dear fat kid, random paragraph - our narrator hiding in a closet after breaking an antique at a fancy party.

Important stuff is always being overheard by people hiding in closets. Also, critical things are regularly being seen from inside closets. I’m here to tell you that is bullshit. Book and movie characters reliably witness wives cheating, powerful fathers having their drink poisoned, and they do this while hiding in the closet with the door open just a crack. Know what you can see through a crack in the closet door? A thin slice of world courtesy of a viewing angle 10 degrees off the wall to your right. You can see down the dim hall and out the open doorway of the library, the courtyard palms backlit by the glowing windows on the far side. You can’t see anything that’s happening in the main part of the library. It’s very frustrating. I couldn’t see who was in the library any better than I could back through the coats and find myself in a snowy world of fauns and witches, because that’s another fallacy: you jump in a closet or wardrobe in a seldom-used room well off the main part of the house, and it’s chock-full of old furs and greatcoats for you to disappear into? No it’s not. What it’s full of is about a million empty triangles of wire and wood hanging a millimeter apart, waiting for you to twitch against them and cause a bunch of noise, such that you crouch down uncomfortably on your haunches, try to spy the action happening nowhere near your crack, nothing is happening, you’re not even doing a good job listening to what’s being said because you’re so uncomfortable crouching there with your knees together, and you end up holding your breath while doing a such an easy-now job of shifting to a sitting position that, were you being filmed, it’d be the boringest slow-motion shot on record—you’re conscious of this even as it’s happening, the soundtrack in your head an army of cellos with bows dragged across the strings in noteless misery—and by the time your butt’s on the floor there are multiple voices talking at once. One of these, the raised-in-anger one, belongs to Perry Ledhard, but who knows about the others. Hell, though, this is okay, this is better. Even though the door crack is behind your head now, you can at least listen comfortably. Then from the doorway of the library—i.e. behind you—new voices speak, male and female. You’re fucking kidding me. You recognize the calm male voice from earlier but can’t put a face to it; you were quasi-introduced to a lot of people tonight.