Wonderland (BoyxBoy)

Chapter 1: Down the rabbit hole

Toby stared through his bedroom window and into the ominous blackness of the night. He rested his feet against the white windowsill and maneuvered his gaze between the burglar bars which trapped him within the four walls of his room. Behind him a clock ticked and read half past eleven. He shifted uncomfortably on his bed. The green covers formed rounded mountain ranges as he moved.

Green he thought, I Played that one safe.

Green was safe it wasn't depressing as blue or aggressive like red or as nauseating like yellow were. It was safe. Safety was important to Toby. Rules were important to Toby.

He stared at the dark purple sky. His whisky brown eyes intently searched the faintly blinking stars. He didn't understand constellations. He could never group the stars together to see the shapes they supposedly made. Dragons, centaurs, lions and other celestial beasts could be seen by others in the stars, but not by him. He only saw them for what they were: the tiny flickering lights of stars which had died thousands of years ago. Toby was more literal than most. Poetry and fictitious stories were facetious to Toby. They weren't real, so why did they matter?

He sighed. It was a sigh of nostalgia. It made him think of high school. He recalled how mere hours earlier he had patiently waited for the school bell to ring for the last time that year. He remembered how everyone had burst from their desks and flooded out the classroom in a flood of navy. He didn't follow suit though. He had simply rose from the wooden desk, thanked Mrs. Daniels for the great Physics lessons she had given that year and stared one last time at the corny chemistry jokes which were plastered all over her classroom's lilac walls.

"Wanna hear a joke about absolute zero?" one read. "OK" he thought, knowing that was the answer.

He had picked up his navy blazer and strung his backpack on his back and walked out of that class for the last time that year.

Toby's thoughts returned to the present and he continued to stare out into the omnipresent darkness when a spontaneous idea occured to him.

"Run out into the darkness."

"No", he thought.

Toby was rational and meticulous. Nothing he did went without planning. His bookshelf to the left of him was arranged according to the Dewey Decimal System and was positioned so the sunlight which poured through his window in Summer wouldn't stain the spines of the books. He arranged his desk and wardrobe according to set rules. Each day was scheduled meticulously with a concise and complete sentences on his desk calendar. His rules and rituals were what allowed him to maintain a 91.57% aggregate. He wasn't about to discard years of strict following for a spontaneous adventure which could lead to him being murdered, maimed or robbed.

No he thought.

Yes.

No he pleaded.

Yes.

No he commanded.

Yes.

"Maybe?" He considered.

He looked to his phone's calender for a revelation.

Today's sentence read "Attend school...?"

It troubled Toby greatly because it firstly wasn't a complete sentence and secondly the question mark left a great list of possibilities open. You see, Toby's concise sentences usually ran like this: "Attend school, work on your biology project and study for Friday's math test. Feed the goldfish, summarise Macbeth Act II and return Simon's Chemistry notes."

But "Attend school...?" that was new...and daunting. Toby did not like leaving things to chance. Question marks scared him. As did ellipses. They were incomplete and unknown. Toby revelled in the known- in the answers in the exactness of mathematics and physics.

But the question mark still daunted him.

He had attended school. What was he to do now? Lost in thought, Toby wandered around the house not really paying attention to the muffled voices coming from his sisters' room nor to the beige walls adorned with photo frames. He realised, when he came to, that he was standing outside. The cold night air played across his face and he shuddered. He opened the large grey metal gate which separated the driveway from the pavement and stepped out and onto the pavement.

His stomach fluttered. A new feeling found its way into Toby's emotional vocabulary: excitement.

Only he didn't know that yet for him it was just something different. Something new. Something a little strange.

With the fluttering in his stomach, he decided then that he purposefully would fall down the rabbit hole and escape into the wonderfully dark and unknown world that is the night.

"Like Alice in Wonderland" he thought as he ran out into the unknown.

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