She's a grown-up before she realizes how much her mindset growing up could be defined by the songs she knew by heart. One night, sitting in the attic with Derek sorting through old boxes, it comes to her. He has a photo album in his lap, and she ignores the sweating in her palms that comes whenever he starts digging into her past. But then she comes across the box of records that she always meant to move downstairs.
"Oh my God," she murmurs, pulling the first album into her lap. It's Puff the Magic Dragon, her first record. She remembers putting it on her Fisher Price record player, and dancing around her room to it, until her mother came in from the office and told her to be quiet. That would set the tone for quite some time.
"Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff." Derek laughs.
"I loved it," she grins and pulls out the next few records. Disney, nursery rhymes, a Sesame Street album. All bought by her father; and she wonders when she thought to order these chronologically. Probably during the time when she was packing up the Boston house, doing everything with great precision, to avoid facing the truths that were about to hit her in the face.
"So did this little girl." He holds up the album, and she smiles wistfully at her childhood-self, giggling and holding a cone of cotton candy at the fair.
She keeps pulling records out as he turns pages of the album. The Beatles, probably stolen from her mother, Multiplication Fact, actually bought by her mother…. "Which Meredith was that?" he demands, when she pulls out Beauty and the Beat and Notorious. "The Go-Gos and Duran Duran seem kind of…" he trails off, tilting his head as though he is reexamining her.
"Upbeat for the dark and twisty child?" she asks, knowing there is a bitter edge to her voice. "Yeah. Here." She takes the album off of his lap, and begins to page through it. He reaches out and pulls her towards him, her jean-clad bottom probably sweeping the dust up from the wooden floor. He settles her into his lap, and she rests her head on his shoulder. "This one," she admits.
The little girl has straight blonde hair, pulled away from her face by a wide headband. She grins widely in the generic school picture, with one front tooth too large for her mouth, and the other missing. "This little girl tried her hardest to please her mom, mostly because she still believed that her dad would show up on their doorstep one day. He had, after all, said 'see you soon, baby girl'. So, she got As in school, wore her uniform without question, ate her broccoli. She was a veritable medical encyclopedia, because she drank in every fact her mother spat out at the dinner table.
"And she had Tigerbeat pullouts of Duran Duran all over her room, knew all the words to 'We Got the Beat', and thought that eventually things would be okay."
They sit in silence for a minute, and he presses his lips to her cheek. "And what happened?" he whispers.
She flips a page. The same little girl stands in front of a Christmas tree, in a line up of four kids, all blond. "Christmas, 1987. I got a suture kit from my mother. My aunt lit into her, because even though it was my favorite gift, my aunt saw how little my mother actually thought about me. I overheard their fight. I wanted so badly to make my mother notice me that I ended up being taken to the ER after trying to stitch my own fingers shut, because I made them bleed using it so much.
"And now that gift is defining for me, because somehow it made me subconsciously know, I was a surgeon, but that night…" She swallows, hearing the echo in her head. Meredith Grey, the daughter I raised is not this stupid. What got into your head? Were you even thinking? It was the first night she ran away from her mother and slammed the door behind her. She had looked at all the grinning people on her walls and ripped them down. "That night I realized that I would never be good enough for my mother."
The next records in the box show her drifting, just as the pictures do. Wild 80s hair and sweaters in one, tank-tops and ripped jeans, her school uniform with a jacket two sizes to big, and Doc Martens. And then.
"And then I fell in love," she grins. The cover of Nevermind has fingerprints all over it, and she blushes when she realizes that there is a lipstick print in the upper left corner. "Come as you are/As you were/As I want you to be" she whispers, forgetting that Derek is there, even though his legs are supporting her. "He was from Seattle, and in my mind I had built Seattle up as a kind of… well… a kind of nirvana." She knows how ridiculous that sounds, and he snorts, but she cannot smile at this. This was who she was for so long.
While she stares at the record, he turns the pages in the album. There she is, flannel clad and pink-haired. The picture is from a party somewhere, and she has a cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other, and Kurt Cobain's face on the shirt she's wearing under the flannel. "God, we thought we were saying something," she murmurs, looking at the other girls in the picture, all similarly clad. "We were all so angry, and I don't even know at what. I mean, really, my mother was a doctor. I had decent grades; I didn't have a bad life. But I was so angry, in ways I couldn't explain. And I was obsessed. The others, they listened to Alice in Chains, yelled with them, did pot and listened to Pearl Jam, but for me it was only Kurt. I loved him so much that I wanted to do Courtney Love serious bodily harm."
His hands rub her shoulders, and she looks back at him, kissing his stubbly cheek. "You were listening to Amy Grant and Counting Crows, weren't you?" she asks, hoping to diffuse this conversation.
