Tom Worthington

Tom Worthington is a Carlisle College student whose return to campus places him between two forms of exposure: the public notoriety inherited from his father and the private vulnerability of his relationship with Reese. His effort to keep his life contained begins as a response to scandal and financial collapse, but gradually becomes a conflict over how much privacy can protect him without also isolating him from the people he loves.

Identity and Background

Tom arrives at Perkins House exhausted and unable to recall his new roommate’s name, remembering instead the room number, 23B. He introduces himself and extends a hand, only to learn that Reese had been promised a single room and had lived there for three days without being told to expect a roommate. Their tense first exchange establishes the awkwardness of a forced arrangement; Tom is too depleted even to insist on a bed, considering the floor and a sweatshirt as a place to sleep.

The name Worthington makes an ordinary introduction impossible. Tom’s father was arrested by federal investigators in what the narration describes as the largest price-fixing takedown in the history of white-collar-crime undercover stings. The scandal became national news, and the story grew more sensational when Tom, sent home from college after reporters swarmed him on campus, found his father unconscious during a suicide attempt while on house arrest. His father had taken pills; an almost empty glass of Scotch stood nearby. Tom called 911. The public attention that followed made his surname a search-engine result and a source of persistent scrutiny.

When Tom tells Reese his last name, he braces for recognition and the familiar assumption that the family must still have hidden money, relatives to support him, or foreign accounts. He has learned to expect people to turn his words into gossip, and to distrust concern because he cannot tell genuine sympathy from fascination with his misfortune. His response is increasingly to say little. That guardedness is not simply a wish to conceal a romance: it is part of a broader retreat shaped by the experience of becoming a public story.

Financial Collapse and Return to Carlisle

The scandal leaves Tom responsible for a college education he can no longer assume he can afford. His father’s imprisonment coincides with the end of the family’s financial support, while Tom’s father’s last official W-2 reported an annual income of seven million dollars. That record complicates Tom’s eligibility for aid even as the family’s assets are being dismantled through foreclosure and sale. He privately turns the experience into a harsh rule: help arrives at somebody else’s expense, so a person should not ask for it.

Returning to Carlisle therefore requires Tom to act against his own instinct for self-reliance. He must establish financial independence and find out whether exceptions can be made. His first call, once he accepts that there will be no last-minute rescue, is to the financial aid office. Explaining his circumstances is humiliating enough that he sweats through his shirt and struggles to hold the phone; the officer recognizes his name before he can finish. The contrast between the promise of an easy solution and the distress of asking for one underscores how the scandal has made even practical support feel exposing.

The college’s role in his return is complicated. Tom characterizes Carlisle as a place that offered help for the wrong reasons, and he remembers that lesson as part of his early experience there. In his private accounting, institutional assistance is not uncomplicated generosity: it is bound up with the school’s interests and the public circumstances surrounding his family. His determination to solve problems alone offers a measure of control, but it also narrows the life he allows himself to have.

Relationship with Reese and the Limits of Privacy

Tom’s relationship with Reese begins under the pressure of involuntary proximity and grows into a bond that demands more honesty than Tom is accustomed to offering. When Reese explains why he is at Perkins House, he withdraws physically, retreating into the corner of his bed and hiding his mouth behind his knees. Tom recognizes that a careless question could make Reese feel cornered again, and chooses to keep quiet and listen. This early restraint contrasts with Tom’s usual defensive impulse: he does not need to know everything immediately in order to remain present.

Tom’s own disclosures are more halting. After Reese teases him about their sexual history, Tom insists that he is not entirely straight and admits that he liked what happened between them. Later, when Reese hears him regret a private admission, Tom refuses to disown it: he says that he came after Reese, brought him back, and is not the one standing halfway across the room. When Reese asks whether he is gay, Tom rejects that label and describes himself as open to more than one gender, explaining that this is not a new possibility for him, even if it has been a long time since he acted on it. His emerging bisexuality is both a self-recognition and a recurring point of friction, because he wants to name himself accurately without making the conversation a rejection of Reese.

That distinction becomes especially difficult when Tom and Reese discuss being out. Reese says that he is out; Tom says he is not in the same place. He explains that the issue is not simply a plan to remain closeted, but his unwillingness to let other people know anything about him when information about him can become gossip. Their eventual compromise is situational: Tom asks what it would mean to be out only at Perkins House. The possibility allows him to imagine being known in a limited, chosen setting rather than surrendering control over his private life altogether.

