for you i'll strip my secrets bare (just promise me you'll still be there)

chapter one

SANTANA

There are moments in your life you'll remember later, moments you can look back and define as points in time when everything changed. A decision made, or not made. A look forward, or a look behind. Trust extended, or denied. Small, yet incredibly impactful choices, like the proverbial wind that blows past you to move a butterfly's wings a continent away.

It was that kind of moment that brought me to a crossroads I honestly never expected to face: the moment when the person I least expected ever to see walked into a dark room that reeked of regret and cheap liquor, looked up at me with her hand extended and said, "Stop. You deserve better than this."

The summer after I graduated from McKinley High School was, to greatly understate things, kind of rough. Life blindsided me and slapped me upside the head so hard that I couldn't see for the stars that spun around it. First, I confessed to my girlfriend that I'd long harbored feelings for another girl we both knew very well, and she broke up with me. Then I came out to my parents, got kicked out of the house for it, and on top of that, lost my scholarship when my parents accused my cheerleading coach, who'd arranged the full ride, of running a locker room that, in their words, "encouraged sexual deviancy." In other words, it was a perfect storm of anger, hurt, disappointment and complete terror.

So, to sum up: right after having the best year of my high school life - winning national championships with both the cheerleading squad and the glee club, graduating in the top ten in my class, finally accepting my sexuality and falling in love - I was suddenly without my parents, my girlfriend, and my home. At least they let me keep my car and all the cash in my bank accounts - though not without the understanding that once said cash was gone, there would be no more coming from them. So hey, they weren't completely heartless!

I'm sure that's what they told themselves to get to sleep at night, anyway.

Life lesson #1: when the worst thing you can imagine actually happens and your greatest fear has been realized, you still have to go on somehow - no matter how terrified you actually are. This includes finding yourself living in your car, with no cell phone (because your parents have removed you from their plan), and all your worldly possessions crammed into the trunk and back seat of said car. Could I have asked to stay with a friend's family? Yeah, I could've, but I was so shocked and stunned by everything that had happened that I wasn't thinking clearly. I felt deeply ashamed, embarrassed and humiliated, and I guess I thought I was trying to be strong and preserve my dignity somehow by trying to hide the truth from all the people who cared about me.

So I wrote a letter, made copies of it at the Lima Public Library, and sent it out to everybody in the Glee Club, spinning a bullshit story about how this awesome cheerleading scholarship I'd gotten required me to leave early for Louisville, Kentucky, where I was looking forward with great excitement to spending the next four years waving my pom-poms thanks to the benevolence of Coach Sue, while hopefully not acquiring one of those syrupy sweet Southern accents and ending up sounding like a Latina Paula Deen or whatever.

That was how I said goodbye to everyone I loved. In a letter, without a return address, without even telling them not to try calling me because I no longer had a working phone number.

I figured they'd find that out soon enough.

Yeah, I'm not proud of it. I'm not proud of running away and leaving all those people behind and in the dark, with no way to contact or find me. Grief does funny things to people, though. All I can say, looking back, is that I was so lost in it that all I wanted to do was put as much distance as I could between myself and the source of my pain – which happened to be my own former home. And yet, that only meant getting as far as the "bad neighborhood" I'd claimed as my own many times, even though I lived all my life in a place that was its exact opposite.

And that, boys and girls, is how Santana Lopez became "Lolita the Candy Striper," living in a a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Lima Heights Adjacent, working the pole at a sleazy little hole in the wall at the very edge of town.

RACHEL

On the day I was set to leave with my fathers for New York City to get a look at the dorms and the campus of the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts, a.k.a. NYADA, a letter with no return address on the envelope arrived in the mail. I looked at it curiously, not recognizing the handwriting in which my name and address had been written across the front.

What is this? I wondered. Sadly, letter writing is a lost art these days, and although my first inclination was to be excited, a strange sense of foreboding quickly settled in the pit of my stomach as I opened the mysterious envelope and unfolded the piece of notebook paper inside.

Dear losers, it began. Instantly I knew this to be Santana's work. We had all come to know, after all, how she loved to use seemingly derogatory descriptors as terms of affection.

I'm sorry to be telling you this in something as lame as a hand-written letter and not something as cool as a text message or Facebook post – no, wait, those are lame too, so no, I'm not actually sorry for that. I am sorry, however, that I'm not able to deliver this news in person, because it's the least you deserve. And by that I mean, really, the least is what you deserve. Anyway, you know that super awesome cheerleading scholarship that Sue somehow arranged (i.e., bribed and/or threatened someone to get) for me? Well, apparently I kinda forgot that it requires me to leave early for beautiful downtown (or uptown, I don't really know) Kentucky, home of bluegrass and bourbon, to get settled and meet the other girls on the squad. Yes, it's a new chapter in the life of Santana Lopez, one that seems strangely similar to the previous chapter: four years of waving my rambunctious pom-poms pretending to be excited about the grunting, groaning efforts of a bunch of brainless, moronic jocks, alongside a bunch of catty, backstabbing, lame-ass bitches, under the guidance of another sadistic, borderline psychotic coach who loves nothing more than to torture our bodies and tear down our oh so fragile self-esteem. (Why did I agree to this again? Oh, yeah – it makes college free!) Anyway, although I wish I could see all of you before I go, there's just no time for me to squeeze you in before I head down the road to Hick City, U.S.A., so this is goodbye for now, and well...I'll see you when I see you.

All right - later, bitches! I'm out.

Love and breadsticks and all that other sappy shit,

Santana.

P.S: Good luck getting to Broadway, Hobbit. Break a leg. No, really. I mean, fall down a flight of stairs or something and actually break a leg. Pain builds character, they say - and years from now, when you land the role of "girl who falls down a flight of stairs and breaks a leg" in a Lifetime TV movie, you'll be able to draw on the experience to bring depth and nuance to your performance.

I frowned as I read this. What kind of cheerleading scholarship required its recipients to arrive on campus earlier than every other student at the school? And why hadn't she at least called us to break the news? I understood that she wasn't the type to encourage or enjoy a tearful round of goodbyes, but still...something didn't feel right about this to me. As I've said before, I'm just a little bit psychic, and the energy that came off the page in my hand carried all sorts of negative vibrations.

When I called Quinn to ask if she had received a similar letter, she told me that she had actually received the exact same letter, but only a copy of it. Santana had actually photocopied the handwritten page I'd gotten. She was as puzzled as I was, and a flurry of texts and calls confirmed that all the other members of the glee club had received photocopies of the letter as well. Equally curious, mine was the only one to include a post script.

More troubling was the discovery that calls to Santana's cell phone were being answered only by a recorded message stating this number is no longer in service. A frantic call to Brittany, whom I thought would be the person most likely to know what was going on with Santana, yielded nothing other than the shocking fact that the two of them had broken up not too long after graduation. She wouldn't tell me anything about the circumstances that precipitated the end of their seemingly blissful relationship, though, citing a desire keep those details private. Which, while understandable, was not exactly helpful.

I wanted desperately to find out what was happening, but there was no time. We had a flight to New York booked and a hotel room reserved, and neither was refundable. I felt my heart being pulled in two directions, between the recent past and the inevitable future, and though it pained me greatly, I reluctantly left instructions with the glee club members to inform me if they learned of any new developments in the strange case of Santana Lopez. I departed for the city of my dreams with the sense that something was terribly, terribly wrong still churning within me.