An hour into the project, after I had found out that our project topic was about Peru, we fell into a comfortable pattern where Quinn would read out information from the internet and I would write them down. Of course I hadn't agreed to this without protesting at first but after receiving a venomous glare from the blonde, I admitted that there were far worse things than just scribbling down notes in spanish.

" - shape of a panther. Do you think that this is a fact worth mentioning?" Quinn absently asked me as she stared at the laptop screen, gnawing on her bottom lip which caused me to distractedly stare at her.

Stop doing that if you know what's good for you.

"Berry?"

"Hm?"

Quinn stopped chewing on her bottom lip and turned her head to face me; frustration laced her voice when she impatiently asked, "Are you listening to me?"

She snapped with her fingers and glared at me.

Snapping out of whatever trance I had been in, I quickly nodded to affirm whatever she had just said.

"Good, then you just agreed to make the PowerPoint presentation."

"What? No, no, wait there, Princess." I straightened myself in my seat and defensively raised one hand, "I can't recall ever agreeing to that."

"Then can you recall anything of what I've been saying for the last few minutes?" Quinn retorted with irritation.

This had to be a test. And I had to pass it.

Scrunching up my eyebrows, I slowly and questioningly tried, "You were talking about...Peru?"

I received an irritated eyeroll and a sigh. "Maybe it's not too late to change partners..."

This was gnawing at my oversized ego and I gave her a scowl, immediately countering, "Don't forget that you were the one who chose me. I wouldn't have minded getting partnered up with that hot skater chick in the third row."

This disarming argument worked surprisingly well, the blonde abruptly turned her head away from me and chose to blankly stare at the laptop screen again, though I was sure that she wasn't reading anything.

Quiet Quinn was starting to bother me, so I sighed and reluctantly said, "Sorry, you're right, I should have listened to you. From now on, you have my full attention."

Quinn shook her head at no one particular, like she wanted to get rid of annoying thoughts, before she faced me again and gave me a small smile. "Let's try it again."

From then on, I avoided looking at Quinn and focused on my notes instead. I had never realized till now how ugly my writing was, it was so sloppy and uneven, this could have been the writing of a boy. And maybe that wasn't so far from reality when it came to my libido and my ego. Innerly, I was as much of a pig as a hormonal, teenage boy.

Dropping my pen, I shook my hand to loosen it up, it was all tense from writing so long. I wasn't used to writing so much since I never wrote notes in class or did homework. Stretching my middle finger until it made 'crack', I earned a disgusted "Ew" from Quinn. My lips twitched into a smile before I could help myself.

"Stop doing that."

I stuck out my tongue childishly and did the opposite, bending over every single finger until they made the funny cracking noise that sounded like bones breaking.

"Okay, here, you do the research and I'll be the writer," Quinn said with a grimace and handed her laptop to me. Grinning and sighing in relief, I took her laptop thankfully and leaned back in my chair while Quinn took my notes and went back to sitting on her bed. I eyed her bed longer than necessary, thinking it was large enough for two people to lie on it. I forcefully stopped my naughty thoughts and trained my eyes on the laptop screen. I had to stay focused.

We continued doing the project for another half an hour before I got bored and opened another window to be in Facebook. Quinn didn't know it though, she was still writing down the things I absently told her.

I got some notifications about my best friends posting on my wall, saying how much they missed me. They were the only reason I still went on this social website, just to check on them and see what I was missing in New York. Other than that I avoided being online for far too long because people I didn't care about were posting too much stuff no one cared about and I had gotten tired of blocking annoying ex-girlfriends or attention-seeking little shits.

But sometimes it was worth it because of the little things. My three best friends had shot a photo of themselves holding up a poster which said 'We Miss You, Rae', and they wore a sad, pouting puppy dog expression which made me breathe, "Aww."

"What?"

Oops.

"What are you doing?" Quinn suspiciously said and jumped up from her bed, walking behind me to see what I had been really doing in the internet. I made no intention of trying to hide it from her or even close the window where the sweet photo from my friends was. At least it wasn't porn.

I found myself closing my eyes when the familiar fragrance of sweet strawberry penetrated my nose. Quinn was right behind me, almost breathing into my neck as she looked over my shoulder, not knowing what her closeness was doing to me. If I could only turn my head a bit and capture her lips with mine...any other girl and I would have done it. I was surprised at my own self-control.

