A/N: I do not own any of the characters from Glee. Yet. The mistakes made here are my own, because I'm too impatient to find a beta or two.
(I Would Give My Life) To Be Human
When she's six, Emma counts the freckles on the backs of her hands. There are eight on her right and ten on her left. It soothes her and she falls asleep rubbing the thumb of her right hand across the arch-like pattern of freckles on the back of her left hand.
She does it every night. First, she kneels next to her bed and clasps her hands beneath her chin, eyes squeezed shut she thanks God. She's little so she doesn't know what for, but she thanks him because that's what mom and dad say. "Thank God, Emma, thank Him every night." Later, it will become, "thank God, Emma, thank Him for giving you red hair," but for now, Emma just kneels and quietly whispers "thank you" to her forearms before crawling under her covers. By the pale light of her butterfly nightlight, she counts the freckles on the back of her right hand and then her left hand.
Over the years, the freckles grow from eight, to ten, to fifteen. Sometimes, they fade and become so light they're almost imperceptible. Almost. Emma knows that, on her 10th birthday, she has thirteen freckles on her right hand and only twelve on her left. And when she lies in the dark, her butterfly nightlight long gone with her Teddy Ruxpin and her Light Bright, by the moonlight she can just barely make out the shadow of an indiscernible amount of freckles in an arch-like pattern across the back of her left hand and she falls asleep slowly rubbing her hands together until she's counted to twenty-five.
She stops kneeling at her bedside because she doesn't want whatever germs are on the floor to get on her knees. She keeps telling herself she'll mop before bed but she always spends the last few moments with the light on making sure her hands are clean and she's counted her freckles just right. She feels jittery every time she slides under the covers, like the inside of her chest is too small and her lungs can't expand quite right, so she lies there taking soft shallow breaths as she wrings her hands and counts.
1…2…3…4…5…6…7…8…9…10…
By the time she reaches twenty-five, she is finally able to take a deep breath and the thudding of her heart has slowed to a normal pace. So she rolls onto her side and stares at the gap in her curtains, willing herself not to count the stars she can see winking on in the sky before she starts to count any way.
1…2…3…
Her friend Jane says that she "just goes to sleep", Anne says that she counts sheep, and Susan's mom lets her listen to music. No one counts the number of times they rub their hands together, or the number of stars they can see through the opening in their curtains, or the freckles on the backs of their hands. Everyone tells her she isn't normal, that there's something wrong with her, that she shouldn't care about the bacteria on an unused tissue in the doctor's office or the cleanliness of her hands after a shower. But she does. She cares about all of those things and more.
She stops making phone calls from school because she can't be sure if the receptionist cleans the office phone with bleach. She usually misses lunch because the cafeteria is likely crawling with bacteria and she can't trust the school's paper towels to adequately clean her fruit. (When dirty fruit became an issue, Emma can't quite remember, because it seems like she's always been wary of her mother's method of cleaning grapes.) In seventh grade, the school counselor has a private meeting with her parents and she sits in the hallway watching the janitor mop the floor.
"You missed a spot."
"No, I didn't." The janitor is gruff, he doesn't like anyone, Emma reminds herself.
"Yes, you did. And are you using a three percent bleach solution?"
"Wh-what?"
"It's the only way to ensure the floors are disinfected. Pinesol won't cut it." The janitor gives her a dirty look and drags his mop to the end of the hallway, leaving Emma to stare at the dirt smudges he left un-mopped.
Her mother calls her, "my little Freaky Deaky" and both of her parents hold her hands when they take her to therapy. They mean well but, as Emma sits on the out-of-date sofa waiting for her new therapist to be done interviewing her parents, she notices a small patch of peeling wallpaper at the back of the room and the greenish-black tinge of mold seeping down from the ceiling. Not good.
