My Tribe

Sam Ihle learned early how to disappear without leaving the room.

It started in elementary school, the kind with low ceilings and scuffed linoleum floors that smelled faintly of milk cartons and disinfectant. Sam was the kid with his nose always in a book—thick ones, usually, with dragons or footnotes or both. He wore glasses that slid down his nose no matter how often he pushed them back up, and he spoke with the careful diction of a boy who thought before he talked. That alone would have been enough.

But Sam also loved the wrong things.

He loved Shakespeare before he understood why anyone would care about football. He could recite soliloquies and Starfleet captains’ speeches with equal reverence. He loved Superman not because of the punching, but because of the restraint—the moral choice to be kind when you could be a god. He loved mysteries, the way logic and compassion could coexist in a single brilliant mind. And he loved history, especially the sort that made people uncomfortable because it proved the world had always been messy and human.

The kids around him noticed all of this.

They noticed when he answered questions too eagerly. They noticed when he corrected the teacher once—only once, but that was enough. They noticed when he brought The Hobbit for silent reading instead of whatever slim, dog-eared paperback everyone else had. They noticed his quiet, his softness, the way he laughed a half-second too late because he was replaying the joke in his head to understand it fully.

“You trying to be a professor or something?” someone asked once in sixth grade, shoving his shoulder.

“Hey, Clark Kent,” someone else snickered in seventh, flicking his glasses.

In high school, it got sharper. Meaner. Less accidental.

Locker doors slammed a little harder. Notes appeared with words like freak and weird and why are you like this. Once, someone tore the cover off his notebook—the one with the faded Superman logo—and tossed it into a trash can.

Sam retrieved it after school, hands shaking, cheeks burning, promising himself he wouldn’t cry until he got home.

He learned to be small. He learned to soften his opinions, to keep his passions tucked away like contraband. He learned that being earnest was dangerous, that loving things openly was an invitation to ridicule. So he became careful. Polite. Mild.

Invisible.

College helped a little. Journalism school rewarded curiosity, after all. Professors liked that Sam asked questions no one else thought to ask. Editors liked that he could write clean, precise copy under deadline. But even there, he felt… adjacent. Like he was always standing just outside the circle, close enough to hear the laughter but not quite sure how to step in.

He told himself it was fine. He had his work. He had his books. He had his quiet apartment and his carefully organized shelves and his coffee mug with Shakespeare wearing sunglasses.

He didn’t need a tribe.

Then he got hired at The Seabrook Viking.

The Viking newsroom was not quiet.

It hummed, buzzed, clattered with life—phones ringing, keyboards clacking, voices overlapping. Bulletin boards were plastered with headlines and sticky notes and cartoons clipped from the paper itself. There was always coffee brewing somewhere, always someone arguing about wording or sources or whether a semicolon was pretentious or necessary.

Sam’s first day, he hovered near his desk like a guest who’d arrived too early to a party.

“Hey—you’re the new guy, right?”

He looked up to see a tall man with an easy grin and a NASA hoodie that had clearly seen better days.

“Sam Ihle,” Sam said quickly, standing up too fast. “Crime reporter.”

“Phil Leavenworth,” the man said, offering a hand. “Science and tech. Resident explainer of why your phone hates you.”

Sam smiled, relieved. “Nice to meet you.”

Phil’s eyes flicked to the book peeking out of Sam’s bag. “Is that A Brief History of Time?”

Sam blinked. “Uh. Yes.”

“Nice,” Phil said approvingly. “I’ve got a dog-eared copy somewhere. Though I mostly use it to intimidate people who think the moon landing was fake.”

Sam laughed—actually laughed, surprised by the sound of it.

It was a small thing. But it stuck.

Over the next few weeks, Sam noticed things.

Phil’s desk was a shrine to contradictions: a Millennium Falcon model sat next to a tiny USS Enterprise. A bobblehead Einstein nodded sagely near a stack of tech manuals. Phil could pivot seamlessly from explaining quantum computing to debating whether Han shot first.

“You can love both,” Phil said once, leaning back in his chair. “They’re doing different things. Star Wars is myth. Star Trek is philosophy. Both matter.”

Sam stared at him, a strange warmth blooming in his chest. No one had ever said that out loud before.

Then there was Ryan Hall.

