But I scream nothing. I smile. I’m faking my way home.

“I hope we succeed,” I say, wiping heat from my eyes.

“This is part one of a class I consider to be the most important section of treatment. It’s called ‘Expulsion.’ You’ll write in your diary every day,”—he reaches across the gap between us and pokes my notebook—“and later, you’ll read what you’ve written out loud to the class.”

When Marcos helped Vance through his crying fit, the boy was terrified he would write about him. Is Marcos going to tell the entire class that Vance cried because Briggs ran him too hard? “So, eh…” I mumble, “we just journal about what we did during the day?”

“No. You’ll write about the past. Sins—sexual encounters; sexual thoughts; sins of your family members. Create an emotional map of all the different factors that brought you to Nightlight.” Briggs flips to another page. “Like this story: as a boy, you frequently played Alice in Wonderland with your cousins. You played…the Queen?”

Briggs looks up, waiting for me to confirm the story like he doesn’t have the answer right there in his folder. My throat burns with this girlish—but accurate—memory. “My mom told you that…? Yeah, I played the Queen, but it was Alice in Wonderland—”

“Your girl cousin should have been the Queen and you could’ve played the Mad Hatter.”

“My cousin Mick was older. He had to be the Hatter or he wouldn’t play. And my cousin Maddie wanted to be Alice, so I had to be the Queen.”

Briggs drags his finger further down his notes: “No…there were frequent disagreements—childish fits—when Madeline didn’t want to be Alice. You insisted on being the Queen.”

My mouth hangs open in space. My mom has been taking notes on my gayness from when I was seven years old. She knew this whole time. She knew what was happening to me, even though I had no help figuring it out for myself. Somewhere inside me, a fuse blows. “I didn’t fall in love with a boy because I played the Queen of Hearts! Okay?!”

I shouldn’t have yelled; it just sprang out of me. My hand floats to the knotted bamboo of Ario’s recorder. I miss him so much. He’s not a sin to be Expulsion-ed. The Reverend is why I’m at Nightlight, not Ario.

“You don’t have to use that specific story,” Briggs sighs, dropping his folder of homosexual evidence beside the recorder. “You could lead with something more serious, like your dad leaving.”

“Why?”

“Your dad left you with a giant hole in your heart. I understand drinking played a role—that’s another Expulsion detail. Alcoholism—any addiction, really—is vulnerability to sin. A vulnerability you inherited.”

My brain clangs inside my skull like a wind chime. I’m not gay because my dad left our family. My mom was happier without him. The years after they separated—and before she fell into the Reverend’s flock—were the happiest of my life.

“He’s nothing to me,” I scoff.