young volcanoes.

In the middle of 1985 in San Francisco, California, there were two brilliantly happy couples reaching the same conclusion: Something was missing. It was Patrick that introduced the notion of a child to the remaining three and, though it took some persuasion, the trio inevitably warmed to the idea of bringing a healthy baby into their intimately small world. The biological logistics of the matter seemed to be the only issue.

It was decided that David and Lorelai would be the donors of sperm and egg, respectively, and the process of creating a child began. It took some time for Lorelai to become pregnant, with two failures and one miscarriage dashing the couples' hopes, but an ultrasound in October 1986 confirmed that the four future parents were having a bouncing baby boy.

From the moment of his birth, Carter Kennedy Pritchard Vaughn held the attention of all four of his parents, and he was doted upon to the point that David began perusing child psychology books to ensure that there was no permanent damage being done in spoiling the child. Resilient and independent to a fault, Carter grew into his own long before any of his parents were prepared to face the fact that he was no longer a baby. That never stopped Carter from taking initiative, however, and by the age of six, he had been saddled with the reputation of troublemaker.

Honestly, all Carter ever wanted was to make people laugh. It had never been his intention to consistently warm a seat in the principal's office to the point that the school secretary began housing a store of Tootsie Rolls in her desk drawer specifically for the times that Carter landed himself in the office. He had difficulty recognizing the difference between hilarious and unacceptable. His mothers were at a complete loss as to how to handle him, while his fathers felt certain that visits to a psychologist would help Carter overcome his obvious need for attention. These appointments did little to address the situation. If anything, it gave the young boy more of an opportunity to talk about himself, a topic that never seemed to bore him.

In his junior year of high school, however, all of that would change. Carter recognized that he had an interest in one of the students in his Greek Mythology elective - a male student. It shook him more than Carter expected, and the identity crisis so characteristic of adolescence overtook him. While his sense of humor remained, he drew into himself, more apt to keep his emotions hidden than to share them in the form of a joke at his own expense. He avoided the topic of dating altogether with his parents, and it was at his Junior Prom that his love life began to shroud itself in a web of lies. Instead of taking the boy that he liked, Carter asked a cheerleader, parading her around the school as his girlfriend for a full seven months afterward. It was easier to identify as a straight boy than address the fact that he wasn't that straight after all.

The lying reached critical mass in late fall of 2013. After graduating college at the University of California, Davis, Carter relocated to Georgia for the sake of employment. He took on a job teaching freshman level remedial English courses and, after three months of flirting, Carter began dating the daughter of the university Dean of Admissions. He had himself convinced that he could be content with a woman without ever having confirmed that he preferred men; it was, as far as Carter was concerned, a matter of sheer willpower. And he might have succeeded, had it not been for the graduate assistant that fate had sent him that fall semester, just three months away from a wedding that Carter had honestly never wanted. Though he had never actually anticipated that it would happen, Carter found himself in a rather precarious position with the boy over Thanksgiving break - as did his then-fiancé. The rouse was shattered, Carter was politely asked to resign, and his things were stuffed into the back of a U-Haul van despite his former fiancé's wishes to decorate the front lawn with them. Out of ideas and in desperate need of a fresh start, Carter made his way to the Big Apple, future plans unknown.

It was in New York City that Carter found himself in one hell of a romantic predicament. Torn between two men, one of which was a cocaine addict that Carter could not seem to tear himself away from, he surrendered to the notion that he was undeserving of the better candidate. It would be a matter of months before Carter would come to realize that he had made the wrong choice. En route to California and a place he knew he would find unending acceptance, he struggled to find the one - the one - that he had stupidly let go.

A matter of months later, married and content with life on the West Coast, it was decided that the somewhat newlyweds would change their scenery and make a return to the East Coast where it had all begun.