Lie With Me It''s the playground of a high school, an asphalt courtyard surrounded by ancient gray stone buildings with big tall windows. Teenagers with backpacks or schoolbags at their feet stand around chatting in small groups, the girls with the girls and boys with boys. If you look carefully you might spot a supervisor among them, barely older than the rest. It''s winter. You can see it in the bare branches of a tree you would think was dead planted there in the middle of the courtyard, and in the frost on the windows, and in the steam escaping from mouths and the hands rubbing together for warmth. It''s the mid eighties. You can tell from the clothes, the high-waisted ultra-skinny acid-wash jeans, the patterned sweaters. Some of the girls wear woolen leggings in different colors that pool around their ankles.

I''m seventeen years old. I don''t know then that one day I won''t be seventeen. I don''t know that youth doesn''t last, that it''s only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it''s too late. It''s finished, vanished, lost. There are some around me who can sense it; the adults repeat it constantly but I don''t listen. Their words roll over me but don''t stick. Like water off the feathers of a duck''s back. I''m an idiot.

An easygoing idiot. I''m a student in terminal C at the Lycée Elie Vinet de Barbezieux. Barbezieux doesn''t exist. Or let''s put it another way. No one can say: "I know this place, I can point to it on a map," except perhaps for the readers (and they are more and more rare) of Jacques Chardonne, a Barbezieux native who in his writing extolled the town''s implausible "happiness." Or those (and they are more numerous) who have a memory of taking Route 10 to formally begin their vacation at the beginning of August, in Spain or in Les Landes, only to find themselves stuck there--precisely there--in bumper-to-bumper traffic, thanks to a succession of poorly thought-out traffic lights and a narrowing of the highway. It is in Charente, thirty kilometers south of Angoulême. The limestone soil lends itself to the cultivation of vines, unlike the cold, clay soil of neighboring Limousin.

It''s an oceanic climate, with mild and rainy winters. There isn''t always a summer. As far back as I can remember, it''s the gray that dominates, and the humidity. The remains of Gallo-Roman churches, and scattered chateaux. Ours looked like a fortified castle but what was there really to defend? Surrounding us there were hills. It was said the landscape undulated. That''s about it. I was born there.

Back then we still had a maternity ward, but it closed many years ago. No one is born in Barbezieux anymore, the town is doomed to disappear. And who knows Elie Vinet? They claim he was Montaigne''s teacher though this fact has never been seriously established. Let''s say he was a humanist of the sixteenth century, a translator of Catullus and the principal of the College of Guyenne in Bordeaux. As luck would have it, that brought him to Saint-Médard, an enclave of Barbezieux. The high school was named after him. We didn''t find anyone better. And finally, who remembers the C terminals? They say "S" today, I think.

Even if this initial does not represent the same reality. These were the classes in mathematics, supposedly the most selective, the most prestigious. The ones that opened the doors to the preparatory classes that in turn led to the big schools, while the others condemned you to local colleges or professional studies or vocational school or just stopped there, as though you had been left in a cul-de-sac. So I''m from a bygone era, a dying city, a past without glory. * * * Understand me, though, I wasn''t depressed about it. This was just how it was. I didn''t choose it. Like everyone else, I made do.

At seventeen, I don''t have a clear awareness of the situation. At seventeen, I don''t dream of a modern life somewhere out there, in the stars, I just take what''s given to me. I don''t nurse any ambition, nor do I carry around any resentment. I''m not even particularly bored. I am an exemplary student, one who never misses a class, who almost always gets the best grades, who is the pride of his teachers. Today, I''d like to slap this seventeen-year-old kid, not because of the good grades but because of his incessant need to please those who would judge him. * * * I''m on the playground with everyone else. It''s recess.

I just got out of two hours of philosophy ("Can one assume at the same time the liberty of man and the existence of the unconscious?"), the kind of subject we are told can show up on "the bac," the French end-of-high-school exam. I''m waiting for my biology class. The cold stings my cheeks. I''m wearing a predominantly blue Nordic sweater. A shapeless sweater that I wear too often. Jeans, white sneakers. And glasses. They''re new.

My vision deteriorated drastically the year before. I became myopic over the course of a couple of weeks without knowing why and was ordered to wear glasses. I obeyed; I couldn''t do otherwise. My hair is fine and curly, my eyes greenish. I''m not beautiful, but I get attention; that I know. Not because of my appearance, but because of my grades. "He is brilliant," they whisper, "much more advanced than the others, he will go far, like his brother, this family is one to be reckoned with." We are in a place, in a moment, where nearly everyone goes nowhere; it garners me equal parts sympathy and antipathy.

* * * I am this young man there, in the winter of Barbezieux. * * * With me are Nadine A., Genevieve C., Xavier C. Their faces are engraved in my memory when many others, more recent, have deserted me. They aren''t the ones I''m interested in though, but rather a boy in the distance leaning against the wall flanked by two other guys around his age. He''s a boy with shaggy hair, the hint of a beard, and a serious look. A boy from another class.

Terminal D. Another world. There is an impenetrable border that stands between us. Maybe it''s contempt. Disdain, at the very least. But I don''t see anyone but him, this slender and distant boy who doesn''t speak, who''s happy just to listen to the two guys talking next to him without interrupting. Without even smiling. I know his name.

Thomas Andrieu. * * * I should tell you: I''m the son of the teacher, the school principal. I grew up in a primary school eight kilometers from Barbezieux, in a first-floor apartment that was assigned to us above the village''s only schoolroom. My father was my teacher from kindergarten through middle school. Seven years of receiving his teachings, him in a gray button-down writing on the chalkboard, at the head of the room, us behind our wooden desks. Seven years heated by an oil stove, maps of France covering the walls; maps of an old France, with her rivers and tributaries, and the names of the towns written in a size proportional to their population, published by Armand Colin, and the shadow on the wall of the two linden trees outside the window. Seven years of saying "sir" during school hours, not because he asked it of me, but to make myself indistinguishable from my classmates, and also because my father embodied a quiet authority. After school, I stayed in the classroom with him to do my homework while he prepared the lessons for the following day, tracing in his big checkered notebook, filling the boxes with his beautiful handwriting.

He turned on the radio to Jacques Chancel''s Radioscopie. I haven''t forgotten. I came from this childhood. My father insisted on good grades. I simply didn''t have the right to be mediocre or even average. There was only one place for me--first. He claimed that I would find salvation in my studies, that only study could "allow one to enter the elevator." He wanted the top-ranking higher education establishments for me, nothing else.

I obeyed, just as I had with my glasses. I had to. * * * I recently returned to this place of my childhood, this village that I hadn''t set foot in for years. I went back with S. so that he would know. The grid was still there with the ancient wisteria, but the lime trees had been cut down, and the school had closed a long time ago. There are housing units there now. I pointed out the window of my room to him.

I tried to imagine the new occupants, but I couldn''t. After, we took the car out again and I showed him the place where a delivery truck (an old Citroën van that served as a sort of mini-market) came to town every two days, the stable where we would go to get our milk, the decrepit church, the little sloping cemetery, the forest that sprouted mushrooms at the beginning of October. He never imagined I came from such a rural, almost fossilized world. He told me, "It must have taken great will and determination to have lifted yourself out." He didn''t say "ambition" or "courage" or "hate." I told him: "It was my father who wanted it for me. I would have stayed in this childhood, in this cocoon." * * * Thomas Andrieu, I don''t know who his father is or even if that matters.

I don''t know where he lives. At that moment, I don''t know anything about him, except for terminal D. And his shaggy hair and somber look. His name I know because I found it out for myself. Just