The evening out with the guys had been perfectly fine. Any time Nick and Jeff got into jukebox wars made for a fun night, especially once David and Thad got into picking sides and trying to sway Wes into doing one song or another as a group. None of them were much good at talking to girls, but what else was new?

What else could even be expected? They went to a boys' school, most of them had never attended a co-ed institution of any kind, and they were used to generally just spending all their time around, well, guys. Girls were kind of a a foreign, unknown entity to all of them, so strange in their desires and conversations and the fact that they all went to the bathroom in a group as if makeup could only be reapplied in the presence of others.

Luckily for them, the girls who were around often - Wes's girlfriend, and David's, and Thad's - all kind of had gotten used to it. They knew to expect that the boys would spend most of their time waiting for dinner talking about the Warblers, most of the time after dinner popping nickel after nickel in the jukebox, and generally not pay nearly enough attention to their fine young ladies. They had learned to joke about it instead of finding them annoying as countless other girls had done - as Jeff and Nick's dates no doubt would. Blaine doubted either of those girls would be interested in seeing the pair again.

And his date had been lovely. Her name was Laura; Thad's girlfriend Betty knew her from the cheerleading squad. She was interested in music and theater, she was smart and sweet, and she had a great laugh. She reminded him a little of Patti Andrews, whom he considered to be kind of the ideal woman, and she blushed when he reached up to brush a stray blonde lock out of her face, looking up at him through her eyelashes coquettishly in the way the ingenue always did in movies right before Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart or whoever leaned in to kiss her.

He had pulled his hand back awkwardly instead and apologized for being too forward.

He liked that she was shorter than he was, but he found himself wondering if the ingenue look would have the same effect if the person making it were taller - say about two, three inches taller than he was - and if it would look sweeter and more innocent if the eyes in question were an intriguing mix of blue, green, and grey instead of Laura's deep brown.

By the time he returned to his dorm at the end of the night, settling into the tiny but private room afforded to seniors as a reward for putting up with three years of horrible roommates, Blaine felt nauseous and doubted it was from the slice of pie he probably shouldn't have eaten. He tugged his tie loose and carefully hung his jacket on the side of his closet devoted to clothes that needed to be sent to the cleaners, then sank onto his bed with a defeated sigh.

What was wrong with him? Why was he doing this to himself? What part of "avoid him and he'll get out of your system" hadn't been a clear enough plan?

And why was he seriously lying in bed at nearly one in the morning, contemplating slipping out of his dorm room to creep into Everett House to go check on Kurt and see if he had found the answers he was looking for in the library earlier in the evening? It was like he was trying to make up any excuse to defy his perfectly simple, entirely reasonable plan.

He had more self control than this.

* * * * *

He couldn't sleep. Who could, after finding out something like that?

Kurt sat in the center of his bed, knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around them tightly as if he could somehow pull himself inward more and more until he just vanished. Somehow in the stillness of the room, it seemed like a distinct possibility. Like he could just keep moving further and further into his own body until limbs met, inverted, and he would pop out into some parallel universe where none of this existed.

Maybe he'd been listening to Sam talk about science fiction too much, he thought with a wry smile. The very movement of his lips trying to twist upwards made his heart ache and his eyes sting, as though the act of displaying any sign of relative happiness just made how he really felt seem that much more agonizing.

He was sick. And not just a little sick, either - crazy. Completely and totally-...it was under a heading that included the word sociopath. His mind swirled with images of people, characters in movies - serial killers, people who lured pretty young women to their homes and then strangled them-

Only in his case it wouldn't be young women, would it? That was kind of the point.

His stomach clenched, and he wasn't sure whether he was going to be sick or not. In the end, he just pulled his knees closer still and buried his face against them, trying desperately to draw in a deep breath as he pictured newsfilm footage on the insane: moaning, shuffling, wild-eyed shells of people screaming nonsense out at the world from behind doors with bars instead of windows. A terrified whimper escaped, and he jerked his head sideways to make sure Sam hadn't heard him. The boy kept sleeping, undisturbed by both the noise and the deep crisis going on just a few feet away.

