He laughed, it was so risky and dumb. "And if we did this, how would you reach the bedroom window?"

Jude looked at him. "You're going to have to trust I can do it."

"This is stupid."

JB stopped him. "This is the only plan, Willem. It's fucking freezing out here."

And it was; only his rage was keeping him warm. "Have you not noticed his whole fucking arm is completely bandaged up, JB?"

"But I'm fine, Willem," said Jude, before JB could respond.

It was ten more minutes of the two of them bickering until Jude finally marched back over to the edge. "If you won't help me, Willem, Malcolm will," he said, although Malcolm looked terrified as well.

"No," he said, "I will." And so he and JB knelt and pressed themselves against the wall, each holding one of Jude's hands with both of their own. By now it was so cold that he could barely feel his fingers close around Jude's palm. He had Jude's left hand, and all he could sense anyway was its cushion of gauze. As he squeezed it, an image of Andy's face floated before him, and he was sick with guilt.

Jude pushed off the side of the ledge, and Malcolm gave a little moan that ended in a squeak. Willem and JB leaned over as far as they could, until they were in danger of tipping over the edge themselves, and when Jude called to them to let go, they did, and watched him land in a clatter on the slat-floored fire escape beneath them.

JB cheered, and Willem wanted to smack him. "I'm fine!" Jude shouted up to them, and waved his bandaged hand in the air like a flag, before moving over to the edge of the fire escape, where he pulled himself up onto its railing so he could start untangling the implement. He had his legs twined around one of the railing's iron spindles, but his position was precarious, and Willem watched him sway a little, trying to keep his balance, his fingers moving slowly from numbness and cold.

"Get me down there," he said to Malcolm and JB, ignoring Malcolm's fluttery protests, and then he went over the edge himself, calling down to Jude before he did so his arrival wouldn't upset his equilibrium.

The drop was scarier, and the landing harder, than he had thought it would be, but he made himself recover quickly and went over to where Jude was and wrapped his arms around his waist, tucking his leg around a spindle to brace himself. "I've got you," he said, and Jude leaned out over the edge of the railing, farther than he could have done on his own, and Willem held on to him so tightly that he could feel the knuckles of Jude's spine through his sweater, could feel his stomach sink and rise as he breathed, could feel the echo of his fingers' movements through his muscles as he twisted and unkinked the twigs of wire that were fastening the window into its stile. And when it was done, Willem climbed onto the railing and into the bedroom first, and then reached out again to pull Jude in by his arms, careful to avoid his bandages.

They stood back on the inside, panting from the effort, and looked at each other. It was so deliciously warm inside this room, even with the cold air gusting in, that he at last let himself feel weak with relief. They were safe, they had been spared. Jude grinned at him then, and he grinned back-if it had been JB before him, he would've hugged him out of sheer stupid giddiness, but Jude wasn't a hugger and so he didn't. But then Jude raised his hand to brush some of the rust flakes out of his hair, and Willem saw that on the inside of his wrist his bandage was stained with a deep-burgundy splotch, and recognized, belatedly, that the rapidity of Jude's breathing was not just from exertion but from pain. He watched as Jude sat heavily on his bed, his white-wrapped hand reaching behind him to make sure he would land on something solid.

Willem crouched beside him. His elation was gone, replaced by something else. He felt himself weirdly close to tears, although he couldn't have said why.

"Jude," he began, but he didn't know how to continue.

"You'd better get them," Jude said, and although each word came out as a gasp, he smiled at Willem again.

"Fuck 'em," he said, "I'll stay here with you," and Jude laughed a little, although he winced as he did so, and carefully tipped himself backward until he was lying on his side, and Willem helped lift his legs up onto the bed. His sweater was freckled with more flecks of rust, and Willem picked some of them off of him. He sat on the bed next to him, unsure where to begin. "Jude," he tried again.

"Go," Jude said, and closed his eyes, although he was still smiling, and Willem reluctantly stood, shutting the window and turning off the bedroom light as he left, closing the door behind him, heading for the stairwell to save Malcolm and JB, while far beneath him, he could hear the buzzer reverberating through the staircase, announcing the arrival of the evening's first guests.

[ II ].

The Postman.

1.

