After that moment in the hallway outside Shelby's bathroom, Rachel couldn't stop thinking about this thing that had happened when she'd been about six or seven years old.
There'd been a little blonde-haired girl named Lindsey in her dance class, a knobby-kneed slip of a thing with porcelain skin and the most perfect little button nose Rachel had ever seen. All of the other girls would crowd around and fawn all over her before and after class, and (thinking about it years later) Rachel supposed she could have just joined in with them if she wanted to talk to Lindsey. But even at that age, she'd had a sense that that wasn't what she really wanted. It wouldn't have been good enough to be just one among the throng. She'd wanted something more, something special.
For months she'd been relentless in inviting Lindsey over to her house. And for months, Lindsey had turned up that perfect little nose and ignored her. Until finally, inexplicably, Lindsey had turned to her while they were waiting in the wings at the spring recital and said with a sigh of frustration, "Fine. I guess we can be friends. Just...don't tell anyone else."
It had taken Rachel years to realize that she probably should have been offended in that moment. At the time, though, all that had mattered was that Lindsey had said she'd wanted to be friends after all, and the fact that she'd said she wanted it to be a secret had only just played right into Rachel's dramatic sensibilities. It had made her blush and set her insides fluttering so wildly that she'd almost forgotten the steps to their routine.
It didn't even matter that Lindsey had never actually come over to Rachel's house even once after that; Rachel had still spent the whole summer smiling.
And she'd felt that same giddy, fluttering feeling in the hallway at Shelby's apartment with Quinn.
Well, almost the same.
It was made different somehow by the softness of Quinn's voice, the warmth of her skin, the fact that Rachel could feel Quinn's heart pounding in her chest as she called them "friends." The physical closeness they'd shared that evening was something Rachel had craved for a while without really knowing it, and for a while longer without really knowing why.
And it was made different also by the rest of what Quinn had said:
Friends tell each other the truth.
It had sounded so reassuring at first, but somewhere along the way, on the drive back home from Shelby's, it had really hit her, and she'd had to pull over to the side of the road to catch her breath.
Friends tell each other the truth.
It made her hands shake and her vision go blurry.
Telling Quinn the truth meant telling the truth about the wedding. And in order to tell the truth about the wedding, she'd have to know what that truth really was. And no matter how many times she went over it in her mind, there were still parts of that day—and the days that led up to it—that she just didn't understand.
For just a moment that afternoon, after Kurt had given her dress his seal of approval, she'd been alone with her reflection.
With a sigh, she'd forced herself to admit that she looked pretty enough. More importantly, she looked the part. It wasn't the way she'd always dreamed she'd look on her wedding day, but that was, in part, by design. At every stage of the hurried planning of this ordeal she'd been careful never to select anything that would have been her first choice. This wasn't for real, after all, this was just for show. Just a way to find out what would happen, to show them all that it could happen—if she wanted it to.
"Do you ever fantasize about your own funeral?" she'd asked Kurt the year before. Maybe that had been the question that had set this whole scheme in motion. At the time, Kurt had just looked at her, horrified, but she'd paid him no mind.
When she'd first seen the 1973 musical version of Tom Sawyer—eight years old, home sick with a fever, curled into a ball in her Daddy's old, oversized armchair—she'd spent days afterward wondering what it would be like to sneak a peek at her own funeral. Would the girls at school who'd called her a freak, the boys who'd barked at her on a routine basis, come and cry and feel sorry for how they'd treated her? Would her music teacher give a speech about what a shame it was that Broadway never got to experience the enormous talent of little Rachel Berry? Would Lindsey from her dancing class finally admit to all their classmates that she and Rachel had secretly been friends all along?
In the end, it had been only the thought of her fathers that had kept her from indulging too deeply in this daydream. One night, after a particularly harsh day at elementary school, she'd been so deeply engrossed in her funereal fantasies that she could actually see her Daddy's tear-streaked face, could hear her Papa's sweet, breaking voice as he stood over her coffin singing the "Little Bird" song from Fiddler on the Roof:
You were always such a pretty little thing, everybody's favorite child, gentle and kind and affectionate, the sweet little bird you were.
With a gasp, she'd burst into tears, jumped out of her bed, and run into her fathers' room, crying, "Daddy, Papa, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to make you sad. I'm so sorry, Papa!"
Her Papa had scooped her up into his arms and patted her back, trying to comfort her. "Aw, honey. You're alright," he'd said. "You must have had a nightmare. It's ok."
"You make us so happy, sunshine," her Daddy had said. "Don't cry."
She'd sobbed until she'd lost her breath, and had vowed never again to daydream about her own demise. Maybe that's what had made this whole wedding ruse so appealing. It was a way to get that sneak peek at people's reactions without breaking the hearts of the parents who had always loved her so fiercely and unconditionally.
The other girls were waiting for her downstairs on the sofa, pretty maids all in a row. Whatever else was going to happen that afternoon, Rachel knew she'd always have the small triumph of having gotten Santana Lopez into her living room, and in a bubble gum pink bridesmaid's dress no less. The last time she'd asked Kurt though, Quinn was still missing.
She picked up her phone from her night table and fired off a nervous text message: Are you still coming? Everyone's waiting for you.