He didn't understand it. How could a person be that sick and not know it? How could he have been walking around with not one, but two sociopathic sexual conditions his entire life-

Had it been his entire life? He wasn't even sure. Was this the kind of thing a person developed? If so, when? Had there been a time before, a time he was normal, a time he was like everyone else, and then suddenly he just...got sick? Was an illness like this more like cancer or like...he didn't even know, mongoloidism or something? The fact that he couldn't really come up with any illnesses that a person was born with other than that made him think that most diseases weren't from birth; you got sick later.

Which meant there had been a time...sometime, somewhere...a time he had been normal. Why couldn't he remember it? Why couldn't he remember a single time he felt right?

From the time he started being around other children he hadn't been like them, he knew that much. He'd been different, especially from the other boys. None of them listened to musicals or liked to cook with their mothers, none of them cared if their shoes matched their belts and they didn't mind getting dirty. From the time he was five, when he started school, he had been more like the little girls than the boys, and those differences only got more pronounced as he got older.

Had he been normal before he was five? Could he even remember? Was there even anything to compare it to? Because sure, he had enjoyed the games his mother played with him, and he loved that she let him help around the house, and he loved helping her pick out her clothes and accessories in the morning (his favourite game)...but did other little boys do that, too? Or was it, as he suspected, something that only girls did?

Had his hips been this size forever? Or at least this proportion?

Had he always been this...what had the book said? "Docile?" He had never enjoyed the rough-and-tumble games the other boys played, he knew that, but there were other boys who didn't like them either. He suspected Sam probably hadn't been that type of kid, either. So did that mean that all boys who preferred to read or draw or just play on the swings like civilized humans instead of wrestling like monkeys (as his mother would have said) were sick like he was?

And, if they weren't, what was the difference? Was it about the erotic sexual attraction part? Was that what made a boy sick instead of just "sensitive?"

He still didn't know what to make of that idea in particular. He wasn't particularly...sexual in the first place. He knew boys who made jokes about it, he knew Finn wanted to have sex but Quinn wouldn't let him - and the fact that he knew that at all had been a giant sign of brotherly bonding and trust because no one was meant to know any of that. Thanks to health class, he knew that sexual desires were normal for guys to have, but he had never really contemplated it. Was it just because he wanted something other than girls? And what would that even mean? He couldn't fathom what two men would do - not that he could contemplate what a man and a woman would do much more easily, the films in class had been deliberately vague and used strange metaphors about flowers to go with the upbeat music and peppy voiceover. He knew girls liked boys with good hygiene, whatever that meant

He didn't know what to make of the entire concept, really. It was too foreign to contemplate.

Did that mean he was less sick than people who were aggressive in their attraction? What did that even mean?

At the very least, he concluded slowly, he had always had that sexual inversion thing. At least from the earliest time he could remember, which involved being three years old and wanting to play in his mother's heels. If the disease meant a man who preferred feminine things, and Kurt could think of few items more feminine than his mother's clothes and accessories, then he definitely had had that forever.

And if sexual inversion was always connected with homosexuality, then that meant he'd always been that, too...didn't it? Or at least, that he was guaranteed to develop it. Or something like that, he thought.

That conclusion did nothing to comfort him.

He almost wished he could be like those women he'd known growing up; friends of his mother but far more traditional, they went to church at least once a day and spent most of their free time praying. When his mother had gotten sick, they had started going to church twice a day instead so they could add extra prayers for her to be healed.

She wasn't.

He had never believed strongly in anything - at least, nothing in that sense; he did believe strongly that Grace Kelly was the single luckiest person alive, and that Auntie Mame should have won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and that the new Chevy model was infinitely better than the Thunderbird even if all Finn's friends seemed to want the latter. But he was suddenly struck by the fervent, desperate desire to be as naive as his mother's friends had been, to be innocent enough to believe that prayer would take away this illness.

But prayers couldn't cure a person. Not even someone who really deserved it, and he wasn't sure whether he did.

* * * * *

"Donna."

The suggestion was met with a mumbling of assent and exactly one clear "No" so loud that it stood out even against the nearly 20 other voices it opposed. Bobby stood and shook his head. "Not 'Donna.'"

