It wasn't until Mr. Schuester walked into the room and started talking about Rachel performing “Defying Gravity” for their upcoming Sectionals that Kurt realized what day he was in. After “yesterday's” disaster with Blaine that had him chewing his fingernails all the way back to Lima, Kurt had spent today—he woke up nearly six weeks later—wondering why he was in this particular day. He had worked out that each day of his new, time traveling life seemed to be an important day in his life, but today was kind of boring.

Now, it seemed that the New Directions needed a Broadway number for Sectionals, and Mr. Schuester was intent on doing a number that Kurt used to love, but after hearing it performed to death at NYADA, he could no longer stand it. Still, he now remembered this particular day because it was the catalyst for his relatively recent—well, maybe; Kurt had no idea how to think about time these days—trouncing of Rachel at Midnight Madness.

Kurt quickly reviewed this moment in his life in his head until he was satisfied that he could put the necessary events in motion. He raised his hand, “Mr. Schue, I want to audition for the Wicked solo.”

Mr. Schuester gave him a skeptical look, “Kurt, there's a high F in it.”

Puh-lease. Since Kurt had been at NYADA, he could now regularly sing notes higher than a high F. Besides, no one in the group—including Mr. Schuester—seemed to notice that at the Diva-off the first time around he intentionally cracked on the high F, but he had already perfectly hit the high G-flat. High F was practically a joke. Heck, he pretty much hit a high F every time Blaine went down on him. He hit even higher notes when Blaine had him face down, cheeks spread, and was tonguing at his entrance.

But perhaps now was not the time to be thinking of that. Kurt crossed his legs.

“That's well within my range,” Kurt assured Mr. Schuester.

Then, quite predictably, Mr. Schuester brushed him off, and Kurt remembered that he had to enlist his dad in order to press the point. Rather than argue, he bided his time.

After school, Kurt went to his dad's shop, as he did most days, because it seemed like the logical thing to do next. He sat at the desk and answered the phone, scheduling lubes and minor repairs until his dad entered the office and complained, “Hey, I thought you were bringing donuts.”

Whoops! Was he supposed to?

“Sorry, Dad. I forgot.”

“What's up with your brain today? You know, I think it's going soft from all that crap you put in your hair.”

Seriously? Kurt didn't know what to say next, so he just said, “I've got a lot on my mind.”

“It's not about a guy, is it? Because I'm not ready to have that conversation.”

If he only knew how much about a guy it was.

Kurt explained about his inability to get an audition for “Defying Gravity,” and his dad commiserated with him, confirming with certainty that Kurt could sing anything a girl could sing (“You know, in a good way”). His dad began talking to Kurt about singing the part, and Kurt was enjoying the comfortable interaction with his dad that he had missed after moving to New York until Burt said, “Isn't there more crossover nowadays? You know, chicks doing construction; guys wearing dress shoes with no socks…” And then he said some other things, but Kurt was fixated on Burt's comment, “guys wearing dress shoes with no socks…”

How did he know? Burt hadn't met Blaine yet. Hell, technically Kurt hadn't met Blaine yet, and still the inadvertent mention of Blaine's signature style stabbed at Kurt's heart and brought tears to his eyes. He looked down so Burt wouldn't notice. Every part of Kurt's body ached for Blaine. His missed him so much he thought he might suffocate from the loss, and he wanted to press his hands to his chest to keep his heart from cracking apart.

“This is really getting you down, isn't it?” Burt asked.

Kurt nodded. His dad had no idea.

The next day—to Kurt's surprise, the actual next day—Kurt was once again in his dad's shop after school answering the phone when his dad stormed in, grabbed the coffee pot and griped, “What the Hell is wrong with this machine?”

Kurt took the coffee pot from Burt's hand and began setting things to brew while Burt paced the floor and asked, “How long until the damn coffee's ready?”

“Dad, what's wrong?”

“I got a phone call this morning. The anonymous kind. It was some dude telling me my son was a fag.”

“Well, Dad, I don't really care what some random guy says about me.”

But Burt clearly cared. He told Kurt how worried he was and explained that he didn't want Kurt to get hurt. Kurt had to suppress a smile, because he remembered his dad yelling at him as he lay in a hospital bed in New York after being hurt by homophobes who used a lot more than words. But that was later.

However, when Kurt offered to pull out of the audition for the solo, Burt refused to let Kurt back down. Then Burt confessed, “Sometimes I just…I wish your mom was still around.”

Kurt's heart squeezed painfully. He realized for the first time in his life that when his dad said he missed his mom, he wasn't talking about a loss that Kurt and Burt shared. Burt had a loss that went so much deeper—or at least in a different direction—than Kurt's loss of his mother. His mom was Burt's partner—the person with whom Burt shared every mundane detail of his life, just the way that Blaine was a partner to Kurt. Burt could talk to Kurt, but he also had the job of protecting Kurt, and there was no one to help him, no one with whom to bounce off ideas, no one to hold him if he failed.

Kurt suddenly understood his dad's loss in a way that he had never understood it before. He stood up and launched himself at his dad, holding him so tightly. “It's going to be okay,” he reassured him, and he hoped beyond hope that he was right.

The next afternoon, dressed in a blue and black Alexander McQueen mohair sweater adorned with a giant spider broach, Kurt hit the high F. He couldn't help it. He had too much training at NYADA to crack on any note.

Fortunately, he also flubbed a few lines from the song because he hadn't practiced at all, so Rachel—dressed very much like a bumble bee in a weird yellow and black striped dress—won the Diva-off. Kurt hoped that the small change in how he lost wouldn't matter to the cosmic forces of the universe.

As Kurt was singing, he also noticed something that he had never seen before when he was in high school the first time. Matt, a slightly nerdy black kid who was in New Directions for about five minutes before his parents moved to Columbus, watched Kurt the whole time he sang with an expression of deep longing in his eyes. Kurt realized that while he spent nearly three years at McKinley as the only openly gay student, there were other students who were not nearly as far in the closet as he imagined. Kurt wondered how important it was to repeat everything all over again exactly the same way, because he knew how lonely this other boy was with his secret, and he also knew that he could help. Kurt knew that, in his time travels, he had already screwed up a few things, and the big events were still moving forward as he remembered. Maybe he only had to get the big things right. Or maybe it didn't even matter what he did, because certain things in life were just fate.  Maybe he was fated to end up with Blaine no matter what.  

He wasn't going to take that chance, but still.

As he walked out of the choir room at the end of practice, Kurt smiled at Matt and said, “Hi.”

“Hi,” Matt mumbled back, blushing, and Kurt saw his face break into a smile before he turned away from Kurt and walked down the hall.