A/N: Okay, trigger warning for eating disorders.

Lucy shifts her books higher in her arms, willing them and pleading with them not to slip out of her sweaty hands. She's already ten minutes late – grape is the hardest color to get out – and when she runs around the corner she runs into something bright red and hard as a brick wall.

Her books clatter to the floor – joined by someone else's – and she mutters, "I'm so – wow, I'm really sorry," and begins gathering her books, trying to go as fast as she can.

"Pick my shit up, too." The person above her commands, and she closes her eyes, thinking that if she wishes and thinks hard enough, they'll disappear.

They don't, and when she still doesn't do what they've asked, they nudge her harshly in her knee with the toes of their sneaker. "C'mon, pick it up. This is part of your weight loss challenge," he sniggers.

And then it's like one of those scenes in those Lifetime movies where everything just slows down and desaturates and all the noise just becomes a din of sounds that blend over and under and through each other.

She doesn't know exactly what it is (and she's actually not sure she wants to, either) but she feels something break in her, somewhere, just shatter and clang to the ground in millions of pieces and with a hopeless look at the tile beneath her she realizes that it very well could be something – somewhere – that she can't fix. There very well could be too many pieces for her to pick up.

But she can pick up his books, so she does, and then straightens and hands it over to him, feeling like someone just dumped some more ice over her head. "H-here." She stutters.

"Later, Caboosey! Toot toot!" She barely feels the shoulder check he gives her.

She keeps her lunch firmly shoved in the bottom of her backpack while she moves with Rachel and Sam over to their table in the far corner and sits.

"Where's your food, Luce?" Sam wonders, a spaghetti noodle hanging out of his mouth.

"Oh," she feigns surprise. "Uh, shoot. I must have forgotten to grab it before I left the house."

"Do you want some of mine?" They both ask at the same time, and Lucy smiles before declining.

"You sure?" Sam wonders, again, and she nods, again.

"C'mon...it's part of your weight loss challenge" –

Ha. She toes her lunch back through her backpack.

She'll give him a fucking weight loss challenge.

When she gets home, her dad's not there, but her mom is. She's reading a magazine, one leg crossed over the other and small glasses on her face with a glass of something that actually doesn't look like alcohol.

"Hi, mom."

Judy looks up, and smiles, and Lucy toes off her shoes. "Hello, dear. How was school?"

Emotionally draining. Confidence crippling.

She shrugs. "It was fine," and then pads upstairs, her backpack bumping against her hip as she goes.

She thinks she can hear the crinkle and uncrinkle of her still full lunch bag with every step.

Her mom calls her down for dinner, and she responds with an, "I'm not hungry!"

She doesn't think it's going to work, and that she's going to have to go downstairs and push around her food to make it look like she's eaten something, but when she doesn't get a response back, she smiles with a sigh of relief, even though that is the exact opposite of what she's feeling right now.

"Mom, I'm not hungry."

"You didn't eat dinner last night, Lucy, of course you're hungry," Judy says, and pushes a single piece of toast towards her. "Eat."

"But I'm not – "

"Respect your mother, young lady," Russell butts in, face in his newspaper. "And do as you're told."

She grabs the toast off the plate, and then mumbles, "I gotta go," before she walks out the front door, a faint cry of, "Have a good day, dear!" echoing softly in her ears.

She rips off a piece of toast with her teeth, and then throws the rest into the dark blue, plastic dumpster at the end of their driveway.

"You forgot it again?" Rachel wonders curiously as Lucy sits down lunch less.

"Yeah," she sighs, heavily, as if she's disappointed, and then silently commends her acting abilities. "I was running late this morning."

"Oh, here." Sam says, and she watches as he rips his lunch in half and then hands it over to her on a napkin. "Have half."

She shakes her head, and then slides it back over to him slowly. "I don't like ham, Sam."

And then they all sort of chuckle, and Sam deepens his voice and says, "I do not like green eggs and Ham, I do not like them, Sam I Am," which makes them all chuckle some more.

