DISCLAIMER ! I own nothing and no one, of course. Except Pippa - leave me a review and tell me whether or not I should keep her, okay?
WHAT'S UP ? Lies, friendships, teams, romances, and Latin schools - Oh my!
LAST WORD ? Thanks for reading; please enjoy!
The school day went by quickly, and everyone was off at things they had to do before Glee club started, be it making up tests or going to other club meetings or team practices, or just sitting around the cafeteria, working on homework while the clock ticked.
Quinn and Rachel sat in the stands, sitting together without really sitting together, and Quinn couldn't bring herself to glare at Rachel and ask what exactly she was doing there, since Quinn was an exCheerio and had a boyfriend on the football team – and a baby daddy - so she was certainly VIP, but Rachel… wasn't.
Hell, even Pippa knew that, from where she was running slowly along the track. Behind her was the rest of the girl's varsity soccer team, running even more slowly than she was. It was the reason for her pace; she could easily run a five minute mile, but one look at the new team had her wondering what exactly their coach had been making them do for conditioning.
She was surprised out of her thoughts by former captain, now co-captain and host-family sister, Mari Wells, who must have sprinted to catch up with her, as she had been bringing up the back to assure no one straggled too badly. Before Pippa could question why she'd abandoned her start, Mari beat her to it: "Pippa, we've run a half mile."
Like that meant anything to her, but she kept her tone cool – let the dethroned captain try and make her last stand – when she said simply, "Yes."
"Don't you think we can stop for a break, or walk a curve, or …?"
"And why would we do something like that?
"I read that you burn more calories if you walk and then take short bursts of spee -"
"We're not running to lose weight. Anyone with a toilet and a toothbrush, depending on the severity of your gag reflex, can do that. We're running to teach discipline and maybe win a couple of games."
Mari tried to keep her voice calm, though she knew that she sounded desperate. Because anyone would sound desperate if they were trying to talk while running, even if Mari considered herself more in shape than a lot of girls on the team."Well maybe we can start slow? The girls, we haven't really -"
"Yes, I can tell by the amount of games you've won in the past couple of years." And damn it, if Pippa could articulate properly under their circumstances.
But Mari knew that that wasn't completely fair – since Pippa had arrived in Lima, sometime early last Friday so that she was already dribbling a soccer ball around Mari's backyard when she'd gotten home from school, Mari had learned that Pippa really worked towards things. In Boston, the team would run the eight miles from the Boston Latin School to "the C.A.H Park" which had led to a bit of confusion as, instead of saying the letters, she had said C.A.H like a word, and with her accent, Mari had thought she'd been talking about a car park, then from the Christian Herter across the bridge and down the river to MIT's main campus, across another bridge, and back to Boston Latin.
When Mari had expressed even the smallest bit of awe at this, she had gotten her first proper ream-out by Pippa, before Pippa had gone on, arched eyebrow, and asked, "What do you do?" When Mari had given her a brief run out of their workout regimen, well, Pippa had made it clear that she intended to make quite a few changes. And when Mari had tried to convince her that the team would be less than pleased, Pippa had come up with a quick, "simply flawless" solution: she'd take over captain.
"Yeah. I mean, no. Look, I don't know. We never did track running. Sure we did laps around the field, but -"
Pippa stopped abruptly, shooting an annoyed glare at the girls that slammed into her back, before turning into the shade of the bleachers. The rest of the team crowded in around her, looking irritable and tired, and partly thankful for the break. Several headed for their water bottles and cellphones, but Pippa stared at them until they rejoined the group.
Rachel had learned quickly through the practice that no one could ignore a stare from Pippa.
The singer continued watching the soccer captain as she did a quick rundown of the next exercise: running while singing.
"It improves endurance," Pippa said with a smirk at Mari, spinning around her and back out onto the track. The rest of the team stared at Mari for a minute before she shrugged and motioned them back onto the track, and they started running again, this time singing about problem children that turn into hot messes who can stumble in the streets all they want but still manage to look 'hella fine'.
It was true, Rachel noticed as the team sprinted by, pace driven by a conscious effort to keep their feet on the beat in the song, Pippa really couldn't sing. Not anymore than the average person, anyway, and maybe the fact that she was running while she was doing it had something to do with it, but Rachel believed that if you were a singer you were a singer, and Pippa was not a singer.
Still, Rachel had read about running while singing in one of the Broadway magazines that got delivered to her house daily: it was supposed to be extremely good for you, and raise your endurance while on stage.
Quinn watched Rachel stare thoughtfully off after the soccer team, and raised an eyebrow. "I'm sure Glee club would just love to do this. Look, Berry, save it for your sequined sweatpants and elliptical."
"It couldn't hurt," Rachel said, shrugging noncommittally.
Quinn pushed her long blonde hair over her shoulder, picking at a few stray strands left on her blue cardigan. "You would get slushied. You would get slushied by Glee club. Look, yes, I am a part of it, and yes, I really like it. But still, getting slushied by Glee club would make you lower than that Perez wannabe. John, or whatever."
"I have."
Rachel hadn't spoken in so long that Quinn had decided their conversation was over and gone back to watching either the football or the Cheerios practice – Rachel didn't know which – and moving her hand over her stomach in absent little circles. The blonde glanced back over at her, confused. "Gotten slushied? I know."
"Slushied Jacob."
"Wow," Quinn said dryly, "I always thought you'd be one of those, 'treat others as you want to be treated','karmedic payback' types."
