Summary

The narrator in “Renaude” by Charlotte Bondy, Clara, talks about how she met her best friend, Mischa, while they were in the ninth grade. Mischa has long, curly hair and is easily mistaken for a girl. When she meets him, Clara approaches him with a story about her being mistaken for a boy a few years previously because of her bad haircut.

The two teenagers become best friends and spend a lot of time together. They usually have sleepovers at Mischa’s house, where he lives with his mother. However, his mother is constantly in her lab, working on her doctoral dissertation. Mischa and Clara usually listen to music, dance, cook, and they even do drugs and watch porn on Mischa’s laptop. The two of them also spend their time in a local Lebanese diner, where they befriend Carl, the owners’ son.

For Clara’s seventeenth birthday, Mischa arranges to take...