by Patrick Bard
“Despite everything, this is really nice.”
“Uh-huh,” Lucas mumbles as he places a hand on her shoulder.
She snuggles against him, their two life jackets compressed against one another.
“It feels like Titanic, doesn’t it?” she says. “Although if I hadn’t agreed to come, I bet you would’ve anyway. It just wouldn’t be the same.”
Lucas laughs. “You’re right.”
His answer gets lost in the noise of the foam as the bow of the Saint-Quay cuts through a larger wave. The wind gains strength and the instructor tells them that they’ll have to head back soon.
The half day flies by before they realize it. Lucas is starving. Back at port, he buys a sandwich and offers one to Eloise, who declines.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“I’m still a bit queasy, from the boat,” she says. “But I loved it,” she adds, placing her hand on Lucas’s. “Thank you.”
They ride the bus back in silence, the better to prolong the magic of their adventure and to not spoil what brought them together.
When they reach the entrance of the Poseidon, Eloise stops.
“Want to grab a smoke in the garden before we head in?”
Lucas shrugs. “I don’t smoke.”
“I know, you idiot. But I do.”
The wind has died down. It looks as if it’s going to rain. They sit on a bench.
“I have to tell you, Eloise. Online games weren’t my problem. I was addicted to cybersex. Online porn. I got caught and my parents took all my devices away. I got depressed, and on the day my parents were driving me to see a shrink, I jumped out of the car on the highway. I wanted you to know before you leave.”
Eloise doesn’t say anything.
“Desnoyers says that I have to find the void I was trying to fill,” he adds.
Eloise blows smoke out through her nose. “She tells me that I have to find what I was trying to escape by gaming. Maybe she’s wrong. Maybe I’m the one who was looking to fill a void.”
Lucas takes the letter Eloise wrote to him from his pocket and hands it to her.
“I have my take on that,” he says. “Maybe I was trying to escape something more than I was trying to fill a void. Who knows?”
Eloise turns to him, their faces very close together, almost touching.
“Good-bye, Lucas,” she says. “Thank you.”
Her voice is no more than a whisper. She brings her hand around the back of Lucas’s neck to bring him still closer, until their mouths come into contact and open. It’s my first kiss, thinks Lucas. A soft kiss. Eloise tastes salty, from the sea spray that blends with the light tobacco. He feels the stud of her tongue piercing roll on his own tongue and the electric jolt happens again. Something else awakens in his belly and spreads to his loins and spine. He presses himself against her and hugs her with all his might. They kiss for maybe one hour, maybe two, he doesn’t know, but it’s delicious, and when she takes him by the hand and leads him to her room, he follows.
EPILOGUE
LÈVES, SIX MONTHS LATER
Lucas’s parents did not come to pick him up. The marriage counselor they were seeing didn’t think it was a good idea for Lucas to sit in the back of Marie’s car and get on the highway again. On the entire train ride back by himself, Lucas could not stop thinking about Eloise and what had happened between them the afternoon of the boat outing. He thought of their skin touching. Of her scent. Of her breath quickening in his ear. Of the tension he’d felt because he hadn’t been in control—hadn’t been in control of anything, and had finally accepted it. Of his mounting desire born out of not knowing what Eloise was going to do and do to him. All of it spontaneous. Of their mutual mounting pleasure.
Viewed from the outside, what took place in Eloise’s dim room—with Lucas trembling and awkward, and Eloise not very experienced—could pass for a very bad porn film.
Viewed from the inside, what unfolded between them in no way resembled the sad business of staring at a computer screen in solitude—of hours spent with no emotion except for what amounted to sterile arousal.
What Lucas experienced was filled with mystery and wonder. Again and again, they explored and nuzzled each other, and he wished it would never end. He pleaded with her to let him take her back home to Rouen. She refused, but promised to see him again. Soon. To write to him. Soon.
Sebastian and Marie waited for him in front of the train station at Chartres. They stood side by side but seemed like two strangers, and if this wasn’t what they had become, Lucas soon realized that they were irreparably estranged.
His suspicions were confirmed when they got back to the house and his parents announced that they had decided to separate. After the accident, they had started couples therapy and had reached the conclusion that they had fallen out of love. Sebastian found an apartment not far from the tennis club. He had been living there for two months already. He had left the house to Marie. They explained that their feelings for him would never change. Lucas wasn’t terribly saddened by the news, nor was he surprised. He listened to his parents as he stroked Cuddles, the cat’s eyes becoming slits, his tail whipping the air as he purred happily in Lucas’s arms.
