Clusterfuck

i

Toby Wentworth's life is an absolute clusterfuck. Just to throw that out there.

Why? There are many reasons, really. But for one, he has not-so-recently discovered that he is in fact very, very gay.

So. Cue the rainbow confetti, or whatever.

But one really, really wonderful, awesome, amazing fact about this revelation is, Toby doesn't know... how to be gay.

If that makes sense.

(It doesn't. He knows it doesn't.)

Obviously, there is no rulebook. No guidelines. No constitution. No magical rainbow fairy gay-mother who waves her wand and sends Toby on his merry way with every single weight lifted off his shoulders and a complimentary bar of soap.

But is it bad that Toby kind of wishes there was?

Because at least at that point, things would be simple. 

Er. Simpler.

Toby Wentworth doesn't know how to "be" gay in the sense that he doesn't know how to be gay and also be a functioning human being. Seriously. It's as though his own homosexuality is a weight he's lugged around on his back for his entire life, and as a result has crippled him at the ripe old age of nineteen, inhibiting him from playing outside with the normal kids.

Well, he knows he's still a normal kid, despite his upbringing. He managed to escape before his parents brainwashed him entirely.

Toby grew up in Hopper Village, a minuscule (and, let's be honest, probably fictitious) town down in North Carolina, where the inhabitants within hit every criteria to ever exist below the term small town mindset. White, Christian, conservative. Very very very anti-gay.

Well, that doesn't matter much anymore. The important part is, Toby got out. He escaped to Pennsylvania for college about a year and a half ago, leaving behind his way-too-clingy parents, non-disappointing older siblings, and his high school girlfriend of three and a half years.

Cough—beard—cough.

(He's no longer in touch with her. It's fine. It's fine.)

Toby Wentworth's life is a clusterfuck, but you already knew that.

And, honestly, people should be impressed by homosexuality rather than against it, because this shit is fucking difficult.

~ ~ ~

Maybe homosexuality isn't as difficult as calculus, though.

Toby's been sitting in this lecture hall upwards of forty minutes, trying, trying to pay attention and absorb what the professor is droning on about, but he just. He just can't.

(Every day that goes by is another day that he regrets going into accounting. Accounting. He can barely a-count to twenty. He doesn't know how he's alive.)

Not only does Toby not understand what the fuck this mumbo-jumbo in his notebook is, but there's also a boy—a very attractive boy—sitting about three rows in front of him that keeps turning his head and catching Toby's eye.

God. He's fucking screwed.

Giving up for whatever-number-time this is now, Toby allows his whole body to go limp and doesn't even wince when his forehead meets the table with a very audible clunk. And he doesn't look up either when he hears shuffling around him, as if people are rising from their seats. Class isn't dismissed yet, he knows. Those two words are the one thing that comes out of the professor's mouth that he does understand. He would already be gone if that was the case.