It was September and she had a Friday evening free. That hadn't happened since she was about 11. Before becoming head Cheerio as a junior, she had been their rising star the first two years of high school. And before that, she had been on the junior cheerleading squad that came out to essentially warm up the crowd to cheer for the Cheerios.

She didn't miss school, but she missed that. The roar of the crowd as she stood at the top of the pyramid, the feeling of falling for a split second as she performed her perfect dismount, the adrenaline of it all. The feeling of being on top of the world - on top of the school, on top of the town. She missed the looks she got as she walked down the hall in her uniform, the red and white pleats swirling against her knees, red cheerleading sweater exactly one and a half sizes too small to emphasize exactly what the boys wanted but didn't get to touch. The seas parted for her when she walked through the hallways in her uniform, made her feel admired. Envied. Powerful.

She was craving that feeling already. What was the point of going through day-to-day life if no one even looked at you?

Why did everyone have to go so crazy over this integration thing, anyway? she wondered. Sure, she didn't like the kids from that colored school, and she was certain that as soon as they reopened with all the schools combined there would be some rule that a certain number of cheerleaders from their squad had to be allowed onto the Cheerios even though there was no way they were technically on par. And she would be damned if any of those girls thought they were going to take her position as Captain - she had earned that. But it wasn't like McKinley was actually all that white and pure anyway - after all, if Sandy Lopez was allowed to be Vice Captain and felt like she had the right to keep snapping at Quinn's heels, trying to one-up her and steal her position, and she was ethnic, then what was the difference anyway?

Sandy could change her name from Santana and try to look as pale as she wanted; she still wasn't really white.

She needed to get back on top, to feel that rush of...something again. To be powerful. To be attractive and popular again.

Finn was a moron and all he could talk about whenever they were together was that stupid job working on cars - did he even know how to put together an engine? He could barely open his locker some days. When she was around him, all she felt was the urge to roll her eyes Being together when they were the school's power couple made sense: after all, what better way to be elected Prom King and Queen than to be the quarterback and the head cheerleader? She had been dreaming of that moment, her coronation as official ruler of the school, for longer than she'd dreamt of anything except possibly her debutante ball. But now that all the parents in town had ruined that for her, it made her wonder...was Finn worth it? Sure, they'd been together for three years now, and his class ring rested on a chain around her neck next to the gold cross her daddy had given her for her First Communion, but he didn't make her feel special. More like he was a boy and she was a girl and the rest was just kind of...there. He wanted to go further than kissing, but not because of her - he would want to go further than kissing with that Rachel Berry freak from glee club, clearly it wasn't about the girl being attractive.

But there were guys who made her feel that way.

Her pink sweater set was tight enough to show what she wanted but covered enough to appear demure, enough to get him leering but not enough to make her feel easy. Even if she desperately needed to feel like she was wanted, she didn't want to feel quite that cheap - he was still going to have to work for her. At least ply her with a few good lines. Reassure her that she was at least as pretty as Sandy, even though her boyfriend was an idiot.

When the door opened and Puck's eyes drifted up and down her body, she felt a little frisson of excitement. It was the closest to alive she'd felt since last year's cheerleading season had ended.

* * * * *

Sam let out a deep sigh as he set down his bag and half-slammed his books onto the desk. Kurt glanced at the clock - 7:32; Sam was back more than a couple hours early tonight. "Something wrong?" he asked quietly.

"What's the point of practically killing myself studying every night when it doesn't actually help?" Sam flung a folder down on the surface with a satisfying 'smack.' "Sorry, Kurt, I just-" He sighed again and shook his head.

"Got back a test?" Kurt swiveled in his desk chair to face him, closing his book in a fluid motion to hint that he wasn't too busy to listen if Sam needed it.

