Jade and Léa’s friendship

Jade and Léa’s friendship begins when they are six and grows through school, bodily secrets, artistic hopes, and years of attempted loyalty. Its decisive pattern is a repeated mismatch: Léa invests in Jade and tries to recover their intimacy, while Jade’s self-presentation remains difficult to verify. Their final trip together to England turns that mismatch into a rupture, and Léa’s later doubts leave the friendship suspended between genuine attachment and possible deception.

Childhood and Shared Rituals

Léa recalls that she and Jade were almost always together from the moment they met. Jade was mischievous, reckless, sometimes malicious, and brave, but also capable of appearing well behaved when circumstances required it. Léa sometimes bore the consequences of Jade’s actions. Jade was not a strong student and showed little interest in reading or numbers; the contrast between that school record and the artistic talent she later displayed becomes part of the friendship’s changing story.

Their lives at home were unequal in a way that made the friendship feel asymmetrical. Jade lived with her mother and younger half-brother, while Léa rarely visited their home; Jade, by contrast, often came to Léa’s. Léa remembers Jade’s mother as thin, a heavy smoker, and possibly a drinker. She kept Listerine by the sink and gargled over dirty dishes, a habit that disgusted Léa. Jade had no father in her life. She told Léa a story about a Polish handball player who had fled to pursue the capitalist dream and left again before Jade was born, though Léa later acknowledges that she did not know whether any of it was true.

At eleven, Jade took Léa to a school bathroom after lunch and showed her how to make herself vomit by putting two fingers down her throat. She presented it as something models did to cleanse themselves. The practice became a routine after school meals, and Léa eventually began doing it at home after dinner. Her parents discovered what was happening and took her to a psychologist; they also separated the girls for the first time, telling Léa that Jade was a bad influence. Léa remembers this as a difficult period but does not elaborate. The episode establishes a disturbing intimacy: Jade’s influence passes into Léa’s private habits, while adults respond by trying to break the bond.

School, Art, and Diverging Futures

The girls reunited at collège. Jade began painting and received praise from her teachers, while Léa played piano without receiving much encouragement. Léa continued to vomit secretly from time to time. She did not want to alarm anyone, and she did not know whether Jade did the same; still, she liked to imagine that the shared behavior joined them in a way no one else could reach. Their friendship is thus remembered not only through conversation and companionship but through a concealed bodily practice that Léa treated as evidence of special closeness.

When Jade entered an arts-focused lycée, the two attended different schools but continued to meet in town. They shopped, committed small thefts, lingered by the river, made plans, and drank gin. Jade attracted groups of boys but could dismiss them to spend time with Léa, a choice that made Léa proud. At the same time, Léa sometimes caught Jade in small lies and explained them away as embarrassment about her family. Her loyalty did not depend on believing every detail; it depended, for a while, on giving Jade’s inconsistencies a sympathetic explanation.

Jade set her sights on the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and Léa helped her select drawings and watercolors for the application portfolio. Léa sincerely admired the women in Jade’s paintings, whose bodies became increasingly snake-like. They both looked forward to the imagined adventure of Paris, although Léa had already arranged to study History at the University of Avignon. Jade’s grades improved during lycée, and her teachers were enthusiastic about her repeated depictions of beautifully deformed women. In May, Jade called Léa’s family home at eleven at night: a Paris school had accepted her portfolio and invited her to an in-person examination. Léa believed in her friend. When Jade lacked money for the journey, Léa paid for the train and lodging with some of her savings and money taken from her mother’s purse.

The Paris Setback and Growing Distance

The Paris opportunity did not become the artistic breakthrough Léa had hoped for. A newspaper feature about students from the provinces facing the costs of moving to Paris brought Jade attention, but no patron emerged afterward. Jade gave up, which Léa considered premature: in her view, Jade was abandoning a chance to make a major leap over a relatively small sum of money. By then it was too late for Jade to enroll at the University of Avignon, so she would lose a year if she changed direction. Léa tried to persuade her not to surrender, without success, and eventually resigned herself to the decision.

Their lives then separated. Léa began university; Jade wandered from place to place, reportedly with a man, appearing at different times in Toulouse, Marseille, or Barcelona. She no longer lived with her mother and returned to the city only occasionally. Léa did not know exactly how Jade earned a living. She tried to stay in touch and worried that something might happen to her. On the phone, Jade said that everything was going wonderfully, that she was working as a model in different places and earning good money. Léa sometimes felt reassured by these accounts and wondered whether Jade really was discovering a fantastic world and finally becoming happy. Against Jade’s apparent freedom, Léa measured her own life with dissatisfaction: living with her parents, studying what she considered useless subjects, and deciding that painting was too solitary for her, while social life suited her better.

England and the Break

The possibility of spending a year in England gave Léa a way to present herself as adventurous too. She invited Jade to join her for the first week, offered to pay for the plane ticket, and planned for them to share her room. For Léa, the invitation carried a further hope: it might be their last chance to regain the intimacy they had lost. The trip therefore tested more than Jade’s comfort abroad; it tested the story each friend had come to inhabit, with Jade as the woman of the world and Léa as the sheltered girl who had never left her parents’ home.

According to Léa’s later account, the contrast collapsed as soon as they arrived on campus. Jade was outside her element, hid behind Léa like a frightened dog, and feared being spoken to because she barely spoke English. Léa says that recognizing this difference, or realizing that Léa herself had recognized it, hurt Jade. She believes that this was why Jade stopped speaking to her. What Léa had intended as an adventure that would reunite them instead exposed the limits of the worldly identity Jade had presented and left the two friends further apart.

Silence and Retrospective Doubt

After returning to France, Jade disappeared from Léa’s life. Léa called and sent numerous emails; eventually she received notice that Jade’s email address was no longer active. She feared that something terrible had happened, then came to suspect that Jade might have been fleeing her lies and preparing to begin again under a new name and email address. The suspicion is Léa’s interpretation, not a confirmed account of Jade’s intentions or whereabouts.

The friendship’s later meaning is unsettled by Léa’s reassessment of the Paris story. She admits that she never saw an official letter or document from the art school and had relied on Jade’s word. Given how difficult admission was, Léa now doubts that Jade had been as talented as she once believed and wonders whether the supposed invitation and financial obstacle were invented to cover a small holiday in Paris. The novel does not resolve that uncertainty. Léa’s recollection holds both her childhood devotion and her adult suspicion: she paid for the journey, trusted the account, and supported Jade’s ambitions, but ultimately cannot distinguish the friend she loved from the versions of herself Jade may have constructed.