Are you happy? he once asked Jude (they must have been drunk).
I don’t think happiness is for me, Jude had said at last, as if Willem had been offering him a dish he didn’t want to eat. But it’s for you, Willem.
(...)most of the time he felt he was floating, trying to pretend that he didn’t occupy his own life, wishing he was invisible, wanting only to go unnoticed.
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.