Rachel shifted to face Quinn, locking her ankles together and straightening the seam of her skirt so that it followed the new line her legs made. "It wasn't premeditated, or anything. I just had a slushee, and he – well, he walked past me."
"So you slushied him." At Rachel's nod, she gave a quiet, contained snort that made it completely girly, in a way that Rachel would have never been able to pull off, and said, "How very Cheerios of you."
"I could have never been a Cheerio." It was supposed to be an insult, but Rachel was smart; she knew that, especially coming from her, Quinn would never take it as one.
"No you couldn't have," Quinn said, proudly, and when she turned her gaze back to the field, there was the sort of wistfulness that made it clear she was watching the Cheerios.
To Rachel, anyway. Because in reality, though Quinn had initially turned towards the Cheerios, it had been in time to see Santana and Puck sneak a kiss. Well, it was more Santana sneaking the kiss, because Puck could do whatever the fuck he wanted and he'd never get pitched from the football team. Santana didn't have that sort of luxury, even though in Quinn's absence, she was the best on the team.
Rachel nodded, and turned away, in time to see that the soccer team had finished their final two laps and the team slowed for a walk as they approached the bleachers, where all of their water bottles were lined up on the steps.
Pippa leaned forward onto her tiptoes to reach for one of the bottles – a red one, with victoria concordia crescit, victory comes from harmony,scrawled on it – sitting on the bleachers, and switched it from hand to hand as she told the team, "We're going to take a break. But first, you guys walk a lap and cool down. Otherwise you'll get cramps, and I don't want to listen to you complain."
The team did complain just then, but Pippa was already picking her way around the water bottles, up the stairs to the seating section. She chose a spot a couple rows down from Quinn and Rachel, on the bottom row.
The distance between them, which was enough to make it clear that Pippa didn't care about them, didn't care about bothering them or not, didn't deter Quinn from snarking, "What happened to being a team?"
Pippa glanced over her shoulder, gave Quinn a full body glance and then spun her features into a practiced smirk, saying, "What happened to contraception?"
Quinn rolled her eyes. Maybe she had walked into that one herself, and maybe she hadn't heard that one before, but she'd heard many like it. Insults hurled at her Christianity and her chastity, at the fact that she'd gotten pregnant in general, like there weren't other pregnant girls in the school. There were four, actually.
Quinn had run into one in the bathroom one day. Literally – ran into her. Luckily, neither one of them were far along enough for it to be that dangerous, but it had still turned into a mess as Quinn hadn't been able to regain her footing in time to reach the nearest stall, and ended up throwing up on the tiled flooring. The other girl hadn't been showing, and neither had Quinn, at that point. Only Finn and Puck – and, though she wasn't aware, Mr. Schue and, she would learn later that very day, his wife Terri – knew.
She had tried to push it away as a bad breakfast, as something she ate and something that one of the football idiots had done in the cafeteria, but the other girl had just smiled, like they shared a secret. And the fact that Quinn had known exactly what that secret was made Quinn throw up a second time, after the girl had walked out without a word.
Still, Quinn didn't think that the other girls were getting the sort of shit that she was. And, in a way, Quinn was glad. There was enough to worry about, being pregnant, without getting this sort of treatment. Of course, she'd like someone that could understand her position to a T, but that wasn't going to happen to anyone, ever. Not her, not Rachel, not Finn or Puck.
It was probably something like karma for well… yeah.
Pippa had turned her attention on Rachel instead. "So I was looking at Mari's yearbooks the other day, trying to get a good grasp on how to describe the god awfulness of this school to call home to my friends about, and have you ever realized how incredibly creepy you are?"
Rachel, while not exactly confrontational had never backed away from a fight. "Excuse me?"
"Enough for me to scan the entire book and email it to them." A pause, in which Pippa seemed to actually take in their expressions, and either misread them or ignored them. At the moment, Rachel couldn't even think of which was more likely. "Oh, you haven't, have you?" Pippa faked an innocent look, and didn't quite get it right. "Sorry. In my defense, I was told to expect less complex classes. Not less complex classmates."
"You don't know anything about us," Rachel said confidently. There were a lot of things that could be said about Glee club, good and bad. The bad might be heard far more often, but the good was still there. And one thing, no matter which way you looked at it, that couldn't be denied, was that they were a pretty complex group.
"It's called making inferences," Pippa started slowly, "We do that, sometimes, especially during reading and math. It means -"
"We know what it means," Quinn broke in, already irritated with Pippa.
"I don't remember expressing an interest in your life," Pippa said, almost curiously. "Speaking of which, you are both quite boring." And just like that, she was spinning off of the bleachers, meeting her team at the bottom of the bleacher steps.
Rachel looked over at the football team, trying to put some sort of semblance of normality back on what had been a – relatively – peaceful afternoon before Pippa had made her appearance. As she watched, Finn made a call – she assumed, because she didn't know too much about football, but she knew that the quarterback was important and that people had to follow his orders, and all of the players started the play, so she inferenced, take that, Mahoney – and after the play was done, the players all "took a knee" around their coach, and when Quinn started shifting around next to her, standing up and smoothing out the back of her dress, Rachel realized that this meant practice was finished.
Well, that was sort of a lie, Rachel figured as she followed Quinn down a different flight of steps than the one that the soccer team was circled around, since Glee practice was set to start in fifteen minutes, after everyone had had time to regroup and shower.
If she wasn't convinced that Quinn would whip a Slushee out of midair and throw it – cup and all – in her face, Rachel would attempt to link arms with the blonde. As it was, she dug her fists deeper into the pockets of her blazer and followed Quinn back towards the school.