FIRST AND ONLY DISCLAIMER: I do not own Glee, nor do I own any of the songs that I will use later.

A/N- So this is my first Glee fic. I've wanted to do a Glee kids fic for a while, so here it goes. I'm not sure if it'll turn out good, but hopefully it will. To avoid confusion, here is the chart of children:

Rachel and Puck- Isabella (Izzy) (main character)

Quinn and Finn- Jake

Brittany and Artie- Valerie (Val or V)

Santana and Sam- Amy

Kurt and Blaine- Chase (adopted, of course)

Mercedes and Shane- Faith

Tina and Mike- Greg

I don't necessarily ship all of these couples (I literally had to sit down and draw out how I wanted the couples to work for this story), but this is just how it's going to be, FOR NOW. There will also be plenty of parental drama, trust me. Alright, well, leggo.

Reality

Chapter One: Move

"You have got to be kidding me."

"No, Isabella, if you hadn't noticed, we have not been in much of a joking mood lately. We are moving to Lima next month, whether you like it or not."

I resisted the urge to correct my obnoxious mother on using my full name as a rare tear snaked down my cheek. I looked around the small New York apartment that had slowly but surely become my home. I gave a small glance at my father, who was looking down, obviously trying to avoid making eye contact with me.

What was bad was that I had slightly seen it coming. My mother had been the star of several Broadway musicals since her graduation from NYADA, including Wendla in Spring Awakening and Christine in Phantom of the Opera. Her continuous career had kept the small family of three on the good side, financially.

However, when she took up the role of Christine in Phantom's sequel Love Never Dies, the musical received horrible reviews, and it quickly closed. After that, she was absolutely devastated, and I knew why. She had a need to be loved; she always had. And when the audience didn't love her, she cracked. Even one bad review from one of her earlier roles put her in tears. So after a figurative slap in the face as heavy as this, she couldn't recover. She went to audition after audition, but she didn't get any of them. Her vocal range suffered. She was left jobless, and so was dad.

We easily burnt through all the money mom had made from her previous jobs in a year. My parents were desperate for any job, but nothing was available. And living in New York City is not cheap. Mom and dad were always fighting, which I guess led them to stop paying attention to me. Good grades, bad grades, weekend plans, homework, and other things that seemed to interest them so much before weren't noticed anymore. It was as if I wasn't even in their lives, as if I wasn't even there. They continued their fighting and their crying when I walked in the room, and barely acknowledged my presence.

Which I guess inspired me to bleach the absolute shit out of my hair in the summer after eighth grade. I had walked home from my friend's apartment, where we had done the deed, and the minute I walked in the front door mom and dad stopped yelling at each other and started yelling at me.

I smiled the whole time. Does that make me a sick person?

I don't think so, at least. I was grounded for three weeks, but it was worth it. At least they knew I existed. But the glory faded fast. Simple things such as coming in past curfew and getting another piercing on my ear barely came on their radar. So I decided to do something drastic. My big Jewish nose had become excessively annoying anyways. A friend's sister's friend's cousin was dating a cosmetologist who agreed to get rid of the ugly thing without parental consent, for an extra charge. For the icing on the cake, I stole the money from my parents.

When I came home with bandages all over my nose, my mother looked slightly worried. "Honey, what happened?" she asked, while looking through the job section of the newspaper. It was the first time she'd talked to me in a week. I just grinned.

"Oh, nothing" I practically sang. "It feels good as new!"

She did a double take, just then noticing that the former prominence of my nose was gone, and replaced with a tiny, cute, albeit bruised, nose. She got up and her hands hovered close to my face, before she burst out into loud, noisy tears. My father stuck his face around the corner to see what was going on. When he noticed my nose, his face turned bright red with anger.

"How could you do this without our permission?" He yelled at me as mom continued to sob. "It's not only an insult to us, but to your heritage!"

I rolled my eyes. "Cut the dramatics, dad. It's just a nose." This made him even more angry.

That had been the week before now. The announcement. That we were moving to some cow-town in the middle of fucking nowhere in Ohio that mom and dad grew up in.

"Remember, you brought this upon yourself" my mother snapped harshly. I gave her a look like a wounded animal. My mother could be ignorant and hysterical, but she was rarely mean. Her expression softened.

"This isn't a punishment, sweetheart… You know we can't afford to live here anymore, and we know we haven't been able to spend as much time with you as we used to-"

I snorted. It had been a bit of an understatement. She gave me a quizzical look, and continued.

