Colorado

Colorado is a pivotal setting in which escape does not immediately become security. Colton reaches the state after fleeing an abusive conversion camp, while Marcel arrives as an adult hoping to make a life in Fairfield; their different circumstances converge in a landscape shaped by institutional barriers, economic strain, and the question of who gets to live independently.

Routes into Colorado

Colton’s route into Colorado begins in flight. After running from Father Benson’s conversion camp, he travels without shoes in the middle of winter. A bus ticket carries him as far as Arizona; from there he hitchhikes into Colorado, where police apprehend him and take him to juvenile detention. Exhausted, dirty, and deprived of his bag and clothes, he sits in a cold cell and struggles to understand his situation as his own. The state is therefore not an uncomplicated refuge: it is where his escape from immediate danger brings him into contact with law enforcement and a new system of custody.

Colton’s arrival also follows a conflict between his own experience and the camp’s teachings. He has been told that the pain of conversion is necessary to burn away supposedly corrupted parts of himself. Even after fleeing, he frames his desires as evidence that something alien has taken hold of him. His journey into Colorado begins before he can fully reject that account, making physical escape distinct from emotional recovery.

Denver and Fairfield

Colorado is familiar and unfamiliar to Marcel. He remembers spending several months in Denver when his father was a guest lecturer, but those earlier visits offered limited independence: the art museum’s sculptures could not be touched, and Marcel had not felt safe attempting skiing with low vision. He had already experienced how an environment organized around sight and other people’s assumptions could make ordinary activities feel inaccessible.

His later arrival is different. As an adult with money in his bank account, he moves with Brad to a townhouse in Fairfield, a small town outside Denver. The house sits on a narrow street, with six steps to the front door and another ten to the living room; it is served by a bus route connecting the town to the city. Marcel takes time to learn the space, and dark mugs left on dark counters lead to broken dishes and coffee cups. Brad’s complaints, despite knowing Marcel’s visual limits, make the household’s accommodations—and the unequal effort behind them—part of their relationship’s growing strain.

Barriers to independence

Colorado’s promise of a fresh start is unevenly distributed. Marcel has been turned away from jobs for which he is qualified because businesses do not know how to accommodate him. Studios have reduced his teaching hours until he has only one class a week, with students’ discomfort around his blindness contributing to the loss of work. The move with Brad is presented as an opportunity, but it also unfolds against a history in which Marcel’s independence is constrained by other people’s unwillingness to adapt.

For Colton, Colorado becomes the setting of a different institutional obstacle. Although he has spent time in foster care, the university denies him financial aid because his parents have not legally lost custody and he does not qualify as independent. Their income is therefore counted against him, despite his own poverty and estrangement from the family that sent him to the camp. The denial arrives alongside a flood that damages his apartment: he saves his laptop, phone, file folder, and backpack, but little else. Both education and housing become newly precarious at once.

The alternatives do not remove the financial barrier. A community college offers tuition of $3,200 for full-time study, split into a $250 deposit and payments of just under $1,000 over the following three months. The figures make the difference between a nominal opportunity and an attainable one: Colton cannot simply produce the deposit or the subsequent payments. Colorado’s educational institutions offer a route toward his desired future, but their costs and eligibility rules limit who can take it.

A setting of intersecting constraints

The state connects the characters’ stories without making their experiences interchangeable. Colton’s gay identity, history of abuse, foster-care placement, and lack of money shape his encounter with police, housing, and educational aid. Marcel’s low vision affects work, navigation, and domestic routines, while his relationship with Brad complicates the promise of the move. In both cases, independence is not a matter of determination alone; it depends on whether surrounding systems and people make room for the person seeking it.

Colorado is thus both the destination of escape and the site where the limits of escape become visible. Colton reaches it after surviving the road and juvenile detention, yet adulthood and financial-aid rules threaten his access to education. Marcel arrives with greater material independence than he had on earlier visits, yet the physical and social environments around him still demand adaptation—and sometimes fail to provide it. The setting holds possibility, but the novel measures that possibility against the practical conditions required to make a life there.