At approximately 9:47 on Thursday, with exactly 13 minutes to spare before he would have to leave the library and not return until classes were out on Tuesday, he finally found what he had been looking for: an abstract in a medical journal from 1951 - and seriously, where were the items in Dalton's library coming from, because the assortment seemed entirely random and not necessarily useful. After all, if an alumnus had decided to donate the following month's journal instead of this one or something, he would never have found the information he needed. Or maybe he was missing some crucial piece of the puzzle that would have helped him figure out what was wrong earlier. In any event, he supposed he should just be lucky he found it. At least, he thought he had.

He walked quickly, with short, sure steps, across the library and stood across from Sam. "Let's go."

"We still have-"

"I found it."

Sam's head jerked up, eyes wide. "Y-...you did?"

"Yes. I think so, at least, it's not entirely easy to tell without a background in medicine, but this sounds like everything you said." A student at the next table over shushed him loudly, and Kurt rolled his eyes, dropping his voice to a whisper. "So come on."

Sam hurriedly gathered his books, shoving papers into their folders and grabbing his pencils and pens into his tightly-clenched fist. It wasn't until they were walking out the front doors of the library that Sam finally spoke again. "Is it...you know. Something bad?"

He looked so damned nervous that Kurt wanted to hug him, because he knew that feeling. The panic that something was badly wrong with you- that the problem making your life miserable was incurable, unfixable, and not something you could ever talk about... "No," Kurt assured him, meeting his eyes. "At least, I don't think so. Not from the article I found."

Sam's relief was almost tangible as his tight, nervous smile turned into a more genuine grin, and Kurt couldn't help but smile. He remembered how amazing that feeling was - how incredible he had found when he saw the paragraph about the man who had come to symbolize everything he could be.

He wondered suddenly if maybe Blaine didn't know. If Blaine was like him - and he wasn't entirely sure why he thought, he wasn't sure how precisely he would know, but the feeling persisted...if Blaine was like him, maybe Blaine didn't know what he was yet. After all, Kurt only knew because he had found those four documents that told him, and if Blaine hadn't seen those-

Or worse, if Blaine had only seen the textbook? Or books and articles that said the same thing as the textbook?

He had no idea how to bring it up, was the problem. What precisely was he meant to do? Say "Hey, Blaine, have you ever had erotic and/or romantic feelings towards a man? If so, there's something you should know!"? Not hardly, and not just because he couldn't imagine saying the word 'erotic' out loud to anyone, least of all someone who already kind of made him blush just by existing. But what if he was right? What if he was right and Blaine was going through his entire life not even knowing what else was out there?

That was stupid, he told himself, almost rolling his eyes. Blaine was older than he was and seemed a lot more savvy about...well, most social things, at any rate. He probably hadn't spent most of his formative years sitting around with one girl singing showtunes the way Kurt had - he'd had friends and groups of people the way most boys did, the way Finn or his buddies did. Blaine almost certainly knew what - if anything - he was. And if he wasn't noticing Kurt being completely head-over-heels, stupidly, blissfully in love with him to the point where he started grinning and blushing if he so much as thought the name "Blaine"...then that meant there was a decent chance that Blaine knew what he was and that wasn't what Kurt was. Maybe-

...maybe he really did like that Laura girl. Kurt's stomach twisted at the thought, but he didn't-

"Kurt?" Sam's voice snapped him out of his daydream - okay, more like a nightmare as he pictured Blaine escorting some girl around where he should be. "...You said it wasn't bad, but you kinda...look like you're gonna throw up or something, so you're kinda freaking me out here."

"What?" Kurt blinked. "Oh! Right. I'm sorry, I was just distracted - I've been spending too long in that library, I don't know how you do it without going crazy." The lies came easier now, and a part of him felt like he must have always been telling them but it felt different now. The little pangs of frustration with each thing he said that he knew wasn't true - or wasn't nearly the whole truth - felt like they were building and collecting. It had only been two weeks of knowing they were lies, and already it was starting to ache when he realized that it didn't even occur to him to say what he was really thinking.

He'd always done it; it just felt different now. Dirtier. Scarier.

Sam was still staring at him, the worried expression back on his face, so Kurt drew in a deep breath and tried to focus on the topic at hand. This was important. Making sure Sam knew he wasn't wrong was important. Crucial, even.

The rest could wait.

* * * * *

"You're sure your family or whoever doesn't mind a stowaway?" Sam asked as he shoved a few pairs of casual pants into his bag.

