--

Kurt Hummel just wanted to exist beyond the iron-wrought fence that surrounded his back-yard. He stood with his feet lined up right behind two of the bars, not daring to let the toes of his shoes exceed the perimeter of the fence. He gripped the fence tightly, his fingers aching the tighter he held onto the bars. Rust was rubbing off and slowly coating his pale fingers, giving his hands a powdery feel, but Kurt didn’t mind.

The grass on the other side was green and luscious, untrampled land that Kurt longed to explore. The treetops towered over his backyard, framing it with a green halo. The thick tree trunks stood firm and strong, their bark untouched and unscraped. The virgin land called to him just as--

“Kurt! Kurt, come back inside this instant!”

Kurt let out a long sigh and turned to face the house. His great-aunt Anne was perched on the steps of their back porch, her arms akimbo, stern face set and mouth poised to call his name again. He knew she would get irritated and probably forbid him from spending time in the backyard if he didn’t at least reply.

“I’m coming! I’m coming,” he answered. He turned to look at the forest one more time before walking back up to the house. 

“You’re filthy,” she proclaimed as he approached her, swatting the dirt off if his back, “You were laying out in the dirt again, weren’t you?”

Kurt winced at the touch of her heavy hand but knew better than to make fuss.  He remained silent as she finished brushing the dirt off and stood back to admire her work.

“You’re sixteen years old, Kurt. You must not act like such a child---playing in the dirt, getting so close to that fence. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get the dirt out of clothes?” she reprimanded him. 

Kurt narrowed his eyes, he knew very well that great-aunt Anne was not the one who slaved away laundering his clothes, their maid, Olivia, was in charge of mending and washing Kurt’s clothes. In fact, great-aunt Anne never did a single chore in the household. She didn’t need to. The Hummels had more than enough maids taking care of their small family that chores were never something Kurt or his great-aunt had to bother with. He refrained from making a comment to his great-aunt and instead listened to her berate him as they entered the house together. 

“Getting so close that fence, you’d think you were five years old and didn’t understand the dangers,” she continued, steering Kurt into the parlor and toward the grand piano. “You haven’t practiced all day. You’re not moving until dinner.”

Kurt couldn’t suppress a groan as he sat down on the bench and pulled the sheet music onto the holder. He dreaded the hours he spent before the piano; Kurt was skilled at a number of things, none that his aunt ever found useful or rewarding, but piano was not among those skills. He practiced enough to be decent, but he had no real passion for it. Kurt loved singing, but his formidable great-aunt disliked Kurt’s counter-tenor voice, proclaiming his gift as  unnatural and forbade him from singing. Kurt played the beginning notes of the song as his great-aunt loomed over him, nodding in approval for a few seconds and then striding off into the kitchen. 

Kurt played for the remainder of the hour, stumbling over the difficult parts of the song he was playing, growing more and more frustrated as the seconds ticked by. His favorite maid, Olivia, approached him with a small plate in her hands.

“I’ve brought a present for you,” she said quietly.

Kurt looked up from the piano keys and smiled at her. The girl in front of him was slender, her body covered by a uniform too large for her frame. Her dark black hair was tied behind her head in a neat bun and her thin face was glowing with pride. She held a plate of toasted bread up for Kurt to examine.

“I see you managed to smuggle out goods past the hawk,” Kurt said with a smile. He took a piece of warm bread and nibbled on the edges.

“I had help. Your great-uncle sent it over,” Olivia admitted. She hesitated for a fraction of a second before continuing, “Mr. Kurt, I shouldn’t have , but I overheard Mr. Hummel and Ms. Anne talking about you. They were whispering and talking fast with their grown-up talk. It sounded serious.”

Kurt wasn’t surprised. He knew that he disappointed his great-aunt on the regular.  He was incompetent in her eyes,  no matter how hard he tried. But the fact that his great-uncle, a gentle older man, took part in a whispered conversation with his great-aunt worried him.

“What were they talking about?” he asked lightly.

Olivia shook her head. “I didn’t want a telling off to for eavesdropping, so I left as soon as their voices got serious,” she explained. She leaned in and lowered her voice, “I did---I did hear them say something about a boarding school.”

Kurt almost dropped his toast on the impeccably clean floor of the parlor. His stomach did a somersault and he inhaled sharply.

He knew what his great-uncle and his great-aunt were talking about; a finishing school that acted as a reform school, planted hundreds of miles away in the middle of nowhere. His great-aunt threatened to ship him off to boarding school whenever Kurt was reluctant to come inside to practice the piano, whenever he accidentally tracked mud into the house, or whenever she caught him singing in his bedroom. But her threats never amounted to anything. 