SATURDAYS WERE FOR work, but Sundays were for walking. The walks had begun out of necessity five years ago, when he had moved to the city and knew little about it: each week, he would choose a different neighborhood and walk from Lispenard Street to it, and then around it, covering its perimeter precisely, and then home again. He never skipped a Sunday, unless the weather made it near impossible, and even now, even though he had walked every neighborhood in Manhattan, and many in Brooklyn and Queens as well, he still left every Sunday morning at ten, and returned only when his route was complete. The walks had long ceased to be something he enjoyed, although he didn't not enjoy them, either-it was simply something he did. For a period, he had also hopefully considered them something more than exercise, something perhaps restorative, like an amateur physical therapy session, despite the fact that Andy didn't agree with him, and indeed disapproved of his walks. "I'm fine with your wanting to exercise your legs," he'd said. "But in that case, you should really be swimming, not dragging yourself up and down pavement." He wouldn't have minded swimming, actually, but there was nowhere private enough for him to swim, and so he didn't.

Willem had occasionally joined him on these walks, and now, if his route took him past the theater, he would time it so they could meet at the juice stand down the block after the matinee performance. They would have their drinks, and Willem would tell him how the show had gone and would buy a salad to eat before the evening performance, and he would continue south, toward home.

They still lived at Lispenard Street, although both of them could have moved into their own apartments: he, certainly; Willem, probably. But neither of them had ever mentioned leaving to the other, and so neither of them had. They had, however, annexed the left half of the living room to make a second bedroom, the group of them building a lumpy Sheetrocked wall one weekend, so now when you walked in, there was only the gray light from two windows, not four, to greet you. Willem had taken the new bedroom, and he had stayed in their old one.

Aside from their stage-door visits, it felt like he never saw Willem these days, and for all Willem talked about how lazy he was, it seemed he was constantly at work, or trying to work: three years ago, on his twenty-ninth birthday, he had sworn that he was going to quit Ortolan before he turned thirty, and two weeks before his thirtieth birthday, the two of them had been in the apartment, squashed into their newly partitioned living room, Willem worrying about whether he could actually afford to leave his job, when he got a call, the call he had been waiting for for years. The play that had resulted from that call had been enough of a success, and had gotten Willem enough attention, to allow him to quit Ortolan for good thirteen months later: just one year past his self-imposed deadline. He had gone to see Willem's play-a family drama called The Malamud Theorem, about a literature professor in the early throes of dementia, and his estranged son, a physicist-five times, twice with Malcolm and JB, and once with Harold and Julia, who were in town for the weekend, and each time he managed to forget that it was his old friend, his roommate, onstage, and at curtain call, he had felt both proud and wistful, as if the stage's very elevation announced Willem's ascendancy to some other realm of life, one not easily accessible to him.

His own approach to thirty had triggered no latent panic, no fluster of activity, no need to rearrange the outlines of his life to more closely resemble what a thirty-year-old's life ought to be. The same was not true for his friends, however, and he had spent the last three years of his twenties listening to their eulogies for the decade, and their detailing of what they had and hadn't done, and the cataloging of their self-loathings and promises. Things had changed, then. The second bedroom, for example, was erected partly out of Willem's fear of being twenty-eight and still sharing a room with his college roommate, and that same anxiety-the fear that, fairy-tale-like, the turn into their fourth decade would transform them into something else, something out of their control, unless they preempted it with their own radical announcements-inspired Malcolm's hasty coming out to his parents, only to see him retreat back in the following year when he started dating a woman.

But despite his friends' anxieties, he knew he would love being thirty, for the very reason that they hated it: because it was an age of undeniable adulthood. (He looked forward to being thirty-five, when he would be able to say he had been an adult for more than twice as long as he had been a child.) When he was growing up, thirty had been a far-off, unimaginable age. He clearly remembered being a very young boy-this was when he lived in the monastery-and asking Brother Michael, who liked to tell him of the travels he had taken in his other life, when he too might be able to travel.

"When you're older," Brother Michael had said.

"When?" he'd asked. "Next year?" Then, even a month had seemed as long as forever.

"Many years," Brother Michael had said. "When you're older. When you're thirty." And now, in just a few weeks, he would be.

On those Sundays, when he was readying to leave for his walk, he would sometimes stand, barefoot, in the kitchen, everything quiet around him, and the small, ugly apartment would feel like a sort of marvel. Here, time was his, and space was his, and every door could be shut, every window locked. He would stand before the tiny hallway closet-an alcove, really, over which they had strung a length of burlap-and admire the stores within it. At Lispenard Street, there were no late-night scrambles to the bodega on West Broadway for a roll of toilet paper, no squinching your nose above a container of long-spoiled milk found in the back corner of the refrigerator: here, there was always extra. Here, everything was replaced when it needed to be. He made sure of it. In their first year at Lispenard Street he had been self-conscious about his habits, which he knew belonged to someone much older and probably female, and had hidden his supplies of paper towels under his bed, had stuffed the fliers for coupons into his briefcase to look through later, when Willem wasn't home, as if they were a particularly exotic form of pornography. But one day, Willem had discovered his stash while looking for a stray sock he'd kicked under the bed.