Kurt was still getting used to the way the Warblers operated. His old glee club had been kind of a study in disorder, a type of chaos that somehow always resolved itself with approximately ten minutes to spare. Here, there was much more order, a lot more structure, and yet no adults officially in charge. And sometimes it was okay to comment or speak up, but other times - like when he had suggested an arrangement of "Fallin'" that he would be happy to spearhead - it was considered poor form and/or a violation of Council procedure. Sometimes it was perfectly fine to suggest songs, but at other times it was almost a threat to the Council's power and authority. So far Kurt hadn't been able to pin any of that on a personal distinction - that was to say, he didn't think it was a matter of Nick or Blaine being able to suggest songs while he was not because he was new. However, until he figured any of it out, he was trying to learn to sit back a little, to not jump in with his ideas, at least not until he had a better read on the best way to do it.

Nonetheless, the Saturday afternoon Warbler meetings were proving to be entertaining, if only because it was Kurt's lone opportunity to see them "casual." Unfortunately, as it was an official function as part of a school organization, uniforms were still required...but they seemed to take an odd interpretation of what precisely that meant. Ties were optional, and there were several boys wearing the red sweater vest, while others were in the full blazer. A few were wearing non-uniform black shoes.

At least trying to figure out what the rules were was keeping his mind off everything else for the first time in eighteen hours. For the most part, anyway. Every once in awhile he would catch himself thinking about it, remembering, and the sick feeling in his stomach would creep back up on him.

"Why not?" David asked.

Bobby shook his head. "She's my girlfriend."

"So? Isn't that a good thing?" Kevin asked.

"She's already said she's coming to the competition. If I sing 'Donna', she's going to think I'm singing it to her, and then she's going to start asking why I haven't given her my pin yet. We've only been going together a couple months, but she's already obsessing. Every time I see her, it's about how this friend got a boy's ring or this girl got pinned after two dates - it's too much pressure!"

"Okay, fine," Thad allowed. "But I think David was right about Ritchie Valens. He's really popular right now, and the past few years the schools that have done popular songs at Sectionals have done incredibly well."

"Anyone know La Bamba?" someone - one of the basses whose names Kurt thought was either Ed or Fred - called, earning chuckles from some and confused looks from the others.

"On guitar," Sam offered with a lopsided grin.

"We can't sing it unless anyone knows what it means," Wes stated. "Not after the incident in 1947 in which the Warblers attempted to sing an impromptu song by Edith Piaf during a convention at which a French delegation was present. Rather than singing the iconic title line, they sang 'J'ai envie alose.'"

Kurt laughed at the idea of twenty boys in uniforms singing in all sincerity "I have in mind to herring!"; he was the only one laughing, though he did catch Blaine smirking and trying not to chuckle.

Wes was not so amused. "That was nothing compared to the unintentional vulgarity they sang later rather than the lyric 'Dont je connais le cause.' It nearly caused an international incident."

"What about 'Cherie'?" asked Bill, the only boy in the Warblers with a voice higher than Kurt's.

"You just want the solo," Blaine joked, but in a way that made it pretty obvious he wouldn't try to fight the boy for it even if he could make an otherwise good case for just changing the key.

"No," Bobby groaned. "No. You can't do that."

"What now?" Thad asked at the same time David joked, "You have a second girl named Cherie?"

"No - c'mon, you guys. If I get up there in front of Donna and sing a song with another girl's name in it?"

"This is why we shouldn't sing songs with girls' names at all," Wes stated firmly.

"But that cuts out so many good ones," Blaine protested. "Come on. I'm sure we can trust girls not to read too much into it. Guys may write songs about girls to get a date, but when it's something on the radio I think it's clear what our intentions are."

"You just want to sing 'Tell Laura I Love Her,'" Nick smirked.

Blaine's discomfort at the overt reference to his date from the previous night was carefully concealed beneath a confident, mysterious grin, as if there might have been more to the night than everyone else had seen; there wasn't - a chaste kiss on the cheek as he walked her from the car at the end of the night, but that had been gentlemanly rather than anything illicit or blush-worthy. Though she wouldn't have been a poor choice of girlfriend, once he had to get one. He was starting to hit that point, he knew, but he kept putting it off. He wasn't one of the boys that was whispered about - yet. For now, a date every now and again with a different girl and a vague brush-off was more than sufficient. And once Kurt was sufficiently out of his head, he might call Laura again to go out; she was one of the few who interested him even a little.

