"What's the significance of the fifth circle? What was Dante's purpose in the habitat here?" Mr. Whitten was prompting during my Thursday AP European History class. We were supposed to begin answering in our journals, but the class was interrupted.

"Excuse me, Ryan. Could I take Blaine out of class?" the nurse asked from the doorway. I popped my head up. What was wrong?

"Sure," my teacher answered. "Blaine, take your stuff. It's almost the end of the period anyway." What happened with Kurt?, I thought as I packed my books into my messenger bag. It was no surprise that the nurse led me into the clinic and back into her office like she had a couple of days ago. I must've had a look of bewilderment on my face, sitting in the same hard chair as before. I had no clue what was going on.

"I'm so sorry, Blaine," she began. Her aging face was full of sympathy.

"For…" I prompted without manners.

"Kurt's situation is difficult to understand and treat as it is, for the most part, a psychological problem." My normal straight posture let loose as I slumped into the office chair.

"What do you know about anorexia?" she asked, clasping her hands under her chin.

"I know that all the symptoms Kurt has aligns with it," I answered honestly. She nodded pensively.

"He's not doing well. Actually, he's awful," she bluntly stated.

"What did you tell him when you took him out of Warblers practice yesterday?" I wondered aloud.

"I weighed him. He's lost weight," she informed me.

"Shit," I breathed out, letting my head fall. She made no sign of reprimanding my language.

"We need to work together as a team here," the nurse began. "I let him off the hook for this weekend in hopes that he'll tell his parents, but I know he won't," she sighed.

"I assume you have met his parents?"

"Yes. I know them well," I replied with a sigh.

"It may be time to just talk to them instead of Kurt."

"I know," I confirmed. I ran my hands through my gelled hair. Ew. "What can I do?"

"Help him or push him to talk to his family. It won't be as simple to do than said," she sighed. I hummed agreement, already planning. We were silent. The gravity of the situation weighed us down. The inspirational posters on the walls of the nurse's office seemed to mock the conversation. It was disgustingly ironic.

"How long do we have?" I choked out. I didn't really even understand my own question. How long did he have until it got so bad he was debilitated? Or until he starved himself out completely, dying a skeleton? My thoughts began to deviate away from those questions and came up with new ones. I started spewing word vomit.

"Could he ever get better? How will he get better? Will he go to some rehab place in Colorado? Will there be lasting damage?"

"Blaine," she stopped me. Surprisingly, her eyes filled with tears. "He can get better, but, if we don't do something now, he will have serious problems. That's as much as I can tell you." Yet again, I found myself crying my eyes out in the nurses's office; she offered me a tissue. It was just too much to actually hear out loud the severity of the issue.

"I-I think I k-know what to do," I said finally. Honestly? That was a lie. She nodded and tried to smile though.

"We can help him, Blaine," she comforted me. I left the office, my mood totally ruined. Dalton students were rushing around me, but I felt so detached. What exactly could I do?

The rest of the day went by in a flurry of homework and a Warblers practice. Kurt gave me my distance as my head remained in the clouds. It wasn't the best mental state to be in as I fell asleep that night, a terrible nightmare taking over my troubled mind.

"Make it stop, Blaine. I can't take this. I'm so cold. Please. Help me," dream Kurt pled on a hospital gurney. Tears sprung to my eyes at his begging but also his current state: desperate, weak, withering away, eroded. Lying on his bed with him attached to many wires, I scooped him up in my arms. They could wrap around twice. I wondered, if we were to be completely silent, to stop breathing, if our radically different body temperatures would make our skin give off sizzling noises. I nuzzled gently into his body, trying to be a human space heater, alone in the morbid hospital room.

"I love you," I breathed out. He coughed, covering his mouth but revealed a bit of blood on his lips. I found tissues on the side table.

"I'm disgusting, Blaine. Worthless," he responded. I stared into his blue eyes.

"You're beautiful. You're my heart, Kurt. You just need help to see how incredible you are," I comforted. His breathing hitched and the heart monitor attached to his frail, pale chest did as well.

"I need help," he whispered before all the monitors in the room began beeping and flashing.

"Kurt? Kurt!" I cried out. He had begun to gasp for breath, eyes wide with panic.

"I'm sorry, Blaine," he choked out. "It's too late to try."

"No!" I yelled loudly. I called for nurses frantically in the empty hallway and returned to his bedside again. Tears ran down my face and fell onto Kurt's taut skin stretched over protruding bones. "Don't you dare leave me." My heart was breaking in two.

"Am I beautiful yet?" he whispered. I knew. Somehow in my dream I knew these were his last breaths. Where were the fucking doctors?

"Yes, baby. You've always been the prettiest," I affirmed, kissing his face all over. He nodded, took one deep breath in, but never breathed out. His glasz eyes never opened again.

I vomited onto the linoleum as his deathbed weight flashed on the plain walls. 100 pounds. 100. 100. 100. Weightless. I gathered his corpse into my arms and let out a wail long and loud over the flatline of his shrunken heart. Suddenly, my own voice transformed into a siren sound. Doctors rushed in speaking frantically in terms I couldn't understand even if I had done well in my summer Health class.

"BLAINE! GODDAMNIT, WAKE UP!" I woke up to a crazed roommate. Wes had one hand on my shoulder. His eyes were full of questions. Tears ran down my face rapidly. I lied back down on my pillow and curled up in a ball, turning away from the Friday sun peeking in our dorm room. My body was racked with sobs. Kurt. 100. Kurt. Kurt. In the dre-nightmare, Kurt voiced his desire for help, but it was too late.