"No, I asked my dad on Tuesday," Kurt replied. "Considering you live less than five miles from where I do, it doesn't make any sense to make your parents come all the way out here."

"My parents live there," Sam corrected.

"Hm?"

"They live five miles from your parents; I don't live there." He leaned over to the desk, contemplating the stack of comics, then reluctantly set them down and grabbed his math book instead. "Sorry. I'm just not looking forward to the questions about how my grades are so far."

"But you know what the problem is now," Kurt pointed out. The clothing options in his closet were all so tempting, and he wasn't entirely sure which ones to select - and that was to say nothing of the clothing options still at home. He was tempted to take a few of the things from his armoire with him to swap them out, bring new ones back, but he hadn't had enough of an opportunity to wear any of them to feel like he wanted to switch yet. There were distinct disadvantages to Dalton sometimes.

"Yeah, but I don't know that saying 'It's not my fault, Mom and Dad, I have this thing called dyslexia and Kurt thinks you should take me to a specialist at Ohio State' is gonna win me enough points, y'know?" Sam rolled his eyes.

"You should take a night off, at least. Relax a little."

"With who? I don't know anyone out there - I've been here for two years and was down near Cinci before that."

Kurt thought a moment. He had already been contemplating a night out with the New Directions gang plus Mercedes, and he knew that any night out during his second weekend at home since August was going to go over better if Finn was with him anyway - family bonding or whatnot...and Sam was bound to get along with some of them, at least. His interest in sports would help him with Finn and Puck, and everyone at the table would be interested in music... He smiled. "Don't you worry about that. You're coming out with a group of us on Saturday. In fact- I may set you up with one of the girls. She's...slow. And shallow. But you need to learn to interact with attractive young women."

"I do fine."

Kurt gave him a deadpan look. "The last time you spoke with one was...when, precisely?"

Sam blushed and rolled his eyes. "Okay, fine."

"You'd look cute together, too - you're both blond. But you'll come out with us, we're just going to have dinner or something. It'll be fun."

Sam hesitated, then a smile spread slowly across his face as he contemplated a night off. "Yeah," he replied. "Yeah, okay. Sounds like fun."

"Great," Kurt replied. Selecting only a few articles of clothing and deciding to wear the rest from his sizable closet at home, he began to gather his homework. Who assigned so much over a holiday? It was kind of cruel, he thought, but what could a person do? "Have you seen my physics book?"

Sam checked the front cover of the book on his bed and shook his head. "No, this one's mine. Sorry."

Kurt checked under his suitcase, then in his bag, then checked on his desk again. Nothing. He tried to remember when he'd last had it - not in the library, he didn't think, he'd finished his reading before the end of the day which meant- "In the office," he sighed. "I'll be right back." He pulled on his jacket and toed on his loafers, then checked the time. "If my stepmother gets here, tell her I'll be less than five minutes." He rolled his eyes and quickly strode out of the room, hurrying towards the main building.

Campus was surprisingly quiet for mid-afternoon on a Friday, even though classes had only let out at noon so there should theoretically have been more people around. A few boys carried suitcases towards the parking lot, but everyone else seemed to have either left already or to be lying low until their rides arrived in the evening. The main building seemed almost too still for the loud echo of his shoes against the floor, and he cringed at the amplified sound as he got to the stairwell and it his steps seemed all the noisier. Trailing his fingers down the banister as he descended, he found himself daydreaming about an entire weekend back home - family dinner tonight, probably spending most of Saturday with Mercedes, Saturday night out with everyone...even if he didn't particularly like most of them when he went to McKinley, he still missed them so much now that he was two hours away. Then Sunday at the shop where he could mock Finn for still being confused by the finer points of engine reassembly that he had learned when he was about ten, followed by a lazy Monday before riding back in the evening. Probably with time built in for shopping, which he missed even though he knew he wouldn't have much use for purchases other than pajamas as long as he was at Dalton; that wasn't the point.

He strode confidently through the suite of offices dedicated to student organizations; the Warblers' office was one of the larger ones, even if Wes was right and there wasn't really room for everyone to put all of their things there during the day. It was also a corner office, which Thad thought was a big deal, even though none of the offices had windows because it was part of an interior maze of hallways. With a faint smile and a shake of his head, he pulled open the door-

"Blaine." Kurt wasn't sure why he was so surprised to see him there, but it felt so...unexpected, just running into him like that. Not like they hadn't run into each other a few dozen times in the previous week just because it was a small enough campus and they had enough friends in common (well...Blaine was friends with them; Kurt didn't know them well enough for that yet, but they were mutually pleasant acquaintances at any rate) that it was hardly a strange occurrence, and yet something about it made him feel caught off-guard. Maybe because the first thing he did was start blushing and, had he been adequately prepared to run into Blaine, he would have steeled himself against that first.

