Page 526 - A Little Life: A Novel

—shifted by the day, by the hour, sometimes by the minute. He was always,
always trying to decide how he should be—if his thoughts should be of
acceptance or of escape. In that moment he had looked at his professor, but

as he was about to answer—Yes; yes, help me—something stopped him.
The professor had always been kind to him, but wasn’t there something
about that kindness that made him resemble Brother Luke? What if the
professor’s offer of help cost him? He argued with himself as the professor
waited for his answer. One more time won’t hurt you, said the desperate part
of him, the part that wanted to leave, the part that was counting every day
until sixteen, the part the other part of him jeered at. It’s one more time. He’s

another client. Now is not the time to start getting proud.
But in the end, he had ignored that voice—he was so tired, he was so
sore, he was so exhausted from being disappointed—and had shaken his
head. “College isn’t for me,” he told the professor, his voice thin from the
strain of lying. “Thank you. But I don’t need your help.”
“I think you’re making a big mistake, Jude,” said his professor, after a

silence. “Promise me you’ll reconsider?” and he had reached out and
touched his arm, and he had jerked away, and the professor had looked at
him, strangely, and he had turned and fled the room, the hallway blurring
into planes of beige.
That night he was taken to the barn. The barn was no longer a working
barn, but a place to store the shop class’s and the auto repair class’s projects
—in the stalls were half-assembled carburetors, and hulls of half-repaired

trucks, and half-sanded rocking chairs that the home sold for money. He
was in the stall with the rocking chairs, and as one of the counselors
seesawed into him, he left himself and flew above the stalls, to the rafters of
the barn, where he paused, looking at the scene below him, the machinery
and furniture like alien sculpture, the floor dusty with dirt and the stray
pieces of hay, reminders of the barn’s original life that they never seemed

able to fully erase, at the two people making a strange eight-legged
creature, one silent, one noisy and grunting and thrusting and alive. And
then he was flying out of the round window cut high into the wall, and over
the home, over its fields that were so beautiful and green and yellow with
wild mustard in the summer, and now, in December, were still beautiful in
their own way, a shimmering expanse of lunar white, the snow so fresh and
new that no one had yet trampled it. He flew above this all, and across

landscapes he had read about but had never seen, across mountains so clean