Ryan was the war correspondent, which meant he carried a gravity around him that made people straighten up when he entered a room. He spoke calmly, deliberately, with the kind of voice that suggested he’d seen things he didn’t talk about unless he had to. He dressed simply, preferred black coffee, and had a habit of listening more than he spoke.

Sam assumed, initially, that Ryan would be intimidating.

Then he overheard Ryan in the break room one afternoon, speaking with unexpected intensity.

“No, see, that’s why Deep Space Nine works,” Ryan was saying. “It asks what the Federation’s ideals look like when they’re under pressure. When utopia has to coexist with war.”

Sam paused mid-pour.

“Captain Sisko is criminally underrated,” Ryan continued. “And don’t even get me started on Uhura. Or Tuvok. Logic as a moral anchor? Beautiful.”

Sam cleared his throat before he could overthink it. “I—uh—sorry. Did you say Sisko?”

Ryan turned, eyes lighting up just a fraction. “I did.”

Sam smiled, tentative but genuine. “He’s my favorite captain.”

Ryan nodded once, solemnly. “Good.”

That was it. No mockery. No gatekeeping. Just… acceptance.

Later, Sam learned that Ryan was also an Arthurian enthusiast, the kind who could debate the virtues of Sir Tristan versus Sir Lancelot with quiet ferocity. When Sam admitted his own preference for Tristan—loyal, tragic, human—Ryan’s expression softened.

“Most people pick Lancelot because he’s flashy,” Ryan said. “Tristan understands cost.”

Sam carried that sentence with him for days.

And then there was Michael Simmons.

Michael worked human interest, which meant he had the uncanny ability to make strangers tell him their life stories in under ten minutes. He wore cardigans, drank tea instead of coffee, and kept a framed print of 221B Baker Street on his desk.

“You’re a Sherlockian, aren’t you?” Michael asked Sam one afternoon, apropos of nothing.

Sam blinked. “How did you—?”

Michael gestured to Sam’s tie. “That knot. Very Victorian. Also, you corrected Phil earlier when he misquoted Doyle.”

Sam flushed. “I didn’t mean to—”

“I love it,” Michael said warmly. “Canon matters.”

They talked for an hour that day. About Holmes and Watson, about the danger of reducing intelligence to arrogance, about adaptations and what they got wrong. When the conversation drifted to superheroes, Sam braced himself out of habit.

“Superman,” he said carefully. “I’ve always liked—”

“Oh, same,” Michael interrupted. “Though I lean Steel and Calvin Ellis. The symbol means something different depending on who wears it.”

Sam felt something loosen inside his chest. A knot he hadn’t realized was there.

It wasn’t one moment that changed everything.

It was accumulation.

It was Phil leaning over the cubicle wall to whisper, “Okay, but hear me out—what if the conspiracy isn’t aliens, but time travelers with terrible PR?” and Sam laughing so hard he had to wipe his eyes.

It was Ryan sliding a book across the table during lunch—The Once and Future King—and saying, “Thought you might appreciate this edition.”

It was Michael defending Sam in a meeting when someone dismissed his angle as “too academic.”

“It’s thorough,” Michael corrected gently. “And it’s human.”

Slowly, Sam stopped shrinking.

He started wearing his fandoms openly. A subtle Starfleet pin on his lapel. A Superman mug on his desk. He stopped apologizing before sharing ideas. He spoke up in meetings, voice steady, eyes bright.

And something remarkable happened.

People listened.

One evening, after a long deadline day, the four of them ended up at the same pub down the street. The place was dim and warm, the kind with sticky tables and mismatched chairs and a bartender who remembered your order after the second visit.

Phil raised his glass. “To surviving another news cycle.”

“To not being wrong on the internet,” Michael added.

Ryan lifted his pint. “To telling the truth.”

They clinked glasses. Sam hesitated, then smiled.

“To finding your people,” he said.

No one laughed.

Phil nodded. Michael smiled softly. Ryan inclined his head, solemn as ever.

Later that night, walking home under streetlights that hummed like distant stars, Sam thought about the boy he’d been—the one who learned to disappear, to make himself small for safety.

He wished he could reach back through time and tell that kid something.

You are not too much.

You are not strange for loving deeply.

Somewhere, there are people who speak your language.

At The Viking, Sam Ihle wasn’t the weird kid. He wasn’t the punching bag. He wasn’t invisible.

He was a reporter. A nerd. A friend.

He had a tribe.

And for the first time in his life, he belonged.