Passing Through Life
Chapter 1
One step at a time
By Rosie Jade
Perfection was just a state of mind, a fleeting concept that humanity had come up with to make themselves feel better. This, at least, was Katie Hummel's perspective on the subject of perfection. She had spent most of her life living up to her world's idea of perfection. Katie had been Prom Queen two years in a row, captain of the cheerleading squad from her freshman year on (a feet no one but her had accomplished in all the time Sue Sylvester had been cheerleading coach at McKinley). Straight A's in all her classes, and she took so many AP classes the only class that wasn't AP was study hall (and if they offered that in AP she would have taken it as well). Her whole entire childhood had been devoted to art lessons, ballet lessons, gymnastic lessons and piano lessons. Katie had even been the president of her class since 6th grade, non contested. When parents in Lima, Ohio needed someone to compare their child to they used Katie Hummel's name. She was almost like the patron saint of what one would consider a good child. Katie had never done anything wrong in her whole entire life. Except until she had, because in reality, Katie was not the good girl that she played. She really did do all those things she was renowned for throughout town, however Katie was also sleeping with her spanish teacher. A big no-no if you wanted to be know as the the biggest and the best of them all. This was one of the worst offences any good girl could be caught doing, the only thing worse than this was getting pregnant.
So Katie kept quiet about it, her little love affair with Will Schuester. Not that she wouldn't have had anyway, this could ruin Will worse than her. No matter the fact that she was 18, she was still his student. Even after the little bump in the road when he had finally left his wife, and then she had then proceeded to find Katie personally and call her a whore, a homewrecker, any name that had something to do with her being some type of slut. Katie had proceeded to brush that off perfectly. Ever the diplomat, Katie could talk her way out of anything. Terri Schuester wasn't known for her sensibility or sanity, so she had just explained it off as her reading into the fact that Will was her favorite teacher, and she was his TA. Everyone believed her, nobody even questioned that anything else was going on. With just a few simple words from her, spun into a pretty little half-lie, everything went away. Katie always got her way, after all, she was 'perfect'. Which was really what had gotten Katie going on the topic of perfection. She was really tired of being the perfect one, the good one, the great one. It was all really tiring, all that pressure. Having to be everything everyone else wanted her to be 24/7, it was awful. Sometimes she wasn't sure how she handled it.
One more year left, however. Katie only had to suffer through one more year. A year that she was assured would be great, because along with all of her lessons, classes and sports, Will was also restarting the Glee club. Not only would this mean that she would get to spend more time together with Will, as he had asked her to be in the club and to be his assistant, but she knew her brother would want to participate as well. Katie couldn't wait for all the extra time she would get to spend with her brother. They normally didn't have all that much time together, their extracurriculars overlapped, and they both had heavy class loads. This year her own class load was lighter, as she only needed three classes to graduate, and Kurt had taken a lot of classes over the summer to get a head start. He wanted a spectacular resume for college. This left them with a lot of free time, and an open spot to take Glee during the day. Glee would also be meeting before and after school, all depending on what they would need to work on. Katie really couldn't wait. This was probably the most fun and exciting thing she would be doing in her whole high school career. Don't get her wrong, Katie really did enjoy her lessons, her classes, even being on the Cheerios, this was just something more. Something she could do with people she loved, with people she liked. None of this would be a competition, and Katie wouldn't need to claw and scratch her way to the top and still come out like the perfect little angel. The whole Glee thing was just about fun. She had the utmost confidence that Will would make it as fun as possible.
This was what brought everything to the point where she was today, pretty much staring at the wall and going on a angry rant in her head about her perfection. Katie was frazzled, not about anything in particular, but just about life in general. While this Glee thing was something she was excited about, she was also worried about what might happen if her brother looked a little too closely at the relationship she had with Will. Kurt had never seen her interact with Will Schuester, and now that he was going to be around them so much she wasn't sure they were going to make it to her graduation without being outed to her brother, if not her father. Which could be really bad for them. Katie didn't want to cost Will his job, or his teaching license. This could all go really bad for them, really fast. Not that she would blame her brother, or even her father. The whole situation made Katie terribly nervous, and she wasn't quite sure what to do. What she did know, was that she needed to get up, pack her bag and get ready to drive herself and Kurt to school. Today was tryouts for Glee, and while she might be bridging on a nervous breakdown, Katie would put on her brave face and deal with everything one step at a time. That was the only way she could take life, she needed to work through it step by step. Eventually everything would work out, everything would get better. It always did.
TBC