He had been embarrassed. "Why?" Willem had asked him. "I think it's great. Thank god you're looking out for this kind of stuff." But it had still made him feel vulnerable, yet another piece of evidence added to the overstuffed file testifying to his pinched prissiness, his fundamental and irreparable inability to be the sort of person he tried to make people believe he was.

And yet-as with so much else-he couldn't help himself. To whom could he explain that he found as much contentment and safety in unloved Lispenard Street, in his bomb-shelter stockpilings, as he did in the facts of his degrees and his job? Or that those moments alone in the kitchen were something akin to meditative, the only times he found himself truly relaxing, his mind ceasing to scrabble forward, planning in advance the thousands of little deflections and smudgings of truth, of fact, that necessitated his every interaction with the world and its inhabitants? To no one, he knew, not even to Willem. But he'd had years to learn how to keep his thoughts to himself; unlike his friends, he had learned not to share evidence of his oddities as a way to distinguish himself from others, although he was happy and proud that they shared theirs with him.

Today he would walk to the Upper East Side: up West Broadway to Washington Square Park, to University and through Union Square, and up Broadway to Fifth, which he'd stay on until Eighty-sixth Street, and then back down Madison to Twenty-fourth Street, where he'd cross east to Lexington before continuing south and east once more to Irving, where he'd meet Willem outside the theater. It had been months, almost a year, since he had done this circuit, both because it was very far and because he already spent every Saturday on the Upper East Side, in a town house not far from Malcolm's parents', where he tutored a twelve-year-old boy named Felix. But it was mid-March, spring break, and Felix and his family were on vacation in Utah, which meant he ran no risk of seeing them.

Felix's father was a friend of friends of Malcolm's parents, and it had been Malcolm's father who had gotten him the job. "They're really not paying you enough at the U.S. Attorney's Office, are they?" Mr. Irvine had asked him. "I don't know why you won't just let me introduce you to Gavin." Gavin was one of Mr. Irvine's law school friends, who now presided over one of the city's more powerful firms.

"Dad, he doesn't want to work for some corporate firm," Malcolm had begun, but his father continued talking as if Malcolm hadn't even spoken, and Malcolm had hunched back into his chair. He had felt bad for Malcolm then, but also annoyed, as he had told Malcolm to discreetly inquire whether his parents knew anyone who might have a kid who needed tutoring, not to actually ask them.

"Really, though," Malcolm's father had said to him, "I think it's terrific that you're interested in making your way on your own." (Malcolm slouched even lower in his seat.) "But do you really need the money that badly? I didn't think the federal government paid that miserably, but it's been a long time since I was in public service." He grinned.

He smiled back. "No," he said, "the salary's fine." (It was. It wouldn't have been to Mr. Irvine, of course, nor to Malcolm, but it was more money than he had ever dreamed he would have, and every two weeks it arrived, a relentless accumulation of numbers.) "I'm just saving up for a down payment." He saw Malcolm's face swivel toward him, and he reminded himself to tell Willem the particular lie he had told Malcolm's father before Malcolm told Willem himself.

"Oh, well, good for you," said Mr. Irvine. This was a goal he could understand. "And as it happens, I know just the person."

That person was Howard Baker, who had hired him after interviewing him for fifteen distracted minutes to tutor his son in Latin, math, German, and piano. (He wondered why Mr. Baker wasn't hiring professionals for each subject-he could have afforded it-but didn't ask.) He felt sorry for Felix, who was small and unappealing, and who had a habit of scratching the inside of one narrow nostril, his index finger tunneling upward until he remembered himself and quickly retracted it, rubbing it on the side of his jeans. Eight months later, it was still unclear to him just how capable Felix was. He wasn't stupid, but he suffered from a lack of passion, as if, at twelve, he had already become resigned to the fact that life would be a disappointment, and he a disappointment to the people in it. He was always waiting, on time and with his assignments completed, every Saturday at one p.m., and he obediently answered every question-his answers always ending in an anxious, querying upper register, as if every one, even the simplest ("Salve, Felix, quid agis?" "Um ... bene?"), were a desperate guess-but he never had any questions of his own, and when he asked Felix if there was any subject in particular he might want to try discussing in either language, Felix would shrug and mumble, his finger drifting toward his nose. He always had the impression, when waving goodbye to Felix at the end of the afternoon-Felix listlessly raising his own hand before slouching back into the recesses of the entryway-that he never left the house, never went out, never had friends over. Poor Felix: his very name was a taunt.

