Disclaimer: Fox owns all rights to the TV show Glee.
When she first hears the news—"Lima teen, Finn Hudson, found dead"—she's downing her third shot of vodka at a frat party.
"Lima?" Madison Pendell says. "Hey, Quinn, isn't that where you're from?"
Heads turn toward her way. She can see the curiosity, the revolting thirst for salacious details in their eyes—and the spite and disdain shining from Madison's.
She doesn't know why or when she started crying—"blubbering", Madison later calls it, to Quinn's mortification. Luckily, she's gotten better at handling her alcohol and doesn't let it slip that she once knew Finn Hudson, that gasp, she had had sex with him and tricked him into thinking she was pregnant with his baby.
She wonders if Madison already suspects (not the second part, but the sex part. The pathetic truth is that whenever girls cry, it's usually about sex). She secretly hates Madison Pendell, partly because she's the daughter of some fancy New York senator, but mainly because she knows she and Madison have scarily similar personalities. Both are cold, heartless bitches.
Still, they're friends, in a loose interpretation of the word. They stick together because everyone else hates them, and because they'd rather pretend to be friends with each other than admit that they have no friends.
Yale is a disappointment.
This silent thought torments Quinn every day while she walks with her chin up, a forced smile poised on her lips, and a my-life-is-perfect attitude. She was so wrong about college that she wants to laugh. The truth is that college is high school and nothing has changed.
Just as before, she survives through her ability to wait out the present and prepare for the future.
She buys a new dress, just for Finn's funeral. The dress is old-fashioned in that it has a high neckline and long skirt, and she can practically hear Santana's criticism once she sees it. "What are you, an amnesiac eighty-year-old grandma who thinks she's living in the 1800s?"
She waits for the funeral invitation. She imagines the envelope to be completely black, the words etched in ostentatious, flowery gold. She is familiar with Rachel's melodramatic style, onstage and offstage, for life and death. Rachel probably already made a full-scale speech for the funeral, which she'll deliver with the greatest emotion she can summon.
Quinn idly wonders what she'll say at the funeral. I cannot express my condolences in words would be too formal, I miss him every day would imply an intimacy that she didn't feel and wouldn't have wanted to acknowledge even if she had.
She finally decides upon: Finn was a great friend to all who knew him, and there aren't words to express the sadness his passing brings. Simple, sincere-sounding, yet reserved.
The only problem is that the invitation never arrives.
For weeks, she perfunctorily checks her mailbox, her email (she could've smacked herself on the forehead—duh, this is the modern age. No one sends letters by post anymore when e-invitations are readily available). And then a few weeks become a few months and one day, the realization hits her on the head:
She's not wanted at Finn's funeral.
She tries to convince herself that she's not hurt, that she should've expected it—after all, it was she who had cut off ties with her classmates in Lima. But it still aches like hell because it reminds her that even though she had once been Miss Popular, she had fallen into disgrace during her sophomore year when she messed up.
(Once. It had just been one, stupid time with Puck, when she had been feeling lonely and depressed like hell.)
She had become jealous—shamefully, irrationally jealous of Rachel and Kurt and everyone in the Glee Club because even though they were outcasts, they were outcasts together. Because they allowed themselves to feel, to talk, to reach out to others at the expense of their own self-humiliation.
Quinn can never do that.
She has her self-image to maintain. Her dignity prevents her from letting people in (to see the unhealed scars, the ragged pieces that will never be fixed), and if that makes people think she's a cold bitch, so be it.
(Inside, she knows that the reason she cried was because she finally realized she will never love or be loved again.)