"You sure, though?" And Lucy nods, before folding her arms on the table and setting her chin on them.

She watches Rachel open her mouth to say something out of the corner of her eye, and she interrupts, "No offense, but that looks gross, Rachel," and then Rachel pouts a little bit and takes a defeated bite out of her avocado and cheese wrap.

Lucy hates routine, so she figures that must be part of the reason that she hates school, besides the slushies and the people, because routine is essentially school in a nutshell.

She routinely gets harassed. Slushies are a routine thing. She can ignore the jocks and the Cheerios and the assholes because dealing with them is so routine that most of the time her emotions and actions and words are on autopilot.

Most of the time.

But there's something weird about the way that Rachel meets her at her locker at the end of every day. To anybody, really, that would seem routine, but to Lucy, it doesn't. It's different somehow, just something continuous that you always expect to be there.

A constant.

And for some reason that scares her a little bit.

"Hello."

"Hey." She greets, after she gets her locker open. "God, I have so much – "

A deep, twisting sound interrupts her, and she struggles to keep a straight face when her heart suddenly starts beating twice the normal rate.

"Hungry?" Rachel teases, and Lucy forces a tight smile and an even tighter shake of the head.

"No." She closes her locker, pulls her hoodie down lower. "I'll text you?"

"Okay." Rachel says, and then raises her hand.

Lucy taps it lightly with her own, and then backpedals down the hall. "See you later."

She can see Rachel's perfectly white grin from halfway down the hall. "Bye!"

Salad.

Salad salad salad.

It's all she ever seems to eat, sometimes. All her mother ever seems to cook.

She doesn't know why. It's obviously not working. She's still chubby in every sense of the word.

She rolls a carrot across her plate with the blades of her fork, drips dressing from a green leaf to a purple one, spears a crouton before she rubs it off on the edge of the bowl and repeats the process.

Lucy reaches for a sip of water, and then looks across the table at her mother doing the same while glancing at her dad, who's saying something either not important, or something she doesn't care about. Probably both.

Maybe it's an art, or maybe it's just been years of practice, but she notices how her mom can always seem so interested in what her father's saying – what new clients he had today, how many people he fired, how much money he makes, how many hours he cut – boring stuff. Unimportant things.

But Judy still manages to glance up at the head of the table like she's staring at a walking and talking decoration magazine.

And that is saying something, because she knows how much her mom loves to decorate, even if she hasn't done it in a while.

"Aren't you going to eat, dear?" Her mother says, and Lucy looks up and gives her a shrug, impaling the crumbling crouton. "I'm not hungry."

That's a lie. She's been hungry since this morning, when she didn't eat the toast she was given. She thinks, wonders morbidly for a second, if this is how all those starving people in third-world countries feel.

She can't compare herself, not really, anyway, because she lives in a first-world country and her family is considered hot stuff in the small community of Lima, Ohio.

She takes another sip of water, and watches as her father looks down at his food, before she looks back across at her mom. "Can I be excused?"

Her mom nods, and Lucy nods back before scooting out of her chair, up the stairs and to her desk, flipping open her laptop and waiting for it to boot up.

She doesn't know what makes her do it. It must have been a thought that she considered a split second too long for it to flit away.

She opens Google and her fingers jerk around the keys as she types in eating disorders.

All that pops up at first are treatments and causes, and a small little blurb that 1 out of 2 people will struggle with one.

Then a little farther down, she sees symptoms, which in her mind translates to, things you need to make sure you don't do.

She scrolls back up to the top of the page, and backspaces and starts typing anorexia before her phone buzzes and makes her jump in her chair and cross her hands in her lap guiltily.

Lucy slides her finger to unlock her phone.

Hello!

It's Rachel.

hi.

She clicks out of Google, goes to YouTube and types a random band name.

How are you? What's up?

good. and uh. not much. you?

