He grinned at me.
"You're very strange," I said.
"I used to think that was a compliment," he said. And his pleasure vanished.
It was at that moment that I thought there might be a bit more to Brian. Yes, he was weird. Yes, he barely belonged to this world. But a part of him knew all too well that he was odd, and he suffered from it.
inspiration for that guy in intern's storyline?
also: introduce people slowly (don't fall into the neal stephenson/chaos monkeys/this book trap of condensing someone's entire life story into one paragraph just to get it over with)