What You Only Say in Pencil

The blue book came back on Tuesday the 27th of October, placed perfectly straight in the middle of my seat, like a cat that comes home in the morning and pretends it never went out.

He'd read it in four days. I knew because the margins were full.

Not full the way mine were, with mice and crows everywhere. Full in his own way: a few words here, a line there, always in pencil, always in that fine slanting hand whose letters dropped a long way below the line, like notes someone had let fall. At the chapter with the strange party, he'd written: “I've always wanted to walk into a house like that without anyone asking my name.” Further on, when Yvonne de Galais says to Meaulnes, on the footbridge, “We are two children; we have been very foolish”, he hadn't written anything. He'd simply drawn his little catapult beside it. Like a signature at the bottom of a confession.