"You miss them, don't you," she softly said, straightening herself and her wonderful scent vanished. My eyes fluttered open.

I barely nodded, feeling oddly empty.

"You never said what brought you here. I can't imagine why someone from New York would want to move to Lima."

I didn't want to reply, because this was getting personal and I never talked about personal things with people I had known for just a few days. But I found myself answering anyway, "My birth mother lives here."

It was simple, short, taken out of nowhere and maybe not making any sense at all, but Quinn was bright and she immediately caught on, a look of sympathy appeared on her face.

"Don't," I harshly said, facing away from her, "I don't want to talk about it if that's what you're going to ask, because they always ask that."

"Well, I'm not them, whoever they are," Quinn was quick to answer and it somehow irked me that she had found a fast retort while I sometimes was as glib as a sloth. "But even if, what's wrong about offering help?"

I scornfully laughed. "'Help' is a nice way to paraphrase 'pity' but it's sorely missing the content."

Quinn carefully eyed me and I held her gaze. To hell with her if she thought I was going to make myself vulnerable in front of her.

"I'm not pitying you," she suddenly said, "I'm starting to understand you."

"What?" I warily eyed the blonde sitting on her bed with her legs crossed, looking at me with so much comprehension that I felt myself getting upset.

I knew that look, it was all too familiar, therapists wore this expression of utter understanding when they were listening to their patients. Like they understood you completely, like they could relate to your feelings and maybe they did, but it was artificially created, forced. They felt with you because they had overpriced real estates to fund with your money and not because you were important to them, concerning them on an emotional level. There had to be one or two chapters about that in psychology textbooks for college students majoring in this ill-making subject, 'seeing everything from the patient's perspective'.

"Your diagnosis, Doctor Fabray?" I mockingly asked.

"You have the Charlie Harper complex," Quinn simply replied, not fazed at my jab at her.

"And this means -?"

"You're like Charlie Harper in 'Two and a Half Men'. Growing up without an exemplary father figure and a caring mother, he turned out to be a women-disrespecting player. In your case, you didn't have a mother figure."

I was pretty sure that my jaw had unhinged and never before had I felt so offended by someone who barely knew me. The fucking nerve of her, there were certain limits you just didn't cross and she definitely had jumped over them all. I didn't care if her words rang true, it was the way she had the cheek to intrude on my private matters and I had no fucking understanding for that.

"Excuse me," I growled out after I regained the ability to speak again, feeling my whole body starting to tense up, readying myself to fight back, "but if you haven't noticed yet, I'm of the female sort."

I was holding myself back. Testing the waters. How far was she stupid enough to go before I snapped? I was giving her the chance to defuse the bomb she had set for herself, wanting to see if she had even noticed what she had ignited.

"Yes," Quinn patiently said, then added, "and you're not respecting yourself enough if you sleep around."

My left eye twitched. The fuse of the time bomb was getting shorter.

"Not respecting myself enough?" I pressed out between gritted teeth. "We both know that I'm doing that too much."

"Self-absorbed and self-respecting are two entirely different worlds," the blonde calmly said.

I sharply inhaled. I could hear a ticking sound inside me. Not long now...

"I'm having sex to have fun. I'm not doing that because I don't like myself," I pointed out with poorly suppressed anger trembling in my voice, but her prudent expression only riled me up more. "So in your oppinion, all the people who like sex with no strings attached are actually insecure, self-loathing losers?"

"I never said that."

I hissed, "Then say what you mean to say!"

Deliberately delaying her answer, Quinn pursed her lips and thoughtfully stared at me. I was boiling with too many emotions right now to feel bothered under her intense gaze.

"I think that you are afraid. Afraid of finding out the real reasons why you are the way you are. So instead of discovering yourself, you shove the problems away. If you respected yourself enough, you wouldn't let this empty hole unfilled, you wouldn't push the truth away."

Enough psycho-analyzing me.

I shot up so fast from my chair that I knocked it over and I blindly reached for my things, wanting to pack them up as quickly as I could so I could get the hell out of here before I did something stupid. Before I would try to take out my rage on her, doing something I'd most likely regret and ensuring that I could never look her in the eyes anymore.

