Page 267 - A Little Life: A Novel

don’t have to go back there.”
But “I can’t,” he heard himself saying. “I can’t. I want to go upstairs. I
want to go home.”

“Then I’ll come in with you.”
“No. No, Jude. I want to be alone. Thank you. But go home.”
“JB,” Jude began, but he turned from him and ran, jamming the key into
the front door and running up the stairs, knowing Jude wouldn’t be capable
of following him, but with Jackson right behind him, laughing his mean
laugh, while Jude’s calls—“JB! JB!”—trailed after him, until he was inside
his apartment (Jude had cleaned while he was here: the sink was empty; the

dishes were stacked in the rack, drying) and couldn’t hear him any longer.
He turned off his phone, on which Jude was calling him, and muted the
front-door buzzer’s intercom, on which Jude was ringing and ringing him.
And then Jackson had cut the lines of coke he had brought and they had
snorted them, and the night had become the same night he’d had hundreds
of times before: the same rhythms, the same despair, the same awful feeling

of suspension.
“He is pretty, your friend,” he heard Jackson say at some point late that
evening. “But too bad about—” And he stood and did an imitation of Jude’s
walk, a lurching grotesquerie that looked nothing like it, his mouth slack
like a cretin’s, his hands bobbling in front of him. He had been too high to
protest, too high to say anything at all, and so he had only blinked and
watched Jackson hobble around the room, trying to speak words in Jude’s

defense, his eyes prickling with tears.
The next day he had awoken, late, facedown on the floor near the
kitchen. He stepped around Jackson, who was also asleep on the floor, near
his bookcases, and went into his room, where he saw that Jude had made
his bed as well, and something about that made him want to cry again. He
lifted the plank under the right side of the bed, cautiously, and stuck his

hand inside the space: there was nothing there. And so he lay atop the
comforter, bringing one end of it over himself completely, covering the top
of his head the way he used to when he was a child.
As he tried to sleep, he made himself think of why he had fallen in with
Jackson. It wasn’t that he didn’t know why; it was that he was ashamed to
remember why. He had begun hanging out with Jackson to prove that he
wasn’t dependent on his friends, that he wasn’t trapped by his life, that he

could make and would make his own decisions, even if they were bad ones.