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  Lucas got up, but instead of heading toward his lair like he usually did when things weren’t going his way, he grabbed his plate full of chicken and smashed it to the ground. The dish shattered and sauce spilled all over the white tiles.

  “Pick that up right now!” his father yelled.

  But Lucas had already stormed off and slammed his bedroom door shut. He stood still long enough to hear his parents talking.

  “What in the world has gotten into him?” Marie asked.

  “Probably just hormones. It’s that age,” his father answered.

  With his stomach knotted up, Lucas gazed at his useless laptop screen.

  8

  By age thirteen, the mere sight of a computer keyboard gave Lucas an erection.

  At fourteen, he started thinking about having sex. He wasn’t going to take a girl on a date. He didn’t think of it in those terms. He had no idea how to approach anyone of the opposite sex, but the idea made him think of Samira, a girl who had caught his eye. Her beautiful, thick dark hair came down her back, and her smoky eyes were underlined with kohl. For the first time in years, he had things other than the videos on his brain. He started to fantasize about kissing her. Of holding her in his arms. But what was he supposed to do? What was the next step? Did she French-kiss? Little by little, Samira invaded his thoughts. And strangely enough, not just with sexual fantasies. He found himself noticing and being surprisingly touched by how she bit her nails in class. By her low-pitched laugh. Yes, he really liked seeing her laughing.

  In the pornos the guy approaches the girl, kisses her, and then she slowly unzips his fly. The girl is always willing. Lucas assumed it would be the same with Samira.

  But he wondered if he would be up to the challenge, like in the movies. If not, wasn’t Samira going to laugh in his face? He just had to show her. He went to the bathroom, where he closed and locked the door and proceeded to carefully shave his body like the men in some of the videos. He grabbed a bottle of his mother’s massage oil and coated himself with it, from head to toe. He contemplated the result in the mirror. He didn’t think he looked bad, especially when he puffed out his already pudgy chest. As he thought about Samira and what she would do to him, he propped up his smartphone on the sink and took a selfie. A naked selfie, with an erection, all the while wondering if his manhood was the right size. His only worry was that Samira would find his penis too small. He knew porn actors were better endowed than he was, but he hoped to come close.

  In between classes the next day, he gave Samira his cell phone number. He had missed a day of school the previous week and pretended that he wanted to catch up on math, which she was good at. He asked if she could text him photos of her corrected homework. She seemed surprised and hesitated, but she texted him a photo of her work during their next class.

  That evening Lucas sent her his naked selfie. There was no doubt in his mind that the following day Samira would come to him, ready and willing. He was startled when he spotted her at the entrance of the school and she glared at him and said, “You have one twisted mind!” She launched into him. “What was that? Are you some sort of monster? A pervert?”

  He was startled when she turned her back to him. Even more when he heard her telling her friend Melanie, “Did you see that creep?” and Melanie burst out laughing. When the group of girls who always orbited around Samira started gossiping whenever they crossed his path, and when they shot him side-eyes and laughed as they elbowed each other, Lucas knew that Samira had shared his selfie with them and that they were making fun of him.

  He was deeply hurt. He was also afraid that the girls would post the photo on social media. He cursed himself out a thousand times for being careless. Samira and the girls were too embarrassed to do that. But each time they caught sight of him, it provoked fits of laughter. By the end of the year, his parents found the new house in Chartres and the family moved away during the winter school break. The incident with Samira receded into a bad memory and Lucas’s wounded pride started to heal. But no one was going to get the best of him again. He was never going to try to pick up another girl. If there was any way for him to avoid talking to girls, he would do it. At least when he was in front of his screen, he controlled the situation.

  9

  Sebastian is disgusted and feels like someone is choking him so he can hardly breathe.

  “What is it? A thing for pedophiles?” he asks when he speaks again. “Tell me, Jerome!”

  Jerome pushes back his chair on wheels and turns it a half circle to face Sebastian.

  “No, nothing like that. Nothing to do with pedophiles,” he says. “Your kid has problems. Serious problems. His laptop and cell phone were infested with viruses and all sorts of filthy junk.”

  “But…what about that?” Sebastian says, pointing to the nude photo of Lucas.

  “That? If you want my opinion, it’s related to this,” Jerome replies as he pulls up a whole series of pornographic photos. “Your son spends his days, even more so his nights, looking at pornos. It dates as far back as I can go inside this damned machine. Up until the crash he carefully erased his browsing history, but it just takes a thorough look through the logs to find some disturbing things. Look! Twenty-four hours before his system crashed, he was changing sites every three minutes. Sometimes he stayed a little longer, but no more than five minutes, tops. From ten o’clock at night, which I guess is when he goes to his room after dinner, till five o’clock the next morning, he watched one hundred and forty porn videos. One hundred and forty.”

  10

  Sebastian does not respond.

  Stunned, he replays the conversation that he and Marie had with friends over dinner the week before. The three couples were approximately the same age, all with teenagers at home. Lana, who works with Marie, brought up the topic. Two days prior, she had surprised her son in front of an X-rated film that he was watching on the internet.

  “I’m sure our kid looks at them too,” Julien, the husband of the third couple, said.

