Prompt: An Unexpected Goodbye

Character: Rachel

Words: 914

It steals into her like a lover, kissing her palm with a fierceness that leaves it aching. She's moon-eyed as it caresses her into a blissful numbness. Its presence fills her to bursting while robbing her of all speech and movement.

Before she knows it, she's vomiting on the floor of a classroom.

West Side Story rehearsals start tonight, she thinks as she is rolled out of McKinley on a stretcher.

I don't think I'll be able to make it.


It has ravaged her. Truly great lovers do that.

Her head throbs. It seems half of her body - precisely to the midline - has been dosed with Novocain. Half her scalp, one ear, half her nose, mouth, lips and tongue, on down her arm, all the way to the tips of her fingers and toes.

It's curious.

Sitting up means being in a storm-tossed boat at sea. The vertigo she feels is so intense that she very unglamorously throws up on some poor woman who had come to assess her speaking ability. (She'd been planning to ace the test too - elocution having been one of many strong suits.)

She's learning quickly that her body has a mind of its own these days.


The pretense she's wrapped around her like a heavy blanket is ripped away the first time she asks for a mirror.

A patch of hair the size of her hand has been shaved. She cannot see the scar from this head-on vantage point, but she has been told of its existence - so long it has to be held together with seventeen silver staples. Her dad tells her (again, but she really listens this time) that a tangle of blood vessels in her brain had burst and that she'd needed emergency surgery to save her life.

Two thoughts occur simultaneously.

No

and

What life?


Therapy and assessments in all their forms are torture for an over-achiever like herself. There is apparently a therapy for everything, even how to get dressed (in sweat suits) and shower.

She fails the eye test spectacularly. Not because she cannot see the letters, but because she cannot name half of them.

She fails the alphabetizing task because her brain seems to no longer filter when reading.

She even fails at counting change, not being able to hold onto the values of each coin while adding another of the same or different value to it.

That first day, she breaks down in the hallway afterward.

But she goes back, learning to walk, strengthening her hand until she's able to shakily kindergarten-scrawl Rachel across a blank page and tie her shoes. (Tennis shoes, not flats.) She even gets to cook and bake.


She feels she's making progress until she heads back to McKinley two months after she left in an ambulance.

Her hair is still a disaster, though she refuses to cut it all short. The result is spikes of the shaved area poking through the remaining flap of hair on the right side of her head. It looks lopsided and horrible, but at least it covers the scar. She's still wearing sweat suits because they're easy and she's not about to let her dads help her get dressed in the morning, so clasps and buttons and fashion will have to wait until she has mastered them. High-top tennis shoes for extra support, plus a leg brace.

No wonder students are hesitant to approach her. (And when Tina finally does, it's to discreetly tell her that she needs to wipe her chin. Because she'd been drooling and hadn't realized it due to the ever-present numbness.)

The devastation continues when she realizes it takes too much concentration to both stand and sing in glee. Even when she sits, her voice comes out thin and barely audible, her range and breath support destroyed.


Blaine asks her to come to the play on opening night, but nothing could've kept her away. It appears that the persuasive powers of Artie, Miss Pillsbury and Coach Beiste (or maybe just her own absence) have convinced Mercedes to take the role of Maria.

Her role.

A chasm is opening itself up in her chest as she watches Mercedes bring Maria to life. She has never been confined to the audience during a school production. The loss she feels is gaping, raw and hungry for still more misery. Her dads flank her, both holding her unaffected hand, the numb one still too prone to pins and needles for contact.

She breathes as Blaine's Tony and Mercedes' Maria sing Tonight and One Hand One Heart. Each note digs itself a little deeper into her, weighing her down. After the first act, she sits blankly while her dads clap with enthusiasm.

During intermission, Daddy admonishes her gently. "Support your classmates, honey. Not clapping for them is rude."

So, after Mercedes opens Act II with I Feel Pretty, Rachel begins to clap. She hasn't done this since before, and it feels awkward. She finds herself looking down, making sure her hands make contact with each other.

And each time they do, a new burst of pins and needles course through her hand.

She steels herself and keeps clapping, sluggish and out-of-sync with the audience at large.

The stage is not hers anymore. But the loss of it, like the loss of herself, clings like an oversized plant burr where her heart should be, ripping her open a little more with each merciless beat.