Sam shook his head. "Essay. But same result. It's always the same result." He sank into his chair. "I just don't understand it, y'know? I study, I stay up reading until my head hurts and I'm practically cross-eyed, and I feel like I understand it when I'm in class, but it's like everything I turn in just gets ripped apart. I mean, I know my spelling's not great - it's never been good - so I'm used to getting a bunch of points taken off, but this teacher even uses one of those rubrics where they can only take off a certain number of points for that and I still fail?" Kurt nodded sympathetically, not sure what to say; he knew Sam worked hard. It was impossible to see him and not know how hard he was trying, but it wasn't something Kurt could really fathom. Schoolwork had always come easily for him, and even now at Dalton with their rigorous standards and heavy course load, he still managed to finish his work with plenty of time and energy to spare. The only subject he had trouble with was the same one he'd always hated - anything in the sciences - and Sam outpaced him by far in that arena...and yet. "My parents are going to come down on me again," he mumbled. " What do they want from me? I- I don't go out, I can't remember the last time I even saw a girl, I quit football because the practices ran too long, but my father keeps saying if I just tried harder- that they know I'm not stupid so it must be that I'm not applying myself-"

"You are," Kurt assured him gently. "Everyone here knows that. We all see it."

"Yeah, but they don't." He shook his head again. "You know they were planning on pulling me out here and sending me back home this year? We would've still gone to the same school," he added with a lopsided, sad smile. "Figured since I'm not actually benefiting from any of the academics here, may as well send me to an easier school and not waste their money, but you can't transfer to a school that's not open."

"What's even the problem?" Kurt asked. "Is it that you don't understand the question, or-"

"I wish I knew. I get everything right when the guys'll quiz me, y'know? Eric and I can sit there for hours and he'll ask me history questions and I'll get every single one, then I go to write this essay and I think it's good, but..."

"Maybe you're just not good at essays," Kurt suggested. "Some people aren't, some people are really good at memorizing facts and dates. I'm the opposite."

Sam ran a hand back through his hair. "I'd think that, but even in physics I can't manage a decent grade. And you know I know that."

"You're the only reason I'm passing that class," Kurt replied. It wasn't quite true - he would probably be able to pull off at least a C if he forced himself hard enough, but thanks to Sam he had a solid A- average. Not bad for his worst subject.

"Wanna take my tests for me then?" Sam joked. "I'll help you study beforehand, give you all the answers, you'll go in and take the test for both of us, we both win."

"If only." Kurt thought for a moment, then said, "Do you have your quiz handy?"

Sam handed over the folder he had slammed onto the desk with a wry "Here - have them all," then hesitated and added in a quieter voice, "Don't laugh at me, okay?"

He looked so nervous as Kurt took the folder that it made him ache a little. "I wouldn't," Kurt assured him quietly, meeting his eyes for a moment. He'd been laughed at more than enough times in his life-...Maybe that was why Sam was one of the nicest people to him here. Not that anyone was mean or hostile, not like he was used to, but there was something kind of purposefully accepting about Sam that Kurt couldn't explain. It was beyond just not mocking his skincare routine or looking at him like he was a freak for racing to the local store to buy the new Vogue, like even if they had not a single thing in common (because Kurt was sorry, but he didn't care about space invaders from planet doom or whatever thing Sam had been talking about a couple nights ago, and he knew Sam felt the same way about the evolution of the New Look), they were still part of the same club. Metaphorical club, not just the Warblers. He wondered what Sam's pre-Dalton school had been like, if they were cruel there instead of rallying around him like the Warblers seemed to.

And he wanted to help, even if he had no idea how.

Opening the folder, Kurt saw a stack of returned assignments, all practically bleeding red ink, several with "See me!" comments at the top. Every subject, every kind of assignment and exam. No wonder Sam looked so concerned about mockery and seemed so defeated about it all. After flicking through a few other pages, he retrieved the physics quiz and reached over to find his own. He had gotten a 93 - a welcome surprise; Sam's didn't have a number on the top, but the red slash through almost every answer made clear what the final letter grade would have been.

What wasn't clear was where Sam had gone wrong. They were questions that Kurt knew Sam had basically given him the answer to the day before the test - had explained what concepts were at play, what forces to consider, all Kurt had to do was fill in the equation, do the math, and he got it right. But looking at them...Sam's answers weren't even close. The diagrams were right, but everything after that... "How are you at math?" he asked as he studied the first question on each paper, attempting to follow Sam's scrawling handwriting to figure out where in the equation he had gone so far off-track.

Sam shrugged. "Same as the others, I guess. Which is weird because when I was a kid, I could always do stuff really fast in my head. And if we're out and need to figure out the tip and stuff, I can calculate that before the guys write it down, but that's not like, Calculus or anything."

