Page 93 - A Little Life: A Novel

classmates’ childhoods, which they had barely left but about which they
were curiously nostalgic and certainly obsessed. They recounted what
seemed like every detail of them, though he was never sure if the goal was

to compare with one another their similarities or to boast of their
differences, because they seemed to take equal pleasure in both. They spoke
of curfews, and rebellions, and punishments (a few people’s parents had hit
them, and they related these stories with something close to pride, which he
also found curious) and pets and siblings, and what they had worn that had
driven their parents crazy, and what groups they had hung out with in high
school and to whom they had lost their virginity, and where, and how, and

cars they had crashed and bones they had broken, and sports they had
played and bands they had started. They spoke of disastrous family
vacations and strange, colorful relatives and odd next-door neighbors and
teachers, both beloved and loathed. He enjoyed these divulgences more
than he expected—these were real teenagers who’d had the sorts of real,
plain lives he had always wondered about—and he found it both relaxing

and educational to sit there late at night and listen to them. His silence was
both a necessity and a protection, and had the added benefit of making him
appear more mysterious and more interesting than he knew he was. “What
about you, Jude?” a few people had asked him, early in the term, and he
knew enough by then—he was a fast learner—to simply shrug and say, with
a smile, “It’s too boring to get into.” He was astonished but relieved by how
easily they accepted that, and grateful too for their self-absorption. None of

them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only
wanted to tell their own.
And yet his silence did not go unnoticed by everyone, and it was his
silence that had inspired his nickname. This was the year Malcolm
discovered postmodernism, and JB had made such a fuss about how late
Malcolm was to that particular ideology that he hadn’t admitted that he

hadn’t heard of it either.
“You can’t just decide you’re post-black, Malcolm,” JB had said. “And
also: you have to have actually been black to begin with in order to move
beyond blackness.”
“You’re such a dick, JB,” Malcolm had said.
“Or,” JB had continued, “you have to be so genuinely uncategorizable
that the normal terms of identity don’t even apply to you.” JB had turned

toward him, then, and he had felt himself freeze with a momentary terror.