Disclaimer: I own neither Glee nor any part thereof. No money is being made off of this story and is intended only for entertainment purposes; therefore it falls within the parameters of "Fair Use"

A/N: Thanks to all those that read and alerted. Big thanks to those who reviewed. I'm glad that you guys enjoyed.

Chapter 2

The Happy List

"So do you have to go?" Artie asked as Quinn was placing the pie the table.

"Do what?" Quinn answered, confused by the question.

"I saw you talking to that guy. That was your date right? The illusive Aaron?" Artie said taking a drink of his water.

Quinn returned to her seat beside Artie and said, "Oh, uh, yeah. That was Aaron, but, no, I don't have to go. I, uh… I kind of blew him off." Quinn took her fork and scooped a bite of the pie up into her mouth. The pie was exactly as delicious as it looked. Quinn couldn't help but sigh contentedly through closed lips.

"What? Why?" Artie asked thinking certainly he'd heard her wrong.

"I blew him off," Quinn repeated, "Gave him a fake name, well not a fake name, I told him my name was Lucy and that he had the wrong person."

Artie sat there astounded that someone, anyone had been blown off for him, and by Quinn Fabray, no less. "Did you… did you blow him off for me? I mean, cuz you didn't have to. We could have caught up later, or whatever."

"Eh," she started out slowly, "I did it a little for you but mostly for me. I just looked at him and saw tall and dark hair and he reminded me of Finn, and I saw his eyes and he reminded me of Sam, and I saw the way he was dressed and heard him talk and he reminded me of this guy Travis that I saw a couple of times last summer, another one of my mom's set-ups. I looked at all of that and saw three failed relationships, more-or-less two years of my life wasted on the wrong guys, and then I thought about what about what I just said to you about spending my entire summer on something that wasn't going to happen and I just had to get away. He was an hour late, hopefully he'll just assume he missed me, and I'll tell my mom that he stood me up and that'll be the end of it. Hopefully."

"Well," said Artie swallowing the bite he'd taken while Quinn was talking, "for my part, thanks. It'll afford me the opportunity maybe to explain my little outburst a minute ago. I mean, you probably don't care… or well, not that you don't care but maybe you don't think it needs explanation, but I wanted to anyway, so you understand fully."

Quinn simply said, "Okay."

"The whole 'I know Brittany loved you' thing touched on basically the biggest sore spot I had about this break up..."

Quinn rolled her eyes at herself and said, "Crap, I'm sorry, Artie. I meant that to make you feel better."

Artie jumped back in, "It did. The sore point was not being sure what I meant to her. She meant so much to me… means so much to me, and I really wasn't sure about what I meant to her. I mean, she told me she loved me a lot but she… I don't know…"

"She throws that word around a lot."

"Yeah," he said. Artie smiled at the shared understanding, "Yes, exactly, and she doesn't make the distinction between loving someone and being in love with someone very clear so for all I knew I was just one of the masses that she loves instead of something more special. So you saying that, it kinda took a weight off my mind. Like if we can't be together, at least she doesn't think that our time together was some complete waste to her."

Once again, Quinn put a hand on Artie's. "You weren't a waste of time, Artie. You helped her be her own person for maybe the first time in her life."

"What do you mean?" Artie said confused.

"Before you it was always 'Santana and Brittany' and Brittany always did whatever San did or whatever San wanted her to do. Dating you was the first thing Brittany did that she opted to do on her own, the first thing that Santana didn't want her to do, and she did it anyway. You know how I said that now San will apologize and Brit will forgive her anything?" Artie nodded. "Well, before you San didn't apologize. She would do something to hurt Brittany and Brit wouldn't talk to her for a day or so until she started to miss San, and then she'd just push her own hurt feelings down and go back to her. Brittany once said to me that being with you made her realize that she could be happy even if she and Santana didn't end up together. You made her willing to let San go, which forced Santana to do right by Brittany for the first time ever, and put them on something approaching a level playing field as a couple." Artie smiled at this. Quinn continued, "In this instance, you're not going to get the girl and I know that's not what you would prefer, but you have changed Brittany's life for the better."

Artie, smiling big and watery eyed, turned his hand in Quinn's, taking his in hers and squeezed. He said, "Thank you, Quinn. You don't know how much that means to me."

"I'm glad," she said. "Helps to make up for all the times you've helped me, even if you didn't realize you were."

"Okay, there's another thing that you're gonna need to elaborate on," he said.

"It's not another thing to elaborate on. It's the same thing, and that's as good a place as any to start. I'm happy to be here today, happy to listen to you unload because without you knowing it, you've been there for me through a lot of things because you and Mercedes sang 'Lean on Me' and I know the whole group sang it and it was Tina's idea originally. Mercedes explained all that to me, when I told her this, but the song was…" Quinn started getting choked up at the memory, "…it was exactly what I needed to hear exactly when I needed to hear it, and you and 'Cedes did such an amazing job on it that it's really stuck with me. It's got me through some really, really rough times, and so because it's your voice, yours and Mercedes, in my head, I really feel like I owe you… a lot."

Artie smiled, "I'm glad to have helped, Quinn, but it was just a song…"

"Not to me it wasn't," she interrupted a very serious tone to her voice, "It was the most gracious outpouring of unconditional love that had or has ever been offered to me, even in spite of the fact that I'd done nothing to deserve it. It means something to me and I'm pretty sure it always will, and this year, when I let Sylvester talk us into quitting Glee, I thought about the song and I hated myself so much that it made me sick, like physically sick to my stomach. And I'm through being that person. I swear to God, if it kills me, I'm not going to go back to being that person: image obsessed, status obsessed, emotionally distant, and cold. I was never happy being her. I thought it would make me Prom Queen and that would make me happy. You see how that worked out."