  Marie immediately contradicted him. “Come on, that’s an unfounded accusation. I’m sure Lucas isn’t like that. I have total confidence in him. Besides, he’s a loner. Boys do that together.”

  “What do you think, Seb?” Lana asked. “Are you as sure as Marie?”

  Sebastian shrugged. “I don’t think Lucas could care less about that. He used to be into superheroes. Now, I don’t know. He likes tennis. And Marie’s right, he doesn’t have a lot of friends. Likes to be by himself. I just don’t see him watching a porn flick with friends.”

  How could he have been so wrong about his son?

  11

  Jerome quickly scrolls down Lucas’s browsing history, unleashing a tsunami of unfamiliar acronyms at Sebastian: MILF, BBW, BBC, not to mention obscure terms: bukkake, tribbing, cosplay.

  “MILF?” he mutters, going to back to the first acronym.

  “Come on, Sebastian, are you for real? Mom I’d Like to Fuck. Otherwise known as a cougar. Don’t tell me you’ve never watched a porno since the one we saw all those years ago?”

  “Jerome, we were fourteen!”

  “Well, how old is your son?”

  “Okay, but we didn’t spend our nights at it.”

  Sebastian still remembers when the two of them were in the living room at Jerome’s house, watching their first VHS cassette, all the while looking feverishly over their shoulders and scared to death of being surprised by someone. The mere recollection of the acronym VHS sends him back in time and makes him conscious of his age. Wasn’t what he did pretty much the same thing? Even if after the initial thrill, he grew bored by all the close-ups, by the rote nature of the sex, and even if his early flirting with girls quickly made him forget the artificial images of sex that he finds of no great interest today, he was nonetheless exposed to pornographic images as a teenager too. In seconds, his mind wanders. Did Marie watch porn cassettes with
girlfriends when she was a teen? He’s never asked her. How can Lucas sacrifice his days and nights, his education and his social life? Suddenly, Sebastian remembers something.

  “Did you say ‘as far back as you could go’?” he asks Jerome. “We gave Lucas the laptop for Christmas when he was in sixth grade. Did you go back that far?”

  “That far is difficult. What I can tell you is that it’s been going on a long time. Several years, for sure.”

  Sebastian ponders how old Lucas would have been. Twelve? Thirteen?

  “I took a quick look, Seb,” Jerome adds. “There’s stuff I’ve never tried, not with Lucie, not with anyone. Stuff I didn’t even know could be done. Violent things too. The good news is that the violent stuff isn’t the majority. The bad news is that that’s what’s most recent. It’s not nothing, Seb. Your kid has a problem. Like I said, a serious problem.”

  12

  Lucas found the cat, or rather kitten, just before the move, on his way home from school. A panicked ball of black fur with a bloody right front leg that was twisted at an odd angle. A car must have hit it. The creature was meowing desperately, as if calling for help. Lucas crawled under a car. He managed to get hold of the animal without hurting it. As gently as he could, he snuggled the kitten in his parka and took it home.

  “I told you: no animals in the house!” his mother yelled.

  “He’s been asking for a pet for years,” his dad said, trying to moderate.

  “I’ll take care of it. I promise!” Lucas swore.

  “Right, with any luck you’ll take care of it for the first three weeks,” his mother replied. “Then it’ll be all on me.”

  Still, she gave in. They took the kitten to the vet, where its injured leg had to be amputated. And since the creature stuck like glue to Lucas, he named it Cuddles. The cat managed quite well on three legs and quickly got the hang of the house in Lèves. He grew into a handsome two-year-old tomcat. Contrary to his mom’s predictions, Lucas took dutiful care of his cat—feeding him, regularly changing his litter box, brushing his fur—which Cuddles loves—and faithfully administering the various antiflea products.

  In fact, Cuddles is Lucas’s closest living companion. All that Cuddles requires is being stroked and being fed. Their relationship is clear and simple. Totally pure.

  For Lucas, the move to Lèves corresponded with an even deeper period of solitude. He started at his new school without a past, without friends, which suited him just fine. The other students pegged him for a moody introvert. After a group of boys tried to befriend him at the tennis club where his mother forced him to register, he hardly was friendly to them, so they left him alone. He suffered taunts about his weight, but that was all. He was spending so much time in front of his computer that he was packing on more pounds than normal for his age. He wasn’t just looking at videos; he was also stuffing himself with popcorn and ice cream, and despite his mom’s objections, he was drinking two large bottles of Coke every day. As a result, he missed balls and got out of breath on the tennis court. It didn’t take long for the group of boys to start calling him Fatso.

  The porn he was watching provided comfort. It was like a refuge, something he knew by heart. The images allowed him to escape from the real world, from his mediocre grades at school, from his physical appearance, and, finally, from his life. Recently, he’s discovered some new videos that disturbed him. The women get slapped during sex. He can’t tell if they enjoy it, if they’re really suffering, if it’s a little of both, or if it’s all one big masquerade. After constantly watching these films, they start to look the same, and he begins feeling a sense of monotony and frustration. At times, even after hours of viewing, he quits the screen without achieving any flicker of emotion. Not to mention achieving the same level of initial arousal. He realized that lately he was looking for some semblance of authenticity in a universe where everything is fake. For a simple, insignificant gesture that would reveal the truth of the moment—an actor who takes out his shirttail and reveals the scene of the action to the camera, or an actress who holds her hair back with one hand for the same reason, or who bothers to tie her hair away from her face before the camera starts to roll so that everything is visible. He notices these things now, latches on to them as proof of real life bursting in.