It didn't always work, but it was better than chancing it. His skin, when given its way, would always turn the reddest it could without him looking like he was bursting into flames.

Blaine looked up suddenly from his homework. "Hey," he replied stiffly, looking...nervous? Was that what the kind of lopsided, awkward, plastered-on grin was meant to signify?

...did Blaine even get nervous? Kurt wondered. He'd never seen it before and the boy seemed to always be so damned confident in a way he completely admired and envied. So confident and comfortable in his skin and his surroundings. Blaine wouldn't do something stupid like almost accidentally knock over an entire tray of salad bowls because he was surprised to see Kurt appear out of nowhere.

...which Kurt hadn't done, he would like it known, he just...almost did. And it wasn't just because Blaine clapped a friendly hand on his shoulder or anything. He was surely distracted by something else.

"Hello," Kurt replied awkwardly.

"What are you doing here?"

"Forgot my physics book yesterday. I needed to come grab it before I went home for the weekend." It was getting harder to act like he didn't want to throw himself in Blaine's general direction. Or to not smile like a fool as soon as they were in the same room. Or to not do something really stupid like ask the questions he kept wanting to ask - if Blaine was...or liked...or might like...or had ever...or any number of things that were just plain inappropriate and would result in certain unspecified disaster if he were wrong.

"Oh." Blaine glanced around, then picked up the book from the top of the bookcase filled with sheet music. "This one?"

"Looks like," Kurt replied. He took a few steps forward to take it; Blaine didn't make the kind of intense eye contact the way he had a few days earlier, listening to that song (Kurt did believe he had a new alltime favourite song, by the way), but it was still enough to make him feel glued in place, like he couldn't bring himself to tear his eyes away. "And you?"

"What?"

"What are you doing here?"

"Hiding out," Blaine replied, a more genuine smile dancing in his eyes, and Kurt consciously reminded himself that swooning was not attractive and would surely result in him hitting his head on some heavy piece of wooden furniture. The office was definitely not big enough for a movie heroine's grand gestures.

"I would've thought you'd left already," Kurt stated. Most of the richer boys had - what with having drivers or butlers or valets or whatnot. Only the boys with families who couldn't drop everything midday but also couldn't send someone to fetch their beloved son remained.

"Edgar's coming at four sharp," Blaine replied with a roll of his eyes that made Kurt think there had been a lecture of some kind associated with that news. Mostly he just couldn't get over the fact that he seriously knew someone with a butler named Edgar.

...maybe, he realized. It was possible that wasn't how things were at all, even if Blaine's dad was a doctor. After all, a few years ago Mrs. Jones would have been the one to come pick him up, and people would have made assumptions because there seemed to be a black employee of the family coming to fetch him, but that wouldn't have been even close to the real story.

"Looking forward to going home?" Kurt asked, and Blaine's look told him everything he needed to know, even if it didn't entirely satisfy his curiosity. Was he the only boy at Dalton who was looking forward to a weekend with his family? Sam acted like it was a horribly oppressive obligation, Blaine wasn't seeming much better...he was practically jumping for joy at getting to leave for a few days and see his family, his friends, to go do all the simple, normal things he'd taken for granted before August.

"You know," Kurt said before he knew exactly what he was saying or why, "If you wanted something to do this weekend - I mean, I assume you have plans and people to see back home, but if you didn't - you could always come out to Lima. You'd get two Warblers for the price of one, and it's not all that far."

It was a ridiculous offer, the kind a child would make - "You look like you want to pout about going home, come to my house instead" - and he couldn't figure out what even made him say it...except for the fact that four days without seeing Blaine or laughing at something he said or feeling his hand on his arm felt like a lifetime and somehow was almost enough to make him wish they didn't have this break.

Almost. If it weren't for how much he missed the quiet of having his own bedroom, it would have definitely been enough. Okay, and maybe how much he missed his dad, but still. The contest was far too close considering how little time he and Blaine had known each other.

Blaine's smile was faint, tight. "While I'm sure your plans for the weekend are much more fun than mine will be...that probably won't be an option. But thank you for the offer." He reached out to touch Kurt's arm, and Kurt was unable to keep the grin off his face at the contact and the way it made his stomach jump just a little - in a good way. He was still getting used to the idea that it felt that good.

