She – the sixteen year old, the overly emotional, the singer with a thousand stars after her name – she is destined to go to Broadway, to meet Patti Lu Pone and sing with her, to attend Juilliard for performance music and theatre, to meet someone and fall in love, and live with Broadway babies in a West End apartment in the core of New York City.
He – the once-lived, the non-dreamer, the stuck-in-a-one-horse-town music and Spanish teacher – he doesn't believe he gets to dream again, that he deserves any chance of happiness, that life can change in your late thirties, that divorce is, quite simply, the end of the world. He believes that when you have your chance, you take it, but after you fuck it up, you're done.
She and he are an unlikely pair, not just because of the age difference. It's the philosophy difference, too.
She plays the piano with reckless abandon and very little technique; she plays by ear and is able to match her voice to the exact sound of the carefully-tuned Yamaha, normally Brad's domain. He prefers the guitar – more human – and she makes fun of him for sitting like a hipster on a stool at the side of the stage. She shuts up, however, when he sings – she can't deny that his voice, like velvet, like honey, like any of those clichés she hates – is beautiful.
Conversely, he'll watch her, striving to reach one more note, to sing one more song, a run-through that's perfect in every way, and he'll put his hands on her sides, to feel her breaths, to encourage her to breathe ("it's okay to breathe, Rachel, breath is what powers your voice,"). He does it when she cries; too, to measure how much breath goes into tears, to feel the pain through the hiccups, through her perceived failure. He hopes she never gets to know what failure really feels like.
They lie in the grass in the local park when she visits his apartment on the weekends. She likes to pick out shapes in the clouds. He finds her whimsicality refreshing. She finds his serious outlook on life mature, exciting. He tells her he loves her; she did that within the first three weeks of this odd, strangely perfect affair.
When they fight, he shuts down on her, not wanting to show her what fighting like an adult is really like. She hurls carefully-worded insults, proud of her maturity in vocabulary. He simply rolls his eyes, tired of her antics. It's only when she begins to cry that he cracks, explains his position, and apologizes for his misunderstanding, his over-expectation of what she can handle. He cringes then, at the thought of her teenagerhood. She wonders if dating an older man is going to be as glamorous and easy as she thinks.
He takes care of her. He holds her at night, close against his chest. She runs her fingers over his mat of fuzzy, soft hair and marvels at the difference from Puck's or Finn's or Jesse's chest. He runs his hands over her smooth long hair, her budding nipples, and her flat stomach with the outie-belly-button. He likes to kiss it; she giggles, like a child. She occasionally cries for no reason she can discern; when he cries, she's wrong-footed, confused. He rarely cries. She does at least once a week.
This series of crystalline, transparent moments of loving someone you shouldn't – she and he, they work because it's unconventional. In the end, though, it only lasts as long as the mystery does, as the novelty does. He tells her one day in the winter, snow piled as high as the lower sill of the schoolyard windows, that he's sorry. She reaches for enough maturity to realize that this is not because of her. It's because it never could have worked, anyway; she needed to be ten years older, or at least in the same headspace. He has bills and utilities to pay; she's trying to figure out how to balance college and free time –playing at the real world, playing at adulthood, when he lives the grudging reality, every day.
She cries for three weeks and refuses to enter the choir room. He spends nights in bed, staring at the shadows of branches crossing the bland painted wall, and beats himself up for being upset over a little girl.
They forgive each other almost simultaneously; he slips her a copy of "Wheels of a Dream" and asks her to help him try out for the community theatre production of Ragtime. She agrees, but only because she's always wanted to sing Audra McDonald's part.
That spring, she graduates and he shakes her hand under the cherry trees by the west gate of the school. She kisses his cheek; he keeps his hand on her lower back, and whispers, "I'm so proud of you, Rachel."
And she leaves his life, goes to realize her dreams; he stays in Lima, but realizes that dreams don't just belong to the young, after all.