Lucas did not want to return to high school. He quickly found a part-time job at the local McDonald’s. He started correspondence classes to get his diploma. He sent his homework for review over the internet. His reunion with the computer was detached. Out of caution, he limited his daily time spent in front of the screen. Instead, he swam a lot, training hard, with an eye toward the regional championships and competing in the four-hundred-meter breaststroke, a challenge where his slight limp isn’t a handicap.
In spite of the promises they exchanged, Lucas never saw Eloise again. For a time they stayed in touch by email. She was doing well. She had celebrated her eighteenth birthday at her grandmother’s. She had found a short-term full-time job at a computer store in Rouen and had moved into an apartment with a friend. On multiple occasions, they had sworn to get together. They had even fixed a date. Lucas was supposed to join Eloise in Rouen, but at the last minute she had canceled. In her message, she said he wasn’t to blame, that what had happened between them was amazing, but that she had trouble seeing him again, the same way she had trouble with everything from that time in her life. A time, she added, from which she wanted to break entirely. Lucas persisted. Soon after, she stopped answering his emails. It’s hard to forget your first time. Even if he wanted to, he knows that he could never erase Eloise from his memory.
Even though he tells himself that Eloise may not be wrong.
Although he still feels the need to talk regularly to a psychologist, Lucas has never gone back on a porn site. He no longer has the interest. Lately Emma, a small, muscular blonde on the girls’ Eure-and-Loir swim team, has captured his attention. He even worked up the courage to talk to her last week.
From time to time, he still thinks about Dr. Clara Desnoyers and the question she asked him. If he met her now, he knows what his answer would be.
It’s no longer time to flee. It’s time to live.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The ease and frequency with which we connect to online social networks has never been greater. Young or old, we’re all guilty of connecting way more than we should. Children and teenagers are especially susceptible to confusing the virtual world for the real one. All too quickly, they can start feeling more alive and more at home in a virtual landscape. That’s when addictions take root.
While I was researching online recruitment by terrorist groups for my previous YA novel, I had occasion to talk to students and teachers about the dependence adolescents have on their screens, and on online games and cybersex. The latter, in particular, grabbed my attention, probably because the moral aspect of cybersex makes it a subject less frequently addressed than, say, gaming. Tackling the topic of cybersex
involves risks—it’s an inherently dark and sleazy world. But the suffering that stems from cybersex addiction is no less valid than the suffering from any other compulsive habit. It simply receives less coverage; it goes largely unreported.
As I began to read studies of children who view online porn, I was shocked by the statistics: 66 million to 110 million young people connect to porn sites yearly, worldwide. And the numbers are increasing each year.
Typically, first exposure to online porn happens when children are as young as eight to eleven years old. The exposure is often involuntary—a random click—with 5 percent of these kids eventually becoming addicted. It’s a dependency that can damage the sexuality of a child and lead to lifelong habits where the only “intimate” contact with another human being happens in front of a screen.
My research was exhaustive. Not only did I talk to teenagers and teachers about various online addictions, but I also spent time with young people in a post-rehab center and with the center’s staff psychologist. I spoke to David Le Breton, eminent professor at the University of Strasbourg, who is both an anthropologist and a sociologist, as well as an expert in the high-risk behavior of adolescents. I went to Marmottan Hospital in Paris, which since 2015 has had a program dedicated to treating cybersex addictions. There I met with a psychiatrist focused on sex therapy. The hospital librarian sent me numerous articles. I read countless books on pornography. I also watched lots of porn videos, on numerous sites, covering different categories of porn. I watched documentaries, read dissertations, and more.
As a writer, I like exploring the shades of gray that make us human. I’m convinced that our consumer society operates exactly like the porn industry: desire alternates with frustration to beget a new desire that, once satisfied, begets a new frustration, and so on.
Lucas is the hero of Point of View. On the outside, he seems like an average teenage geek. At least that’s what his parents believe him to be. But once his addiction to online porn is revealed, his virtual world crumbles, and so does he. He has a long, hard journey to being a whole person again.
As I wrote this book, I did not want to make judgments. I have not judged Lucas. I have not judged his parents. I have not judged any of the characters. I merely want readers to have empathy for Lucas and be aware that help and recovery are possible.
Patrick Bard
If you want more information about addiction, or to get help for yourself or someone you know, you can contact mental health organizations and hotlines online.
The following resource is a good place to start:
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration
www.samhsa.gov/find-help/national-helpline
1-800-662-HELP (4357)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Bard is a novelist, travel writer, and photojournalist. His many novels for adults and young adults have received prestigious awards in his native France. Point of View is his first novel to be translated into English.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Françoise Bui spent twenty years as an executive editor at Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, where her list of edited books included numerous novels in translation. Of these, four received the American Library Association’s Mildred L. Batchelder Award, and two were Honor titles. Originally from France, Françoise lives in New York City.
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