"Blaine, please. What's wrong?" Wes begged. He then literally man-handled me and made me sit up. Quickly, he sat on my bed to envelope me in a hug. It was more a support to stay up than anything. I sobbed and sobbed, breath hitching drastically.

"He-he-he's gonna die!" I wailed helplessly, a bit muffled in Wes's shirt I had put my face into.

"Who, Blaine?"

"K-kurt!" I cried. New tears seemed to form at his name. "I h-have to go," I said, pushing out of my friend's grip and exchanging my pajamas for the Dalton uniform. Wes opened his mouth to speak but shut it. I ran around our room, drying my tears and gelling my hair simultaneously. In a short time, I grabbed my bag and headed out the door without a word.

I stepped outside the housing building and started on an early morning walk on the grounds. I needed to organize my thoughts and get that fucking dream out of my head.

What did I already know? Kurt had anorexia, his parents didn't know, and Kurt didn't think he had a problem. What I didn't know was how much he weighed exactly, how his parents would handle it, or why Kurt started starving himself in the first place. Anorexics had goals for themselves, right? They, I guess, had an idea of what a perfect body should look like. Wow, I really didn't know shit about this. Without thinking, I whipped out my phone from my pocket. Knowing Carole was a nurse and had to be up early for work anyway, I decided to make a call.

"Hello, Carole? It's Blaine," I greeted Kurt's stepmother cordially, trying to pretend like I hadn't been crying. I made my way back to the main Dalton building seeing as my walking and thinking had actually taken up a considerable amount of time. School was beginning in a little bit.

"Blaine! What can I do for you?" she asked.

"Well, I needed to talk to you about Kurt," I responded with hesitation.

"I may know what it is, but continue," she said. Her change of voice shocked me and made me believe that statement.

"Kurt has had a significant amount of purposed weight loss. Everything really escalated when he fainted a week or so ago. The nurse is keeping a very close eye on him, but he needs help immediately. She says it's gotten too severe," I blurted out all at once. Hopefully she could understand me… There was a rush of noise on the other line. I stopped walking briefly, stepping aside to the wall of an empty hallway.

"I was scared of my assumptions being true. He doesn't look like himself anymore," she sighed with cracks in her voice. I heard sniffling on the phone as I stood in the corridor.

"We need to confront him," I said. "Would it be possible for me to come over tomorrow for dinner? Maybe that will push him," I suggested. My plan wasn't exactly foolproof, but at least I would have backup when it came to Kurt's outbursts I know he could have.

"Yes. Absolutely," she agreed. I sighed in relief.

"Great. I'll see you later then," I said. We exchanged polite farewells, and I clicked my phone off. Come on, Blaine. Get through the day, and this situation will be brought into light. I continued my trek to the classroom. Kurt was already sitting at his desk, so I slipped right beside him and kissed his cheek.

"Hello," I said, getting myself situated in a desk, but, before he could reply, our teacher came in to begin class. I pulled out a sheet of paper and quickly scrawled a note to pass to Kurt.

"Can I come to family dinner tonight?"

I watched his face screw up in thought as he read it then scribbled a reply to pass back.

"What's going on?"

"My parents are out of town, and I don't feel like being alone."

Just for good measures, I drew a sad puppy dog beside my line. He smiled when he saw it. After a few moments, he wrote a reply.

"Sure, I guess. Meet me by my car after last period?"

I turned to him and gave him a thumbs up. He chuckled, and we both turned to pay attention to the lesson. I felt a bit happier because this plan seemed to pretty good.

Kurt's POV

Friday morning was one of the tougher times getting up for school. My hunger pains kept me awake until past two in the morning. Knowing I would be running on a few hours of sleep for the day, I dragged myself out of bed already in a glum mood. Just like every morning and night, I weighed myself on the scale in my bathroom. The numbers had been decreasing well over the past week or so despite Blaine and the nurse's interventions. It wasn't at the place that I wanted, but, at the rate it was dropping, it would take a month or two more. I jotted the number down in my journal and got ready for school.

With a huge cup of black coffee in my system, I felt sort of ready to conquer the day as I sat in the History classroom before the bell rang. A draft of raspberry-scented gel blew past me as Blaine hurried into the room.

"Hi," Blaine greeted. He appeared by my side and kissed my cheek. I smiled back. He had arrived just in time for class to start, and our teacher was talking to us about our lesson for the day. Suddenly, Blaine pushed a small piece of paper to me.

"Can I come to family dinner tonight?"

I internally groaned. The dreaded Friday dinners where I was required to eat? Well, having Blaine around meant I couldn't purge the meal afterwards. What was I supposed to do?

"What's going on?"

"My parents are out of town, and I don't feel like being alone."

What a suck up. I bit my lip. What's one more lie? I wrote back.

"Sure, I guess. Meet me by my car after last period?"

Now to come up with a plan. One excuse I hadn't made in front of Blaine was feeling nauseous. The problem is that I used that with my parent last week. Too bad I didn't have a dog that could eat up scraps from the floor. I could always try the hiding-food-in-napkin trick. Rearrange the food to make it seem like I ate more than I actually did. Start a fight and refuse to come out of my room. Pretend to be so tired I couldn't possibly even lift a fork to my mouth.

Yeah, I can do today easily.