The previous month, Mr. Baker had asked to speak to him after their lessons were over, and he had said goodbye to Felix and followed the maid into the study. His limp had been very pronounced that day, and he had been self-conscious, feeling-as he often did-as if he were playing the role of an impoverished governess in a Dickensian drama.

He had expected impatience from Mr. Baker, perhaps anger, even though Felix was doing quantifiably better in school, and he was ready to defend himself if he needed-Mr. Baker paid far more than he had anticipated, and he had plans for the money he was earning there-but he was instead nodded toward the chair in front of the desk.

"What do you think's wrong with Felix?" Mr. Baker had demanded.

He hadn't been expecting the question, so he had to think before he answered. "I don't think anything's wrong with him, sir," he'd said, carefully. "I just think he's not-" Happy, he nearly said. But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate? He couldn't remember being a child and being able to define happiness: there was only misery, or fear, and the absence of misery or fear, and the latter state was all he had needed or wanted. "I think he's shy," he finished.

Mr. Baker grunted (this was obviously not the answer he was looking for). "But you like him, right?" he'd asked him, with such an odd, vulnerable desperation that he experienced a sudden deep sadness, both for Felix and for Mr. Baker. Was this what being a parent was like? Was this what being a child with a parent was like? Such unhappinesses, such disappointments, such expectations that would go unexpressed and unmet!

"Of course," he had said, and Mr. Baker had sighed and given him his check, which the maid usually handed to him on his way out.

The next week, Felix hadn't wanted to play his assignment. He was more listless than usual. "Shall we play something else?" he'd asked. Felix had shrugged. He thought. "Do you want me to play something for you?" Felix had shrugged again. But he did anyway, because it was a beautiful piano and sometimes, as he watched Felix inch his fingers across its lovely smooth keys, he longed to be alone with the instrument and let his hands move over its surface as fast as he could.

He played Haydn, Sonata No. 50 in D Major, one of his favorite pieces and so bright and likable that he thought it might cheer them both up. But when he was finished, and there was only the quiet boy sitting next to him, he was ashamed, both of the braggy, emphatic optimism of the Haydn and of his own burst of self-indulgence.

"Felix," he'd begun, and then stopped. Beside him, Felix waited. "What's wrong?"

And then, to his astonishment, Felix had begun to cry, and he had tried to comfort him. "Felix," he'd said, awkwardly putting his arm around him. He pretended he was Willem, who would have known exactly what to do and what to say without even thinking about it. "It's going to be all right. I promise you, it will be." But Felix had only cried harder.

"I don't have any friends," Felix had sobbed.

"Oh, Felix," he'd said, and his sympathy, which until then had been of the remote, objective kind, clarified itself. "I'm sorry." He felt then, keenly, the loneliness of Felix's life, of a Saturday spent sitting with a crippled nearly thirty-year-old lawyer who was there only to earn money, and who would go out that night with people he loved and who, even, loved him, while Felix remained alone, his mother-Mr. Baker's third wife-perpetually elsewhere, his father convinced there was something wrong with him, something that needed fixing. Later, on his walk home (if the weather was nice, he refused Mr. Baker's car and walked), he would wonder at the unlikely unfairness of it all: Felix, who was by any definition a better kid than he had been, and who yet had no friends, and he, who was a nothing, who did.

"Felix, it'll happen eventually," he'd said, and Felix had wailed, "But when?" with such yearning that he had winced.

"Soon, soon," he had told him, petting his skinny back, "I promise," and Felix had nodded, although later, walking him to the door, his little geckoey face made even more reptilian from tears, he'd had the distinct sensation that Felix had known he was lying. Who could know if Felix would ever have friends? Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged. He waved goodbye at Felix's small back, retreating already into the house, and although he would never have said so to Felix, he somehow fancied that this was why Felix was so wan all the time: it was because Felix had already figured this out, long ago; it was because he already knew.

