Free Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow by Faïza Guène Page B

accused him. I don't know if he's paranoid but, in any case, they had no right to accuse him without proof. That's no good.

    Life is really full of disappointments. Coming home from the market this morning, I overheard two girls and a guy talking on the bus. The girls were twins, or nearly. They were dressed the same, had the same hairstyle, and they talked the same.
    The guy was really little and he had his mouth open all the time. On the plus side, thank God, he didn't say anything. He just listened. The girls were chewing gum and blowing bubbles at the end of nearly every sentence.
    "You know
The Pretender?
"
    "Yeah sure!" (Bubble.)
    "Do you watch it every day?" (Bubble.)
    "Yeah!"
    "You know the main character?"
    "Right!" (Bubble.)
    "His name is Jarod..." (Bubble.)
    "Yeah! And he's seriously hot!"
    "Well, I heard he's a homo!" (Bubble.)
    "Serious? That's crazy! How do you know?" (Bubble.)
    "My sister told me she saw it on the Internet."
    "Oooh, that's so screwed up. I can't believe they're saying he's gay." (Bubble.)
    Not Jarod. Someone could have said James Dean, Claude François, Michael Jackson, or Christian Morin, OK. But not Jarod. When I watched that series, I could never follow the story: He was the only reason I stayed crouched in front of the TV like an ass. Because he's really too hot. Those other gay guys out there are so lucky.
    Mme Burlaud is always saying that all my life I'll get deceived and I've just got to get used to it. Yeah. But that wasn't written anywhere in my contract.

    It's weird, but I can't stop thinking about that lameass Nabil and I still can't understand why he did that. Why he suddenly decided to glue his fat mouth to
mine. And he's got enormous lips, I was scared he'd inhale me and I'd be a prisoner inside him. Once I got out of there, all the TV channels in the world would interrupt regular programming to get my eyewitness report of my stay in Nabil the loser. And then I would write a book called
Journey to the Center of Nabil.
It would definitely be a bestseller.
    I wonder when he's coming back. Just to know. Oh yeah, and to tell him he's got some debts to pay back—and he has acne and pisses everyone off.

Since Mom's still on vacation until next week, we decided to hang around Paris together. It was actually the first time she'd seen the Eiffel Tower even though she's been living half an hour from it for almost twenty years. Before now, she only saw it on TV, on the one o'clock news on New Year's Day, when it's all lit up from top to bottom and people are partying, dancing, kissing, and getting wasted. Anyway, she was seriously impressed.
    "It must be two or three times our building, yeah?"
    I told her it had to be. But our building, and the projects in general, they don't get so much tourist interest. There aren't any Japanese hordes with their
cameras standing at the bottom of the towers in the neighborhood. The only ones interested in us are the parasite journalists with their nasty reports on violence in the suburbs.
    Mom, she would have been happy to stay there for hours looking at it. Me, I think it's ugly, but you can't deny it makes an impression because it's powerful: the Eiffel Tower. I'd like to have gone up in the red and yellow elevators that look like ketchup and mustard, but it was too expensive. And plus, we would have had to get in line behind the Germans, the Italians, the English, and piles of other tourists who aren't scared of heights and even less scared of spending their dough. We didn't have enough money to buy a miniature Eiffel Tower either, even uglier than the original, but still it's classy to have one on top of your TV. Tourist-trap stalls are crazy expensive. Plus, what those guys sell is total crap. Later, a pigeon took a shit on my shoulder. I tried wiping it off discreetly against a statue of Gustave Eiffel, 1832–1923, but the bird shit had gone hard and wouldn't come off. In the RER, people were staring at the stain and I felt serious
hchouma.
I