Senior year. That means that Rachel only has to suffer one more year in this god-awful place before she can pack her bags and leave for the big apple. So of course senior year needs to start out bad. The universe is going to torture her for the entire year, isn't it. How hard could it be for the school to schedule her in the correct elective? Very, apparently, because Rachel's schedule is currently telling her that she belongs in "Advanced Painting- Ms. Dobbin" Rachel is horrible at painting. She avoids the set construction portions of theatre at all costs, because helping will inevitably result in too many splinters, paint all over her favorite blouse, and a shoddy job painting a backdrop that someone will have to re-do later anyway. It's probably because painting is something that Rachel is horrible at that she hates it so much. Because, why ever do something that you'll surely fail at, if you'll just end up ridiculed. Rachel is a star. She hates failure. She hates painting.
But, she's been signed up for painting anyway. She has to set this straight.
Rachel weaves through the students milling around the dirty, paint stained room, and over to a stool where a young Woman with blonde hair sits holding a clipboard.
"Are you Ms. Dobbin?" Rachel asks.
The woman looks up, smiling kindly at Rachel. "Yes, I am. Is there something I can do for you?"
"Actually there is. Painting really isn't something I'm good at, and I think it would be better for this class as a whole if I were moved into another elective. One that better suits my talents."
"You don't need to worry about not being a good painter. That's what the class is for. You're supposed to learn. The class is listed as advanced, but that just means most of the students took art appreciation already. You don't need to worry about other people being better than you. I'm sure you'll end up being a lovely painter."
"But, Ms. Dobbin. I really don't think you understand. I'm never going to be any good at painting. I don't want to waste your supplies when I could just be in a different class."
"You've got to have more self-confidence. Just try it out. I grade based on effort mostly. You'll probably get an A. It'll boost your GPA."
"But-"
"I've got to take attendance now. Why don't you take a seat. There's a free seat next to that girl over there" Ms. Dobbin pointed, and sure enough, an empty, paint stained, horrendously dirty looking stool is free, next to a girl that Rachel has never seen before in her life. Rachel strutts silently over to the seat, and gingerly sits down, smoothing her plaid skirt. She looks over to the girl next to her, who is drawing a very anatomically accurate picture of a guy, without any clothes on. Rachel huffs, and turns her head away from the girl. Who would draw that in school? Rachel peeks over at the drawing once more.
The guy is actually really hot.
Rachel tries to ignore the girl and her drawing while she pays attention to Ms. Dobbins giving a brief overview of what is expected of the students, and what their first project will be. But Rachel can't help but steal another glance, and see that the guy now has a face. A familiar one too. Rachel looks across the row of tables to a guy sitting slightly behind them. He is on the football team, and his name is James. Rachel had been slushied by him at least ten times since she started high school.
That thought makes it easy to ignore the muscle structure that the girl is now going over with thicker pen lines, and Rachel gets off her seat to go grab a piece of paper from the pile that Ms. Dobbins has indicated. She grabs another, for the girl, two paintbrushes, and two palettes. Ms Dobbins goes around the classroom, and squirts two colors, and black and white paint, onto each person's palette. She uncovers a still life at the front of the room. And she tells them to paint, but not to share colors.
Rachel raises her hand. "But Ms. Dobbins. Purple and yellow look awful together. And there are so many other colors in that still life. How am I supposed to make green for those apples? It's going to look all wrong!"The girl next to her snorts, and glanced at Rachel, eyes running up and down her body, assessing her outfit. Rachel suddenly feels self conscious in her pink tights and blue button down blouse. "What?" She askes defensively.
"Just… you don't' need everything to look exactly like it does in real life. The apples will still be apples even if they're the wrong color." Rachel raised an eyebrow and looked over at the sketch of the still life the other girl was doing.
"And the apples WILL look like apples if they're square? I think you're hardly the one to be telling ME how to paint." Rachel looks condescendingly at the drawing, and then turns to do the best she can with her own, trying and failing to reproduce every curve onto the sheet of stiff white paper. While Rachel is still sketching her first apple, the girl starts to paint, and the way she slopps on blue and orange paint without abandon, messily, is crude, and Rachel smiles to herself. At least she is better than the person sitting next to her. That she can deal with. A grin is plastered on her face as she continues her perfect drawing of the apples.
Five minutes before the bell rings, however, Ms. Dobbins is standing over the pair of girls, watching them work. "That's really lovely. I like the detail you're using on the texture of the basket."
"Thank you so-" Rachel looks up at Ms. Dobbs, and then stops speaking when she sees the woman's eyes trained, not on her own picture, but her neighbor's. Rachel looks down at the Painting. It looks nothing like the apples. They are square, and are mostly shades of brown that the girl has created by mixing different amounts of her blue and orange together. "Hers?" Rachel asks incredulously.