"It still stands - if you change your mind." Kurt drew in a deep breath and forced himself to take a step back. "My stepmother's probably here, I should..."

"Of course," Blaine replied. "Have fun. See you Monday night maybe?"

"Yeah, maybe," Kurt replied, the stupid grin still on his face. "I should go."

"Yeah, I got that." Blaine's teasing grin - had he repeated himself? Oh. Maybe he had. Right. - made him roll his eyes a little, but he forced himself to turn and leave.

What was with him? He was better at being pulled-together than this. Ugh. He had turned into everything ridiculous that girls did when they kind of obsessively liked a boy. He was turning into Rachel Berry, with her completely obvious love of Finn despite his very serious longterm relationship with Quinn that wasn't going to end any time soon - the way she practically turned into a giant ball of sappy, adoring fan that made her sing ridiculous declarations of love to Finn in front of everyone...

...he was so not above doing that right now, and that was never a good sign.

He rolled his eyes at himself as he walked back down the hall.

...he couldn't skip. It would be too obvious if someone rounded a corner suddenly, if only because his bouncy, uneven steps would echo too much.

* * * * *

Of the many things Blaine enjoyed about living at Dalton, the one that always felt like the biggest luxury was talking and joking during meal time. It was a stupid little thing that shouldn't have mattered, he knew that, and of all the big things - the ability to come and go more or less as he pleased, being surrounded by a lot of people instead of the kind of isolation that came from being an only child, having a purpose and something to do to fill almost every minute of the day...it was the idea of meals as a respite, a recharging period, that always stood out. The idea that, after an excrutiatingly long morning of classes (because who in their right minds thought that advanced biology followed by calculus followed by the most boring U.S. history teacher in the universe was a reasonable schedule?), lunch time was his opportunity to talk and joke and listen to the other Warblers talk and joke and tease each other about stupid things one or more of them had said during the day...about nothing in particular, really. They didn't even discuss Warblers business at lunch, despite Wes's attempts to the contrary. There was an understanding that, in a world of too many schedules and too much to do, lunch was a time for them to just enjoy each others' company.

He thought about that as he sat stiffly at his parents' dining table. Despite the fact that there were only three of them, they insisted on eating always in the formal dining room despite the fact that there was a perfectly serviceable table in the breakfast nook. A table that, he was fairly certain, he was the only one to ever use and even then only when he was the only one around. While there was no photographic evidence, he knew that when he was at school? His parents still ate at this table that was best suited for ten - his father at the head, his mother at the foot, and just some centerpieces and eight feet of polished wood between them.

Maybe that was why they never spoke much at mealtimes. It practically required shouting to be heard from one end to the other.

He got the impression that his parents almost wished they'd had a second child so the table would be more balanced; it was almost impossible to plan well when there was someone who wasn't properly coupled off, and before a certain age it was just inappropriate to have family friends bring an extra person - he could only imagine what psychological justification his father would have given about trying to pair him off with a nice girl at age 11 during the annual Christmas party for sake of an even table.

During the summers he got used to it all - the silence, the strain, the formal dress code even during a weeknight dinner for the three of them - and when he was younger he hadn't known enough to think it was unusual. But when it was just for a few days, just a weekend, the reentry from his gloriously loud world into this echoing chasm of silence left him feeling perpetually out of sorts. If he'd had the option to stay at Dalton all weekend, he would have gladly taken it, but for some reason this was the rule that even Warblers couldn't get around.

So at precisely the stroke of 7, dressed in a dark suit with a striped tie and immaculately-shined shoes, he made his way down the grand staircase in the foyer and into the dining room. His mother was already there, staring off into space as she sat at the foot of the table, a hi-ball of some type of pre-dinner spirits resting in her curled hand, her perfectly-manicured nails just barely tapping at the glass. She was a beautiful woman - tall and slim, still towering over him even now that he had reached what he was beginning to reluctantly acknowledge was probably his full height, with silky blonde hair that her expert stylist kept looking like Grace Kelly's. Her poise and elegance were beyond compare with the kind of perfection that came from being an empty shell of a human being. Who needed to work at being without fault when there wasn't an ounce of person left inside to make things messy, to screw things up? Say what you want about chlorpromazine and its ilk, but it had turned his mother from a woman who laughed too loudly and occasionally lost her temper into the perfect robot of a wife who attended every function and luncheon and shook every hand without so much as a flicker of recognition of anything distasteful like emotions.

