The small scrunched up paper projectile bounced off the back of Rachel's head, meeting the classroom floor to the tune of hushed sniggers seconds later. She stayed facing the whiteboard, still for the smallest of moments, before continuing to make languid loops of the marker in her hand, until the lesson objective was scrawled across it in beautiful cursive.
"I would suggest that whoever threw the paper ball reveal themselves before the lunch bell. Otherwise it's going to be a very short lunch for the entire class."
Rachel span around to face her students, chin held high like the moment that precedes a checkmate. She began to tap the sole of her Penny Loafer to the shiny floor, even lifting a nail to inspect. "I've got all day," she told the adolescent poker faces before her, as though it was an afterthought to whatever was so interesting about her cuticles.
Jacob Ben Israel fidgeted at his desk, his eyes fighting to stay away from the perpetrator, as the culprit's glare bruised the side of his face.
"Something to say, Jacob?" Rachel asked, raising an eyebrow without looking away from her nails. The boy squirmed upon hearing his name.
"No. But I do."
Rachel looked up, hand returning to her side. Her severe brown eyes regarded the owner of the suave, almost bored, voice. "And what is it that you would like to contribute, Miss Fabray?"
The slight accusation in Miss Berry's tone piqued Quinn's nostrils, causing them to flare. She rolled her eyes, before inclining her head towards Kitty Wilde. "She did it."
Kitty's jaw dropped, like you'd expect of an innocent. "Me?" she snarled at her Cheerio's Captain. "The ball came from behind -"
"Just admit it, Wilde, because if you think I'm spending lunch cooped up in this classroom with all of these losers, you're delusional. I need to see Puck, and I'm not rescheduling because you wanna play games with the new teacher!"
Kitty gripped the pencil in her hand so hard that her knuckles blanched. "But it wasn't me!" she bit out, her voice hard, gruff, and unyielding.
"It was," Jacob murmured. He kept his gaze low whilst Kitty treated him to a glare just as hot as the one that he'd received from the true culprit, moments ago.
In light of the afro-haired boy's helpful little contribution, Quinn looked to Miss Berry, eyebrow arched dryly.
The young Cheerio's Captain was challenging her, Rachel gleaned, and in a manner that was self-satisfying, smug, and really quite disrespectful. She narrowed her gaze into the cheerleader's eyes, refusing to look away from the brilliant champagne hue that defined Quinn's irises. Not even as she said, "this is your last chance, Kitty. Did you throw the paper ball?"
"You needs to 'fess up, Wilde!" Santana cut in, expelling a huffy, over it, sigh. "We all saw you do it. Now say sorry for almost getting my lunch hour taken away."
Kitty glanced around, silently imploring her peers to testify for her innocence. But everybody either averted their eyes, bowed their heads, or nodded in testament of her 'guilt,' under the weight of the peer pressure that both Quinn and Santana were exerting upon the room.
"Confess, or you're gonna have suicides coming out of your ass by the time I'm done with you," Quinn quietly growled out of the side of her mouth.
Behind her, Santana stretched, kicked back in her seat, and smirked.
That was when Kitty knew that she was done - that she was taking the fall for this, whether she wanted to or not. Whether she was guilty or not. After all, she was still just a lowly cheerleader, who'd pledged that she'd do whatever her captain said in order to work her way up from the bottom of the pyramid. "Yes, I threw it," she said, feeling the words burn her tongue, but holding her head high anyway. "I apologize."
Rachel allowed a suspicious gaze to bounce between all three girls for a moment. Then she nodded, albeit reluctantly. "Very well. Kitty, for such juvenile antics, you'll lose forty-five minutes of your lunch hour. Everyone else is free to leave once the bell sounds. Now, let's get on with the remainder of this lesson!"
As Miss Berry turned to retrieve the red marker pen for the whiteboard, Quinn committed everything about the new teacher's butt to memory. The way that it sat, pert, full, and firm beneath its skirt. Then she blinked, turned her textbook to page thirty, and willed the way that she wished to touch Miss Berry away.
After all, her plate was already full, without adding to it her budding attraction to the neat little woman.
"How's your second week here going?"
Rachel startled at the sudden company, the textbooks slipping from her grasp and clambering against the wood, as she narrowly avoided hitting her head on the shelf inside of the cupboard that she was peering into. She took a step back, drawing herself out of the cupboard, to find William McKinley High's Guidance Counselor leaning against the filing cabinet on the other side of the pokey office.
He winked at her. "You're lucky I wasn't a student. You're just petite enough that some delinquent could've shoved you inside."
Ignoring his comment, Rachel inspected his shoes - sensible men's footwear that were perfect for the kind of position that he held. Shoes that she easily should have heard clack into the room, but hadn't. In that moment, she decided that she was going to have to keep her wits about her whenever Mr Puckerman was around.
