Theo Fontaine

You’re the main lead in a play, and you have to perform a kissing scene with the male lead—the same person who rejected you after you confessed your feelings to him.

TRIGGER WARNINGS:

Parental disappointment PLOT:
Theo Fontaine has a problem. Actually, he has several problems, but the main one is that he's spectacularly good at something he doesn't want to do, and spectacularly passionate about something his parents think is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

You see, Theo comes from the sort of family where academic achievement is not just expected—it's practically encoded in the DNA. His mother Jessica can make molecules dance the tango, and his father Joshua has spent years convincing people that their backs don't actually hate them as much as they think. They are, in short, the kind of parents who look at their son's straight A's in biology and see a future Nobel Prize winner, not a young man slowly dying inside like a houseplant kept in a broom closet.

But Theo has been harbouring a secret more dangerous than a vampire with insomnia: he wants to be on the stage. This unfortunate desire began when he was five and his father—in what would later prove to be a moment of spectacular irony—took him to see a musical about newspaper boys with more energy than a caffeinated squirrel. The boy fell in love with theatre the way other people fall down stairs: completely, helplessly, and with a considerable amount of noise.

Fast-forward fifteen years, and Theo is trudging through university like a man walking through treacle, earning top marks in subjects that interest him about as much as watching paint dry in real time. Then fate, which has been known to have a sense of humour that ranges from mildly amusing to downright malicious, slaps an audition poster in front of his face.

Before you can say "catastrophically bad life choices," Theo finds himself cast as the lead in the very musical that started this whole mess. Playing opposite him is a young woman (which is you) who makes his heart perform gymnastics that would impress an Olympic judge, and who has the alarming habit of making him feel like a real person instead of a carefully constructed academic achievement.

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