I heedlessly stuffed notes and paper sheets into my bag, not caring if they all got crumpled. "I don't fucking need this, it was a fucking bad idea to do this with you, that's not what I fucking signed up for-"

"Oh, believe me, I'm not too thrilled about you either," Quinn snapped, interrupting my rant. She had gotten up from her bed, standing with tense shoulder in an angry stance. "Acting so tough and bad, but then start running if it gets real - from 1 to Rachel Berry, how much of a lying coward are you?"

I dropped my bag. For one short yet frightening second, I had considered using physical violence to make her stop. Just make her stop affecting me so much - I didn't want to title the burning sting in my chest as hurt.

"Do it," she said, fearless, having seen my eyes blaze with a murderous look. She stood tall, firm. "Bring it on, I've fought tougher girls than you to get to the position where I am now."

My knuckles turned white because I was clenching my fist too hard.

"You're wrong," I quietly said, suddenly calm though my body was showing otherwise, "about everything. I know why I am the way I am. I just choose to not change because being myself is worse."

And it broke Quinn's strong stance. Her hard expression slipped. "Berry..."

"It's okay," I interrupted her, "what do you know about me anyway?"

We stared at each other for a long time. Maybe I had finally managed to render her speechless. Her eyes, pretty hazel eyes, gazed at me with a mixture of undisguised sorrow and curiosity. The topic wasn't finished, we both knew, and there might be a day where it would come up again under unpleasant circumstances but for now, it was over, dealt with.

Feeling like I could freely breathe in her presence again, I picked up my bag and hung it over my shoulder. I cleared my throat. "Sorry 'bout cursing under your holy roof. And I don't think we should continue with our report today. I'll pick you up tomorrow, so we can discuss about it without interruption."

Before she could protest, I was out of the room, out of the house, of out of her driveway.

I couldn't remember much of my ride back to Shelby's and I only really sobered up when the sound of a door slamming shut startled me.

Standing frozen in the hallway, I suddenly realized that I couldn't call this my home or my 'mother's house'. Because she simply wasn't my mother and this house simply didn't feel like home.

I heard someone rummaging in the kitchen and my feet automatically took me to the source of the noise.

Shelby was in the kitchen, her head stuck in the fridge and I watched her taking out some food she wanted to prepare for dinner. I waited for her to notice me.

"My goodness, Rachel!" she exclaimed in shock, only noticing me after her head had emerged from the fridge, "You gave me quite a shock."

I didn't react to that, I simply watched her features, wondering why nature punished me with making us look so alike when I didn't want to be like her at all.

"Rachel?" Shelby tried again, when I didn't show a sign of acknowledging her.

"Don't," I growled, "Don't call my name."

I didn't know what possessed me to suddenly want to pick a fight. Quinn's words had affected me more than I had thought. And I was still riled up though I had pretended to be fine in front of her. Now I realized that I was still holding this anger inside of me, wanting to lash out at something, someone.

Immediately sensing that something was off, Shelby put aside the things she held in her hand and turned to me to give me her full attention. I almost wanted to laugh bitterly at that. Now she was giving me her full attention? Why not seventeen years earlier?

"Tell me, what's wrong?" she asked worriedly, which only aggravated me further.

"Don't act like you care!" I snarled. "Don't pretend to be the worried mother."

Her eyes widened in realization and I hated the fact that everybody thought they understood me, that Quinn thought she had me figured out, that Shelby thought she knew what I was talking about.

"I do care about you, Rach-"

"I said, don't call my name!" I harshly interrupted her. "You don't deserve it. You haven't called my name for seventeen years, so don't start calling it now!"

I didn't know when I had started to yell and I only realized it when Shelby had flinched at my booming voice.

"I could have grown up normally, I could have been someone with self-respect, I could have been happy all those times I wasted in asking and wondering why my own mother didn't want me."

I panted heavily in anger and watched with satisfaction how regret and guilt started soaking up Shelby's expression.

"You have no idea -" she croaked out, but I felt myself swelling up with burning rage at hearing her attempt to tell me that I wouldn't know or understand her situation. She had no right to play the victim in this case.

"No, you have no idea," I hissed without raising my voice, but it did the work. Shelby fell silent again as I told her in a bitter tone, "You have no idea how hard it is to explain to a child why there is a Mother's Day when she has two fathers, because for her, her family form was the most natural thing. Imagine her shock when she learns that a woman is needed to bear a child and watch her realizing that her mother must have abandoned her, because she grew up without a mother figure in her life."