His expression accomplished exactly what he intended for it to: a round of laughter and quasi-lecherous encouragement from the boys, and no one suspected a thing.

Kurt tried to ignore the knowing grin Blaine wore, the reaction it garnered- he assumed it had to do with the night out with girls that he had mentioned before Kurt went to the library. But the mere thought of the library had him feeling queasy again, out of sorts. He steeled himself, trying to project his most calm, even demeanor, but his fingers tightened just a little too much around his notebook and his jaw clenched just a bit too hard as the boys started a rousing discussion on the merits of "Peggy Sue" versus "Wake up Little Susie" because no fewer than four guys had gone with girls whose name was a derivation of Susan.

It all seemed so normal. So casual. Was this what boys talked about when they went off to guffaw amongst themselves and left Kurt either alone or with the girls and a snide comment about his voice? Was this what Puck and Finn and the gorillas on the football team talked about when they were alone? Was it only new to him because he'd never been included in this kind of fraternal setting before?

Was that why he felt lonelier than he ever had in his life, including the first six months after his mother died when he said maybe ten words in total? Was that why it felt like his seat had suddenly been pushed back a hundred yards and he was part of the conversation from that insurmountable distance?

He knew logically that this was not the first time he had been part of this conversation; he had overheard boys talking about girls before, he was sure of it, and the conversations during lunch the previous two weeks had certainly included mentions of Wes's girlfriend, at the very least, who was applying to colleges in California over Wes's strenuous objections as he would be at...one of the Ivy League schools, Kurt couldn't recall which one. Suddenly it just felt so much more pointed, as if every comment about girls was being directed at him. As if everyone was staring and laughing and reminding him how horribly, disgustingly abnormal he was and would always be.

Could sick people ever feel normal? Even just for a minute? Because he had been trying all day, and the clammy, nervous feeling kept coming back every time he caught himself thinking about it. It didn't seem to be going away, and he had a sinking suspicion that it never would. Every time he was in a conversation with boys, a conversation where girls were mentioned, it was going to feel like this. He was going to feel like-...like an aberration. Like some pitiable, ill creature. Like the people in that residential facility where New Directions had performed once, where half of them were barely able to keep themselves seated upright without assistance and drugged out of their minds to keep them from acting on their inappropriate urges-

...Was that the treatment for this? Was that what they did to people like him?

It was what they did to schizophrenics, wasn't it? People who heard voices telling them to do horrible, illegal, dangerous things- If he heard voices telling him to...to want Blaine, did that...

...did that count? Was he sicker than he thought?

He didn't even notice the meeting wrapping up, but heard the sharp bang of Wes's gavel. His head snapped up and he saw Warblers leaving in groups of threes and fours. He began to gather his things and a thigh came into his line of vision. He glanced up slowly and found Blaine standing above him, looking concerned. "Are you okay, Kurt?"

"Of course," he replied as smoothly as he could, which wasn't very.

Blaine kicked himself for coming over to ask in the first place. He was supposed to be avoiding Kurt, to not spend all his time fixating...staring...it was just that the boy looked so achingly, breathtakingly sad, that was all. He was just trying to comfort his friend. To make sure nothing was wrong. That he was settling in okay at this new school that was kind of a strange world in and of itself. After all, Kurt was new to the Warblers, and he got the feeling that the guy was having a hard time adjusting to the energy of the room and the way they operated - his first day had gone pretty disastrously, after all, with the awkward attempts at humour and the inappropriate song suggestions. Maybe he was just feeling out of place and could use a friendly shoulder to lean on - someone who had been the new boy once and made it through with flying colours once he learned to blend in a little better.

When he put it like that, he could almost believe it.

"I know we take a little getting used to," he offered. "But don't worry - you'll fit right in. I promise."

The kind sympathy in Blaine's eyes was almost too much for Kurt to take on its own; then he added the line that really twisted the knife. "You just need to keep blending in, like you've been doing."

Translation: As soon as we know you're crazy, you're gone. No one will speak to you.

That had to be what he meant. After all, if they all looked at him like he was nuts just for suggesting they sing a song by a girl, he could only imagine how they would look at him when they actually knew he was nuts.