That made even less sense, then. Because Sam would dutifully write down the equation with variables, he put the numbers in the right place, but the answers to the simple multiplication and division problems weren't even close. Dividing 43 meters, the distance an object had fallen, by 9.8 m/s2, he got 5 instead of 4.388 (Kurt's answer, and the correct one). "Did you think we were supposed to round to the nearest whole number?" he asked, though even that would have been wrong.

"What?" Sam moved his chair to look over Kurt's shoulder at the papers side-by-side on the desk. Kurt pointed to the equation on each page, and Sam just kind of kept peering at them, trying to figure out where he had gone wrong.

Could he not see it? Kurt wondered. Was it a vision thing? No, obviously Sam could see - he didn't have any problem identifying people as they walked past, and while his writing was messy and a little all over the place, it was certainly not indicative that Sam's vision was a problem. "You divided 43 by gravity and got 5 instead of-"

Sam shook his head. "49."

"What?"

"It'd be 5 if the object was at 49 meters, not 43."

Kurt checked quickly, and Sam was right, but that only confused him more. "But the question said 43, and that's what you wrote down."

"Really?" Sam shifted, trying to get a better look, so Kurt moved the papers closer. He squinted, ran his fingers under the equation, then nodded. "Yeah...yeah, it says 43. Guess you're right."

Kurt studied the next question. "And over here you copied the whole thing down wrong."

"I did?"

"Yeah - see?" Kurt pointed. "It should be the square-root of 2d over g, you put dg over 2."

"Sorry." Sam sounded more frustrated by the second, like a sullen kid being chastised by his parents - which he had been, Kurt reminded himself. Quite a bit, from the sound of it.

"No, don't apologize," Kurt told him gently. "I wasn't trying to- I'm just trying to figure out why you did that when I know you know the concept. You were explaining to me the day before why you divide by the gravitational constant, why it's the square root-"

"Because in the original equation, time is squared, so to find for t you've gotta take the root," Sam confirmed.

"Exactly. You know the equations, you know why they are what they are, but when you go to copy them, something happens."

"The lines blur together sometimes," Sam tried to explain. "Not like, y'know, blurry, not like getting a new glasses prescription, but it's hard to stay on one. That's what Rick kept saying, anyway, during Lord of the Rings."

"What about it?" Kurt asked.

"Well, see- Okay, last year I was failing English because my essays kept sucking, and the Council convinced my teacher that if I could read the Lord of the Rings trilogy and give a presentation on it by the end of the year, she'd raise it to a B. Rick and Jeff and a couple of the guys who graduated last year, they would talk about it at rehearsal and it sounded awesome - y'know, with all the creatures and the mythology and the quest? I mean, I'm more into science fiction but it still sounded pretty cool. They figured I'd be into reading it, and I tried - I really did, but do you know how long those things are? Probably not to you, but it was so..." Sam sighed and shook his head. "Every night for at least an hour, on top of the rest of my homework. I felt like an idiot - I feel like an idiot. And it's awful because I know if it were a movie, I would love it. The stories sound so great, and the characters are neat...Or if it were a comic book? So great." He sighed again and mumbled, "An hour every night and all I managed to get from it was learning to speak Elvish. That I can do. Too bad my essays are in English."

Kurt started to reach out to touch Sam's shoulder, in absence of being able to say anything reassuring, but he stopped with his fingers a few inches from the curve of Sam's bicep. If this were Mercedes, he would hug her, but boys were so often weary of him touching them. He would have chalked it up to the fact that boys were less tactile than the girls he knew, but they seemed to be fine touching each other - Finn and Puckerman clapped each other's shoulders or patted each other's backs after a great play in whatever sport, all the guys did. When he had touched Finn's shoulder exactly once before they were brothers - in a similar situation, kind of, with Finn confiding in him that he thought Quinn was going to break up with him - the response had been stiff and awkward. No one ever said Kurt couldn't touch them, but their body language made their aversion clear.

Except Blaine, obviously. And Sam seemed to be more like Blaine than like Finn, and the boys at Dalton seemed a lot less nervous around him, didn't appear to have the instinctive bristle whenever he came around. With a light touch, he rested his hand on the curve of Sam's shoulder and got a faint, sad smile. "If it's getting frustrating, we can stop," he offered. "I know having someone rip apart something I was working on would feel horrible."