He wasn't sure he remembered what she'd been like before, not anymore. Not by now. It had been almost his entire life, he knew that, and to this day he didn't know the whole story. He remembered sitting at the top of the stairs after he was meant to be in bed as he usually did, and hearing her yelling. Upset about something. He heard her; the entire house heard her, all the guests...and then his father, ever the psychiatrist, had taken her to a colleague and gotten her set up with something lovely to calm her nerves. He still didn't know what had made her snap that night, though there had been rumours at subsequent parties about his father and his exotic-looking nurse, but Blaine knew better; his father tried to conceal every non-white part of himself with a ferocity generally reserved for beloved hobbies or a cut-throat career path or the welfare of one's family. There wasn't any universe in which his father would have willingly become involved with someone he thought might undermine the illusion he'd worked hard to create.

It would have caused too much of a scandal. His mother's outburst had caused more than enough for a lifetime of Andersons.

He wondered occasionally, with a kind of idle curiosity, where in the world his last name had come from because he had met a few of his father's side of the family when he was young and they didn't look like the sort of people to have such a...well, such an upper-crust and exceedingly white surname. He had long suspected his father opened a phone book to the first page and picked the name with the most number of entries. Common, but still the first listing in the yellow pages for his practice. After all, his father was still a businessman even if that wasn't his primary profession.

His father breezed in at precisely 7:10, his tardiness going unnoticed as it always did; had Blaine been so much as two minutes late, there would have been hell to pay - assuming his mother could still read that exquisite Tiffanys watch dangling from her slim wrist, that was, he thought sarcastically. He wasn't sure what it was about being around his parents that brought out the surly teenager in him, but like clockwork there it was by the time the first dinner at home started.

The maid - whose name Blaine didn't know only because she had been hired two days after he left for Dalton - whisked in to place the salads in front of the three diners. Her footsteps were quick and silent, a winning combination in that house. She was gone almost as quickly as she had arrived, and his mother began to delicately pick at her food with the kind of careful determination she could devote only to completely meaningless things like selecting a centerpiece or spearing a precise leaf of lettuce.

"Blaine." His father's voice broke the silence abruptly, and Blaine tried not to jerk towards the sound; he knew better. Still, it was the first anyone except Edgar had bothered to acknowledge his presence, and he wondered if maybe- "Posture."

Blaine sighed and straightened a little in the chair. He was out of practice; during the summer the finer points of his parents' social graces became second nature again, and he was always amazed how quickly they disappeared once he was at school. He'd been gone barely a month and was getting critiques already - he didn't want to think about what would happen by the time he came back for Thanksgiving, in all its fifteen-course glory with a half-dozen of his father's colleagues and their wives, all of whom his mother saw socially on a regular basis. They would have to bring out the table leaf for that to fit sixteen instead of ten, leaving his parents even further away with no reason whatsoever to speak to one another; Blaine wondered if that was their favourite part of the day, the real reason to be thankful.

No, he concluded with a faint smile to himself. That would imply they were hostile towards one another. They couldn't be; that would require them having emotional attachment.

"How is school this year, darling?" His mother's voice was smooth, with just enough emotion and feigned interest to be socially appropriate.

He thought for a moment, knowing he needed to be careful of his language and speech here in a way he didn't at school. It was like remembering a separate dialect, or that "soda" when they went to the family compound in Maine during the summers meant something entirely different - a horrible bitter concoction that was nothing like the Coca Cola he'd been requesting. While he was considered to be one of the more adult-sounding students at Dalton, a fact that curried plenty of favour among the teachers, at home he sounded immature by comparison - a fact his father had been trying to change since he was about eight. "I'm enjoying it," he stated smoothly with exactly the right practiced level of confidence and comfort. "My biology professor is excellent, and I find myself doing better than expected."

His mother gave a vaguely happy-sounding "mmm?" as she sipped her drink, which was as high of praise as he was likely to get from her; he had a feeling it would still be the highlight of the evening.

"Your marks so far?"

Blaine had often wondered how his father, who made a living off listening to other people's problems and telling them how to fix them, could do so well for himself when the only times Blaine heard him speak he sounded so inherently, intrinsically annoyed. Displeased. Bored - as though he knew the answer already and he resented the subtle social pressure to ask the question at all. As though he wanted nothing more than to eat dinner in complete silence without intrusion from the inconvenience of his son being home from school and therefore expecting an intrusive conversation.

Blaine had stopped expecting conversation of any kind before his twelfth birthday; he doubted he would ever stop wanting it.

