Prologue
In April, after meeting with Dave in Principal Figgins’ office to lay out the terms of his return to McKinley, Kurt goes back to his house to figure out the logistics of his decision. He sits down at his vanity with a piece of paper, planning to draw up a proposed schedule for seeing Blaine during the week, but what comes out instead is, “Things For Which I Might (Or Might Never) Forgive David Karofsky.”
Kurt’s not quite ready to forgive Dave for anything just yet. But he needs to figure out a truce, at least. They’ll be spending large chunks of every day together, thanks to Santana’s Bully Whips patrol. And Kurt’s ingenious PFLAG idea means that he’ll have to look at Dave’s face for long stretches one or two afternoons a week. He should have thought of that when he’d come up with the idea. But he hadn’t.
It’s not that Kurt’s afraid of Dave’s face anymore. He’s not. He’s just kind of disgusted by it. And, at the same time, it fills Kurt with pity. The two emotions are balls of yarn that have gotten tangled together, and they’re so knotted up now that it’s hard to feel one without the other. It makes Kurt’s stomach twist.
So – forgiveness. If Kurt figures out what he can forgive Dave for – not today, but one day, if Dave sticks with the plan and doesn’t go back to being a capital-M miscreant as soon as Kurt walks back through the doors of McKinley – maybe those balls of yarn can start to untangle a little, too. Maybe he won’t be able to undo all the knots, but he can snip away at the disgust (which is another word for anger) until it’s no longer getting in the way of the pity.
Kurt starts his list:
Locker slamming.
That one is easy. Kurt has plenty of practice forgiving people for things like that. He’s mostly forgiven Puck for the things he used to do, and the rest of the football team for the dumpster tosses. If Karofsky doesn’t start it up again, Kurt can forgive him.
Kiss.
That one’s a little harder. After the initial shock, Kurt was furious about it for weeks, and sad, and even entered a sort of state of mourning over the theft of his first kiss with a boy – a state of mourning that never fully ended until just a few weeks ago, when Blaine pressed their lips together and – oh. That thing with Karofsky hadn’t been a kiss at all. More like a punch in the face. And Kurt forgives violence. So he can probably forgive the kiss, if Dave really reforms.
On the other hand, the kiss wasn’t actually a punch in the face, and Kurt wonders for a moment if maybe he should read something more into it – if there wasn’t just general closeted gayness behind it, but something more specific, like attraction. Kurt’s stomach twists again and he almost puts the thought aside. But if he doesn’t deal with it now, the question will fester and taint all his interactions with Dave. And there are going to be so many interactions.
Kurt wants to slam his head against his desk, but instead he takes a deep breath and thinks.
If Karofsky was attracted to Kurt, it makes the whole thing a lot creepier. But as his dad has so graciously pointed out to him, Kurt’s been creepy in want before, too. Not on purpose, but because every time Finn didn’t look at him, every time they didn’t touch, Kurt felt like he was dying inside. Reaching out for him felt like the only cure, even if that wasn’t what Finn wanted. Kurt would make Finn want it eventually, one way or another. So he set up their parents, and somehow convinced Burt that it would be great to have Finn move into Kurt’s room, and … okay, so yeah. Creepy.
Kurt didn’t go about things the right way, but it didn’t make his attraction to Finn wrong. It didn’t twist his desire to be loved and held and wanted into something sick. And if he’d just let his fantasies be fantasies, without trying to foist them on Finn – well, then, he was entitled to them, just like Finn was entitled to masturbating to pictures of Taylor Swift (not anything Kurt had ever wanted to know, but sometimes you learn too much about a guy when you become brothers).
All of that is easier thought than believed – Kurt still feels conflicted sometimes when he masturbates and thinks of Blaine, even though they’re boyfriends now and Blaine probably thinks of Kurt when he does the same thing (and whoa, an image comes to mind that makes Kurt want to throw down his pen and unzip his pants now) – but Kurt knows it’s true. It’s not fair to fault someone for an attraction. The only thing you can fault them for is what they do with it.
So Kurt will fault Karofsky for the kiss, but he won’t fault him for anything that may or may not have lain behind it. As long as Dave keeps it to himself from now on, it’s none of Kurt’s business.
It’s how Kurt would have wanted Finn to have dealt with his attraction, rather than shaming him for his feelings. So Kurt can do the same for Dave, even if he doesn’t like him.
Kurt moves on.
Threatening to kill me.
Okay. This one … is not going to be easy. Kurt’s blood still boils at the way Dave shrugged it off at today’s meeting with, “It’s just a figure of speech.” And adding that he felt awful about it wasn’t the same as saying he was sorry.
So, no. Kurt’s not anywhere near ready to forgive Karofsky for threatening him. He’s not ready to forgive Karofsky for the way he repeated the threat over and over again with small, stabbing looks. He’s not ready to forgive Karofsky for stealing the sense of invulnerability that every teenager is entitled to have.
Kurt doesn’t know if he’ll ever be ready, or what it will take to make that happen. An apology would be nice – but apologies are just words. Saying “I’m sorry” never prevented anyone from doing the same thing over again.
Actions are Dave’s only way out of this one. Kurt’s just not sure what actions it will take, though. Maybe if Dave came out, subjecting himself to the same sorts of daily assaults to his safety and dignity that Kurt has had to live through – that might tell Kurt that Dave is sincere. Maybe true contrition – the kind full of tears and empty of ego – that might do it, too.
