He takes a deep, stabilizing breath, and manages to nod. "Okay. Okay, I just... I don't know where we go from here. Dolemeck said there's a group for, um, people who've been through what I have that meets in the same building his does. But that's a lot of people and I don't know if I can admit something like that in front of a group. Just explaining a bad flashback I had to him was really hard. People don't talk about this. Not from when and where I'm from."

Everything is unfamiliar territory. It feels good to have said something because that opened up the door to him that there are options and he's not alone. But he would be pushing himself not to bolt from a support group the second he got in the door. (Remarkably, two teenage boys did not form a great psychological treatment plan in one conversation.) He's still unclear on what his options really are and part of him feels like maybe he shouldn't have said anything, maybe it would've been better if he'd kept his mouth shut. Dolemeck and the Headmistress are already looking at him differently - what if they start thinking of him as just weak, broken little Ilya? Can they really still respect him knowing what happened?