"All A's," he reported evenly without pride. If he sounded proud, it would appear that he was cocky - that he thought all A's were gratuitous and he could have been happy with a few B's. That simply would not do. All A's were exactly what were expected of him and what he would unfailingly deliver.

Sure enough, his father's reaction was a simple nod, as though that was exactly what he expected to hear. He wondered if it was the same nod that schizophrenics got when revealing the deeply complicated worlds building themselves inside their heads - the slow, simple nod that was carefully practiced to seem without judgment but was more loaded than any word could ever be.

"And your applications?"

"Not yet, sir," Blaine replied. College applications had been the topic of each and every one of the four conversations he and his father had had over the summer - and those four conversations were practically a record for them.

His father's brow furrowed and Blaine was struck by the realization that his eyes narrowed a little when he did that almost-glare thing. He wondered if they narrowed when his father smiled, too - he'd never seen that, not that he could remember at least. Maybe that was why he was determined to seem neutral all the time, completely without any semblance of human emotions in the presence of others; maybe it all came back to trying to appear as non-Asian as humanly possible.

It seemed ridiculous, he knew that, but considering the earliest lecture he could remember involved his father telling him that the only way to get ahead in life was to blend in with the crowd...he'd been six, maybe seven, and excited about getting a solo in the all-school Christmas pageant. It wasn't even like he'd gone and tried out for that one, the teacher picked him because he was the best student and the only boy who never gave her any trouble, but for some reason the mere act of being alone in the center of the stage like that, singing without anyone around to cover his mistakes if he made them...to his father, that was threatening. Made everyone vulnerable. Made him uncomfortable.

Made Blaine want to sing every solo he could get his hands on because he was six or seven and hated being told no so often.

So apparently being around his parents had made him surly long before he became a teenager.

"Those need to be in soon. Your legacies won't get you everything, you know."

No, Blaine thought, but the donations to whichever of the two Ivy League schools he selected certainly would. Yale and Princeton both - whichever he selected, even if he didn't have stellar grades and a host of well-regarded extracurriculars, his father's last name and the generous grant to whatever department the school wanted would ensure his acceptance.

He hated it. He hated the whole idea of it. The fact that, right now, Sam would be able to get into better schools than Kurt could because Sam's family had gone to good schools - even though Sam's grades were horrible and he would probably say something silly in the interview because he hadn't had the same kind of social graces drilled into him...not that Sam didn't deserve to go somewhere good, it wasn't that, and he knew as well as anyone how hard Sam worked to try and show people he wasn't dumb, it was just that...Kurt wanted it ten times more than any person he knew and would probably never get there because of the system. How was that fair? How was any of that something he could legitimately buy into?

But he would, he knew that. He would apply to the two schools from which his father held degrees and probably get into both of them, then select the one he liked better and get whatever he wanted. If only he actually wanted any of it.

He didn't dislike the schools themselves; Yale actually seemed pretty great, they had the most incredible a cappella groups in the country and a football team people actually went out to watch on the weekends...he would probably enjoy himself there. Especially if he made with Whiffenpoofs. It just pissed him off that this was why.

"I know, sir," he replied simply, taking a few bites of his salad.

"You should have gone on tours of them this weekend instead of coming here." And even though Blaine knew that what his father meant wasn't "We don't want to see you"...he also knew the didn't exactly revel in his visits.

"Dalton's arranged a trip next month. I've signed up to go." The reply was clearly not satisfactory to his father, but the matter was considered dropped.

Their salads were cleared in silence, and no one spoke during the soup course. When he was little, Blaine had wondered if it was all a secret trick to try to get him to slip up; if no one was speaking, it made it much easier to hear if a kid made the mistake of slurping his soup. He had come to realize that was simply too taxing for his family to try to sustain conversation during two courses in a row. The niceties of the salad course had to give way to the silence of soup if they wanted to have the emotional or mental capacity to engage in pleasant exchanges of anecdotes during the main course, only to retreat back into silence as they carefully picked at their pretentious desserts.

He wondered if the fact that he could carry on a conversation for longer than five minutes at a stretch made him some kind of aberration. After all, everyone around him seemed to be like this, even during dinner parties where continuous quiet meaningless conversation was not just expected but required if one was polite...then he met a few of the Warblers. Jeff and Nick could fill an entire dinner just the two of them, cracking jokes and teasing each other.

He missed them already. It had been four hours.