Under her dress, Rachel's knees were shaking. Quinn was the lynchpin of this whole plan, and up until just a few hours ago, Rachel hadn't even been sure Quinn would come. But then they'd talked; Quinn had called her up out of the blue and asked her to meet her at the Lima Bean that very morning, and she'd said she wanted to come to the wedding after all, if she was still invited, to offer her support.
Rachel should have felt relieved at that. It was the kind of validation she'd been dreaming of for years. Quinn Fabray, the Quinn Fabray, practically begging to be re-invited to her wedding, to support her in her marriage to the boyfriend she'd taken from her more than once. But there'd been a sadness in Quinn's voice that had been so disconcerting. Now wasn't the time for sentimentality, and Rachel knew it, but still...she couldn't help but notice how Quinn had barely been able to look her in the eyes, how she'd had to stop to take so many deep breaths, almost as though—almost as though she were trying to keep herself from crying.
Rachel's reflection frowned back at her, and she cursed her artistic intuition. Why did she have to notice every little thing? And what did it matter if Quinn was upset about the wedding? Wasn't that at least part of the point?
She wasn't sure anymore.
Every so often lately, the combination of Quinn and herself and a wedding dress would reconfigure in her mind, and the whole thing would shift suddenly from revenge fantasy into...something else, something that made her feel light-headed and jittery. She felt a flood of heat rush to her face, and she had to sit down at the foot of her bed.
When all of this had started, when the first inklings of the marriage plot had crept into her mind, Quinn Fabray had been barely more than a caricature to her, a wicked queen dressed in the guise of Rachel's own version of idealized femininity. It had almost seemed too perfect, actually, that her number one tormentor was blessed with every one of the girlish attributes she secretly coveted. Oddly enough, it was Finn who had seemed more real to her in the beginning, concrete and sturdy not only because of his imposing stature or supposed war hero parentage, but because of the inexplicable respect he commanded. At the time, he seemed to her to be masculine in a way her fathers never could be. And in that sense, maybe pursuing him had been a bit of a rebellion on her part, too.
But she thought of Quinn differently now. Maybe it had started with the pregnancy, the first sign of something amiss beneath that perfect veneer. She would have had every right to look at that episode the way everyone else had: the well-deserved fall of the mighty. But instead it had changed her perception of Quinn in a completely unexpected way. She'd admired the strength Quinn had shown in those months as she was shuffled from house to house, and she'd cursed herself for lacking the courage to offer Quinn a place to stay in her own home. But perhaps selfishly, she'd found herself fixated mostly on the softness those months revealed in Quinn, the bits of quiet encouragement Quinn had begun to express for other the members of the Glee Club, a moment (once) when she'd allowed Rachel to put a comforting hand on her shoulder. Rachel had always expected Quinn's body to exude the same iciness her personality once had, and so she had been shocked to feel the warmth of life radiating from Quinn's skin.
Perhaps that was the first moment Quinn had ever seemed real to her.
Then there had been the whole Lucy debacle, another reminder of Quinn's supposed lack of perfection. But those images of a pre-teen Quinn had done little to shake Rachel's reverence. Instead, she found herself thinking that even Marilyn Monroe had once been just Norma Jean Baker; Judy Garland had been Frances Gumm. And finding out that Lucy Quinn Fabray hadn't just hatched from an egg fully-formed as the ghost of Grace Kelly only made Rachel want to know her more, to understand her more.
Just then, as she'd been thinking all of this over, there'd been a gentle tap on the door, and Kurt had poked his head in.
"Quinn's still not here," he'd said gently, "but I think we have to get started. The justice of the peace is threatening to leave soon, and Finn's starting to get antsy."
"Just give me one more minute," she'd replied, hoping he wouldn't notice the wavering of her voice.
Up until that day, Rachel had never really worried about this last part of the plan, the part that was waiting for her downstairs in the living room. The way she saw it, it was no big deal. She'd just appear to lose her nerve, say she wasn't ready. They were too young, and she wanted to wait to do things the right way. Everyone would understand that, certainly. Wasn't that what they had all been telling her for the past few months?
And Finn. He might be disappointed, but he would understand. She wouldn't be rejecting him; she'd just be asking for more time. She still loved him, after all.
Didn't she?
Rachel felt herself break out into a cold sweat. Just as Quinn had become more real and vital to her over time, Finn had become more cartoonish and less deserving of all her admiration. His apple pie grin belied the fact that underneath it all, he was really just a coward and a bully. He'd never really stood up for Kurt the way he should have, and the mere thought of the way he'd outed Santana earlier in the year made her stomach turn in revulsion.
She'd suddenly realized he was no longer the kind of person she longed to share a stage with, much less her life. She didn't love him. And she didn't want to do this anymore.
Her fingers had faltered as she'd tapped out a garbled, frantic message to Quinn before running for the safety of her fathers.
And then the world had gone dark.
She was still on the shoulder of the highway between Shelby's apartment and home.
As she wiped the tears from her cheeks, she found herself wishing that she could go back to that morning at the Lima Bean with Quinn; wishing that she had reached out and touched Quinn's sweet, sad face, just as she had that time last year at the prom; wishing that Quinn had said whatever it was she'd been withholding that day behind those watery eyes and forced smile.
With a deep intake of breath she thought to herself that if friends told each other the truth, maybe she and Quinn weren't meant to be friends. But what was the word for two people forever bound by the secrets they kept from one another?