Billie’s infatuation with Pierre

Billie’s infatuation with Pierre turns a passing attraction into the summer’s persistent inner weather: she notices his blue eyes, blond hair, and physical presence, tries to command him out of her thoughts, and nevertheless imagines knowing him completely. Its defining contradiction is present from the start. Billie understands that Pierre may not be capable of returning her love, yet her desire to be close to him keeps growing, until memory itself becomes difficult to escape.

Identity and First Attraction

The attraction first appears in Billie’s refusal to admit what she feels. When Simon observes that the girls are taken with Pierre, Billie claims she is not. The denial lasts only in speech: privately, she confesses that she is just as captivated, partly because Pierre is blond and handsome and partly because it is enjoyable to tease herself about things that shine too brightly. Watching him gives her an electric sensation low in her belly. Her fascination is thus both physical and self-conscious; she recognizes the attraction even as she conceals it from her sister and Simon.

Pierre’s animated presence intensifies that first impression. Billie watches him tell a modest story about his father’s dachshund saving his life when he was three and a half. The incident itself is not extraordinary: the dog barked at the right moment. What holds her attention is Pierre telling it, gesturing, jumping about, and making the group laugh. Her infatuation attaches not just to his appearance but to the liveliness with which he occupies a room.

Attraction in Everyday Life

After Pierre has entered her thoughts, ordinary decisions begin to orbit around the possibility of pleasing him. On the walk to cégep, Billie wears her favorite sandals despite their rubbing her heels and chooses a mauve dress, tugging it down as it rides up her thighs. She wonders whether Pierre likes that color, dresses like hers, untidy red hair, mascara, and the other details she is suddenly inclined to assess from his imagined point of view. The effort to make a good impression changes how she experiences even uncomfortable clothes and the walk to class.

At the same time, she resists the change in herself. She reproaches herself for thinking about a blond boy with blue eyes, strong thighs, and a mouth shaped into an O as he whistles her favorite songs. He does not resemble the colorless-haired bass player she once preferred, and she tells herself that this difference should make the attraction pointless. Her command for Pierre to leave her head cannot undo the mental attention she has already given him. The gap between the person she thought she wanted and the person occupying her imagination makes the infatuation feel like a disruption of her own preferences.

Desire and the Warning Against Love

Daphné names the danger Billie is reluctant to acknowledge. She warns that Pierre does not really have a heart yet: Billie can enjoy his blue eyes, but should not fall in love. When Billie asks whether she can do both, Daphné firmly distinguishes the two. She later says that Pierre likes Billie, finds her intriguing, and is excited by her, while repeating the warning not to fall in love and advising her not to introduce him to her parents. The distinction between his interest and his capacity for love becomes a measure of the risk Billie is taking.

Billie cannot make herself accept that distinction emotionally. She wants to enjoy Pierre’s eyes, blond hair, and manly muscles, but also wants to fall in love with him. Their prolonged kissing makes that conflict bodily immediate: she wants to make love with him even while describing him as a cyclist with no heart. She knows she would have to restrain herself from loving him with the full force of her infatuation, yet her desire is already entangled with the possibility of unreturned love.

She imagines preserving their intimacy as a secret of her own. Billie wants their encounter to remain in a private sandbox in her memory, a chapter she would omit from a polished account of her first love; the oversized feelings she has for Pierre, she thinks, will be hers alone. That imagined omission matters: she anticipates a difference between what she experiences and what she could later make public. Even at the height of her desire, she is preparing to keep part of the story from view.

Imagining a Whole Person

Billie’s attraction expands beyond Pierre’s body into a wish to know the person she cannot yet reach. After a moment in which he praises her legs, she leaves rather than risk altering the memory. She pays for her burger and Annette’s salad, then preserves the encounter intact in her recollection, deliberately putting Daphné’s warnings away. She feels full of food and hope and recognizes, with exasperation, that she is in love with a boy named Pierre—an almost embarrassing name, she thinks, for someone who could inspire songs if she knew how to write them.

The scene also shows the difference between the real encounter and the imagined continuation. Driving home, Billie pictures Pierre waking her with kisses the morning after their affectionate gestures, in a bed she supposes smells of bicycle tires and athletic deodorant. She does not have this experience; she dreams it into being. Her hope gives a small compliment an expansive afterlife, turning a brief moment into a possible romance.

After another encounter, the desire becomes a wish for knowledge as well as closeness. Billie wants to know Pierre’s mother’s name, his favorite shirt color, the song that makes him cry, and the words he finds beautiful. She imagines his cousins, childhood friend, godmother, and first-grade teacher: ordinary facts that would make him specific beyond the blond hair, blue eyes, and body she already desires. At the same time, she wonders what he looks like naked beneath the covers and what the two of them would look like together, skin against skin. Curiosity about his private life and erotic imagination develop side by side, but neither means that she actually knows him.

Persistence, Hurt, and Writing

The infatuation leaves physical traces. Billie says she wants Pierre despite not really knowing how a person is supposed to want someone. After seeing him, her hands and legs tremble; she scratches the paint around her car’s lock and grips the steering wheel tightly to calm herself. The journey home seems longer, and she feels only half present. Her body registers the force of the attachment before she can give it a stable explanation.

Seven days after the humiliation, the attraction has not simply faded. Billie cycles through thinking herself foolish, thinking Pierre foolish, continuing to love him, finding him beautiful, changing her mind, and deciding she does not love him after all. She cries when she thinks of that evening and mentally replays it. She and Annette spend hours on the phone devising revenge scenarios, but neither has the courage to carry them out. Hurt therefore creates anger and imagined retaliation without dissolving the attachment.

Trying to forget Pierre only reveals how many sensory details memory has gathered. Billie attempts to put aside the taste of his kisses, his voice, his eyes, the shine of his hair, and the image of him; whenever she drinks slush, he comes back to mind. Even the features she now labels foolish—his muscles, jokes, questions, and Converse—remain part of the same remembered person. The slush becomes a recurring trigger, linking an everyday drink to the taste and image of the boy she wants to forget.

Writing gives the feeling another form. Billie composes a long poem titled Pierre, almost a letter, on perfumed paper. She finds comfort in rereading it when panic rises in her chest and heart, which she describes as filled to the brim with naivety. The poem does not resolve the mismatch between her longing and Pierre’s limited capacity for love; it lets her give that longing shape and return to it. Across denial, physical desire, imagined intimacy, humiliation, and poetry, the infatuation remains at once a source of pleasure and a wound she cannot simply choose to close.