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.

“Rejection of reality. Your father, out there running around with other women while his son runs around with boys. An obvious pattern. A weakness that’s part of your emotional map, and it should be the first thing you tackle during Expulsion.”

Mom refused to admit to her own mother about Dad’s girlfriends and drinking, but she told Briggs? She is so desperate for me not to be me—desperate for any explanation other than the truth—that she has drawn this absolute stranger into our family’s most painful, private moments. I don’t even know what to say back to him other than “NOPE.”

“Expulsion is about recognizing patterns so you can break them,” Briggs adds. “Which is why, in the end, you’ll need to take responsibility for your son.”

“My…what?”

“Avery Woodbine. You’ve let him go, haven’t you?”

The baby. The Goddamn baby again.

I drop the Expulsion Diary to the floor with a thwap. Briggs glances at the notebook, then at me before withdrawing a piece of crisply folded paper from his Evidence Folder of the Damned. He unfurls it in front of me like a magician would present the Ace of Spades—nothing up my sleeves!—and when I recognize the paper, my hands shake with rage.

Ink-dark baby footprints adorn the official document: a birth certificate.

Avery Woodbine’s birth certificate. His name is clearly visible beneath the footprints.

My head throbs, as Briggs’s next instruction confirms my worst, plummeting, odious fear: “Before this is over,” he says, “you will sign this as Avery’s father.”