"In 1994?" he asks, and she flinches just a little. "I was an intern. I wasn't listening to much of anything."
"Oh," she murmurs, thinking of afternoons spent browsing CD stores to unwind on her days off in her intern year. "Well, anyway… I was obsessed… and then… April 6th, 1994. He was younger than I am now. I don't remember the day, really. We all skipped school, got drunk, but I realized that none of them felt it the way I did. Or, I thought they didn't. I felt like he left me too, one of the only people who got me. It sounds really stupid now. Really, really stupid."
"No it doesn't. You were eighteen, and that's intense love. Nancy was absolutely head-over-heels with Rick Springfield. She was depressed when he got married, and that was long after her love affair."
Meredith smiles a little, fingering through the rest of the Nirvana albums, the Pearl Jame, the Soundgarden. "Yeah," she murmurs. "So, I went to college." He nods at the graduation photo. Her hair is faded pink there, and she remembers just stopping at that point, for months. She burned his posters one night when her mother was at the hospital, boxed up the records, and just felt betrayed for a while. In college she couldn't bring herself to actively listen to much; whatever was playing at parties. Oasis peaked her interest for a while, the Foo Fighters felt like treason, and pop began to climb the charts.
"Is that Alanis Morisette?" Derek asks, stopping her as she goes through the box.
'Um… yeah. Angry chick, that was me. Still buying records while everyone else switched to CD. Oh, I got some of these in Europe," she adds. "If I really loved something I got it in vinyl. I don't even know why now."
"You mellowed," he points out. They've reached the early 2000s, there are no more pictures. Rilo Kiley, Maria Mena, Melissa Ethridge.
"Lost girls," she says. "I couldn't attach myself to guys in music anymore. I—I don't know."
The Nirvana album is still in her lap, the page in the photo album has a pink-haired girl in the upper-left corner. A girl who longs for Seattle, for truth, to be who she is. Here she was. Entertain her. For a while, before she saw the interviews where Cobain admitted to not caring much about lyrics, she had thought for sure he meant "entertain" in a different sense. In the way she wanted. "Entertain", pay attention to. She still heard that in her mind when she listened to the song, and felt found.
"Are you still lost?" Derek whispers in her ear, sliding the photo album away from them. "What's your record now, Meredith?"
She starts to say that she barely listens to the radio, because he's always around and she'd rather talk to him, but that's a little bit of a lie. The truth is, she doesn't want to admit the music that's speaking to her. The CD she hides in the console of her car. A deep red blush is digging into her cheeks, more than the one that came when she admitted the name of the first man she let into her heart.
Still, why not tell him? She leans back and puts her lips to his ear. She's barely started before she feels is low chuckle vibrates through her. "You were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter," she whispers.
"You're not serious."
"Oh but I am. How I wish I wasn't. But 'The Way I Loved You' is definitely how I felt when I was with Finn. 'You Belong With Me', well that's an obvious parallel. 'Fearless'… I'm always kissing you in the rain…"
He pulls back, regards her for a second, and then pulls her up. "Come with me," he says. She lets him take her hand, follows him down the attic steps, and to the study. With a sheepish grin he reaches behind the stereo in there and pulls out Fearless: The Platinum Edition.
"Seriously?" she says.
"It's a love story, baby just say yes," he retorts. And, as corny as it is, she can't help the grin.
"Yes," she whispers, and lets him fold her in his arms. The next day, though, she takes the Nirvana record and the picture of seventeen-year-old her, and gets them framed. Each day that she finds herself singing along to a happy pop song on the radio she looks at that girl and sees how far she's come.
That girl dies a little, though, when she realizes that she knows Party in the USA by heart. There's only so much she can blame on watching movies and MTV while on bedrest. Still, she has Duran Duran on repeat in the car, and the Go-Go's get up and moving in the morning. Who knew that one day the happy girl would emerge again. Happy enough, anyway. She is not "Puff the Magic Dragon" any more, because George is dead and Izzie is not back.
And one night, after they lost a patient and watched Alex and Izzie have a huge fight in the parking lot of Joe's, she and Derek come home, and she pulls the record player out of the study closet. He cleans Bleach for her, and she pours tequila. It has been years, fifteen of them, since she played it, and yet she knows everything from the words to the cadence of "About a Girl" by heat. Tears stream down her cheeks, but she doesn't think she is crying for the man any more. She is crying for the lost girl who wrapped herself in a voice, whose eyes show how lost she feels, and who could never know that one day she would not feel this clawing fear and loneliness.
So maybe she hadn't reached nirvana in Seattle, but she'd come pretty damn close.