Therapy lasts for six months. It's not that the therapist gives up, it's that Emma refuses to go because the mold is spreading and no one is doing anything about it. Her parents just sigh and shrug and "let Emma be Emma". They keep telling her that she's blessed with: two parents who love her, a sharp mind, a comfortable life, a healthy body, and a full head of gorgeous red hair. They tell her to pray to God to make her better, and to always thank him for what he has blessed her with. They take her to the Red Oaks, where the silverware is always polished and the janitor actually took her advice on the proper cleaning solution for the floors.
It's not enough. It's never enough. She still has to change in the girl's locker room (countless bacteria on every surface) and use the pencil sharpener at the front of the room when her lead breaks (her peers sneeze on it). She's so stressed by the end of the day that when her mother comes home from the hospital (she refuses to hug her mother until she's changed out of her uniform and washed her hands twice) she finds Emma on her hands and knees anxiously scrubbing the linoleum in the kitchen or disinfecting the stove top.
"Uh-oh, someone has a case of the cleanies," her mother says, and mimes a kiss on the top of her daughter's head.
They call it her "quirk" and her "little problem". They adjust. They have to after years of hearing their daughter counting quietly in the dark. Her father learns to remove his shoes each time he comes in after golf and her mother learns to wipe off Emma's plate and keep her foods from touching. They laugh it off when members of the country club comment on some of Emma's oddities, they say "isn't she special? She's one of a kind" and the others laugh with them.
Emma's sweet, quiet, and on the surface is everything a parent would want in a daughter. She says "thank you" and even bobs a curtsy during the year before cotillion. She dances beautifully with her escort at the ball (a handsome dark-ginger named Arthur whose parents moved to Ohio from Germany) and even lets him kiss her goodnight. So when she goes to college and refuses any school that won't allow her a single dorm with an en suite, her parents can say she's "dedicated" and "doesn't want to get distracted by normal college behaviour" and everyone believes them.
She stops counting at night because she's exhausted from student government, celibacy club, and the two extra classes a semester she decides are absolutely necessary. In some ways, college is torture (not enough sleep) but in other ways, it's a dream. Her dorm room is small and private and always so clean that her RA stops formal inspections because nothing ever changes. Her bathroom practically gleams and she can never quite get over the thrill of not sharing a shower with anyone but her own feet.
In most ways, her "little problem" recedes in college. She gets "better" and her worst flare ups come when she's at home for winter and summer breaks (she cleans the grout in the kitchen because her parents replaced the linoleum and the sight of dirty grout makes her hands twitch). She's twenty-one when the stress of being home is so great that she starts counting again. Her father hears her from the hallway and when he finally goes to bed, he looks at his wife with an indiscernible look.
"She's counting again, Nance." He sits down on the edge of the bed and slides his slippers off.
She sighs, placing her book down and removing her reading classes, "that's just our little Freaky Deaky, Matthew, when will you learn to accept that?"
"When she stops?" He offers softly before slipping under the covers. She makes a noncommittal noise and returns to her book.
They never talk about it once she's on her own after graduate school. She manages to find jobs and hold down an apartment, so they're not worried about her. Sure, she wipes her fruit down with a paper towel and has to wear plastic gloves to do so but the Pillsbury's new rule is "don't ask, don't tell".
Emma is young and quiet with a tidy one bedroom apartment in a nice part of Lima, she works as a receptionist at the mental health clinic downtown while searching for a school counseling job, and she even goes on a date (she ends up referring him to one of the therapists at the office and never speaks to him again). The Pillsburys are a respectable middle aged couple with their only child out of the nest, they go to the country club on the weekends and spend weeknights putting together puzzles and watching 'I Love Lucy' re-runs on TV Land.
What goes unmentioned at their bi-monthly dinners at the Red Oaks is that Emma can't sleep unless she's counted the buttons on the front of her nightgown and the number of times she rubs her hands together because she has too many freckles on the backs of her hands to count. She doesn't tell them that walking through the produce section of Kroger's makes her chest constrict uncomfortably so she has to take a break in the bakery just to catch her breath. They don't know that she has to buy things in groups of seven and that her hair-touching tick is back with a vengeance. Instead, she tells them that things are fine and her job hunt is yielding promising options. She never lies about having a boyfriend (they would want to meet him and inspect his genealogy for a possibly recessive red hair gene) and is always honest if she needs a little financial help (she never does, she's overly frugal thanks to her father and only spends extra money on Blockbuster rentals and bleach).
