I’ll stop poking now. It’s been fun, but I need to be a good camper to pass my review.

“So, how are you getting on here?” Briggs says, returning to business.

“How are you getting on?” When Dad bothered himself to call the house, that’s how he’d ask about school: “How are you getting on?” Not well, bitch. Anxiety spills slowly out of my heart like air from a pricked balloon. Somehow, I manage a shrug. “It’s the first day. I ran drills with you…whatever…”

“You think this is horseshit, don’t you?”

“No!…But is my mom really paying you guys—?”

“Your mum will pay anything if the Reverend can return a straight son to her.”

Scalding heat spreads down my back. Breathe, Major. I want to scream that she’ll never have a straight son and she’s taken money we can’t afford and flushed it down the toilet.

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.”