Before he knew it, he was outside the school, in the back court. Alone. Finally.

The first thing he did was shake himself out. Anxiety swirled in his chest as a breeze pulled loose garbage and leaves into a small whirlpool. Dizzy, he dropped onto a flaking picnic table, and soon his journal was in his hands. He recorded the strange events of the day before and the morning, messy and meandering and full of embellishment.

There is something unreal about everything, and I have proof, he wrote, so why do I feel like I’m making it all up? Why do I have to feel like the crazy one, when it’s the world that’s wrong?

Kane tapped his boots on the bench, wondering if it was a mistake to look for answers to who he was by coming to school. He was the least of himself here, and on purpose. Kane’s exclusion was one he’d cultivated over years, withdrawing from a world he’d always felt wrong in.

It wasn’t due to being gay, or who he was, but instead how he came to be. Kane had been outed pretty young by his eccentricities. Maybe a more astute child would have tried harder to rein themselves in, but Kane was the last to know he was gay and therefore powerless to deny it once he was finally told. He only found out as the other boys began to evade him in elementary school. Sleepover and birthday party invitations dried up. Teachers became overkind, which secured his shame. He became marked. A curiosity placed in the limbo between the worlds of boys and girls.

The limbo yawned wider every year, and no one yet had dared to join him. Alone, Kane felt himself warping into someone who didn’t trust anyone. Sometimes he would get messages through the limbo—people reaching out to him through unsigned notes or anonymous emails saying they wished they were out, too—but it was hard to tell which were real. Most of the time, they were pranks from the same sleepovers he wasn’t invited to anymore. More than once the conversations got shared throughout the school. Eventually Kane stopped responding.

Statistically, Kane knew he wasn’t the only gay person at Amity Regional, but he had been marked in a way that made it risky for others to associate with him. That’s what curiosities do: they draw the eye. No one else wanted to be the focus of the eyes that scrutinized Kane. No one wanted to share his limbo with only him as company. They watched from afar, and Kane made himself at home within his habit of hiding.

People left him alone, which he liked. Not anymore, though. Vivian’s comments would be the first of many as Kane’s classmates remembered him—and how little they liked him.