A/N: How did this happen? I don't even like Rachel all that much.
She got her first pair of high heels when she was ten.
Too early, some might say, clucking and shaking their heads, but for Rachel it couldn't have come sooner. Her mother had been compromising with her for years, offering her low-heeled wedges and childish Mary Janes, but these didn't satisfy her. She wanted to be tall, to stand equal to the men like she was born to, to earn their respect like her mother does with tailored coats, perfectly cut dresses and long slim legs ending in stilettos.
She receives them in mid-November. It is a day of little significance, so she does get something of a shock when she opens the stylishly wrapped box to find a pair of kitten heels, champagne gold with jeweled toes. "They're Miu Miu," her mother says, tipping her head to the side. "Maybe you might get Louboutins if you're good, hmm?"
Rachel sits down to slip them on, smoothing her skirt down immaculately like her mother showed her. They fit her perfectly, and when she stands up she walks not with the stumbling gait of a fawn, but with the sure strides of an expert supermodel. Her mother claps her hands delicately, letting out a coo of satisfaction.
She wears them three weeks later to meet Kim Tan for the second time, and her nose is almost level with his.
By the time they're engaged during the awkward mid-adolescent period, she is taller than him in heels.
When he walks out on her at the airport, a prince rushing to see his pauper, she wonders when he grew taller than her.
(She takes off her shoes to run to the gate.)