I'm currently solo-reading Donna Tartt's "The Secret History", and here's what I found a disturbing and well-written excerpt from it. I strongly recommend the book to anybody who likes crime, Sherlock Holmes and "Catcher In The Rye". I don't know why the following paragraphs have stuck with me, quite possibly because I don't like people who behave like Bunny.

[...]'But even then I had a feeling we hadn't heard the last of it. He teased us about it - quite innocently, I believe, but in public as well as private - for the rest of the term. You know how he is. Once he gets something like that on the brain he won't give it up.'

I did know. Bunny had an uncanny ability to ferret out topics of conversation that made his listener uneasy and to dwell upon them with ferocity once he had. In all the months I'd known him he'd never ceased to tease me, for instance, about that jacket I'd worn to lunch with him that first day, and about what he saw as my flimsy and tasteless Californian style of dress. To an impartial eye, my clothes were in fact not at all dissimilar from his own but his snide remarks upon the subject were so inexhaustible and tireless, I think, because in spite of my good-natured laughter he must have been dimly aware that he was touching a nerve, that I was in fact incredibly self-conscious about these virtually imperceptible differences of dress and of the rather less imperceptible differences of manner and bearing between myself and the rest of them. I am gifted at blending myself into any given milieu - you've never seen such a typical California teenager as I was, nor such a dissolute and callous pre-med student - but somehow, despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the green leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the subtleties of the particular shade. Whenver Bunny, rudely and in public, accused me of wearing a shirt which contained a polyester blend, or remarked critically that my perfectly ordinary trousers, indistinguishable from his own, bore the taint of something he called a 'Western cut,' a large portion of the pleasure this sport afforded him was derived from his unerring and bloodhoundish sense that this, of all topics, was the one which made me most truly uncomfortable.