Page 95 - A Little Life: A Novel

to tell him, and then what will he think of you? Be smart. Say nothing. Have
some self-control.) But this was of course illogical. He knew even before he
got to college that his childhood had been atypical—you had only to read a

few books to come to that conclusion—but it wasn’t until recently that he
had realized how atypical it truly was. Its very strangeness both insulated
and isolated him: it was near inconceivable that anyone would guess at its
shape and specificities, which meant that if they did, it was because he had
dropped clues like cow turds, great ugly unmissable pleas for attention.
Still. The suspicion persisted, sometimes with an uncomfortable intensity,
as if it was inevitable that he should say something and was being sent

messages that took more energy to ignore than they would have to obey.
One night it was just the four of them. This was early in their third year,
and was unusual enough for them all to feel cozy and a little sentimental
about the clique they had made. And they were a clique, and to his surprise,
he was part of it: the building they lived in was called Hood Hall, and they
were known around campus as the Boys in the Hood. All of them had other

friends (JB and Willem had the most), but it was known (or at least
assumed, which was just as good) that their first loyalties were to one
another. None of them had ever discussed this explicitly, but they all knew
they liked this assumption, that they liked this code of friendship that had
been imposed upon them.
The food that night had been pizza, ordered by JB and paid for by
Malcolm. There had been weed, procured by JB, and outside there had been

rain and then hail, the sound of it cracking against the glass and the wind
rattling the windows in their splintered wooden casements the final
elements in their happiness. The joint went round and round, and although
he didn’t take a puff—he never did; he was too worried about what he
might do or say if he lost control over himself—he could feel the smoke
filling his eyes, pressing upon his eyelids like a shaggy warm beast. He had

been careful, as he always was when one of the others paid for food, to eat
as little as possible, and although he was still hungry (there were two slices
left over, and he stared at them, fixedly, before catching himself and turning
away resolutely), he was also deeply content. I could fall asleep, he thought,
and stretched out on the couch, pulling Malcolm’s blanket over him as he
did. He was pleasantly exhausted, but then he was always exhausted those
days: it was as if the daily effort it took to appear normal was so great that it

left energy for little else. (He was aware, sometimes, of seeming wooden,