The limits remain visible in everyday moments. When Reese wishes Tom could believe that the world would not end if he kissed him in the campus center, Tom corrects the word gay to bi, then immediately apologizes for the way the correction sounds like another denial of Reese. Later, he becomes less quick to correct Reese’s use of gay, recognizing that the reflex can put distance between them even when he means only to retain his own label. His challenge is not to abandon bisexuality or privacy, but to stop making either one a barrier between himself and his boyfriend.

Their relationship also gives Tom a place that feels safer than the life organized around the scandal. Driving west from Boston, he realizes that his sense of home has shifted toward the Connecticut River Valley and the edge of campus: Perkins House is the place where he can relax, or come as close to safety as he can. The movement is more than a change of address. A room he initially enters too tired to claim as his own becomes part of a shared domestic life and a reason to return.

Public Fear and Changing Conduct

Tom’s caution is not limited to labels or formal disclosure. He worries that a campus audience will turn private affection into public knowledge, and at first draws a line between being with Reese and being seen with him. Yet his behavior changes incrementally. In one charged doorway moment, with Cash and Steph calling from the hall for the couple to hurry, Tom pulls Reese close and kisses him in the open. He is no longer focused solely on the risk of being seen; he is also concerned that their friends will embarrass them. The shift is small but consequential: public visibility has not ceased to unsettle him, but it no longer automatically overrides the relationship.

Tom’s fear has a history beyond homophobia or campus gossip. At an LGBTQ student organization meeting, he says that the difficult part is the volume and reach of other people knowing: he could bear an individual knowing he was with his boyfriend, but the prospect of many people talking about his private life frightened him. He connects that fear to the public attention surrounding his father’s arrest and trial. The scandal gave him a ready-made reason to withdraw and shrink his world at a time when he was supposed to be preparing for a wider life. It also allowed him to avoid confronting other uncertainties, including what he wanted after graduation and whom he might want to share his life with.

The meeting gives Tom a chance to describe that distinction aloud. His voice wavers, but he speaks rather than leaving the subject to others. The image he uses for the risk of living differently changes as he takes those steps: what had seemed like a narrow, swaying branch begins to feel like the broad branch of an old oak. The metaphor does not mean that public attention has become harmless. It marks a change in his sense of what might support him, as he tests the possibility of living without letting fear dictate the full size of his world.

Change, Home, and Narrative Significance

Tom’s movement toward intimacy is accompanied by material signs that his old financial security has disappeared. Near the end of the semester, his laptop freezes during the rush to finish papers and projects, and he cannot replace it. Reese assumes the problem is lack of time rather than lack of money. Tom has not explained how bad things are. His running shoes are separating at the sole, and their worn cushioning aggravates tendonitis in his knees. He schedules runs so he can ice them while Reese is away, avoiding questions as well as expense. These concealed difficulties show how his habit of withholding has practical consequences: even in a caring relationship, he continues to manage hardship alone.

The ongoing sense of impending trouble is captured by Tom’s recurring image of a train coming, its horn warning that it cannot slow down. The image gives shape to his expectation that the consequences of his past and the pressure of public life will eventually catch up with him. It sits uneasily beside the home he has begun to find at Perkins House: he can feel drawn toward Reese and the campus while still anticipating a future collision. The narrative holds these conditions together rather than treating love as an instant cure for insecurity.

By the time Tom and Reese are establishing a life in a new suite, Tom can say that he loves Reese without the words being the end of the work. He has learned that affection needs to be expressed and followed by actions, and he pays attention to the happiness his words bring Reese. Their new room has its own number plate, a modest marker of a new beginning; Tom still expects the gossip around him to persist, but the sound of Reese waiting at the top of the stairs slows his racing pulse. Even under the awareness of being watched, he is moving toward a shared home rather than away from it.

Tom’s arc is not a simple passage from secrecy to unguarded public openness. He continues to care about privacy and recognizes that publicity can distort a person’s life, especially after his family’s scandal made him the subject of a national story. What changes is his willingness to distinguish privacy from isolation. He becomes more able to name his bisexuality, explain his fear, accept Reese’s need for recognition, and show affection in front of others. The decisive change is not that the spotlight disappears, but that it no longer dictates every choice about love, home, and the future.