Page 527 - A Little Life: A Novel

that they made him feel clean just to contemplate them, over lakes as big as
oceans, until he was floating above Boston, and circling down and down to
that series of buildings that trimmed the side of the river, an expansive ring

of structures punctuated by squares of green, where he would go and be
remade, and where his life would begin, where he could pretend that
everything that had come before had been someone else’s life, or a series of
mistakes, never to be discussed, never to be examined.
When he came back to himself, the counselor was on top of him, asleep.
His name was Colin, and he was often drunk, as he was tonight, his hot
yeasty breath puffing against his face. He was naked; Colin was wearing a

sweater but nothing else, and for a while he lay there under Colin’s weight,
breathing too, waiting for him to wake so he could be returned to his
bedroom and cut himself.
And then, unthinkingly, almost as if he was a marionette, his limbs
moving without thought, he was wriggling out from beneath Colin, quiet
and quick, and hurrying his clothes back on, and then, again before he knew

it, grabbing Colin’s puffed coat from the hook on the inside of the stall and
shrugging it on. Colin was much larger than he was, fatter and more
muscular, but he was almost as tall, and it was less wieldy than it looked.
And then he was grabbing Colin’s jeans from the ground, and snatching out
his wallet, and then the money within it—he didn’t count how much it was,
but he could tell by how thin a sheaf it was that it wasn’t much—and
shoving that into his own jeans pocket, and then he was running. He had

always been a good runner, swift and silent and certain—watching him at
the track, Brother Luke had always said he must be part Mohican—and now
he ran out of the barn, its doors open to the sparkling, hushed night, looking
about him as he left, and then, seeing no one, toward the field behind the
home’s dormitory.
It was half a mile from the dormitory to the road, and although he would

normally have been in pain after what happened in the barn, that night he
felt no pain, only elation, a sense of hyper-wakefulness that seemed to have
been conjured particularly for this night, for this adventure. At the edge of
the property he dropped to the ground and rolled carefully under the barbed
wire, wrapping Colin’s jacket sleeves around his hands and then holding the
coils of wire above him so he could scoot beneath them. Once he was safely
free, his elation only intensified, and he ran and ran in the direction he knew

was east, toward Boston, away from the home, from the West, from