It was a little… chilling, almost, to step back and watch the walls when they were finished.
"We got everyone," Finn said, still shocked. "Every single person in the school."
Brittany taped the last card to the wall and stood.
"Roll the camera," Rachel ordered.
000
It started on a whim one Monday morning. Rachel gave Ms. Pillsbury a cardboard box, covered in colored construction paper and stars and the word "SECRETS" written on every side, and a stack of blank index cards.
By the end of the day, there were only four completed cards in the box, but the rest of the blanks were gone, as well as nearly four packs of Ms. Pillsbury's.
By the end of the week, the box had been filled and emptied three times.
There were more cards than students in the school, and most were quite personalized. One had music notes arranged into letters; another had a girl whose hair flowed into a marker copy of TheStarryNight; another looked all black at first glance, but when inspected closely, it was a colored pencil rainbow covered in black crayon, and in the top-right corner the words "I can't tell them" were scratched off. At one point a whole pack of index cards was found bound together with ribbons, and each one was completely different, though the handwriting showed that they were all from the same person.
Rachel took them home and kept them in filing boxes under her bed. As they accumulated, she wondered what exactly she would do with them. Making a Glee project out of them seemed like the obvious idea, but how?
000
During the second week, the questions started to roll in.
What are you going to do with these secrets? Who's reading them? Do you know who I am?
Rachel asked her fellow Glee Clubbers for any ideas, but no one came up with anything until a song played through Finn's iPod that brought back memories.
000
They knew they wouldn't get anyone to help if it got out that it was a Glee project, so they set it up through Ms. Pillsbury and got Finn and Puck to handle the photoshoots. Posters went up everywhere: "Stay after school - take a picture - go viral on the Internet!" and instructions to wear clothing that made your identity obvious because no faces would be showing.
The response was slow in coming. Only a few people showed up the first few days, each sitting for three cards at most, picked at random. Once they had come, their names were crossed off of a list of all the students, provided by Ms. Pillsbury herself.
Some of the secrets would never be used - some were signed, and they wanted complete anonymity; some were offensive; many were unpersonalized repeats.
The students were told to hold the cards in front of their faces, and were provided a paper bag if they couldn't hide enough of their face behind the card. They never got to see the words on the cards they held.
When the football and hockey teams were ushered in, in uniform, by their respective coaches, Puck decided to have a little fun with them, and went through the cards, picking out specific ones for each player's first picture. Finn almost fell down trying to hold in his laughter as he snapped a picture of Strando holding a card that read "I wish I could wear skirts and dresses, but I hate my legs." Strando, ever the clueless idiot, didn't even notice.
The teachers started getting in on it, too. The art teachers were the first ones; Mr. Vote, everyone's favorite, taught Photography, and as such was interested enough in the project to brave Ms. Cady's after-school crash to drag her down to the shoot before she passed out. Of course, they had to make fun of the school administration's resident drug addict. She only stayed balanced on the chair long enough for one photo: "I get my pot from the Chronic Lady. I pay the Lady in sexual favors." She then passed out in the nurse's office for a full two hours as she came down from whatever she had smoked during lunch.
One would think they would have fired her already, but no - her various addictions didn't affect her teaching, so Figgins didn't really care.
More teachers started showing up. Even Figgins sat for a few photos. Once the teachers started coming, so did the students, in great floods. Puck suspected they were being offered extra credit.
There was much bitching to be done when the photoshoots began to last several hours. Artie and Quinn took over photography after four o'clock, and Puck and Finn returned at five if there were still students left over. Some students began to notice it was a Glee project, but they kept on coming anyways.
Rachel posted a note on the box on the Monday of the fourth week: "This is the last week we will be accepting secrets. All cards must be submitted by 3:00 PM on Thursday. Friday will be the last day of pictures. We are trying to gets all students to sit for photos, so please come! We will also be doing pictures with two or three people this week, and you will be able to choose your cards for these."
The last round of secrets was small, as they had mostly been exhausted in previous weeks, and the last few students showed up to Friday's shoot. There were still about fifty cards left over after that shoot; the ones picked specifically by each Gleek to pose with, and the ones they had written themselves.
Santana and Dave specifically requested to pose together for one picture. They held each others' cards in front of each others' faces; Santana's said "I can't stop loving her" and Dave's said "I can't stop loving him."
Kurt snapped that photo, and that was the last one.
000
Artie got them a blog and started posting some of the pictures, just a few per day. He kept the best ones private; they would be used in the video.
Artie asked people who followed their blog to send in sound clips of them singing the chorus to add more voices. There was a surprising rise in response to that request when Figgins arranged for a link to the blog to be posted on the school's main site.
It was almost sad; there were so many incredible singers at their school that would probably never come join Glee, even though they obviously had the talent for it.
The next task was the video. They went around filming students going about their everyday lives, picking out mostly the ones who had held the most poignant secrets.
They caught Strando carrying a slushie just in time to film him dumping it on Jacob…and subsequently got Strando dumped in detention. They filmed several teachers passing around a flask in front of Breadstix just after school. They recorded the Duval twins, who brought in guitars and started playing on the steps during lunch. Cameron - a sophomore who looked almost exactly like Kurt - was filmed spinning his field hockey stick before practice.
000
Rachel got Jesse to pull a few strings for her and set them up in a recording studio on Saturday morning. They had two hours in a room that was just barely big enough for all of them, but it was worth every second in the cramped, too-hot room and the sweat-humid air and the too-bright lights.
The song was mixed that afternoon by one of Jesse's friends, who was interning at the studio. Artie added it to the video when he got home and sent it out to the rest of the club with the following comment:
There are a lot of empty parts of this. I was thinking we could put up all the cards on one wall in the school and then walk down the hall while filming them to fill the gaps. Y/N?
000
They got permission to use the long stretch of empty wall in the music hallway, which, despite that it was small and few people had classes there, its location in the very front of the school meant everyone would pass by. A whole weekend was spent getting the several thousand unsigned cards laminated and taped up.
The only things on that wall were three TVs which usually showed lists of upcoming activities, absent teachers, and other announcements. As they were controlled from the computer in the choir room, Mr. Schue agreed to have the middle one play their finished music video and the two on the sides play slideshows of all the photos, but only before school started and during lunch.
There were still a hundred or so cards left when they got kicked out Sunday night, so they came back at five-thirty Monday morning, as soon as the doors opened, and stuck the pre-taped cards up as fast as possible. Artie attached his camera to his wheelchair and Puck pushed him down the hall slowly enough to film all the cards. The last bits of footage went into the video, and it was saved at 7:01 AM, exactly three minutes before the first bus arrived.
They made it on time.
000
Reactions were mixed, but, miraculously, no one took any cards down.
For the most part, it was positive. The first few to experience it, mostly band kids dropping off their instruments, stood mesmerized or paced up and down the hall to read all the cards. A few left, then came back with groups. The music hall crowded quickly after that.
The Gleeks wanted to watch everyone's reactions, but very soon there just wasn't enough space to be standing around staring at people.
They were satisfied, though. They had done something memorable for a school that had previously hoped to forget them.
Tell me all that you've thrown away
Find out games you don't wanna play
You are the only one that needs to know