"You're not the one ripping it apart - you're at least trying to help," Sam replied with a shrug, and Kurt took that as his sign to pull his hand away. "Kinda like detective story or something. The Case of the Missed Questions." His smile, like his joke, was forced - but Kurt could appreciate the effort as well as the reflex. He forced a little reassuring smile of his own and moved on to the next question. This time Sam had inverted two numbers. Further down the page, he had multiplied by 45 instead of 54, obviously yielding the wrong answer. By the time they reached the end of the first page, they'd been through eight questions and there was exactly on thing Kurt was sure of:

Sam couldn't help any of it.

He saw how frustrated and defeated his roommate was, how much he wanted to be doing better; this wasn't carelessness. He saw how much his roommate knew; this wasn't stupidity. It wasn't an issue of Sam not reading the questions carefully enough - Kurt had watched him do his homework. He read questions two, three, four times...and still missed parts of it. There was nothing Sam was failing to do here that he could or should be doing to improve his score. Especially not because every time Kurt asked him a question, Sam got it right - just like he said he did when Eric was tutoring him in history.

Something else was going on.

"You should take the night off," Kurt stated, standing. He stretched carefully, then toed on his shoes.

"Where are you going?" Sam asked.

"The library," Kurt replied, pulling on his jacket and straightening his tie.

"Why?"

"Because I'm going to figure this out," he stated. "You're not stupid, Sam. I think there's something wrong with the way you see things."

"Like I need new glasses?" He sounded confused, and Kurt honestly wasn't sure whether it was over what might be wrong with him that he hadn't yet been able to identify, or over the statement that he wasn't stupid.

Kurt shook his head. "You can see the numbers, you just mix them up or put them in the wrong lines. You can see the blackboard or the textbook in front of you, but you don't understand what it's asking. You can answer every question a person reads you but you get it wrong on the written exams. I don't know what it is, but I'm going to find it." He slipped on his loafers, grabbed a notebook, and hurried out of the room, down the stairs, and out into the cool evening air. The library was open until 11 on Fridays, that meant he had almost 3 hours to get started.

He needed to figure out where to begin looking. If his suspicions were correct, then he was probably going to need to start with...hm. Eyes? Brain? Mental condition? He had no idea - science wasn't something he'd ever particularly been intrigued by, and he had a sinking feeling that Sam would actually have to be the one to unlock the mystery of whatever it was because Sam was the only guy he knew here who was really into science.

Or possibly just into physics, he wasn't actually sure. Something about velocity of rocketships seemed to be the impetus for most of Sam's interest, so there was a decent chance that Sam wasn't actually all that versed in biology anyway. Not that that was the point.

His shoulder bumped hard into someone else and he glanced up to offer a quick apology to find himself face-to-face with- "Blaine. Hello. I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention-"

Blaine cursed his luck. He had managed to avoid Kurt, except for Warblers practice, ever since his realization Monday. For four days, he had been forcing himself to stay away, to not worry about whether Kurt was settling in, to not take Kurt aside and gently explain to him the differences in the way the Warblers operated to help him settle in...and it had seemed do-able, like he could handle not seeing Kurt all the time, could force himself not to think about all of the things he didn't want to think about.

Except whenever he saw Kurt. If Kurt was in the room, it was like he sucked all the oxygen out and left Blaine panting in twisting in its wake. Whenever Kurt was there, whenever he saw the nervous twitch of his thin lips or heard his voice or saw the elegant flick of his perfect hair, it took increasingly more energy to keep himself seated, upright, stiff - to not rush over and grab him and whisk him away to somewhere private.

Blaine knew what he was. That didn't mean he had to enjoy it or do anything to perpetuate it.

"It's okay," Blaine managed, his throat suddenly dry. "Where are you off to so fast on a Friday?"

"The library," Kurt replied. "I need to do medical research."

"Is everything okay? That sounds serious." He kicked himself for caring so much, for not just continuing across campus to the student parking lot to meet up with Thad and a few other guys to go pick up their dates.

Kurt nodded. "Everything's fine. You don't happen to be a secret biology whiz, do you?"

Blaine laughed nervously. "Uh, no. Can't say that I am."