She only gets "the cleanies" once in front of her parents, when her mother mentions her love life and a rush of anxiety floods her system. She scratches anxiously at a spot on her butter knife that she hadn't seen before and her mother tuts sympathetically.
"I guess are little Freaky Deaky isn't completely cured of the cleanies, huh, Matthew?" Her mother picks up her wine glass and smiles over the rim while her father grumbles some response around a mouthful of potatoes.
The spot is gone and Emma can breathe.
She's sitting at her new desk, completely cleaned with a 3% mixture of bleach and water, when William Schuester pops his head in the door way and smiles at her in a way that makes her heart break and swell at the same time. He rambles on about welcoming her to McKinley and that they're lucky to have such a highly qualified counselor on their team (everything that Principal Figgins has already said, but it sounds so much nicer coming out of his mouth) while she focuses on his dimpled chin and his perfectly curled hair. She feels a heated blush creep to her cheeks once he's gone and she instinctively hops up to scrub something because she can't handle the rush of endorphins into her system.
It's been years, it feels like, and Emma's loved Will from afar. Or something like that. Through a fiancé and a husband, Emma still feels that unnerving rush of endorphins every time he saunters down the hallway to her office or pops into the break room to share lunch with her. It's painful, the flood of emotions he conjures up, and she has to clean something immediately after he's gone because that's the only way she can handle herself. Cleaning is still her only escape: when she's dealing with the end of her relationship with Ken and the ruination of her marriage to Carl, no amount of scrubbing or disinfecting helps, but at least once she's done polishing the silverware set her aunt gave her when she married Carl, she feels like she can sit back and breathe a little easier.
The therapist (sort of) helps and the pills (sometimes) help. When she moves in with Will, the therapist helps her determine what coping mechanisms she still needs in her new life and which ones don't work with a partner. Will respects her, knows that she doesn't want to have sex (yet?) and knows that she's probably going to disinfect the entry way at least once a week. Her therapist tells her that she's blind, that leaping into Will's home will only make things worse, but Emma rebuffs her because how could living with Will make things worse when she's shared a glass of wine with him twice during movie night.
Perhaps it's the reintroduction of her parents into the equation that makes her open her eyes wider. Maybe it's the way her mother throws her most hated childhood nickname around. Or it's the way they pick apart Will's heritage for the far superior melanocortin-1 receptor mutation. Maybe it's just the way her parents look at her but, at her next therapy appointment, when she enters the room she makes a beeline for the leather chair in the corner and perches on the edge.
"Emma, is something the matter?" Her therapist is startled and Emma notes that she hasn't even picked up her notebook from the table next to her chair.
"It's not right, is it?"
"What do you mean?" Her therapist leans forward, pen and paper still forgotten. Emma wills it not to bother her.
"I'm not right." Her voice is small and quavers when she speaks, her eyes still wide with anxiety but threatening to spill over with tears that she should have cried all of those years ago when she first walked into that horrid therapists office with the moldy ceiling.
"It's not that you're not right, Emma," her therapist takes off her glasses in a way that makes Emma flinch, because it's a mannerism her mother perfected over the years of her life. "It's that you have a disease. And diseases? We can manage those. Maybe not cure. No, not cure. But that's not the important thing here."
"What is, then?" She sniffs and the first tear rolls silently down her cheek.
"Emma, it's the person that's important. You are important. And right now? You have to put yourself first." Her therapist leans back, reaching for the legal pad to her right. As soon as she looks away, Emma grabs a tissue from the box on the coffee table and for the first time since she was six she doesn't stop to think about the number of germs on the tissue, she just blots away the tears on her cheeks.