Page 185 - A Little Life: A Novel

The older boys, the ones whose names and faces were in the 15+ binder,
knew they would never be adopted, and when the counselors turned away,
they snuck out through the back exit to, they all knew, get high. The babies

and toddlers had only to be babies and toddlers; they would be the first to
be chosen, and they didn’t even know it. But as he watched from the corner
he had drifted toward, he saw that some of the boys—the ones old enough
to have experienced one of the fairs before, but still young enough to be
hopeful—had strategies. He watched as the sullen became smiling, as the
rough and bullying became jocular and playful, as boys who hated one
another in the context of the home played and bantered in a way that

appeared convincingly friendly. He saw the boys who were rude to the
counselors, who cursed at one another in the hallways, smile and chat with
the adults, the prospective parents, who were filing into the room. He
watched as the toughest, the meanest of the boys, a fourteen-year-old
named Shawn who had once held him down in the bathroom, his knees
digging into his shoulder blades, pointed at his name tag as the man and

woman he had been talking with walked toward the binders. “Shawn!” he
called after them, “Shawn Grady!” and something about his hoarse hopeful
voice, in which he could hear the effort, the strain, to not sound hopeful at
all, made him feel sorry for Shawn for the first time, and then angry at the
man and woman, who, he could tell, were actually paging through the
“Boys, 7–9” binder. But those feelings passed quickly, because he tried not
to feel anything those days: not hunger, not pain, not anger, not sadness.

He had no tricks, he had no skills, he couldn’t charm. When he had
arrived at the home, he had been so frozen that they had left him behind the
previous November, and a year later, he wasn’t sure that he was any better.
He thought less and less frequently of Brother Luke, it was true, but his
days outside the classroom smeared into one; most of the time he felt he
was floating, trying to pretend that he didn’t occupy his own life, wishing

he was invisible, wanting only to go unnoticed. Things happened to him
and he didn’t fight back the way he once would have; sometimes when he
was being hurt, the part of him that was still conscious wondered what the
brothers would think of him now: gone were his rages, his tantrums, his
struggling. Now he was the boy they had always wished him to be. Now he
hoped to be someone adrift, a presence so thin and light and insubstantial
that he seemed to displace no air at all.