AU after Episode 17, "It's Not A Mint". Please disregard the (heart-wrenching) season finale when reading.

This story will - hopefully - update on Mondays, like the show.

Bunheads is Amy Sherman-Palladino's world, and I am incredibly grateful and gleeful to be playing in it.

Prologue

It started with the D+.

Well, OK, that wasn't entirely true, because everything had been so crazy lately; maybe it would be better to say it started with 6 hours per week of ballet rehearsal for the May recital, and 2 hours a week of remedial driver's ed, and 3 hours a week of derby practice, not to mention Tuesday trivia at the Oyster Bar and mandatory Friday nights at Sasha's new place and burgers with Dez and the surprisingly thorough John Huston retrospective that TCM had been running at 2 AM lately …and basically, something had to give.

And, like, it wasn't really that big a deal not to know who killed Macbeth, right? The Segal family DVD copy of the Orson Welles version was seriously scratched, so she hadn't had time to finish it. Plus, before Michelle had left town for six months on the Twyla Tharp tour, she had sworn that nobody in the business even mentioned the play because it was cursed. Talking about cursed things made them worse, therefore nobody should talk about it, therefore little details didn't matter. But Mr. Brandt in 3rd period English Lit hadn't seen it that way.

Mel's parents hadn't, either. They were so angry, in fact, that she would have been in risk of a permanent grounding if Charlie hadn't come home drunk on a Wednesday night in the middle of the argument and interrupted everything by quietly vomiting all over the kitchen floor. (Mel paid him back for the distraction later by doing his disgusting laundry.) But because this was the third time in a month Charlie had vomited somewhere and it was tax season (the Segals were both accountants in the same firm in a neighboring town), they had to drop the grades thing for a few days. "You'd better decide what you're giving up, young lady," her mother had warned. "Junior year is the most important for your college applications. Cal and UCLA don't just hand out dance scholarships, especially not to girls with 1.9 GPAs."

And Mel had decided, thank you very much. She had been perfectly willing to give up driver's ed for a while in exchange for some trig tutoring. After all, Sasha had a car and Dez had a car, and even though their parents had just taken Charlie's license away, he would find a way to charm them pretty soon. And almost everything – well, a lot of things – in Paradise were walking distance. (Besides, the thought of telling Madame Fanny that she needed to miss some rehearsals for academics was scarier than Norman Bates at midnight, during a thunderstorm.)

Anyway, she and Ginny had worked out a perfectly reasonable list of debate points for the Sunday evening Family Meeting that her parents would find persuasive. Boo had offered to help her out with the chem labs, and even Carl had lent her some flashcards for French. It was all going to be fine.

And then on Saturday afternoon, Stella Sabotage rammed into T. S. Helliot during practice and during the ensuing pile-up, Mel tripped over Val Capone and dislocated her right shoulder.

So that was it for roller derby. She knew as soon as Dez called her parents from the E.R that there was no going back. The world didn't end, but it definitely flattened a little.