The Diva Brigade
It had never been this quiet at a Jones Family Dinner in living memory. That was the first thought to pop into Mercedes' head as she passed Leo the breadbasket. He grabbed the top roll greedily with his whole hand, not realizing that they were fresh from the oven. He dropped the basket and the roll, sending a dozen rolls scattering across the floor. "Sorry," he mumbled, bending to collect the bread. "Don't worry, I made extras" her mother said before grabbing a new basket from the kitchen.
In her mind, Mercedes watched the meal unfold how it should have; Leo's fumble would have sent them all into hysterics. The rolls probably would have stayed on the ground for their collie, Sandy, to gobble up. They would talk about their days and tell jokes – usually at each other's expense, but all in good fun.
She glanced around the table, wondering how to make this situation less awkward, how to make everyone laugh. Next to her was Leo, her fourteen-year old brother who, despite being a lifelong nerd, had recently decided that he had a future in rap music and had spent most of the afternoon practicing the lyrics to Gold Digger. At the head of the table was her father with his kind brown eyes and big laugh. Her mother, beside him, was still in her teachers' clothes and looked a bit tired from the long work week, but happy that they were all together. Beside her mom sat Ruby, her loud-mouthed ten-year-old sister, who was currently sporting all of the pink play jewelry from their earlier game of Pretty Pretty Princess. And finally, sitting between her and Ruby at the foot of the table, was Quinn. She was the obvious outsider of the group both in her looks and her manner. The ex-Cheerio was quiet and courteous, the houseguest that Mercedes's mother dreamed her children would be like, but she was also the obvious cause of all the awkwardness.
"So how was school today?" Her father asked, and Ruby began a long explanation of her science report on Saturn, but Mercedes wasn't listening. Instead, she watched Quinn, who picked at and played with her food more than she actually ate it. Weren't pregnant women supposed to eat more, not less? But while the rest of them were digging in, Quinn seemed content to merely cut her food into smaller and smaller pieces. No, she thought, that was wrong. Quinn wasn't content – she was distracted, like a kid trying to appear busy so that they wouldn't be called on by the teacher. Rather than join in the conversation, she was looking for a convenient excuse – a preoccupation with cutting up her food – to stay out of the conversation.
"What about you girls?" Her father asked, gesturing at her and Quinn, "how was Glee practice?"
"We just practiced some numbers for Regionals" Mercedes answered with a shrug. "And this week's lesson was 'Funk', so, you know, Quinn and I had that covered pretty well."
Quinn nodded, but didn't say anything.
"You know what's funky?" Leo asked, "This chicken!" But the joke, which normally would have set off a chain of jokes about funky food, instead earned him a punishing look from their mom as silence set in again. Mercedes sighed; saving this dinner was impossible. Everyone was on edge, and it was better to let them all adjust on their own terms – she just wondered how long that would take. Meanwhile, she would set her focus on making Quinn feel comfortable. So as the conversation limped along she snuck out her phone and jotted out a quick text.
After a few more minutes of covert texting, she had the perfect plan for that night.
Twenty long minutes later Mercedes was rinsing a sinkfull of dishes as Leo and Quinn organized the already cleared plates into the dishwasher. In the other room Ruby wiped off the table with a wet rag while their parents talked in hushed voices in the living room. Suddenly, the doorbell rang. "We'll get it," Mercedes called, handing Leo a just-rinsed dish and dragging Quinn behind her to the door. She yanked it open and smiled – there stood Kurt, dressed fashionably as always, with a bursting backpack and a couple of DVDs in hand.
"So I was thinking we'd start with the classic, Roger and Hammerstein's Cinderella before delving into some of the lesser-known musicals." He announced, showing them the movies he'd brought as he led the way downstairs.
"Hmmm." Mercedes mumbled, reading the back of a DVD as Kurt opened his bag and pulled out kettlecorn, pretzels, chips, and candy, setting them on an open table.
"I didn't know what you liked, or if you might have any of those weird cravings they always say pregnant women have on TV," Kurt explained, gesturing at Quinn's stomach, "so I just went with a variety."
"This looks good," Mercedes announced, handing the DVD case she'd been reading back to Kurt. "I'll go get the ice cream – does chocolate sound good to everyone?"
"Hold up," Quinn said, with more force than she'd used since entering the house. "What's going on here?"
