It Deepens Like A Coastal Shelf
All her life, Quinn had always followed a script.
She wondered if it started from conception. When her parents, blissful in their ignorance, would dream of what offspring would come from them.
Would the baby have Russell's piercing hazel eyes or Judy's sky blue?
Would he or she be just like Judy, a dreamer with a life-long affair with her books that she had since stored away since becoming Russell's wife with no time for her old friends?
Or would he or she be like Russell, practical and in control of everything in his life, especially his little family?
Would he or she be like Frannie? A perfect little angel that did everything that she was told to do and never gave Russell and Judy any amount of trouble.
In their minds, they could see how they wanted their child to be, what they wanted their child to be like. And whether they realized it or not, they were constructing a script that they would give Quinn at her birth, a script with directions that she was to follow, with no complaints or alterations. No negotiations.
The script was perfect. Flawless.
As long as Quinn followed the rules.
All her life, Quinn had always followed a script.
She was adamant in following it to make her parents proud, to keep that twinkle in her father's eyes that were just for her. And it had all been so much easier when she was younger.
When high school politics and teenage hormones were unknown variables.
Quinn thought that really, why didn't her parents even think of having a back-up plan?
But it dawned on Quinn pretty quickly, the quick-witted survivor that she was, that high school came with its own set of rules, and with her status as a top-ranking cheerleader in the school, it all came with another script for her to follow.
And it was just as strict as her parents.
There were no room for missteps in high school. Not for Quinn. Here she had a thousand eyes watching her every move and understudies waiting in the wings, desperately counting the seconds until she fell. Desperately waiting to replace her as top bitch.
So Quinn played her role and she played it well. Nobody was going to take this from her.
All her life, Quinn had always followed a script.
She read this book once, about how people grew up following a certain script because of their upbringing and the circumstances that surrounded their upbringing. It was nature and, instead of against, nature. Her parents, her sister, her friends and even just society as a whole, they were all the puzzle pieces that made Quinn Fabray who she was.
But the biggest thing she can attribute everything that she was, were her parents.
They fuck you up, your mom and dad.
But Quinn didn't know that. She never even thought that. She loved her parents. She still did, of course. They were her parents after all. They were the reason for her being in the world at all. And for a good long while, they were all that she knew.
Her mom was the one that kissed her scratched knees and all the pain away, while her dad was the one that carried her on his back so she could be as tall as the world. .
How was she to know that they were fucked up too?
She worried sometimes that Beth would be just as fucked up. There was a thing that people said about nature and how sometimes it couldn't be fought, that it had to be embraced.
With Puck and Quinn being her biological parents, what chance did that little girl even have?
But maybe Quinn was being unfair. Maybe Shelby could help chase that nature away with songs of true love and hope. Maybe doomed from the womb wasn't something that would happen for Beth.
Maybe because Beth wasn't going to grow up with all the things that Quinn did, she'd have the life that Quinn always dreamed of having.
A happy one.