He hadn't had cornish game hen in awhile, and while it was beautifully cooked, he kind of longed for the simplicity of a burger. It was ironic; at school, everyone talked about how formal he was, said if he were just a little more uptight and stopped dancing so much he would be Wes's doppleganger, but at home he felt so...sloppy. Unrefined for even wanting something simple instead of the complex, elegant dinner before him.

He had been chastised frequently for wanting things he shouldn't. At a certain point he just stopped admitting he wanted them; it was easier for everyone that way.

"So, dear," his mother said as she elegantly worked to deconstruct the bird on her plate. "How was work?"

He was convinced his mother had a Rolodex of questions in her mind, go-to safe topics that she could pull at random for any situation. He would have thought it odd, but considering the friends of hers he'd met he didn't think he could even blame her probably-toxic combination of pharmaceuticals and alcohol. Next she would probably pull something about the weather, then possibly a question about the upcoming party season and someone's masked charity ball, all asked with the same affected smile and lack of investment. She didn't care what the answer was - she never did. None of them cared about the response; they cared that it was the right, proper question to ask in the first place and then everyone stopped listening.

His father swallowed his mouthful of food, then responded, "Average. Though there is an interesting case that's just come in."

Blaine froze.

They had these code words, the three of them. "Colourful" meant something more than merely unconventional, but someone who defied social graces because they lacked the proper knowledge and background to adhere to the rules properly. "Business-oriented" meant someone who was indelibly dry and interested only in himself - without, as his parents did, pretending to be interested in the others. Everyone knew no one actually cared about what the others were doing, but they all made a show of acting like they did because that was just polite. "Modern" meant hideous when applied to furniture and inedible when applied to food, and "interesting case"-...

...Interesting case almost always referred to homosexuals. Actually, scratch that - it always referred to them; the only case Blaine thought was a counterexample had turned out not to be, as the revelation of what the voices in the patient's head told him to do had an awful lot to do with preying on young boys for sexual gratification.

His mother simply nodded with interest, eyes round as she sipped her water, as though she didn't know exactly where this was going. Of course she knew, they just weren't meant to acknowledge the code; they were supposed to pretend this wasn't all so damned formulaic. "Oh?"

"Yes. And a particularly difficult one."

Difficult. That meant he didn't want to change. That the homosexual didn't think he was sick, and there seemed to be nothing Blaine's father delighted in more than proving him wrong.

Not that he wasn't wrong, Blaine knew - the poor man was sick, it was just the kind of...pride his father's voice would take on when he talked about curing him-

He knew he was being irrational, that he was taking it too personally because of his own fears. His father's job was to cure people who were sick, to alleviate their suffering and ameliorate their conditions to the point where they could function normally. Could be normal people who could blend in with the rest of the world around them. Of course his father was proud when he accomplished that, even if the methods were barbaric.

Those had their own code words, too.

"He's had a lengthy history, this patient, with a number of recurrences. And intense symptoms."

That meant he'd tried fixing it before and it had failed. And 'intense symptoms'? That meant he'd done the worst thing he could possibly do: he'd had sex. With a man. And if the case was difficult, it meant he didn't have remorse for it.

Blaine wondered if he would have remorse, if he screwed up like that. If he would regret it as much as he regretted feeling it in the first place, or if something...happened after. If something happened and after going through with the acts he envisioned so much - it felt like all the time they were in his head, especially at a school where all he saw were boys and so many of them were physically attractive, fit, clean-cut in their uniforms...if after doing that, having the most intense of intense symptoms...if it made the person stop feeling bad for doing what he'd done. If it was like a psychotic episode, where sometimes the patient had struggled for years to overcome and ignore and vanquish their demons, but after a psychotic break they just-...it stopped seeming wrong. They were too far gone to know how horrible it was, the things they'd done.

He wondered if that was why the recurrences.

If he would have recurrences.

Because he knew how easy it was to let himself slip a little, to start wanting what he knew he shouldn't want, how hard it was to clamp back down on it and shove it back and not think about it. And the more he tried to let himself have just a little taste- It made things worse.

If he let himself do everything he wanted to do, everything in those incredibly hot, intense dreams that left his sheets sticky and his throat sore from the moaning he apparently did into his pillow in his sleep...he could only imagine how much the intense symptoms would recur. And that couldn't happen.

He couldn't let it.

A part of him felt like he needed to get help. He had always been praised by teachers for being the kind of kid who knew enough to go to an adult when there was a problem, and this...this was a big problem. He should be...adult enough to tell someone and get help.