"I thought you could use a friendly face and some –" Mercedes struggled to find the right word; 'girl talk' was the first phrase to pop into her mind, but with Kurt here that wasn't really the right phrase, "diva talk."
Quinn looked suspicious, but nodded. "Chocolate's good," she said, and Mercedes smiled to herself as she climbed the stairs – that reaction was way more of the Quinn she knew than the quiet girl she had been at the dinnertable.
"That is themost obnoxious hat I've ever seen." Quinn proclaimed as the thin stepsister waddled onscreen in a hideous green-and-blue costume. Well, that was what Mercedes assumed she was saying around the gob of ice cream in her mouth. Unlike dinner, where Quinn had hardly eaten a bite, she was now on her second serving of ice cream covered in chocolate syrup and – one of those weird cravings – crumbled potato chips. She was way more relaxed than she had been all evening, lying sprawled across the couch with her back against a pile of pillows.
"Really?" Kurt asked from his seat on the ground, lounging against the couch. "I always kind of liked it." Quinn rolled her eyes and shoveled more ice cream into her mouth, not dignifying him with a response. A moment later her eyes grew wide and round.
"Gimme your hand," she insisted. But instead of waiting she grabbed Kurt's hand and held it against the left side of her stomach. He twisted to sit comfortably.
"What?" he asked indignantly, angry to be pulled away from the movie. But a moment later his eyes grew wide too.
"Woah. So there's . . . there's really a baby in there?" he asked in an awed voice. Mercedes chuckled and leaned over from her seat, placing her hand beside Kurt's. Beneath the fabric of Quinn's dress she felt a series of powerful little kicks.
"No, I just stuck a pillow under my shirt for giggles." She retorted, but she wasn't angry.
"Well, I mean," Kurt struggled to explain his surprise, "I mean I knew, of course, but – I don't know – feeling it kick - it kind of makes it seem more real. Doesn't it?"
"I guess it did, at first." She replied thoughtfully. "Now it just keeps me up at night."
"Are you gonna keep her?" Mercedes asked, and instantly she could have kicked herself. Here Quinn was, finally opening up, starting to feel comfortable, and she had to go and ruin it. But Quinn didn't automatically shut down as Mercedes expected her to.
"Puck wants to," she explained, her eyes glassy as if she wasn't really seeing them. "And really, I do too, it's just – I mean, if I do, what kind of life is that? Puck and I would get married, we'd never graduate high school, let alone go to college. We'd get minimum wage jobs and live with his mom until she finally kicked us out. We'd be Lima Losers forever, stuck in an unhappy marriage with a kid neither of us really want." She sighed heavily. "I want to keep her, I do. I love her. But if I really love her, than I have to let her go so that she can be raised by a couple with real jobs and time for her; so that I can go to college and not be tied down to Puck. I love her, so I have to let her go."
Mercedes was overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness, of pity, of decisions too big and serious for teenagers to be making. All this time, she had assumed that Quinn was considering adoptions for purely selfish reasons when that was not the case at all. She was doing this for the baby, whom she loved and cared about far more than she let on.
"Insignificant," Kurt announced, reading from the green Apples-to-Apples card in his hand before turning over the cards that Quinn, Mercedes, and Leo had submitted. "This," he proclaimed, feigning outrage as he showed the others the top red card, "is blasphemy!" He laid down the card, which was labeled Musicals. "Toilets," he read, placing the card on the floor, "better. And-" he burst out laughing.
"What?" Mercedes asked, trying to grab the card from him, "what is it?"
"It, it-" but he couldn't stifle his giggles long enough for a full sentence.
Mercedes grabbed the card and read, "fashion faux-pas," before handing it back to Kurt with a smile.
"All right," he finally said, calming down, "that's a winner. Who's 'insignificant'?"
Quinn plucked the card from his hand, cheering "I won!"
"What are you?" Leo asked, gesturing at her acquired green cards. It was his theory that the green cards you earned were adjectives that described you.
"I am," she cleared her throat, "insignificant, zany, goody-goody, cosmopolitan, dangerous, profound, and principled. What about you?"
An hour later Quinn and Mercedes were stifling yawns as they cleaned up from the evening.
"Mercedes," Quinn said, putting a hand on her arm, "I just wanted to say thanks, for tonight. I really needed it, more than I knew."
"No prob," she answered, shrugging.
A/N: It's nowhere near perfect, but it's been sitting in my inbox for since August waiting to be published. Let me know what you think!