closed her eyes, just like after she dropped her things in class, then she caught herself: Florence. I felt like my rib cage opened to swallow her up and keep her warm in there with my organs. Just shows the line between freaking disgusting and sickly romantic is pretty thin.

Once we started walking, I wanted it to rain. I wanted to have to take shelter under a tree or a porch. I would have liked us to find the smallest shelter possible so I could press up against her, or at least brush up against her. I had to adjust the boys a couple more times just thinking about it. It might have been a little insensitive to pray for a flood just a month after the one in the Saguenay, but I don’t know anyone in La Baie. And everyone’s got their own problems. Anyway, it was the end of August, and it was hot and sunny, so unless rain hit out of the blue, the only way I was going to get to touch her was by breaking her fall if she tripped. I was checking out all the cracks on the sidewalk, just to be ready. Florence was looking at the ground too, but sometimes she would turn her head toward me. Her eyes would glance off mine and look down at the concrete straight away. I tried to find something not too lame to say, but I couldn’t come up with anything, so I suggested we listen to Sublime’s latest album, which I had been playing non-stop since it came out. I told her that my headphones were old, and you couldn’t pull on the wires too much or the sound would go to shit. It wasn’t a total lie, but it wasn’t exactly the truth either. But our arms were touching, and that was the main thing. Except that my headphone kept sliding away from my ear, and I couldn’t hold it because I was walking with my fists balled up in my pockets to hide my hard-on. There was no way I could take her hand at that point. If you have to take something, it’s not worth anything. It’s only worth something if someone gives it to you.

We walked past a few bus stops on Laurier. I didn’t know where we were going, except that it was in the opposite direction from my house, but that was okay. My Discman had stopped playing, and I didn’t have more batteries, so we had been walking along like that for a while, not talking. I can’t handle walking without music, so I was humming a tune in my head, Edwyn Collins’s A Girl Like You, which I hated last year but that popped into my head for no reason.

She finally stopped at the corner of Dickson and Pasteur. I had never been to this neighbourhood. Me and my dad aren’t poor, but Sillery is a cut above Saint-Jean-Baptiste. The big houses and manicured lawns are a change from the crooked buildings on D’Aiguillon. I felt like a foreigner visiting a new city and a new country. The same feeling as I had with her. Patrick Roy, Indiana Jones, Jacques Cartier … Étienne Desmarais, same deal.

Is this where you live?

No, a bit further, but I don’t want my mom to see you.

I said okay and left, but I couldn’t help doubling back to see where she went in. Her door was hidden by a bush trimmed within an inch of its life. As she searched for her keys in her backpack, she turned toward me, and I think she blushed.

It made my dick hurt.

That was three months ago, and it hasn’t stopped hurting. Until tonight. I have a feeling about tonight.

Earlier, it snowed for the first time this year. I left my window open this morning because I didn’t want Florence to smell the smoke. She’s the only person I know who has never had a smoke in her life. When we came in, there was snow on the windowsill, and she thought it was pretty. It was as cold in my bedroom as at the rink. We got under the covers. For the past month, she’s been coming over to my house every Thursday. Her mother thinks she’s helping me with English. I told my friends I’m dating a girl from Stanislas so they would leave me alone, and so Marie-Ève would find out and stop chasing me, because I don’t want to sleep with her anymore. I wouldn’t know what to tell the others. I don’t want to explain why I’m hanging out with Florence. I don’t want them to think I’m weird, too. This is just between us. I have no choice but to lie. And Florence, well, she doesn’t really have any friends, so she has no one to hide things from except her mother. She doesn’t talk much, just to me, sometimes. She listens though. I like telling her stuff. I can tell her anything, and she gets it. She doesn’t judge me. Not like the others. She doesn’t laugh at me because I still don’t know what I want to do with my life, even though I only have a year to go at Saint-Charles-Garnier. She gets it that I don’t really want to play hockey anymore, but I feel like that’s all I know how to do. I tell her about my little brother who is a fuck-up, being bummed out since my mom left, and my father who’s not really coping. I try to explain how it feels to know all they have is me. What I would like to do is to take off to Europe or the States. With her. She strokes my hair, and it makes me feel like everything is going to be all right, like I’m good enough for her.

So we’re in my room, and we’re making out, and I touch her tits over her sweater. She lets herself moan a little. I stick my head in the hollow of her neck and say, Jesus, you turn me on … I watch her bite her lip. Normally, this is when she backs out, when she smiles and fixes her clothes, because she thinks that’s enough. When she does that, I want her even more, but I respect her more, too. Normally, after she says that, I say I can walk her home. But then Florence looks at me with lust in her eyes, her hair making a sort of black sun on the pillow. She looks more beautiful than ever. I blurt out I love you and things start to happen fast. She’s not like other girls. That’s why she’s always alone, why Marie-Ève and Geneviève laugh at her when they see her in the hallway or the caf. I fume on the inside when they do that. I want to tell them that they don’t know her like I do, that she is worth more than the two of them put together, that she is precious. I want to walk across the caf, knock over chairs, grab her by the neck, and make out with her, like that, to shut them up.

But I don’t.

Instead, when I see her and I’m with the gang, I give her a little smile, on the sly, and I look down at my Vans. When we’re alone, I feel like I can do anything one-handed, while she holds the other hand, but it’s not the same when people are around. I hope that doesn’t make her sad, but there’s not much I can do about it.

Florence names cats we see in the street. She sings stupid old songs when she thinks no one is listening. The first time I tried to kiss her was at lunch hour, when we ended up alone in the darkroom during photography. I had registered, pretending it was a new interest, but it was just to be with her. She looked down at the ground, so I gave her a wet kiss on the top of her head. She apologized and said, Okay, you can go now, and then she looked down again. No, wait, I’m not ready. She looked at me again, took a breath, smoothed the pleats on her skirt under her bum, and said Okay. Go ahead. She closed her eyes, waiting for me to kiss her. I thought that was cute, with the red lamp lighting us, so I waited a second before kissing her. She opened her eyes, and they were filled with questions, but only one came out: You don’t want to anymore? I grabbed her by the neck, with surgical precision, firm yet gentle, and I kissed her, in the right place this time. I think she stopped breathing for, like, five seconds. I grabbed her neck harder, and pulled her toward me. Her brain shut down, and she let herself go with it for a few seconds and went limp in my arms. Then she slowly backed away, and put the