DISCLAIMER ! I own nothing and no one, of course. Except Pippa - leave me a review and tell me whether or not I should keep her, okay?
WHAT'S UP ? Lies, friendships, teams, romances, and Latin schools - Oh my!
LAST WORD ? Thanks for reading; please enjoy!
It all started pretty simply.
There was nothing exciting about that morning's glee club practice:
Quinn was off throwing up, Finn standing just inside the door – they all remembered the way she'd shoved and told him to leave her alone the one time he'd tried to console her through the morning sickness – glancing up at the clock nervously, because Quinn was like clockwork and if she wasn't back in three minutes then something was wrong.
Puck and his other friends from the football team were sitting with the Cheerios, chatting excitedly about something that had happened on the field the day before. Everyone else was in various states of practice or dozing in chairs around the choir room.
Except for Rachel, who was trying to capture everyone's attention in the center of the room, casting irritated glances at Will and Emma – she was so over her crush, so over it, but this wasn't the time for him to be rebounding off of the fight with Teri, which had, just as everything else did in McKinley, made its way through the grapevine. But more than that, he had just gotten reinstated as lead of the glee club, and they really did have to start buckling down to make up for the lost time.
And the fact that Emma was engaged. That, too, had worked its way through the grapevine.
Anyway, no one had really expected the door to open, but they weren't especially offset by it. The only real causality was Finn, who sprang away from the doorway after quickly realizing it wasn't Quinn, and ended up knocking a chair over. Kurt lifted his gaze from his iPhone to watch the display, and rolled his eyes: even after all of the dance moves he'd picked up along the way, Ballet Barbie he wasn't.
But when he sprang away, he hadn't revealed Sue or Coach Tanaka or even Figgins, but instead a girl in a short black and white paisley dress, with a red beaded necklace and a thin red headband dividing her curly, light brown hair. Bright black eyes flicked around the room and she tilted her head like a confused dog, cropped bangs falling in her eyes.
"This is so not where I'm supposed to be," she groaned in a voice like sand in the form of a Boston accent being poured over gravel, and stamped one flat-covered foot on the ground, turning her schedule over in her hands, even though there was clearly nothing written on the page.
Puck raised an eyebrow at the new girl's arrival. An athlete of some sort – that much was clear. The only other thing he knew was that it wasn't cheerleading. He'd been with enough cheerleaders to know their physique forward and backwards. The pierce of Santana's elbow in his ribs made him jump, and he looked at her irritably. She hadn't even looked away from Brittany's phone, but that didn't mean Puck didn't know she was simply ignoring him.
Will walked towards her, with a welcoming smile. "Are you new?"
She blinked up from the now-wrinkled paper in her hand slowly, saying just as slowly, "Are the students in this school so idiotic that you get enough misplaced kids to have to make that distinction?"
Will raised his hands in defense. "Just a question. But here, let me see if I can point you in the right direction." He reached for her schedule, and she let go of it disdainfully. Will's eyes ran over it for a minute, before he looked back up at her and said, "I'm Mr. Schuester, by the way. It looks like you have me for Spanish."
She took his offered hand quickly, the action betraying the disinterested look on her face. "Pippa Mahoney."
Emma immediately perked up and hurried forward. "Pippa? Hi, I'm Emma Pillsbury. We were supposed to meet in the guidance office before classes started, but it looks like neither of us are where we're supposed to be," she said brightly.
"Oh my god, look at that!" Pippa yelped sarcastically, face brightening artificially for a minute before the same, detached look came over her.
Emma took a deep breath, as if she were steadying herself, and then clapped her hands together, perpetual spirit back in place. "So, why don't we head up there now? This is actually sort of nice, because Guidance is on the other side of the school, more or less, so I can sort of give you a pseudo-tour on the way there."
Pippa made a vague upward motion with her mouth, and an abstract tilt of her head. Emma took it as a sign of recognition, and started for the door, offering Glee club a small wave that shook the plastic bracelets she'd layered on that morning.
"Maybe we'll see you back here," Will said as Pippa followed her out silently.
New girl paused, and half turned back around, "What is 'here', anyway?" Pippa asked, and it was the most genuine she'd sounded all morning. With good reason: she really had been trying to figure out what exactly was going on in the room.
In her defense, it wasn't all that easy to tell: all of the instruments had been moved to the stage. Glee was practicing so hard these days that it took more time to move the instruments around than Rachel could hold a note for - a true accomplishment – and it was just more convenient for everyone to leave them on the stage in the auditorium.
So, at the moment, the choir room just looked like a hang out for a very eclectic group of high school students.
"Glee club," Rachel explained, a touch proudly. She didn't see any sort of light go on in Pippa's head, so she continued, "You know. Singing, dancing."
Pippa resurveyed the other students in the room. Quinn had reappeared, having slipped past Pippa to return to her seat next to Finn, toothbrush and toothpaste still clutched in one hand. "Oh. Of course. But, yeah, no way – I play soccer."
"Hey, I - uh - I play football!" Finn volunteered, hand shooting into the air for some unknown reason. Puck, Mike and Matt all added their muttered agreements. Finn looked towards Kurt for a minute, because even if he had played for about a day and a half, he knew that it was possible. But Kurt stayed silent, focused on straightening his collar.
The Cheerios unknowingly picked up the slack, adding their own input about dual-teaming.
"Yes," Pippa said ambiguously, "But you guys have a trainwreck of a soccer team here, and I really can only balance one of those at a time."
Puck shrugged. "That's true, actually." Some glares were shot his way, and he shrugged again. "Have you seen them? Or their record? They made us - pre-Kurt -" And that was a nice touch, Quinn thought, thinking about how sweet Puck could be, before thinking, oh, God no, because she didn't care about him, "- look like the NF - fucking - L."
"Which makes complete sense because soccer and football are just so alike," Quinn fired back.
There, she told her previous thoughts, I don't care. And the fluttering in her stomach was the baby, not butterflies. Not that it even mattered, when she thought about it, because the baby was still Puck's, despite what Quinn told herself and everyone else, and so it was basically the same thing. Quinn changed her thoughts: the fluttering was morning sickness. Sure, she could attribute that with Puck in a completely uncaring, passively insulting way. It was perfect.
"They call soccer 'football,' in some places," Finn muttered, trying to keep Quinn happy while not leaving Puck out to dry. He and his best friend hadn't really been best friends in a while; not since the Quinn bomb dropped, and Finn honestly missed him. Puck might be a jerk, but he was nice to have around every once in a while.
Also - Quinn bomb? Totally stricken from his vocabulary. Forever. Not just once she had little Drizzle – he couldn't think of his daughter as the baby, no matter how hard he tried in preparation for giving her off to her adoptive parents - and no doubt kicked herself back into Cheerios shape. Always.
"I know that, Finn. But we're in the United States. Soccer is soccer and football is football," Quinn said, a familiar finality in her voice that said that the discussion was over – her point had been made, she'd won her war, and she didn't want anyone to try and steal her victory.
Finally turning their attention back to the front of the classroom, they noticed that Pippa and Emma had disappeared. Will was flipping through pages and pages of music. The teacher glanced up at the sudden silence. "So are you guys finally ready to get to work?"
Rachel, for better or for worse, spoke for all of them when she let out an enthusiastic squeak of a yes!