He knew French and German. He knew the periodic table. He knew-as much as he didn't care to-large parts of the Bible almost by memory. He knew how to help birth a calf and rewire a lamp and unclog a drain and the most efficient way to harvest a walnut tree and which mushrooms were poisonous and which were not and how to bale hay and how to test a watermelon, an apple, a squash, a muskmelon for freshness by thunking it in the right spot. (And then he knew things he wished he didn't, things he hoped never to have to use again, things that, when he thought of them or dreamed of them at night, made him curl into himself with hatred and shame.) And yet it often seemed he knew nothing of any real value or use, not really. The languages and the math, fine. But daily he was reminded of how much he didn't know. He had never heard of the sitcoms whose episodes were constantly referenced. He had never been to a movie. He had never gone on vacation. He had never been to summer camp. He had never had pizza or popsicles or macaroni and cheese (and he had certainly never had-as both Malcolm and JB had-foie gras or sushi or marrow). He had never owned a computer or a phone, he had rarely been allowed to go online. He had never owned anything, he realized, not really: the books he had that he was so proud of, the shirts that he repaired again and again, they were nothing, they were trash, the pride he took in them was more shameful than not owning anything at all. The classroom was the safest place, and the only place he felt fully confident: everywhere else was an unceasing avalanche of marvels, each more baffling than the next, each another reminder of his bottomless ignorance. He found himself keeping mental lists of new things he had heard and encountered. But he could never ask anyone for the answers. To do so would be an admission of extreme otherness, which would invite further questions and would leave him exposed, and which would inevitably lead to conversations he definitely was not prepared to have. He felt, often, not so much foreign-for even the foreign students (even Odval, from a village outside Ulaanbaatar) seemed to understand these references-as from another time altogether: his childhood might well have been spent in the nineteenth century, not the twenty-first, for all he had apparently missed, and for how obscure and merely decorative what he did know seemed to be. How was it that apparently all of his peers, whether they were born in Lagos or Los Angeles, had had more or less the same experience, with the same cultural landmarks? Surely there was someone who knew as little as he did? And if not, how was he ever to catch up?

In the evenings, when a group of them lay splayed in someone's room (a candle burning, a joint burning as well), the conversation often turned to his 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. "Like Judy here: we never see him with anyone, we don't know what race he is, we don't know anything about him. Post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past." He smiled at him, presumably to show he was at least partly joking. "The post-man. Jude the Postman."

"The Postman," Malcolm had repeated: he was never above grabbing on to someone else's discomfort as a way of deflecting attention from his own. And although the name didn't stick-when Willem had returned to the room and heard it, he had only rolled his eyes in response, which seemed to remove some of its thrill for JB-he was reminded that as much as he had convinced himself he was fitting in, as much as he worked to conceal the spiky odd parts of himself, he was fooling no one. They knew he was strange, and now his foolishness extended to his having convinced himself that he had convinced them that he wasn't. Still, he kept attending the late-night groups, kept joining his classmates in their rooms: he was pulled to them, even though he now knew he was putting himself in jeopardy by attending them.

Sometimes during these sessions (he had begun to think of them this way, as intensive tutorials in which he could correct his own cultural paucities) he would catch Willem watching him with an indecipherable expression on his face, and would wonder how much Willem might have guessed about him. Sometimes he had to stop himself from saying something to him. Maybe he was wrong, he sometimes thought. Maybe it would be nice to confess to someone that most of the time he could barely relate to what was being discussed, that he couldn't participate in everyone else's shared language of childhood pratfalls and frustrations. But then he would stop himself, for admitting ignorance of that language would mean having to explain the one he did speak.

Although if he were to tell anyone, he knew it would be Willem. He admired all three of his roommates, but Willem was the one he trusted. At the home, he had quickly learned there were three types of boys: The first type might cause the fight (this was JB). The second type wouldn't join in, but wouldn't run to get help, either (this was Malcolm). And the third type would actually try to help you out (this was the rarest type, and this was obviously Willem). Maybe it was the same with girls as well, but he hadn't spent enough time around girls to know this for sure.

And increasingly he was certain Willem knew something. (Knows what? he'd argue with himself, in saner moments. You're just looking for a reason 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, icy, of being boring, which he recognized that here might have been considered the greater misfortune than being whatever it was he was.) In the background, as if far away, he could hear Malcolm and JB having a fight about evil.

"I'm just saying, we wouldn't be having this argument if you'd read Plato."

"Yeah, but what Plato?"

"Have you read Plato?"

"I don't see-"

"Have you?"