"So what brought on this decision?" Artie asked fascinated by the unprecedented forthrightness from Quinn.

"I don't think it was any one thing. I think I spent most of this year trying to pretend that last year didn't happen, so I could be Head Cheerio again, so I could be the most popular and powerful girl in school again. I pushed Kurt and Mercedes away. I stepped on Santana. I used Sam up until the second I thought that using Finn would better serve my purposes. Despite my obvious talent for it, I don't enjoy hurting people, so doing all those things made me nothing but miserable. There was no one thing that made me want to change but if there was a tipping point, it had to be Prom. I did all those things, I sacrificed personal happiness, and I spent the whole year obsessing over that stupid fucking crown! It meant everything to me, and in the end it meant nothing to anyone else. Everyone else in this school cared so little about what meant so much to me that they used to play a cruel joke on one of the nicest, sweetest guys I know. I knew that no one would care who was Prom Queen five years from now, but I thought at least they would care now. But they didn't, and it was then I realized that it doesn't matter. Status in high school doesn't matter at all."

"It matters to some people, well a lot of people really," Artie countered.

"Well, okay, maybe it matters to people. Maybe the more accurate thing to say is that it's meaningless. In the bigger picture, the world outside of McKinley, is Rachel's extreme unpopularity going to stop her from achieving her dreams?"

"Doubtful," Artie replied.

"Would she be any more likely to achieve those dreams if she were popular?" Quinn asked.

"I don't guess so," Artie said after thinking on it for a long minute.

"Did my extreme popularity save me any embarrassment last year when I was pregnant?"

"Little, if any," he said.

"And we've already established that it didn't help me achieve the one goal I've ever had in my life. You took Econ with me this year, so if having something doesn't help you and not having it doesn't hurt you, does it have any intrinsic value?"

"Well, clearly not, but there is a certain extrinsic value. It lets you do whatever you want."

"But only if what you want falls within the parameters of 'being popular.' Puck can throw people in dumpsters, Karofsky can rain slushies down on people, Santana can be a rampaging bitch to whomever she wants, but if what I, in the paradigm of 'popular girl,' wanted was to join the AV Club or Jazz Band, would I remain a 'popular girl'?"

"I suppose not."

"Absolutely not, my social status started to decline from the moment I joined Glee Club, really from the moment Finn joined but definitely by the time I joined. The only reason I wasn't thrown from my perch as alpha dog immediately is because Santana and Brittany joined too. They were next in the pecking order so they also lost social currency just being there."

Artie snorted and laughed slightly. "My God, the ridonkulousness of this conversation," he said smiling and casting his hands to the sky. "I can't remember the last time I had a discussion with anyone that involved the words parameters, paradigm, social currency, or intrinsic or extrinsic values."

"And that's another thing. I can't be openly smart around the popular crowd. I have to work my butt off to get good grades and be top of our class… or at as close to top of the class as one certain bespeckled brainiac will allow me get," Quinn said hitching an eyebrow at Artie who smiled at her in return, "but I have to suppress my intelligence, my vocabulary, everything. I can be cunning and devious and underhanded to my heart's content, but heaven forbid I'm just smart for its own sake. Ugh!" Quinn grunted in frustration. "I'm done with it. I am so over being popular. I'm not going back out for Cheerios next year. I'm not chasing a Prom crown. I'm not dating a football player."

"So is that why you're spending the day with a nerd in a wheelchair?" Artie said teasingly.

"Well, kind of, yeah," Quinn replied, "I mean, you say being popular means I get to do whatever I want, but don't you do whatever you want? I know things are done to you by popular kids that you wish weren't, but of the things in your control, don't you do basically whatever you want? You're in Glee, you're in Jazz Band, you're in the AV Club, you're the captain of the Academic Decathlon Team, and you spent the bulk of this year dating a cheerleader. Did you do any of that because you felt like you were supposed to or did doing them just make you happy?"

"They… just make me happy," he said, almost sheepishly.

"And that's what I want. I want to do things that that make me happy and I want not to care what people think, people other than my friends that is."

"Okay," said Artie, "so what are the things that make you happy?"

"That I don't know. I've spent every second of the last three years trying to craft the image of Quinn Fabray that I've never bothered to find out what I actually like, but I've started a list of things. It's pretty short. Do you want to hear it?"

"Sure."

"Okay," she said retrieving her phone from her purse, quickly pushing buttons and pulling up a list. "Number One, Glee Club. Love singing and dancing and being around people who supported me through tough times. Number Two, my new look. I like my short hair and my skinny jeans. They make me feel sexy and I really like that feeling."

"Definitely sexy, yo," Artie put in with a flirty smile.

Quinn smiled at the compliment and continued, "Number Three, big one, New York. Once I loosened up and actually let myself enjoy it, I absolutely loved it. I want to go back. To college. I have no idea what I want to study or what I want to do with my life but I know where I want to go to figure it out."

Artie was fairly certain he'd never seen Quinn Fabray so excited about anything. Her face had suddenly lit up and become very animated. A huge, genuine smiled had stretched across her face and made her look positively radiant.

"Oh, and now I need to add, number four, having intelligent conversations with Artie." Now Artie's smile matched Quinn's.