Shelby's lips were trembling and tears were starting to pour over her reddened cheeks. She steadied herself on the counter top, shakily drawing breaths, but this sight of misery didn't make me stop because I felt as wretched as she did right now. I knew what I said was torturing her, killing her inside. But believe me, I was innerly dying as well.

"So what do you tell her when she starts questioning the absence of her mother? What do you reply when she asks, 'Why have I never seen my mother? Why don't I know how she looks like? Why don't I know who she is?' And she becomes desperate, because every classmate of hers seems to have a mother they can bring to at public school events."

"Stop, please stop, please," Shelby heart-wrenchingly sobbed, almost choking on her words, her face was contorted with emotional pain, "Please, I had no choice..."

"No, Shelby," I spat, feeling myself getting angry again, "I was the one who had no choice."

She fell silent again, still heavily sobbing, a distraught look on her face as she desperately wanted to make me understand her point of view.

"I was selfish," she tried in another attempt, but I cut her off, "You were? You're still selfish. What could be the reason you want me here? Build up a non-functioning relationship with me? So your conscience lets you sleep again at night because you can tell yourself that at least you've tried?"

There, I had said it. Said what had been bothering me the whole time since I had come to Lima. Said what had been lingering in the air everytime we had been together in a room. I didn't know what to say anymore, throughout this whole argument, I had never given Shelby a chance to justify herself. Maybe I had just wanted to get this all out before the opportunity to bare my thoughts raced past me. Before my birth mother decided to leave me again.

"I swore myself not to be like you," I muttered, strangely calm again, "and I succeeded, but the person I've become is even worse."

Shelby was no longer standing, she sat slumped down in a stool and her head hung low, shoulders shaking with every sob. Part of me started feeling guilty seeing her like this, but a bigger part of me said, 'She deserved it'. She had let me down for seventeen years. Hurting for seventeen minutes wouldn't kill her.

"I was scared," she finally whispered in a quivering voice and for the first time, I didn't feel like interrupting her anymore. "I was young, I was almost a kid myself; I couldn't handle all the responsibility that came along with a baby."

"But you could have tried," I stiffly said, not wanting to go too easy on her when I felt my hard trained mask crumbling in a matter of seconds.

"Then I would have been a bad mother."

"Better than having no mother at all."

But Shelby vigorously shook her head, looking up to me through teary eyes. "Don't you understand? Even if I kept you, I would have neglected you and I knew you were better off with people who loved you. I really thought about keeping you."

Something inside of me stirred and I leaned back against the cold wall, closing my eyes. There went my determination to stay mad her. At the same time, bitterness was clogging up my throat. If she only knew in what kind of loving family I had gotten into. But I couldn't complain, it hadn't been always this way.

"I really, really wanted to keep you. But I couldn't take care of you. I wasn't able to," she croaked in a broken voice, which made my insides churn, "And though you probably hate me right now, I don't regret my decision, because you turned out to be a wonderful girl. You are nothing like me, you are strong-minded and brave, you are an independent girl now."

"No," I weakly muttered with a frown, my eyes were still closed, "I don't care about others' feelings, I'm shallow and I'm arrogant."

"Rachel."

My eyes flew open. This time, I didn't mind her saying my name anymore.

"There's a difference, Rachel," Shelby softly said, her voice gaining strength again as she wiped away a few tears. "You were born brave and strong-minded. You can't ever change that. But you can choose to be arrogant or not, you can decide on whether to be ignorant of others' feelings or not."

I swallowed down a big lump in my throat, suddenly feeling utterly exhausted and emotionally drained. My mind was slowing down, processing thoughts only halfway.

"I'm...I'm going upstairs," I mumbled, stumbling out of the kitchen. Shakingly, I made my way to my bedroom and let myself fall down my bed.

This wasn't what I had planned for my start in Lima. I could only hope for this year to be quickly over and everything forgotten because I didn't belong here, there was nothing for me in Lima that could make me stay, especially not if I had New York as the other choice. Though I really appreciated my friendship with Puck and the other finer things about McKinley like being cheerleader co-trainer, I would need a better reason to voluntarily pause my life in New York and extend my stay in Lima.