"In future, I'd appreciate it if you didn't startle me, Mr Puckerman. But other than that, my second week is going rather well."
"Nah, you see..." Noah screwed his face up, steepling his fingers as he took steps toward his newest colleague. He shook his head. "That's not gonna work. Mr Puckerman makes me feel old. Even the students call me Puck. Faculty members call me Noah. You should too. Especially you, actually." The handsome counselor - Rachel could begrudgingly admit - then grinned, bringing up a charming dimple in each of his thinly-stubbled tan cheeks. "How'd you feel if I asked you to come over to my place this Saturday night?" He shrugged the proposition off as casual. "Few glasses of wine... or beer, if you're into beer."
Rachel smoothed down the front of her skirt, because the man before her was making her feel like it was wise to. She shook her head staunchly. "No, Mr Puckerman, I'm not a fan of beer. Also, I don't date my colleagues, so I'm going to have to refuse your offer."
A little too quickly, and with a smile that was a little too friendly following such rejection, Noah thrust his hands up as if to demonstrate that he was backing off. "No one said anything about dating. But it's not a problem, Rach. I'll be around if you need anything." He gestured towards the open cupboard. "Don't let any of the students lock you inside," he jested, winking on his way out of the room, only to collide with someone.
Rachel listened to him issue whoever he'd fallen into a quick apology. She craned her neck a little, until her sight met with a sour-faced Quinn Fabray, who did not look like she was about to apologize for her part in the collision any time soon.
Something conspiratorial passed between the muscular counselor and the Cheerio's Captain. Then Quinn's gaze flickered to Rachel, lingering a few seconds, before returning to Noah.
"I've been looking for you! We need to talk!" she told him, and with all the couth of a mother snatching her crying child's arm, and dragging them out of a toy store.
"S-Sure." Noah nodded, glancing between the stern teenager, and his colleague. "But you know you're not allowed in faculty areas. If you had something you wanted to talk to me about, you should've waited in my office, Quinn," he said, on the verge of scolding.
But not quite, which caused the space between Rachel's eyebrows to pinch.
In her last place of work, an affluent private school that was situated in New York, the guidance counselors had not so easy to get around.
Frown still intact, she turned and began to collect up the textbooks that had bumbled to the cupboard floor, placing them in their rightful place whilst attempting to listen in on Quinn's hushed words. But before her ears could grow accustomed to deciphering the stabbing whisper, both Noah and Quinn absconded, closing the door in behind them.
Now alone, Rachel stared at it for a long while, everything inside of her knowing that she had just witnessed something to be suspicious of.
It wasn't too much of a stretch for her mind to take her where it was so obviously intent on leading her. Of all the students at McKinley High, Quinn Fabray stood at the pinnacle of the beauty mountain. With her seamless golden ponytail, mysterious hazel eyes, perfect upturned nose, bowstring pink lips, astute smarts, and endless planes of delicate alabaster skin - which was always on show in some capacity - Rachel did not think that it was at all unfair to assume that male staff members had perhaps allowed themselves a few lingering looks in her direction. There was also a knife-edge sort of coldness to her, a superiority. Yet an unmistakable something swam just beneath the surface, like a soft light washing a dark room in a delicate glow.
Quinn Fabray was unjustifiably beautiful, and emitted a certain melancholy. A certain vulnerability. Noah was her guidance counselor - the same guy who Rachel had watched make passes at several female faculty members, including herself, in the short time that she'd been employed at McKinley High. He almost reminded her of the sort of guy who'd drop his cell phone, just so that he could peer up young girl's skirts.
His rapport with the young blonde seemed more than a little strange. Could it be that he was using his position to take advantage of her?
Rachel had seen many things in her twenty-five years, and it would not have come as a shock to her if the answer to that question turned out to be yes.
After retrieving the textbook that she'd been looking for, she gently closed the cupboard door, and set about a journey to the library to use one of the computers; surely, somewhere in cyberspace, there was information on Noah Puckerman's past puttering about.
Noah flashed Mrs Baker a friendly smile as she walked by, before retreating into his office and pushing door in, hard. His smile instantly dropped - not a trace of it remaining - as he whipped around to round on Quinn. "Man, what the hell was that back there?" he whispered, quick and harsh. "Rachel was suspicious as all hell!"
So Rachel was Miss Berry's name, Quinn found herself thinking. But it was fleeting. She glared up at the older man. "You said you'd be here!" she hissed back. "But, no, instead you were trying to get the fresh meat to sleep with you! Fuck!" she grunted, clutching her forehead in frustration as she huffed at the ceiling. "This is such a God damned mess!"
"You don't gotta tell me that!" Noah snapped, dropping down into his office chair, like a sack of potatoes. He passed his palm over his face. "Look, Quinn, it was good while it lasted. But I'm calling this -"
"I skipped a period. I'm - I think I'm pregnant."