"No, but-"

"See! See, see?!" That would be Malcolm, jumping up and down and pointing at JB, while Willem laughed. On weed, Malcolm grew both sillier and more pedantic, and the three of them liked getting into silly and pedantic philosophical arguments with him, the contents of which Malcolm could never recall in the morning.

Then there was an interlude of Willem and JB talking about something-he was too sleepy to really listen, just awake enough to distinguish their voices-and then JB's voice, ringing through his fug: "Jude!"

"What?" he answered, his eyes still closed.

"I want to ask you a question."

He could instantly feel something inside him come alert. When high, JB had the uncanny ability to ask questions or make observations that both devastated and discomfited. He didn't think there was any malice behind it, but it made you wonder what went on in JB's subconscious. Was this the real JB, the one who had asked their hallmate, Tricia Park, what it was like growing up as the ugly twin (poor Tricia had gotten up and run out of the room), or was it the one who, after JB had witnessed him in the grip of a terrible episode, one in which he could feel himself falling in and out of consciousness, the sensation as sickening as tumbling off a roller coaster in mid-incline, had snuck out that night with his stoner boyfriend and returned just before daybreak with a bundle of bud-furred magnolia branches, sawn off illegally from the quadrangle's trees?

"What?" he asked again, warily.

"Well," said JB, pausing and taking another inhalation, "we've all known each other a while now-"

"We have?" Willem asked in fake surprise.

"Shut up, Willem," JB continued. "And all of us want to know why you've never told us what happened to your legs."

"Oh, JB, we do not-" Willem began, but Malcolm, who had the habit of vociferously taking JB's side when stoned, interrupted him: "It really hurts our feelings, Jude. Do you not trust us?"

"Jesus, Malcolm," Willem said, and then, mimicking Malcolm in a shrieky falsetto, " 'It really hurts our feelings.' You sound like a girl. It's Jude's business."

And this was worse, somehow, having to have Willem, always Willem, defend him. Against Malcolm and JB! At that moment, he hated all of them, but of course he was in no position to hate them. They were his friends, his first friends, and he understood that friendship was a series of exchanges: of affections, of time, sometimes of money, always of information. And he had no money. He had nothing to give them, he had nothing to offer. He couldn't loan Willem a sweater, the way Willem let him borrow his, or repay Malcolm the hundred dollars he'd pressed upon him once, or even help JB on move-out day, as JB helped him.

"Well," he began, and was aware of all of their perked silences, even Willem's. "It's not very interesting." He kept his eyes closed, both because it made it easier to tell the story when he didn't have to look at them, and also because he simply didn't think he could stand it at the moment. "It was a car injury. I was fifteen. It was the year before I came here."

"Oh," said JB. There was a pause; he could feel something in the room deflate, could feel how his revelation had shifted the others back into a sort of somber sobriety. "I'm sorry, bro. That sucks."

"You could walk before?" asked Malcolm, as if he could not walk now. And this made him sad and embarrassed: what he considered walking, they apparently did not.

"Yes," he said, and then, because it was true, even if not the way they'd interpret it, he added, "I used to run cross-country."

"Oh, wow," said Malcolm. JB made a sympathetic grunting noise.

Only Willem, he noticed, said nothing. But he didn't dare open his eyes to look at his expression.

Eventually the word got out, as he knew it would. (Perhaps people really did wonder about his legs. Tricia Park later came up to him and told him she'd always assumed he had cerebral palsy. What was he supposed to say to that?) Somehow, though, over the tellings and retellings, the explanation was changed to a car accident, and then to a drunken driving accident.

"The easiest explanations are often the right ones," his math professor, Dr. Li, always said, and maybe the same principle applied here. Except he knew it didn't. Math was one thing. Nothing else was that reductive.

But the odd thing was this: by his story morphing into one about a car accident, he was being given an opportunity for reinvention; all he had to do was claim it. But he never could. He could never call it an accident, because it wasn't. And so was it pride or stupidity to not take the escape route he'd been offered? He didn't know.

And then he noticed something else. He was in the middle of another episode-a highly humiliating one, it had taken place just as he was coming off of his shift at the library, and Willem had just happened to be there a few minutes early, about to start his own shift-when he heard the librarian, a kind, well-read woman whom he liked, ask why he had these. They had moved him, Mrs. Eakeley and Willem, to the break room in the back, and he could smell the burned-sugar tang of old coffee, a scent he despised anyway, so sharp and assaultive that he almost vomited.