But then...wanting to sing a song by a girl was kind of the problem, wasn't it? The inverse what what a male should want. Maybe they all knew his secret already. Maybe everyone had known he was crazy for years - the boys at McKinley certainly seemed to know he was more like a girl than like a boy, and had since he had met any of them. Maybe everyone here knew, it too. Maybe he was the last to know.

He was afraid to ask.

* * * * *

"Sam? Can I ask you a question?" He cursed his voice for quivering, but the look on Sam's face seemed to indicate he hadn't noticed.

"Sure." Sam looked up from his comic book - a Saturday evening treat after a long week of working nonstop, Kurt surmised. He was sprawled on his bed and seemed relaxed...downright comfortable. Certainly more than Kurt had seen in the time he'd known the non-blond. Maybe that was what happened when Sam wasn't stressing over school for a couple hours.

The thought, combined with the enviable level of contentment his roommate appeared to be experiencing, renewed his commitment to find out what was wrong...once he could think of the word "library" without flinching.

"Have you ever had a girlfriend?" The question tumbled out awkwardly from Kurt's tongue as he shifted stiffly, perched on the side of his bed. He wasn't sure why he felt better in positions that seemed to just elevate his level of stiffness and tension, but he always had; when something was wrong, when he was uncomfortable, it was like if he channeled all of that into his posture somehow it helped the rest of him relax. He was trying his level best now, but so far to no avail.

Sam blinked, glanced down, then gave a kind of weak, crooked smile. "Not really." His voice rumbled low in his chest when he spoke, and it always surprised Kurt a little because he knew Sam only sang one line below him. He wasn't sure why Sam's speaking voice could be so low when his singing voice was so high - for Kurt it seemed to be a package deal, a fact he'd been lamenting since he was 13 and everyone else's speaking voices dropped.

Was it because Sam wasn't sick and he was? Was the sexual inversion thing what kept his voice from sounding like everyone else's? It seemed strange that a mental illness would cause that kind of physical response, but considering it somehow related to his hips being the shape that they were, maybe it was related.

He didn't know. He knew he could theoretically find out, but he wasn't sure he wanted to go down that road yet. He didn't know that he could go back to the library and flip through that horrible book and read what else there was to say about how crazy he was.

"It's 'cause I spend so much time studying, y'know? And I don't really get girls, I mean - they're pretty, and I like them and all, but whenever I try to talk to one like, at mixers and stuff, they think I'm kind of a freak of nature or something. Girls don't really read comics or watch sci fi."

Kurt supposed he could see the girls' points inasmuch as Sam was a bit of an acquired taste - a genuinely nice guy, but a little strange and with an even bigger tendency towards awkward humour than Kurt had, which was saying quite a bit.

"I want to, though. Hey, maybe if we figure out what's wrong with me, we can take a Friday night off, find some girls, and go on a double date," Sam offered with a grin; Kurt got the feeling Sam didn't actually believe the day would come but desperately wanted to. Kurt desperately wanted to avoid it, even if he hoped to make the first part come true.

Why was he so adverse to it? he wondered. He was practically a girl, he had always been best friends with girls, they always enjoyed each others' company, why not embrace the idea of going out with them? He already missed hanging out with Mercedes and girls from his own school, talking about the movies and music they had in common. Wouldn't a date be nice for that?

...Until they realized Sam was the only real man at the table, he reminded himself. He was something in between, and that would only be more obvious when the four of them sat down together.

"What about you?" Sam asked.

Kurt thought about lying - about saying that he and Mercedes were an item. After all, he did talk about her all the time, more often than most of the boys talked about girls they were dating. He genuinely liked her and could maybe love her that way if he tried hard enough. They had plenty in common and had been best friends practically forever...and no one at Dalton would judge him for it, not the way they would back home. No one at Dalton looked at him strangely when they saw the picture of his best friend and her family on the night stand. No one would even think it was strange that their families had been close since he was a child, as long as he left out the part where technically her mother worked for his father - several of the guys were dating or had dated in the past girls that they had known for most of their lives thanks to their parents being in the same circles. He could just lie and tell Sam that he and his girlfriend Mercedes had been an item for some time now but prejudices back home kept them from going out much. Maybe in time he could even make that be the truth.

He told a bigger lie instead.

"No," he said, pasting on a fake smile. "Just haven't met the right girl yet, I guess."