"Why of course. She's spent a lot of time coming up with different colors she could make simply with the two she was given, and the texture on the basket is beautiful." Rachel suddenly looks down at her picture, which hasexactly four colors in it: Purple, yellow, black, and white. All carefully spaced, and not mixing in any way. "This is very precise, and I see that you've spent a lot of time concentrating on it. That's good. Why don't you try working with some midtones next time though? Contrast is nice, but learning how to mix colors effectively is also a good skill to have." Rachel is about to say something else, but the bell interrupts her, and instead she grabs her bag and leaves the classroom without a word.
-X-
This class is going to be a piece of cake.
It's a level 5 advanced class, and there is still no way in the world Santana can fail. She knew she made the right choice when she signed up for Spanish instead of French as a foreign language in sixth grade.
Santana files her nails nonchalantly as she listens to her classmates fail to come up with an answer to the question Mr. Shue has written on the chalkboard.
"Que hiciste durante el verano?"
Mr. Shue goes around the room asking for answers. One girl thinks the question is asking if she is a vegan, and proceeds to talk about how much she loves steak. Another answers that he went to "Germania" over the summer with his parents. Santana laughs, and doesn't tell him that the word for Germany is Alemania, and that germania means something completely different. Mr. Shue looks pointedly at her and then corrects the student before moving on. Santana begins to filter the voices out and focus on other thoughts. The sound of Brittany's laugh rings in her ears and she smiles as she examines the nails on her right hand and moves onto her left.
Suddenly there is a voice bringing Santana back to the class. The voice isn't unlike Brittany's but it's fuller, not quite as sweet, but more audacious. It's a white girl's voice, but without the annoying American accent. Her accent is hard to decipher, very faintly Spanish. Every once and a while she slips in a "SH" that shouldn't be there, but not too often. And then of course on a few words she sounds very Chihuahuan. And those are two different parts of the world. And the words fall out of the white girl's mouth like she's been speaking Spanish her whole life- not too formal like they teach you in school, but still kind of polite- or at least as polite as you can be when you're telling your new teacher about how your life sucks because you had to move from your hometown near New York to live with your conservative Aunt and Uncle in Ohio. The girl stops talking and then glances over at Santana who has made a small noise of surprise, and then goes back to doodling in a notebook.
So there's a new girl in town. And from the look that girl has on her face, Santana knows she's got guts.
She smirks.
A few minutes later Mr. Shue arranges them in groups to work on making a poster for the vacation spot they visited that summer, and Santana finds herself paired up with the white girl, who holds out a hand. "I'm Katie." Santana takes the hand and says her name, before turning back in her seat, and resuming the job on her nails. "So… I hope you went somewhere interesting we can draw because the most interesting place I visited over the summer was a hospital." Santana nods. "We visited my Mama's family in Puerto Rico." Katie immediately starts outlining the island, and Santana watches, surprised that, as far as she can tell, the map is pretty accurate.
"How about we say you went windsurfing" Katie says as she begins to sketch the outline of a person windsurfing in the ocean next to the island.
"How do you say that is Spanish?" Santana asks, distracted.
"Hacer windsurf." The two girls look at each other. And then laugh.
"That's so lame. It sounds like something Puck would come up with." Santana says, and she turns to look at the poster.
"Who's that?" Katie asks.
And Santana looks at her for a minute, before saying, in all seriousness."Just some asshole I fucked a few times."
"Been there. He's hot?"
"Super. You'll probably meet him. He'll like you. He has a think for… un-skinny girls" Santana looks pointedly at Katie's body for a minute. Katie raises and eyebrow.
"Sounds like an interesting story…"
"He just stood me up for some bitchface whale Zizes last year." Santana starts helping Katie color in the poster with the broken old crayons Mr. Shue has provided them with.
"Still together?"
"No, she left him and the glee club because she thought it was ruining her reputation."
"That's a load of crap" Katie answers, and then looks confused. "What's glee club?"
"It's the showchoir club… actually this year they started having it as an elective class. It's ninth period."
Katie glances at her schedule. "They signed me up for that. My old school was super academic oriented, so I've gotten all the academic credits I actually need to graduate from McKinley. They just gave me a shit ton of electives" Santana asks to see the schedule, and Katie shows her.
"We have lunch and choir together, but nothing else. I think Brittany's in your fourth period Home-ec though." Santana tells her.
"Brittany?"
"She's my best friend. We met on the cheerios freshman year. She's like the sweetest girl you will ever meet. She rocks." Katie watches Santana gush on for a few minutes about her friend. "We've dated the same guys even. Speaking of, are the guys hotter here or in New York?"
"Well, the guys are pretty much the same. But the girls here are way hotter." Katie says this very nonchalantly, but Santana eyes her for a moment, confused.
"You're not… gay.. are you?"
Katie smirks at her. "You interested?"
Santana gets defensive. "What? Fuck no. You think I'd be attracted to a chubby dyke like you? What did you eat for breakfast? A cow?"
"Actually I don't eat meat"
"Like that's any less lesbo."
"I never said I wasn't gay. I do like girls. I just like guys too. I wasn't hitting on you. It was a joke." Katie looks at Santana like she's a toddler throwing a tantrum. Like a Why am I even paying attention to this little brat kind of look. But then again she also looks defensive. So Santana breaks the momentary silence.
"You're alright bitchface."