"Oh." Kurt sighed, then looked Blaine up and down; he wasn't wearing his uniform. It was the first time he'd seen the guy in something other than their mandated clothing. He wanted to comment on the fact that that jacket did not suit Blaine's complexion and the shirt and tie barely went together in an aesthetically-pleasing way, but all he managed instead was, "Where are you off to?"

"A bunch of the guys are going in to town. I should go, actually, the girls are probably waiting for us."

Girls. Kurt wasn't sure why that sounded so strange to him. Of course Blaine would be going out with girls when he got the chance - all the boys did, except for him and Sam. Just because Sam worked so hard he couldn't justify taking the night off for a date, and just because he hadn't met any girls he particularly wanted to 'go with', didn't mean that everyone was as antisocial as the two of them. But something about the idea of these girls watching Blaine be charming all evening made him uncomfortable.

He just missed him, was all, he realized suddenly with a kind of longing feeling. Blaine had been busy all week, couldn't really stop and talk, and he understood that - he did. Blaine was a senior, they didn't really know each other, they weren't particularly friends, and Kurt didn't have the right to cling to him just because he had shown a tiny bit of kindness in his first few days at the school. He had a tendency to do that, he knew - seize on any boy who was nice to him and want to dominate all his time. It was a mistake he'd made countless times with Finn, he knew that.

"Right," Kurt replied slowly. "I'll let you go then. Enjoy your night."

Blaine closed his eyes as Kurt turned away. He had to almost physically fight the urge to tell Kurt that he'd stay - he imagined the two of them in the back corner of the library, huddled over a spread of dusty books, as they contemplated whatever biological question Kurt was researching. Just sitting across the table from one another, catching an occasional glimpse of those eyes-

No, he told himself. Thad said his girlfriend picked this date of his, and she seemed to have decent taste - and decent friends. He would spend an evening with a cute, charming, funny young woman and enjoy himself a lot more than he possibly could sitting in a library with some boy.

If only Kurt could just be 'some boy.' But that was the larger war, wasn't it?

"You, too," he called, half-joking, as Kurt continued across the yard to the library.

* * * * *

The reference section was the most frequently-used area of the library, but on a Friday night at an hour before closing time, Kurt was the only one there. A stack of medical textbooks garnered from local universities sat on either side of him - a small stack to his right, that which he had completed reading and come up empty, and a much larger stack to his left that contained the rest of the books he needed to check.

He was fairly certain, after skimming the opthomology book, that there wasn't actually anything wrong with Sam's eyes themselves - well, aside from needing glasses, but that was hardly an unusual condition or the cause of Sam's problems...and, he suspected, probably because Sam spent so much of his time hunched over books trying to get grades that would please his parents. The problem had to be something bigger than that, something wrong with the way Sam's brain unscrambled (or scrambled, in this case) whatever he saw. He wasn't sure if that fit into neurology or psychology, so he had both types of books open, flipping back and forth every few chapters in the hopes that would help him find an answer sooner.

So far it wasn't working, and he suspected his system wasn't nearly scientific enough to yield him the kind of result he wanted, but it was the best he could come up with for 10:00 on a Friday with no real basis in medicine beyond his incredibly basic Biology course freshman year.

The psychology textbook was several years old and starting to come apart at the binding, as though too many Dalton students had previously tried to look up everything that was wrong with them. Kurt supposed he could see why - the subject matter was beginning to be a little en vogue, the type of thing that all individuals were meant to know at least a little about even if they didn't believe a word of it, and it was terrifyingly easy to find previously-undiagnosed disorders that you had been walking around with this entire time. For example, in the first twenty minutes reading this text, Kurt had discovered that it was entirely possible that he had a psychophysiologic skin reaction, a psychoneurotic depressive reaction, and a Chronic Brain Syndrome associated with metabolism, growth, or nutrition. He still had no idea what Sam had.

This was getting him nowhere. It was easier to understand than the neurology text, which was written so densely that he couldn't begin to decipher it, even with the medical dictionary at his side. At least the psychiatric conditions book was written at a lower collegiate level, probably pilfered from someone's freshman or sophomore course at Ohio State, whereas the neurology book seemed to be aimed at medical school students.