"I was hoping that moving there would give us more of an opportunity to work on us, this family, so we can all love each other again."

Love each other? That was a good one. Last night her parents had been screaming at each other, worse than ever before. It was clearly not an act of love.

I had been under my covers, listening to my iPod, trying to drown out most of the screaming, but it wasn't working. I ended up taking out the headphones anyways.

"This isn't high school anymore, Noah. You can't just get drunk or sing a song and expect all of your problems to go away! You need to enter reality and realize that we need to actually do something if we can get out of this situation!"

Dad laughed without humor. "You think I need a reality check, Rachel? You have been living in a fantasy your whole life, all throughout high school, even now. You really think this could work? You're not a star, Rachel. You need to step off your cloud and realize you're just normal like everyone else."

I heard a sniffle. "I- I…" Mom stammered. Dad had hit a soft spot. Mom had to be a star, the center of attention. She was lost without it. Normal was something she could not deal with. I heard a door slam. I slowly drifted off to sleep.

I sent eye-daggers at mom before pounding off into my room. "Start packing, young lady!" She shouted. I screamed some obscenities at her before pulling out my phone.

Moving, I texted to Cori, the girl I had been friends with since second grade.

Are you serious? She replied instantly. I had confided in her in the worries that they would be looking for somewhere cheaper to live.

Dead serious, I sent back.

Somewhere close to NYC though, right? I sighed as a few more tears slipped down.

About how many miles away do you think Lima, Ohio is, roughly? A few seconds later, she called me in tears.

"No!" she practically screamed. I nodded, and then realized she couldn't see me. "Yes. Trust me, I might kill myself on the way there."

"Listen, we're not going to be those friends who swear we'll stay in touch and then slowly fade away, alright? I won't let that happen. You are my best friend forever no matter what. I will drive all the way to Limia or Limo or whatever and take you if I need to, alright?" I grinned. Cori somehow always knew just the right thing to say.

"Alright," I responded. "I promise"

I sighed as I cramped in between mom, dad, and several boxes as my grandfathers drove in the front and passenger seats. I looked around to see nothing like glamorous New York City, but everything that looked like something right of the set of One Tree Hill or something of the sort. It could only be described as cute.

I wasn't into cute.

We were going to live in my grandfathers' house for a while, until we could get a house of our own. We turned into the drive way of a medium-sized home. My mom immediately dashed upstairs, almost squealing, to see her old bedroom. My dad rolled his eyes, but it wasn't in a mean kind of way, but in a she's annoying but I still love her kind of way. The change of scenery had an almost instant effect on my parents. They had been excitedly pointing out random places they remembered on the way here, and I even saw them exchange a small peck on the lips. Most children would be disgusted, but I appreciated it.

I entered the house. It was definitely home-y, and very well designed. It felt warm and comfortable. The flooring was a dark shade of wood, and all the couches and chairs were some light shade of brown. I went upstairs to see my mom standing in a door way with tears in her eyes. I looked past into the room. It looked like it belonged to a five-year-old. There was pink frilly- well, pink frilly everything. I traced my hand over the pink desk to find a small scratching. It said RB+FH with a heart around it. I furrowed my brow, but I was quickly distracted by mom wrapping her arms around me.

"I'm sorry, darling… I'm sorry about everything." She didn't have to list the things she had done wrong, I knew she meant it with just those few words. "It's okay mom…" I murmured into her shoulder awkwardly. I did love my mom, but I didn't really do emotional. She ruffled my blonde hair lovingly, though giving a small frown, obviously at its color. "Maybe you should let your hair go back to its natural color…" she said, already returning to her normal bossy self.

"Nah, I like it like this." I said with a grin. She sighed and suggested that I should go get some of my boxes. I agreed.

As we walked outside, she mentioned, "By the way, you're going to be starting at McKinley on Monday.

I froze. It seemed ridiculous now that I hadn't given a second thought about changing schools. Fantastic.

A/N- So there's the first chapter! It gets more exciting soon, I promise. I know Love Never Dies hasn't opened on Broadway, just in London before it closed, but I HAD to take a dig at it. It was a truly awful idea to make a Phantom sequel. Sorry, Lloyd Webber. It reads like a bad E/C fanfiction. I should probably stop this crossover now. Anyways, review!