Page 188 - A Little Life: A Novel

letter to the Learys had gone unanswered, and every day the driveway to the
dormitory remained a long, blank stretch, and no one came to get him.
Finally, two weeks after the visit, he went to see Boyd at his workshop,

where he knew he stayed late on Thursday nights. He waited through dinner
out in the cold, the snow crunching under his feet, until he finally saw Boyd
walking out the door.
“Christ,” Boyd said when he saw him, nearly stepping on him as he
turned. “Shouldn’t you be back in the dorms, St. Francis?”
“Please,” he begged. “Please tell me—are the Learys coming to get me?”
But he knew what the answer was even before he saw Boyd’s face.

“They changed their minds,” said Boyd, and although he wasn’t known,
by the counselors or the boys, for his gentleness, he was almost gentle then.
“It’s over, St. Francis. It’s not going to happen.” He reached out a hand
toward him, but he ducked, and Boyd shook his head and began walking
off.
“Wait,” he called, recovering himself and running as well as he could

through the snow after Boyd. “Let me try again,” he said. “Tell me what I
did wrong, and I’ll try again.” He could feel the old hysteria descending
upon him, could feel inside him the vestiges of the boy who would throw
fits and shout, who could still a room with his screams.
But Boyd shook his head again. “It doesn’t work like that, St. Francis,”
he said, and then he stopped and looked directly at him. “Look,” he said,
“in a few years you’ll be out of here. I know it seems like a long time, but

it’s not. And then you’ll be an adult and you’ll be able to do whatever you
want. You just have to get through these years.” And then he turned again,
definitively, and stalked away from him.
“How?” he yelled after Boyd. “Boyd, tell me how! How, Boyd, how?”
forgetting that he was to call him “sir,” and not “Boyd.”
That night he had his first tantrum in years, and although the punishment

here was the same, more or less, as it had been at the monastery, the release,
the sense of flight it had once given him, was not: now he was someone
who knew better, whose screams would change nothing, and all his
shouting did was bring him back to himself, so that everything, every hurt,
every insult, felt sharper and brighter and stickier and more resonant than
ever before.
He would never, never know what he had done wrong that weekend at

the Learys’. He would never know if it had been something he could