But the only person he could tell would be his father, and he couldn't-...the amount of shame it would bring him, that his own son-

There were a lot of people in psychiatry who believed it was the parents' fault, and while the theory of an overbearing mother was certainly inaccurate, the absent father bit...well, there might be some grounds for that. Or at least, his father might think there were grounds for that, and it wasn't entirely fair to him.

Not that he particularly wanted to be involved in any of the "options," either. The "treatments." He knew what they entailed, and he wasn't so sure he wanted to leap into any of that.

He could imagine the family dinner after that conversation, his mother and father talking in all the same euphemisms about him - about how he was an interesting case but fortunately hadn't been too severe in his manifestations - after all, he still liked football and could talk passably about cars if he had to - and wasn't at risk for many recurrences provided the treatment options worked. No emotion. No showing that he was any different than any random homosexual man his father encountered. They would barely stop eating their salads long enough to mention it at all, probably.

But it would be there, hanging over them, like some giant guilt-tripping cloud, and suddenly he felt like he couldn't breathe. His hands quivered as he lifted his fork to his mouth to take a bite, to keep himself from admitting something or asking a question or doing anything except sitting straight up in his chair and eating politely.

If he forced himself hard enough, he could feel normal.

He'd done it before, and it wasn't such a bad thing. Just because he enjoyed standing out when he sang solos didn't mean he had a problem with the idea of fitting in - especially not this way. He could let his parents introduce him to a nice girl - a daughter of his father's business associates, most likely, maybe the daughter of a woman in one of his mother's social circles or a new initiate into the D.A.R. once he got to New England where it seemed like everyone he'd ever met was a member...a girl of good breeding and impeccable grace, who could entertain guests at a party with ease and juggle a half-dozen social responsibilities at a time while he was off doing some achingly boring job. Then he would come home and they would have silent dinners across a giant table and be shells of people the way all adults were.

It was just that he couldn't go there yet without feeling like he was suffocating on his own lungs.

He made it through dinner and excused himself shortly into dessert; no one noticed. By the time he reached his room, he was almost shaking with tension, with the intense need to just get out. It wasn't normally this bad, he knew that. Usually he lasted at least a couple days before it felt like he was being strangled by his mother's gardenia perfume and his father's idle disapproval; six hours might be a new record.

Approximately sixty-eight still to go.

He let out an involuntary whimper at the thought, clamping his mouth shut before another sound could escape into the silence of the bedroom that never felt like it belonged to him.

Maybe if he focused hard enough on things, he could feel like he was back in his home, at school, where he belonged, where he didn't feel like he might die from everything being so...so everything. Pulling out his math book, a slip of paper fell from his bag.

Kurt's phone number.

It had been in there so long he'd forgotten about it - Kurt had given it to him back when he'd gotten the boy his off-campus pass that first weekend, just in case anything had gone wrong or someone needed to reach him.

He wondered what Kurt was doing right now. If he felt as smothered by being home as he did. He knew going home for the first time in almost a month after getting used to Dalton had to be strange - he should call and check on him, see how he was holding up. Reentry problems were common among new Dalton students, especially among those whom hadn't been going to boarding schools their entire educational careers. He reached for the phone on the nightstand and dialed the number written on the slip.

Kurt answered on the third ring. "Sorry, Mercedes, I'll be over in about twenty minutes." Kurt sounded...happy. Like he was smiling about something someone had just said. Blaine could hear voices in the background, including someone telling Finn what fate might befall him if he tried to take that last slice of pie. It sounded-

...it sounded like chaos. Like lunch with two dozen boys who had been cooped up, only on a smaller scale. And nothing had ever sounded more beautiful.

"Things ran long, you know how dinner goes," he added.

"It's-" Blaine cleared his throat. "It's Blaine, actually. I'm sorry, I had your number from-"

"Is everything okay?" Kurt sounded worried, and Blaine realized suddenly he wasn't exactly sure what to say now that he knew Kurt wasn't sitting around some silent house wishing he were back at school. Kurt was enjoying his weekend home, and he didn't-

"Yeah," Blaine replied quickly. "Yeah, it's fine. Say, I was thinking. I mean, if your offer's still open. I could come out there tomorrow, see you and Sam - you could show me around. I'd love to see this crazy town of yours you're always talking about, meet the infamous Mercedes." It sounded ridiculous time, and Kurt's tone was...strange when he responded. A little breathy and rushed, but still happy, and Blaine had no idea what that meant.

"That sounds great."

It meant getting out of the house, that was all Blaine needed to know.

The fact that it meant spending at least part of the weekend with Kurt was either an added bonus or the worst curse ever; he wasn't sure which one yet.