I'm looking at the table. My pen is flat under my fingers and I've stopped writing and I don't pick it up again. I think about RJ at the fence. His thumb through the chain link, finding my marks. His howl, still lodged somewhere behind my sternum.
I breathe. I don't look up.
"What do the elders understand," Tomlinson asks the room, "that a different community might not?"
The discussion opens. Students talk about liminality, about fixed categories, about what it means to sit with someone instead of fixing them. Tomlinson asks questions until the ideas sharpen.
I don't say anything.
***
When the class ends I take my notes and walk down to the athletic complex on the far side of the grounds. Padded floors, climbing walls, an obstacle course along the far wall, the ceiling going up two stories.
Coach Reeves is already there. Older, with the build of someone who has been training for decades and means it.
"Physical Development," she says, to the group assembling near the door. "Strength, endurance, self-defense, situational awareness. Partner up. We're starting with grappling."
I scan the room. Nobody I know. I end up beside a girl with her hair pulled back tight who looks at me, looks at my boots, and raises an eyebrow.
"Those are going to be a problem," she says.
"They won't," I say.
Her name is Sasha. She's fast and technically solid and in the first two minutes she figures out this pairing isn't what sheexpected. She stops trying to outmuscle me and starts trying to outthink me instead, which is more interesting for both of us.
Coach Reeves moves through the pairs calling corrections. She gets to us and stops and watches for a moment without saying anything. Moves on.
By the end of class Sasha is breathing hard and I'm not and she looks at me.
"Tomorrow?" she says.
"Sure," I say.
I walk to the dining hall for lunch — soup, bread, some vegetable medley— and find the same window table and eat and think about the hunter at the edge of the village and Tomlinson's voice and the way the room went quiet at the end of it.
Some come back. Some don't. The ones who do are never entirely one thing again.
***
Writing 101 meets after lunch in a smaller room on the second floor, eight students and Dr. Clary at the front with a stack of photocopied poems on the desk. Becky is two seats to my left. She clocks me when I sit down and goes back to her notebook without saying anything.
"We've been working on close reading," Dr. Clary tells me. "Analyzing what a text is doing under the surface. Today — Mary Oliver. Wild Geese." She slides a copy across to me. "Read it once before we start."
I read it.
I read it again.
It isn’t asking for perfection.
It isn’t asking for control.
Just that you exist. That you belong anyway.
The discussion opens and students talk about mercy and belonging and what it means to not have to be good. I sit with the photocopy in my hands and say nothing. There's a line near themiddle that I read three times and then turn face-down on the desk because I can't look at it in a room full of people who don't know what it costs to let your body want what it wants when what it wants is somewhere you can't reach.
I write down what Dr. Clary says. I write down what the other students say.
I don't add my own.