The next chapter was entitled Sociopathic Personality Disturbances - probably not Sam's problem. It sounded like something involving one of those gorey murder movies Finn liked to drag him to, where the main character was a sociopath: someone who lacked any moral responsibility or social conscience, according to the dictionary (he'd looked it up once while trying to prove a point; unsurprisingly, he had been correct and Finn had been...Finn). He flicked through the pages quickly until his fingers stuck on one. He wiped them on his trousers, firmly opposed to the idea of licking them to get a better grip, but his eyes caught on a word:

"queer."

It was a word he had heard before, more times than he wanted to think about, and he knew what it meant (which was: run and don't let the guy calling you that catch you), but it was strange to see it in a book like this. Glancing up to the top of the paragraph for context for why the insult was there, he saw the heading Homosexuals and began to read. He couldn't explain the nervous flutter in his chest - what was one more syndrome to read about at this point, right?

Homosexuals - From the Greek "homo" and Latin "sex"; previously diagnosed as psychopathic personality with pathlogic sexuality, or antipathic sexual instinct. Often colloquially known as bent or queer, with other regional terms gaining in popularity, homosexuality refers to the unnatural demand for an intimate sexual relationship with members of a person's same sex. This demand can appear latent in some but most often manifests in aggressive, predatory behavior towards males and often towards young boys. These compulsions for same-sex sexual contact are pervasive and occur over a period of years.

The related condition Sexual Inversion, first identified by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in 1897, refers to physical, social, and emotional traits relating to the inverse of one's natural sex: that is, female traits for male inverts and male traits for female inverts. While it is unknown whether one condition causes the other, they are frequently comorbid, with one hallmark of sexual inversion presenting as erotic homosexual attraction. Other common afflictions in male inverts may include a more docile temperament, interest in feminine activities and careers, and in extreme cases even a feminine shape such as rounded hips.

Kurt slammed the book closed with trembling hands, toppling his chair over as he tried to scramble backwards, as though putting physical distance between himself and the tome would make it go away. One fist closed over his mouth as the other wrapped as tightly around his torso as he could make it, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to will himself to disappear.

He tried to think about anything else - anything other than what he'd just read, anything benign and pointless and mildly pleasant. A perfectly normal Friday night dinner with his dad and Carole and Finn. Listening to music with Mercedes.

The feeling of Blaine's breath on his neck and the reaction it had garnered.

He let out a strangled whimper, shaking his head fiercely as he pressed himself back against the wall, half-crumbling as his knees threatened to give out on him. No. No, he couldn't- He couldn't have that, could he? He couldn't be that kind of-

...but everything about it made sense.

He tried to remind himself about every other syndrome he'd thought he'd had over the course of the two hours researching. For awhile he'd even almost convinced himself he had a few of the conditions listened in the chapter about mental deficiencies before reminding himself that he probably wouldn't be getting such high marks on all his exams if that were the case. It was just something he was making up. Surely. It was just something that he had gotten into his head and was reading too much into - he had been doing it with conditions all night.

But everything it said seemed too right. It was nothing he had put words to before, but it was-...it was true, all of it was true. Right on down to the size and shape of his hips and the fact that he...well, he acted like a girl. There was a reason people had been saying that since he was practically in first grade. There was a reason his best friend wasn't a boy.

There was a reason that the way Blaine even looked at him made him blush. There was a reason that the only two people who had ever caused the warm, shivery below-the-belt feeling were boys. Blaine and Finn - was that what this would be called? Erotic homosexual attraction? Was that what it meant when he felt that jolt of energy coursing through his body whenever Blaine smiled at him?

Oh god. Oh no - what was he going to do?

He wanted to go back to the table, to flip the book back open and start looking for the cure, the treatment, what scientists were doing that would make him better. Diseases either had cures or they killed you - like cancer had killed his mother. Diseases either were treated or you withered away and died. He wasn't sure which one he preferred at the moment, but either way - he needed to know. He needed to know if this was something he could fix and how.

But he couldn't bring himself to look. He couldn't force himself to tiptoe back over there and see that- that word again.

He couldn't look, because what happened if it said there was no cure? If there was no getting better?

He ran past the table just close enough to snatch up his notebook, then raced out of the silent library as quickly as his legs could carry him. The weight crushing his chest felt like it could kill him if he didn't stop; he wondered if that was better or worse than the alternative.