Kurt gripped the bread tightly, a few crumbs slipping between his fingers and peppering the bench and floor beneath.

“No.”

“What is it, Mr. Kurt?” Olivia asked, “What does it mean?”

“They want to send me off,” Kurt frowned, “She’s finally convinced him, that one.”

Kurt abandoned the bread, his appetite completely gone at the prospect of having his life uprooted because his great-aunt had a grudge against and was unrelenting about the idea of shipping him off.

After Kurt’s mother and father passed away when he was a small child, Robert Hummel stepped up graciously to the task of raising his nephew’s only son. His wife, Anne, was not as pleased to have inherited what she considered a crying, babbling nuisance into her life.

But how did she convince his great-uncle? He couldn’t imagine his great-uncle coming up with the idea on his own. Kurt and his great-uncle didn’t have many words to exchange, but Kurt knew that his great-uncle loved him very much. His great-uncle loved that Kurt had his father’s heart and compassion, he loved that Kurt had inherited his mother’s poise, wit, and her remarkably contagious laughter. He was even comfortable with Kurt’s singing voice and would occasionally ask Kurt to sing for him whenever his great-aunt was in town running errands.

But he knew his behavior this past week had invited the thought into his great-aunt’s mind again. Today was the third day he had ignored her requests for him to come inside and practice the piano. Earlier in the week, great-aunt Anne heard him singing in his bedroom, and when she burst into his room to investigate, she found him perched on top of his bed in mid-performance. Just the other evening, she had reprimanded him for leaving a jar of fireflies too close to her favorite armchair. To add to the repertoire of behavior she considered to be unsuitable for a young man, she had found crumbs on the piano bench even though she had a strict rule about Kurt not being able to eat until after he finished two solid hours of piano practice.

Olivia stared at Kurt, afraid that she had overstepped her place. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kurt. I shouldn’t--I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“No. No, it’s good that you did. Thank you. Really,” he assured her, “At least now I know what to expect when they ask to speak to me.”

--

Kurt paced around the hallway outside of the library. It had been three days since Olivia had mentioned overhearing the hushed conversation describing Kurt’s future and he grew more and more anxious as each day passed. His great-uncle and his great-aunt were having their evening tea inside the library. He approached the entry quietly and pressed his ear to the door, listening intently. He could hear the occasional deep and jovial laugh coming from his great-uncle, and a false laugh that he knew belonged to his great-aunt.  He recognized it as the laugh she employed whenever she wanted to soften Mr. Hummel up. 

Kurt couldn’t take it any longer, he scrambled to his feet and swung the door open, “Uncle Robert?” he called out nervously, interrupting his great-aunt in what he presumed was her rattling off a boring list of the things she had done that day and hoping she could disguise it as an interesting contribution to their conversation.

“Kurt!”Anne exclaimed indignantly at his boisterous and unexpected entrance. 

“Kiddo, hey--”

“Kurt, really, I will not tolerate your insolence, coming into the room without knocking first. Robert, this is exactly what I’m referring to,” great-aunt Anne said icily. “Immediate action must be taken if the boy is to have a chance in the outside world.”

Turning in his armchair to look at Kurt as he spoke, Robert began,“Kurt, give us a minute, your aunt and I are having an adult conversation about--”

“A conversation about my future,” Kurt finished for him, “I know. I know about her plans. Uncle Robert, you can’t send me to that reform school, please, you can’t.”

“You little eavesdropper!” great-aunt Anne gasped. She was sitting ramrod straight in her chair, looking positively indignant at Kurt’s knowledge of her plans.

“Now now, Anne,” Robert said, extending his hand out and placing it on Anne’s knee, “Let the boy talk.”

Kurt gulped audibly and held his hands in front of him, rubbing nervous circles onto his palms.

“I don’t want to go. This might be a small town and I might be confined to this stifling life,” he glared at his great-aunt, “And the fence around the house, but I don’t want to be shipped off to somewhere---somewhere like that school.”

Robert let out a long breath, listening to what Kurt had to say. “I understand that. But your aunt and I have already come to a conclusion about what is best for you, Kurt.”

“How is taking me away from what I know going to help? I’m at the top of my class here, and it’s the first week of summer and I’ve already read three of the books on my suggested reading list. I’ve alr--”

“That’s enough, Kurt,” Anne cut him off, holding a hand up, “You need to learn that as adults, we know what is best for you. I spend the majority of my time with you, and above all people, I am more than aware of how incapable you are of following certain rules. Action must be taken.”