Is "not much" code for shooting animated zombies at Sam's?

She shakes her head, and lets herself start to laugh and regret the day she told Rachel what her favorite hobby was.

haha, no. i'm home.

and don't poke fun. you're making me self-conscious.

She wishes she was, though, because as weird and contradicting as it sounds, running and ducking and jumping around a map while shooting flesh-eating and potentially death-bringing animations is oddly therapeutic for her.

But video games are for boys, and her dad won't even let her look at the Star Wars LEGOs let alone an Xbox.

You shouldn't be.

According to Sam you're amazing at it.

Lucy shrugs to herself, and clicks one of the videos in the suggestion box when the song is over.

it's a video game. i'm amazing at it because i have no other way to spend my free time.

Sleep, eat (well, not lately), homework, school, and shooting things. That's her routine, in a nutshell.

and i might as well embrace it. i'm not good at much else.

Except not eating.

She's a lot better at that than she though she'd be.

The encyclopedias are in the very back, very dusty part of the library. Lucy figures that they just kind of shoved them back here when technology rendered them useless. Why spend five minutes looking for something when you can plug it into Google and have it find it for you in less than a second.

But the computers at McKinley are slower than her Grandma Francine in a walker, and she doesn't really know what the school deems appropriate enough to be searched on the internet, even though she knows that 'eating disorders' doesn't really sound appropriate at all.

She sets her bag down on a table, and pulls a Britannica from the shelf, flipping through the pages until she's in the A's, her eyes scanning across the two words on the tops of the pages.

She feels like she's crazy for doing this, and in a way she kind of is, both for starting a disorderly eating habit and now searching for more information on it in her school's library.

Lucy about jumps on top of the bookcase when someone says, "hey," behind her.

She turns. "I um. Hi."

Rachel smiles, and sets her bag down next to Lucy's before taking a few steps towards her and attempting to glance over her shoulder. "What are you reading?"

"Uh." Lucy snaps the books closed, and puts it back on the shelf in a way that she hopes doesn't scream guilt. "An encyclopedia."

Rachel laughs, a tiny little chest giggle, and then wonders, "Why?"

Her shoulder's raise easily in a shrug. "Just to."

"I see." Rachel nods, and then glances at the book that Lucy just put back before looking at Lucy herself. "I wanted to ask you a favor."

Lucy slides by Rachel and tosses her backpack over her shoulder, gripping the strap. "Shoot."

"You have a good grade in Trig, right?"

"Uh, yeah?" Lucy furrows her brow in confusion. "Is that really all you were – "

"No, no, no it wasn't." She unzips her bag and sits down and pulls a book and some papers onto the table. "I was wondering – well, if you don't mind – if you would maybe – "

"Tutor you?" Lucy guesses, and Rachel smiles sheepishly and nods. Lucy nods back and then pulls a pencil out of her bag and sits next to Rachel. "I thought you were good at everything."

"I'm good at a lot of things." Rachel says, and then writes down some numbers before flipping the page. "Math is not one of those things."

"Any type of math?"

"Most types of math." Rachel corrects.

"Most types of math." Lucy repeats, a small smirk on her face.

Their free period is only so long, but towards the end of it she already notices Rachel getting it a little better.

"I'm a crap teacher, probably, because I have almost no patience, but um. I hope I helped at least a little bit."

Rachel nods, and then gathers her stuff and pushes it into her bag. "You did, thank you," Rachel says, and then smiles over at her.

And Lucy smiles back because it seems like such a natural thing to do, which is a little bit...crazy.

She waves and watches Rachel disappear towards the entrance.

Good crazy. But still crazy.

Lucy watches Sam's head bob through the crowd on his way over to her locker. She smiles at him and he smiles back, giving a small wave. She returns to throwing things into her bag. He leans into the locker next to hers.

"Hey."

"Hi." Her locker shuts. "'Sup?"

He shakes his head, and then smiles over her shoulder with a small head nod.

