Page 525 - A Little Life: A Novel

sixteen, his old life would stop and his new life would begin. He knew, he
did, that Brother Luke had been lying, but he couldn’t stop thinking about
it. Sixteen, he would think to himself at night. Sixteen. When I am sixteen,

this will end.
He had asked Brother Luke, once, what their life would be like after he
turned sixteen. “You’ll go to college,” Luke had said, immediately, and he
had thrilled to this. He had asked where he would go, and Luke had named
the college he had attended as well (although when he had gotten to that
college after all, he had looked up Brother Luke—Edgar Wilmot—and had
realized there was no record of him having ever attended the school, and he

had been relieved, relieved to not have something in common with the
brother, although it was he who had let him imagine that he might someday
be there). “I’ll move to Boston, too,” Luke said. “And we’ll be married, so
we’ll live in an apartment off campus.” Sometimes they discussed this: the
courses he would take, the things Brother Luke had done when he was at
college, the places they would travel to after he graduated. “Maybe we’ll

have a son together one day,” Luke said once, and he had stiffened, for he
knew without Luke saying so that Luke would do to this phantom son of
theirs what had been done to him, and he remembered thinking that that
would never happen, that he would never let this ghost child, this child who
didn’t exist, ever exist, that he would never let another child be around
Luke. He remembered thinking that he would protect this son of theirs, and
for a brief, awful moment, he wished he would never turn sixteen at all,

because he knew that once he did, Luke would need someone else, and that
he couldn’t let that happen.
But now Luke was dead. The phantom child was safe. He could safely
turn sixteen. He could turn sixteen and be safe.
The months passed. His back healed. Now a security guard waited for
him after his classes and walked him to the parking lot to wait for the

counselor on duty. One day at the end of the fall semester, his math
professor talked to him after class had ended: Had he thought about college
yet? He could help him; he could help him get there—he could go
somewhere excellent, somewhere top-flight. And oh, he wanted to go, he
wanted to get away, he wanted to go to college. He was tugged, in those
days, between trying to resign himself to the fact that his life would forever
more be what it was, and the hope, small and stupid and stubborn as it was,

that it could be something else. The balance—between resignation and hope