Chapter 18
Inès ran upstairs and opened the door to her room as if she were being chased by the devil himself, then pulled it shut behind her.
Furiously, she flung her bag to the other side of the room and collapsed onto her bed in despair.
What was wrong with that boy? Was he crazy, blind, or what?
She couldn’t understand it. There had definitely been a spark between them the other night. What was going on?
When she’d found out Tiphaine would be looking after Nassim until their mother returned, she’d realized it was the perfect excuse to see Milo again.
A sign, even. Milo hadn’t replied to her Facebook message, at least not yet, but maybe messaging wasn’t his strong suit.
When she’d gotten back from school, she’d gone straight over and rung the neighbors’ doorbell, supposedly to make sure that everything was going well with her little brother.
Milo answered the door. When he saw Inès on the doorstep, his face darkened.
“Hi!” said Inès with a radiant smile.
“Hi,” he responded without enthusiasm.
Thrown off by the frosty reception, she lost some of her self-assurance.
“I . . . I just came by to see if everything was okay with Nassim.”
Milo looked at her in surprise, maintaining an expression that combined boredom and annoyance.
“Nassim’s not here.”
“Really?” said Inès, increasingly disconcerted. “But your mom was meant to be getting him from school.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
Inès felt the ground swaying beneath her feet. No boy had ever treated her with such indifference. Worse than indifference—contempt. The silence between them persisted, like torture.
“Well . . . sorry . . . I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she managed to say, her heart pounding in her chest under the assault of this stinging humiliation.
“No worries,” he said brusquely as he closed the front door.
Inès found herself alone on the sidewalk, with the intolerable sensation of having just received a slap in the face.
It took her a few seconds to realize what had happened: a boy had spoken to her as though she were boring and unattractive.
She’d never felt so spurned and humiliated.
How had it happened? What had she done? What had gone wrong?
It took almost a minute for shock to give way to anger. That was how he treated her? Okay, then. The moron would soon realize the error of his ways. She couldn’t just let it go, not without reacting, not without showing him what she was made of.
This was not going to be the end of it.