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When he returned to his room, he assembled an old iMac with various spare parts so that he could do his homework. His mother came in to show him his progress report. She had circled his Fs, even though some were from last quarter. She didn’t understand the grading system.

“Okay,” he said, exhausted by the evening’s strange events. “I’m going to bed.” It was late.

“Are you done with your homework?”

“Yes.”

“No you’re not. You’re lying.”

I actually did what I’m supposed to do and she doesn’t believe me, Blue thought. “Mom, I can show it to you.”

“Then go do it again. I know you didn’t do a good job. You never do.”

“But I want to go to sleep.”

“Go do it all over again,” she said.

A week later, Blue was lying in bed, late at night and sleepless, when the sobs came. He hadn’t cried in five years. Even after he was able to stop the tears, he shook and spluttered for at least an hour.

Blue considered himself an unapologetic romantic, indulging in giddy crushes on people and things, generally in a good mood with great hopes for each day. When he talked to students and Ms. Collins about his troubles at home, they were surprised that he seemed so unflustered by the tatters of his life. “Don’t worry!” he would tell them. “I’m used to it by now!”

Recently, however, when he was alone, waves of depression caught him unaware. This has never happened to me before, he thought, his chest tightening as dark frantic images crowded out any chance he had of getting to sleep. He was afraid he was falling back into “the cycle of failure” at school, whereby he would establish an impressive momentum, and then his mother would “come in and destroy it with something” so he would have to start over, again and again. I will never be good enough for my mother.

Blue had started to do his homework at Starbucks with a laptop Ms. Collins had loaned him. Away from home, he explained, “My concentration is freaking sublime. But now that my mom has actually ordered me to do [homework], the plan is tainted. She’s constantly hovering over me in my head, taking all the credit.”

With only thirty minutes to work outside of home, Blue couldn’t complete his assignments. After his mother went to bed, he stayed up late to work on Ms. Collins’ laptop, which his mother didn’t know he had. Then he would oversleep and get to school late. Arriving an hour late to school became a regular occurrence. His grades plunged. His teachers recommended he emancipate himself, but he thought that doing so would create a new list of uncertainties that he wasn’t prepared to handle.

Sometimes Blue wondered if his efforts mattered. His backup plan was to go to the University of Hawaii, minor in business, and major in future studies, a new field that fused foresight, philosophy, science, and art to postulate worldviews. But when he looked online, he saw that UH required Algebra 2, which Blue hadn’t taken. Blue worried that he wouldn’t be able to go to college at all.

Because Blue wasn’t allowed to game at home anymore, he snuck out to the arcade more often. To Blue, gaming was “one of the only times where you only have to focus on one thing.” But, even more than that, “It’s like an anchor. As long as I know it’s there, it’s a part of me. It’s some form of continuity that in my life I desperately need.”

In bed, alone and scared, Blue thought about his social life. I have never had and will never have that friend I’m looking for. He thought about Jimmy. Blue had discovered that they read the same tech blogs, like Engadget and Gizmodo. But Jimmy wasn’t taking Blue’s hints. Their conversations led nowhere. Blue still didn’t know if Jimmy was gay.

Blue remembered a recent discussion with Jackson about what would happen if they suddenly woke up and were still in kindergarten. He thought about how much he would like that. He thought about killing himself. He mulled over how he would compose a suicide note. It would have to be short. Direct. Something that left no questions as to why he did it. The suicide note is an act of kindness, really. Why would he do it? Because my life