  It’s no wonder his computer is infested with viruses, his mailbox inundated with spam for “enlarging your penis,” with hordes of imaginary girls who want to become his friends on Facebook. Until now, though, the firewall on his PC held up despite the regular appearance of pop-ups. Some of the pop-ups are totally funny, like the time when he was viewing a threesome and a window opened of a portrait of the president of France, along with a pseudo-official warning: You are in violation of the law—you have connected to an illegal pornographic site. He was instructed to click on the president’s portrait, which would let him off with a warning and a fine. If he didn’t do as told, a summons would be mailed to his home. He had looked at the president, whose chest was covered with a tricolor scarf and whose legs were moving wildly on the screen. Lucas had burst out laughing. Who could possibly fall for that? He had surfed dozens of sites, and none had bothered to inquire whether he was legal. What a load of crap!

  But at present, both his smartphone and laptop have crashed for good. He knows that his devices are totally infected and won’t function again without the help of a specialist. Even then, he’ll probably lose all his files. But that isn’t the worst. The worst is that his depravity will inevitably be revealed to his parents.

  It can’t happen. He’d rather die. Or vanish forever. But his father took his devices to work. The cherry on top of the cake is that he’ll be the laughingstock of his dad’s colleagues. Everything he miraculously escaped two years ago with Samira rushes back to him. It’s at that precise instant that he remembers the selfie. Suddenly, he can’t remember for sure whether he tossed it in the trash, whether he cleared it out. If his father finds it, Lucas will die of shame.

  Or maybe he’ll flee with Cuddles under his arm. To where? He doesn’t have a clue.

  It’s been more than a week now that he hasn’t gone online and, in truth, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. His hormones are raging, but that isn’t the worst. He knows how to take care of himself. Worst of all is the free time on his hands, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. Simply eating, petting Cuddles, and playing tennis and missing balls because he’s completely out of breath do not fill the hours—hours that until now marched on without him noticing. Now the days are endless. The nights too long, especially as he wakes well before dawn and ponders how to get out of this dead end. He misses the videos. He tries to plunge back into old issues of his Marvel comics but with little success. Reading? Not his thing either.

  Maybe no one will be able to restart his computer. Or his phone.

  Maybe his father will offer to buy him new ones. He’ll sound off about it, of course, and Lucas will promise to be careful. And he won’t be lying. He’ll definitely be careful next time around. He’ll be a lot more cautious. He’ll look twice before going on certain shady sites. He’ll stick to mainstream sex. Mom-and-pop stuff. Promise. Even if a little voice deep within him murmurs that none of his promises will be kept.

  The worst outcome is never a given. That’s what he wants to cling to. It could be that his father will come home from work railing about the unreliability of computers and that in a few days everything will go back to the way it was before. Maybe his hard drive is fried. If that’s the case, then there’s no problem. He’ll see. As if he could do otherwise.

  13

  When Sebastian tells Marie why Lucas’s devices aren’t working, her legs give way beneath her.

  “Are you sure?”

  Sebastian nods.

  “How are we going to confront him about it?”

  Sebastian doesn’t answer right away.

  He did not want to wait unt
il the evening to tell Marie about Jerome’s discovery. Was not able to wait is more like it. He called her at work and asked that she take the rest of the afternoon off. Pretending she had a raging migraine, she left the office and met Sebastian at a café near the Chartres train station.

  The immediate problem is knowing what approach to take.

  “There’s no doubt. I’m sure of it,” Sebastian confirms. “We can’t act like nothing’s happened.”

  “I know that,” Marie responds as she halfheartedly stirs her coffee. Because of the antidepressants that she has never really stopped taking, she rarely drinks alcohol. “But how are we going to tell him that we know?” she asks, almost as if talking to herself.

  Sebastian bites the inside of his lower lip, deep in thought.

  “In my opinion,” he finally answers, “he can’t doubt but that we already know. As soon as I give him back his computer, all cleaned up, he’ll know for sure.”

  “You’re right; we can’t just stay silent. And that nude selfie. What was it for?”

  “I don’t want to know, Marie. All we do know is that he didn’t email it to an adult. More likely to a girl in his class at the time. We’re lucky the parents didn’t file a complaint. But it didn’t have anything to do with pedophilia.”

  “Do you think we should seek out professional help? With Lucas?”

  Sebastian shrugs. “He’s a teenager. He’s trying to find himself. He spends too much time on the internet looking at porn videos, but that doesn’t make him a mental case.”

  “Are you trying to make less of this, Seb? There’s the selfie. I’m worried about how he views women. Do you really think it’s not necessary? I think it would be good for us to take him to see someone. After all, every kid his age doesn’t spend all their free time on porn. And that’s on top of his binge eating.”