School isn't as difficult in the ways she thought it'd be. She uses different entrances, depending on where the ramps are, but everything else is basically the same. Going to school is just classes, which involve sitting (an activity she now excels at), and she'd taken chemistry last year so there were no high stools to worry about.

What's hardest now is how she gets there. She doesn't have a car anymore, not that she could drive it now, anyways. The district, strapped for cash, doesn't have a school bus with a lift.

She quietly gave thanks to the fact that Artie's already paved a path through this nightmare and is able to help navigate her through it. She took more than her own abilities for granted.

Mr. Abrams had already arranged to pick Quinn up for school. "It's been lonely, just us men, all these years," he'd said on her first morning back. "We appreciate the company."

She instantly forgave Artie for every time he was a prick the moment he placed a hot cup of coffee into her shaking hands and helped buckle her in.

They pass the busses and student parking lot, pulling around to a mostly ignored ramp on the far side of McKinley. She recognizes the area. She spent most of the beginning of the year here smoking and brooding in silence, flicking cigarettes and wondering why she couldn't just drift away with the ash.

That's all she's going to be for a while - floating, like dust motes in the air; aimless and invisible.

Shockingly, it hadn't been that hard to defer.

It just meant delaying what she never thought was real in the first place. Her whole life had been shackled to one reality. All she had was all she knew, and she didn't know anything that was better. There was no taste of actual freedom, just the promise of it.

Even when she'd been shackled to a future and life she never wanted (but thought she deserved), it was of her own construction. Now, there was nothing. Despite how badly she itched to leave, there was no escaping the fact that in a few short months, she's never be ready to live on her own at Yale. There was no such thing as independence anymore. Not ever.

Now, Quinn simply clings to each minute. Because minutes pass into hours, hours into days, and a minute is easier to hold onto than the vastness of a year.

Quinn clung to minutes the way she'd clung to Beth's fingers after she was born: desperately and without absolution.

It reminded her of that moment, back in the hospital not too long ago. When she'd heard Elmo foggily through the veil of medication and woke up a few days later to the sight of her daughter eating applesauce. She saw, for the first time, that there are some things more importantthan the past and cried silently, as the two-year old drooled blissfully unawares.

It was the first time she'd felt anything close to okay since losing consciousness, broken, on the side of the road.

Quinn knows she can hold onto minutes. Because the ghost of Beth's touch lingers on her skin, and now she gets to see her daughter every other week. It's a start.

So she wheels herself up that ramp and another day begins.


Her entire life has been an exercise in bracing herself; for who she was and what she couldn't be, for what she wanted but couldn't ever have, for what she thought she deserved, and all the things she didn't.

Lucy hurt. Rachel Berry hurt. Her Father hurt. Beth hurt. Being Quinn hurt. She'd been accepting the pain for years now. What she didn't expect to throw her for a loop was graduation- this was never in her plan; it was the one thing she could always count on, walking across that stage.

She almost didn't attend, but certain gossip queens had somehow found out she was planning on skipping the ceremony and they made it their business to rally the glee troops. It was easy to say no to herself, but whether she said yes to them out of sheer exhaustion or real affection was less clear.

Glee might be a family, but it was a dysfunctional, borderline abusive one. If anyone would know, it'd be Quinn. Both families she'd been a part of had come to blows over her at some point, but at least glee's never left bruises.

As she sat in a chair she'd never get up from, bitterly watching her peers cross the stage, shake hands with their teachers and accept diplomas all at the same time (as if it were nothing to juggle so many simple actions), she couldn't help but feel a pang of pity for someone that wasn't her.

Their wedding rings twinkled in the sun, sparkling like Rachel used to. They might get out of here, but they'd never escape Lima.

For a girl so solid in character and ambition, whom Quinn's spent the most tumultuous years of her life loving, the Rachel Berry here on this stage quaked through Quinn's being the hardest and crumbled upon exiting.

The Rachel Berry wearing a red cap and gown walking toward her with a smile was nothing like the one Quinn imagined in the deepest corners of her heart walking toward her in a white dress matching her own.

They hugged, Quinn still hating how the newfound height difference interfered, before Rachel tore her gaze away and she bounced over to her fathers and Finn. Quinn rolled back to her mom, grateful for the few hours of quiet until the glee gang meets for midnight milkshakes.


The summer passed without incident.

There were a couple get-togethers with everyone throughout the summer, and it was good to not be by herself for a few hours. These people were her friends, after all. Mostly there were pool parties where Quinn would lie out in a bikini, reading month-old magazines, and realizing it was the most blissfully normal action ever- that no one could tell that the legs tanning below her on the pool chair didn't work. Other times she'd sit on the pool steps with her bottom half in the water, trying to ignore how the wheelchair parked a few feet behind her felt like a cage.

Quinn's upper arms got stronger, but there was no cheer camp, and she couldn't lifeguard or babysit like before. Not many homes in Lima had accessable houses, and no matter how much parents trusted their children to brush their teeth and go to bed, they still wanted someone to be able to check up on their kids at night.

So she spent most of her time on Brittany and Santana's couches, watching endless movies and practicing her braiding techniques on Santana's long brown hair, torn between wishing it were Rachel's and being disgusted at her sentimentality.

It's hair. It's dead.

But then Quinn thinks back to that first visit in the hospital and everything surrounding it, and forces herself to focus on whatever's on tv instead.

A few weeks and a wrung-out Instant Netflix account later, Brittany starts getting board games because she claims she can smell their brains rotting from inside their skulls.

First is Bananagrams, because Brittany liked the shape of the bag. After two drinks, Brittany outplays them both with words like 'loquacious', 'quagmire', and 'decimal'. "The decimal is completely destroyed by the hundreds space. That's how the Romans defeated the Goths."

Taboo is great, whether sober or inebriated. They played for about an hour then hid the buzzer in the couch cushions to be rediscovered once they've forgotten about it.

They drink wine and play Monopoly, which is a lot more fun when Santana curses like a drunk matador and completely owns the board, taking their money with relish, no matter how fake it is. "This is just a precursor to my future, get used to it, chorras."

Two minutes into starting Operation, they're all doubled over, having devolved into a laughing fit over the buzzing noises. They wipe tears from their eyes and make up new body pieces. Quinn doesn't even care that it takes both Brittany and Santana's combined motor functions to prop her upright against the couch.

They finish the tequila.