The broken utterance smacked Noah's hand away from his face, where it fell to his lap, limp.
"What?"
"You - God dammit - you heard what I said, asshole!" Quinn exclaimed, eyes wide and vibrating with a terror more potent than all of her childhood monsters combined could evoke.
Noah slowly stood up, shaking his head as if trying to wade through the time-stopping fog of shock that had befallen the room. He began to pace the light and airy office, images of how he'd defiled the seventeen year old girl in various corners of it crashing his psyche.
Then he halted, expelling a shuddery breath as he repeatedly touched his fingertips together in what seemed to be a nervous tick. "Whose baby is it?" he accused.
Quinn dipped her head forward slightly, and narrowed vicious eyes at him. "Fuck you," she said, eerily calm.
"You think I don't see how all the boys look at you? What's to say you haven't been sleeping with any of them?" Noah growled, looking her up and down with eyes that were filled with disgust. Eyes that were pitched to a frequency that would shame and demean whatever focused upon. "I heard the rumor about you and Finn Hudson! What's to say he's not this kid's dad?"
Whirlwind fast, Quinn's palm shot out and cracked against his cheek, ringing out in the room like snapped bones. In any other situation, he would have restrained her, escorted her to Principle Figgins' office, and gotten her expelled for the violent breech. But all formal respect for one another's personal space had fallen to the wayside the moment that he'd penetrated her for the first time, some three months back.
Tears shimmered in Quinn's eyes, her shoulders trembling. "I have half a mind to tell my father about us - about how you abused your position to get me to sleep with you! Because that's what happened, isn't it? You telling me you loved me, leaving roses in my locker - it was all bullshit to get me to keep my mouth shut! You'd never work again. My father would make sure of it!" she spat, jaw barely moving for how stern it was wound, her eyes unwavering in their hate. "That you'd never work or have a normal life again!"
The threat had been spoken scratchily, with a tight throat that was laden with bitter unshed tears.
Noah sighed, watching everything that Quinn had ever thought him to be crumble, in favor of the truth, which was that he'd used and manipulated her into spreading her legs for him when she'd gone to him with concerns about her sexuality.
And now she was threatening to go to her dad.
Panic flared in his stomach, hot and acidic. It told him to act, to do something to stop the bleeding! Anything! "Well if you tell him, you're gonna have to tell him why you came to me in the first place - that you swing both ways, and have a preference for girls! He'll kick you out, disown you, and you'll have nothing but your Cheerio's uniform! Then what?"
Noah knew that was a low blow, especially when Quinn had confided in him about the plights of living in the Fabray household. He hated himself in that moment. But everything hung in the balance. His job, his reputation. Quinn was backing him into a corner, and he'd always been taught to come out swinging whenever his back was against the wall.
A resentful chuckle left Quinn's lips, because how could she have ever allowed herself to be duped by such a no-good bastard? Well, she knew how. She couldn't say that she didn't. Puck had always just been the school's cool guidance counselor, who the students could go and talk to about anything. He used all the slang, wasn't afraid to make fun of himself, drove an attractive sports car, and was a luxury on the senses, especially the eyes and nose. Quinn had genuinely thought that he'd been on her side, and when he'd offered to pop her cherry, so that she could see whether or not she was, in fact, gay, she'd thought that it was for her - that they were about to break all of the rules to help her out. That's how Puck had made it seem. That was how good he was at taking what he wanted.
And now he was threatening to out her to her parents.
She couldn't believe that she'd been so naive, and for all of the adult things that she was capable of, Quinn had never felt like a silly schoolgirl more than she did in that moment.
"I don't even know if I am pregnant, cocksucker! But know that you're gonna get what's coming to you! Even if it's the last thing that I do, you're gonna get what you deserve!" she hissed, baring teeth. "That's a promise!" Her moist eyelashes flickered as she snatched her backpack up from where she'd dumped it amongst the files on Puck's desk, and without another word, she bounded out of the office, leaving Noah in need of much guidance himself.
In the serene quiet of the library, sat in front of the computer that was closest to the exit, Rachel could not believe what she was reading…
Case Dropped Against New Haven Teacher
20.05.2010
Following seventeen year old Andrea Barkley's allegations against her thirty year old school counselor, Noah Puckerman, it seemed as though the former Jeff Harper High employee was headed for a long and drawn out lawsuit, facing charges such as carnal knowledge of a juvenile, indecent behavior, and contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile.
But today, all allegations were rescinded. When asked to comment, Barkley refused.
Puckerman claims that when he spurned young Barkley's advances, during a counselling session, she fabricated the allegation that he coerced her into performing sexual acts upon him, in a bid for revenge. Now vindicated, the thirty year old counselor says that he hopes the false allegations will not impact upon any future job opportunities.
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