It’s hard to imagine David Karofsky doing either of these things.
* * *
After his meeting with Kurt and their dads in Principal Figgins’ office, Dave goes home and opens the bottom drawer of his desk, pulling out a bundle of plaid cloth. It’s his old Cub Scout neckerchief, and he lays it on the top of his desk to unwrap it slowly, with the same methodical care he used to successfully solve the equations on his AP Calculus final.
In the center of the cloth is a porcelain figurine of two people joined at the hip: a woman in a white bridal gown, a man in a tuxedo. Bride and groom.
For the past few months, Dave has looked at this cake topper at least once a week, always with a confused mixture of tenderness and shame. He can’t look at it without remembering how he stole it: the way he let his face twinge into that threatening, silent smirk before prying the couple from Kurt’s hand; the thrill that the momentary contact with Kurt’s skin sent through his body; the sickening clutch in his stomach when he realized that the only response Kurt would ever have to his touch would be abject fear. He can’t look at it without remembering how far away Kurt had to run, because of him.
But rising to the surface with the guilt is always the thought, This is something that Kurt loves.
Dave can never be something that Kurt loves, but he can hold this thing that Kurt cares about, and if he holds it long enough, he can feel some of Kurt’s affection bleed from the object into his skin.
No one in his right mind would choose to give love to someone as fucked up, as ugly, as confused as David Karofsky. So Dave takes what he can get. Usually in the worst of ways.
He needs to stop.
He wraps the figurine back up in his neckerchief and slips it into a padded envelope.
Dave means to give it back the day that Kurt returns to McKinley. He walks around with it inside his Bully Whips jacket, waiting for the right moment to arise while escorting Kurt through the halls.
But the eyes of everyone in the school are on them, and Dave constantly feels like his stomach is pressing against his throat. At the end of the day, he shuts it in his locker and tries to forget.
Kurt never mentions Dave stealing it. He doesn’t mention their past at all. At the PFLAG meetings, Kurt treats Dave like any other unknown kids who show up – cautiously, like he’s waiting for them to prove that they’re there for honest reasons. Not surprisingly, most of the kids don’t return. But Dave always does. Even without Kurt’s threat to out him, even without the fact that it’s an excuse to be near Kurt, Dave wants to be at those meetings. Maybe if he goes to enough of them, he’ll stop being scared of people finding out who he is.
On the last day of classes, during the last break before the last period of the day, Dave walks Kurt down the hall. Their small talk has become easier over the past weeks, since Dave’s apology just before prom. They’ve ended up talking about a lot of things in the hallways and the sparsely attended final two meetings of PFLAG – differential equations, and the link between football and dancing, and Kurt’s detailed explanations of gay icons whose names Dave can never remember, and Dave wondering if it’s safe to come out to his dad – but Dave hasn’t told Kurt the thing that’s weighing most on his mind: he’s not coming back next year.
Everything here at McKinley is too much. It’s not just the well-intentioned sympathy he got after prom for almost having to dance with Kurt Hummel. It’s not just the ill-intentioned lewd remarks he got about the same. It’s not just having to see Kurt several times a day, every day, the exhaustion of being filled simultaneously with awe over Kurt’s strength, and guilt over how he might have destroyed it.
For Dave, McKinley has become synonymous with hiding and rage and fear. He needs to move on.
As they approach Kurt’s last class, Dave pulls the padded envelope from the inside of his jacket and hands it to Kurt. “I can never make up for what I did to you,” he says, “but at least I can give back some of what I stole.”
Kurt stops and pulls the bundled neckerchief out. “What – ?” he starts to say, but his fingers have already made quick work of the wrapping, revealing the white netting of the bridal veil. He looks up at Dave with a stunned, silent oh on his lips. “Thank you,” he finally says.
“No, please don’t say that,” Dave says. “Not for this. I stole it from you.”
“Okay,” Kurt sighs. “Not for this. But for – becoming yourself. It suits you.”
Dave can feel tears pushing against his eyes. “Santana will meet you when the bell rings,” he says. “Have a good summer.”
“You, too,” says Kurt, and he looks like he wants to say something else, but he doesn’t – or Dave doesn’t let him, because he turns then, unable to look at Kurt another moment. He doesn’t need to look at Kurt any longer, really, doesn’t need one last imprint for his memory. Kurt’s face has long ago burned itself into Dave’s mind.
He leaves Kurt outside the classroom with the cake topper and kerchief. When his father first tied it around Dave’s neck, Dave felt so proud of being one year older and a better Scout for it, felt like he was on the cusp of becoming a man.
Dave’s not sure he’ll ever be a man now. Not with what he’s become. Not after what he’s done to Kurt.
The best thing that could happen is if Kurt treats that kerchief like a rag – throws it in the trash or gives it to his dad for wiping up spills at Hummel Tires & Lube. It’s the kind of fate that Dave’s hopes deserve.
Dave doesn’t go to his last class. He walks to his locker, empties it of his things, and walks home. He says goodbye to no one.
When he gets to his room, he locks the door, lowers the blinds and turns his stereo up as loud as he can to Rachmaninoff’s Élégie in E Flat Minor, and cries the hardest he has since, at the age of seven, someone close to him died.