Drew sets our diaries on an empty desk and begins: “Connor and Molly, welcome. You should’ve already been introduced to the idea behind this class’s therapy: locating the roots of your condition and then expelling them. If you’re wondering why I’m here, I am an Over. I’ve been at Nightlight for more than a year, and it’s my desire to pursue teaching, so Ben”—he points to a suddenly cheery Briggs—“let me take over.”

Molly rolls her eyes as Drew blathers on about the “great honor” of becoming a Nightlight teacher. Drew’s aunt is in for a rude surprise when she sees him again. I hope I can get back my GoFundMe donation. Once he finishes, Drew calls on a Beginner—the stout, ponytailed thirteen-year-old from Molly’s cabin I found “taking the wall” at the chapel: “You went last yesterday, so start us off today.”

The Beginner clomps miserably down the aisle to meet Drew and accepts their Expulsion Diary with a bent head. Mr. Calvin Klein steps aside to give them the floor, but when they open their lips, they’re already on an exhausted, labored breath: “I used to love going to comic cons, gamer cons, or whatever I could get to by bus from Minneapolis. I’d spend weeks making my cosplay costumes. I loved going as Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid, but my best look was Sheik from Legend of Zelda. I had the bodysuit and the bandage mask,”—they take a giant, pausing breath—“and I bought a chest binder to hold back my boobs.”

The young Beginner breathes out in a deliberately steady stream. My insides twist with a painful understanding: this is private.

“It relaxed me to bind my chest,” they say, their focus never straying from the diary. “My girlfriend—the one I used to have—sh-she tricked m-me. She put an idea in my head that I’m still getting rid of. She’d been noticing things about me…and said maybe I wasn’t a gay girl. Maybe I was a straight…boy. On the inside.” They wipe a trembling hand against an oncoming storm of tears. “She did this to me. She made me think, she opened a door, and I couldn’t stop thinking. That’s why my mom made me…”

“Keep going, you’re doing wonderfully,” Drew urges.

Shut up, Calvin Klein! This isn’t your moment to be a smug prick, and it isn’t right for me to sit here like everybody else, tsk-tsking my head at this Poor, Confused Soul.

“The body is true and immovable,” the Beginner reads from their diary as they sniff back an emotional avalanche. “The mind is soft. Only the mind can transform. God made the body and the Devil made the mind.”