Being disliked is a relationship.

Somebody has considered you.

Being excluded is being administered.

You are a line item that gets removed and the room carries on and nothing about the evening is different for anybody except you.

Julian had four years of that.

Four years of a lunch table filling up in front of him, and of being the last name called in a gym, and of group projects where the work arrived in his inbox at eleven at night with no message attached.

Nobody ever hit my son.