"Hi, Sam." Rachel says, and moves to stand next to Lucy. "Have a good day?"

"Uh, yeah." He nods. "Yeah. Thanks for asking. You?"

"I did." She says, and then nudges Lucy in the side. "What about you?"

"Don't." She mumbles back and watches Rachel's face fall a tiny bit before she adds. "Fine. It was fine."

Sam butts in awkwardly with a "So, um. You guys wanna come over?" and Rachel looks shocked before she slowly agrees.

"Luce?"

Lucy nods. "Yeah, sure."

Her kill/death ratio is plummeting, spiraling into a deep, dark abyss and she's not sure if she'll ever get it out again.

"You have got to be – " she shoots at someone as they duck around a building, then gets knifed in the back "– kidding me. Wow. Alright."

Sam just laughs, a joyful smile on his face as he gets a double kill and rockets himself into third place. "Hell. Yes."

Lucy sets her controller down in frustration, pushing her glasses up onto her forehead and rubbing at her eyes.

It's probably more than a little pathetic how much emotion she's feeling over a fucking video game, but killing people (virtual people, thank you) is like her escape.

She's failing at escaping, so hypothetically speaking, or thinking, she's trapped and that's –

Those aren't good thoughts to be thinking. That kind of stuff leads to depression. She read that in a magazine or something once, she thinks.

Lucy looks over her shoulder at Rachel, who's spread out across the bed on her stomach, her chin on her forearms, staring semi-blankly at the TV.

"You bored?" She wonders, and Rachel's eyes swivel to hers that light up slightly when a small smile graces her features.

"Not at all."

She's probably lying, because some things are only fun when you're the one doing them, and video games are one of those things.

The game ends, and Lucy takes a glance at the scoreboard, spotting her user name next to the number 8 while samtheman95 is perched proudly next to a tiny number 2.

"Damn Luce." Sam chuckles a little bit and cracks his knuckles. "What happened?"

Lucy blows out a sigh and shrugs. "I...dunno."

And then she jumps because Rachel lets out a sound that's half-screech, half-excited yodel followed by a wide-eyed look at Sam when she asks, "Do you play?" and points to the acoustic in the corner.

Sam kind of snorts, and then gets of the floor and moves over to it, gripping the neck and swinging the strap over his shoulder. "Uh, yeah."

"Would you play something?" And Rachel looks up at him utterly starstruck, like she's never seen an actual guitar or guitar player in her life.

Which is understandable, because when Lucy first found out he played, she sat him down and watched his tiny, clumsy, still-learning fingers press down G7s and A minors.

"Sure." He says, and then sits back down on the floor, warming up with a few simple riffs and chord progressions. "Um. Any requests?"

Rachel slides down and joins them on the floor. "Mumford and Sons?"

"Okay." Sam says, and then clears his throat unnecessarily and starts a fast, uneven strumming pattern.

Lucy snorts at the song choice, and Sam gives her a semi-dirty look before looking back down at the fret board.

What she doesn't expect is for Rachel to jump in with the lyrics, and when she does it's like her voice starts pushing against Lucy's chest and she suddenly loses her ability to breathe.

She's heard some beautiful voices, because she's heard a lot of music, but all of them just get pushed to the back of her mind while she watches Rachel carefully drag out the lyrics, not one pitch out of place. She watches Sam stare at her with his mouth curved in a surprised smile, and he almost misses a chord.

At the last chorus, Sam drops out, and it's just Rachel's voice carrying throughout the room while Sam and Lucy just stare on wordlessly.

"Holy shit." Sam says when Rachel finishes, and Lucy nods in agreement while Rachel ducks her head and blushes a little bit.

"Thank you." She says, and pushes a strand of hair behind her ear. "I've been performing since I was very young so I – I've had lots of practice."

"I repeat; holy. Shit."

A/N: I guess the whole quality over quantity thing is true, because this is longer than other chapters, but I feel it isn't nearly as acceptable quality-wise.