Disclaimer: I obviously don't own Glee because it belongs to Ryan Murphy. Musetta's Waltz belongs to Puccini and his opera, La Boheme. Finally, I cannot claim The Road Not Taken, but Robert Frost can.
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What a joke, he thought. The fact that for the third year in a row David Karofsky's English class would be studying the Robert Frost classic, The Road Not Taken, would definitely help him earn an A in class. He knew this would be easy, he'd already learned this crap before. Why did his school district think that this was necessary to look at over and over? Be different. Don't fall for peer pressure. Be yourself. It's worth it. That was bull, and not just the students thought so. Even the teachers fell for peer pressure, blackmail, conformity. No one wanted to be different, not when you were teased, bullied, mocked. He had been down that path. He had been teased, and he had sent the past two years trying to erase that memory, that person. He hated when they called him "big boy" or "fat" or made fun of the amount he ate. It had taken him two years on that path less traveled to turn it to muscle, to train his body to use his size for "good." He played football and hockey now, sports where bigger was better.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both. He looked at the words on the page. They jumped at him. They stared back. They mocked. Just like his "friends" had mocked him for humming Musetta's Waltz when he stepped out of his mom's car at school that morning. He really couldn't help that his mom enjoyed operas. She had minored in Music in college, so he'd grown up with her singing to him, around him. If Azimio and the others called him gay for humming Musetta's Waltz, they would definitely think he was gay if they saw how his eyes lingered on Mr. Pruett as the teacher walked around the room. He knew how much teasing he would receive if the others found out. That's why they would never know. Not if he could help it. He didn't know how to interpret these feelings. All he knew was that when his friends were busy gawking at Kate Winslet in Titanic, he was bored, uninterested, and wondering what Leonardo DiCaprio would look like instead. He also knew that these feelings could not be natural. If they were, his friends wouldn't tell him he was gay as they shoved him into walls when he didn't show an interest in a swiped copy of Playboy or a pin up from the Sport Illustrated Swimsuit edition.
Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. Physically, this teasing did not hurt David, but mentally, he couldn't handle the shame of not being accepted by his peers. He knew that if he didn't change how he felt now, there would be no way to back track later. He had to define himself now as who he wanted to be. He knew he could never come back to this moment and undo it, but he could not imagine wanting that. Ever. He would do anything for the acceptance of his friends, to feel like a normal kid again, like the kid he had been only months before.
It was the words from the last stanza that spurred his thoughts into action. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. That day, in eighth grade English class, David Karofsky made a decision. He would be the jock, the football player, the hockey star. He would do what it took to shake the teasing and mocking of his friends. They were tough, he could be tougher. They were cool, and he knew he could be cooler. He would choose to follow one of the two paths laid out before him. He knew the decision had to be made. He couldn't walk down both, not now, maybe not ever.