Kurt sulked as he stood there and listened to her tell him off, a scowl spreading across his face. “You’re right, action must be taken,” he echoed. 

He looked from his great-aunt to his great-uncle, taking in their confused expressions before turning on his heel and exiting the room without further comments.

“Kurt! Come back here,” he heard his great-aunt’s shrill voice calling after him, but Kurt didn’t stop walking. 

He didn’t stop walking when he reached the end of the hall, he didn’t stop walking when he got downstairs, and he didn’t stop walking when he reached the back porch. In fact, Kurt became aware that he was running at full-speed toward the fence when he felt his heels make contact with the soft grass of his back-yard.

He reached the fence and pressed himself up against it. He felt the coolness from the bars reach through the thin layer of his button up and he shivered slightly. A gust of wind blew and sent the tree branches dancing in one direction, and then another. Kurt felt his heart racing and with the adrenaline coursing through his veins, he finally did what he longed to do. He pushed the fence open and stepped out onto unchartered land.

--

Immediately, Kurt knew he shouldn’t have made it past the fence. His sheltered upbringing had not prepared him for this. It was simultaneously frightening and liberating. The frightening part overshadowed the liberating part of his little expedition. He wandered into the little wooded area behind his back-yard. 

His great-aunt would be furious with him, but she was always disappointed in him, it was his great-uncle that worried him. He didn’t like disappointing one of the only people that cared about him. Kurt tried to put that in the back of his mind, deciding he would simply find a nice clearing in the woods, enjoy the outside world and then turn back.

He picked up the pace, ambling past thicker trees and over knotted roots, in search of a spot to rest. The slight liberating feeling he had felt not too long ago was ebbing away, and fear was growing in its place. Regretful at his hasty decision to even enter the woods, he turned back and began to walk in the direction of his house, but after half an hour of walking in the direction he assumed he came from, he came to the realization that his house was not in that direction at all.

Kurt heard a loud snap and jumped. He swivelled around, eyes wide and ears alert as he tried to identify the noise. 

He walked away from that spot, moving away from the source of the noise, retreating further into the woods. He heard another noise and this time began to run.

A branch caught his arm and snagged a piece of the fabric of his shirt, he didn’t dare look back, but the skin on his upper arm stung painfully. Kurt quickened his stride and stumbled over a thick root and lost his footing.
Kurt was inwardly grateful that he had enough sense to throw his arm out in front of himself to soften the fall. He still landed awkwardly on the grass, but it was a lot less painful than he expected. 

He sat on the soft ground and tended to his arm. The cut wasn’t too deep and the blood had dried, but it still hurt when he tried to clean it up with the hem of his shirt. He heard splashing coming from the other side of the shrubbery that encased the clearing he was in. 

Curious, Kurt abandoned his attempts to nurse his wound and made his way over to the shrubs. He pulled a few branches apart, crouched, and looked through the leaves at the other side.

His heart skipped a beat as his eyes fell on another person. A young man was hunched over, his back to Kurt, deeply invested in a source of water that Kurt couldn’t see. The boy was making quite a splash, and it appeared to Kurt that he was washing his face.

The boy straightened up and shook off the water from his hands. He looked to the side and Kurt ducked down, hiding from view. He waited a few seconds and reemerged to get another look at the boy. The boy dried his hands on his shirt and then turned around, this time Kurt had to refrain from gasping audibly.

The boy was extremely handsome. His shirt was dirty, Kurt noticed, but Kurt’s own clothes were now ripped and he could only imagine the state of his own face. His eyes scanned over the boy’s features, each one looked as if they were hand-picked by god himself to create the most attractive face Kurt had ever laid eyes on. The boy had thick curly hair and a jaw like Kurt had never seen. A bead of water was slowly trickling from the boy’s hairline down to his jawline, and Kurt felt something unusual stirring in his stomach.

They boy was preoccupied with something on his palm and hadn’t looked in Kurt’s direction. To be fair, Kurt was well hidden in the bushes. It made Kurt wonder what was on his palm that required so much of the boy’s attention. He wanted to get a good look at the boy’s face again, but the boy wouldn't turn.

His curiosity got the better of him and Kurt elongated his stance, in his movement, he rustled the leaves and caught the boy’s attention.

The boy’s eyes snapped up from his palm and locked onto Kurt’s.

Kurt stared into the boy’s deep hazel eyes and felt his breath shorten. The boy stared right back at him, and Kurt heard him curse.