Rachel was a walking cliché and she knew it. It's not like that is what she had aimed for at the start of her freshman year, but she found a strange comfort in the dark clothes and the overdone make up. She liked it. Yes, she was made fun of, but she could deal with it. She would have been made fun either way. What with her two dads and her not good enough looks and her grades. She had been used to it before, and if she could be comfortable now, then it didn't matter what anyone else thought.
She had friends, though. She wasn't as much of a loner as everyone believed. She had found a great friend in Tina, the only other gothic girl at school, and Mercedes, a sassy girl who loved to point out fashion flaws in everyone that walked by. And she had learned, over four years of sharing a lunch table with them, that they were quite possibly even bigger gossipers than the boys who ran the school paper.
And that's how she heard of the new girl.
"Quinn Fabray, I heard" Tina whispered, while putting photos of her and her boyfriend in her locker. For someone who pretended not to have feelings, her and Mike's love for each other was bordering on nauseating.
"Quinn?" Mercedes snorted from the other side of Tina's locker "Lauren told me her name was Lucy"
"Well, I heard that she has a tattoo of Ryan Seacrest!" Santana said walking by, in her cheerleaders uniform. Rachel did not envy Brittany and Santana, she definitely had enough to deal with, with Glee club and being part of other extra curricular clubs. She would probably be under too much pressure if she was on the Cheerios as well. But of course she would have loved to be wearing one of those uniforms, after all, everyone wanted to be part of the Cheerios. Nobody seemed to care that the Coach, Sue Sylvester, was a maniac.
"I want to give my cat a tattoo, but no tattoo shops will allow it. It's so racist" Brittany said, wide-eyed and deadly serious. Mercedes laughed and then turned the sound into a soft cough, when Santana started giving her a murderous glare.
"Well, I guess we'll see soon" Tina said loudly, turning her head towards the school doors.
Rachel looked over her shoulder and saw the hallway forming a path in the middle to let someone pass.
Quinn Fabray.
She was slim and not too tall but not as short as Rachel either. She had soft pink hair with some blonde highlights. Her long grey skirt hovered just above the floor, long enough to hide her shoes but not so long that it touched the floor. Rachel had to make an effort to suppress the smile that was tugging at her lips. The girl was really pretty and Rachel had had her gay crisis a long time before not to be worried at the thought.
And then they locked eyes.
Because Rachel's life was a cliché and sometimes, not many times, but some of them, they were great clichés.
And this was one of them.
The girl smiled.