The Shards

by Bret Easton Ellis

If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. 1984 George Orwell

I lingered there too, only momentarily, knowing I wouldn’t see that magical boy again but hoping to catch a glimpse of him anyway. And yet I was glad that I didn’t see him: it would have been too overwhelming and ultimately tinged with disappointment, because I could never be for him what he ended up being for me. I even included a version of him in a short story I was working on that summer where he became a character I controlled.

I liked decorating an otherwise mundane incident that maybe contained one or two facts that made it initially interesting to be retold in the first place but not really, by adding a detail or two that elevated the story into something legitimately interesting to the listener and gave it humor or surprise or shock, and this came naturally to me. These weren’t lies exactly—I just preferred the exaggerated version.

I might have fallen in love with him but there was no way for this to happen, to actualize itself in this particular time and place, in the atmosphere at Buckley, in high school, in 1981, so fuck it, go with the counter-narrative. Who cared anyway? It was all bullshit. It felt so cleansing to look at things from this angle. I wanted to be where Susan Reynolds was. And I wanted to write like this as well: numbness as a feeling, numbness as a motivation, numbness as the reason to exist, numbness as ecstasy.

Being afraid is so lame, I kept telling myself. Being afraid is so lame and you’re not a pussy, I kept telling myself.

I desired both of them and it was never going to happen. That’s just something you’ll have to accept, I told myself, and another thing hardened within me: the world isn’t going to work out that way for you—get over it.

I was as lost as anyone she knew and this was fucking me up and that she deserved so much better than this seventeen-year-old zombie who was pretending to be someone he wasn’t. But I couldn’t form the words because I saw a future that seemed even more desolate than the present I was trapped in if I admitted any of this.

To say that any of us were politically engaged was stretching that notion into fairy-tale territory: we were teenagers distracted by sex and pop music, movies and celebrity, lust and ephemera and our own neutral innocence.

The sadness I felt was tied to Thom’s impending pain and it was something I didn’t want to process: Thom didn’t deserve this. But, then, I thought, as the fear started overriding my sadness: who deserved anything? We get what we get.

Everything was futile. There was no hope. The world didn’t notice your pain.

The day really became effortless once you faked it and it actually became more real because of your changed demeanor; the act became the reality and it affected everything in what seemed like a positive way. In fact, it was preferable to reality.

I stared at Croft hoping I hadn’t sounded desperate but I knew that I’d become overtly emotional and there was nothing I could do about it: an involuntary adolescent reaction.