Emma hurried down the hall, worried and confused by Will's phone call. He hadn't been making a lot of sense and she had to admit Will was often very high energy, but he had been upset and the confused rambles had sounded truly urgent.
She heard someone shouting and flung open the door, throwing caution to the wind as her own concern grew. Only a few steps into the room, she froze, coral Moss Rose Mary Janes coming to a stop on the linoleum as though they had suddenly encountered a puddle of superglue.
It wasn't the dozen small children (adorable, but potential germ factories) milling around, even if some of them looked eerily familiar. She had no clue why they were in a high school, but that was all secondary.
Will was standing at the front of the room, eyes wide, fixed on her with a sort of desperation. What was so unusual was the fact that he looked like he'd lost a decade somewhere in the hour since she'd last seen him. The change was subtle, but clear if you knew Will's face as well as she did…fine lines and wrinkles had vanished and his skin had a bright, youthful glow. If she had to guess his age, she'd say, 22, maybe 23...which was wrong, wrong, wrong.
"Will, what…?" she looked from him to the children, not even sure what to ask first. This all seemed to make no sense.
"I have no idea!" He was obviously still freaked out. He crossed over to the door and shut it quickly, then spun, his back against the door before saying. "One minute, everything was normal, then next…."
He waved his hands expressively at the little kids, which made Emma turn and look more closely at them.
She made several immediate observations. 1. They were much cleaner than most small children, none of them having that sticky, food and drink covered look of many that age. 2. About half of the looked like they were in shock. 3. …Oh. My. GOD.
The two little girls in their tiny, matching Cheerio uniforms. A little boy in a military inspired red jacket, pants tucked into knee high leather boots. Boy with a potty mouth and a Mohawk…little guy in an oversized wheelchair…blue streaks in a girls hair.
"Oh!" she breathed, hands coming up to cover her mouth in shock. "Oh, wow…oh, this can't be real…how…"
"How is this possible?"
If the knee socks and now even briefer skirt weren't a clue, the big voice issuing from the smallest child present would have identified Rachel Berry to anyone who had ever known the girl.
If she didn't know that Lou the janitor didn't sterilize his mop between rooms (cause really, who used the same mop to clean the floor in the boy's bathrooms as well as the rest of the school?), she might have fainted. It was one of the first times her germ phobias helped her retain some modicum of cool. Life was funny that way.