Rachel's POV

For the first time since I was ten years old, I tossed and turned all night before the performance. Something was off… there was something that wasn't right and we needed to win. Standing in the hotel lobby at six in the morning, four hours before we were to perform, it finally struck me:

It was my ballad. It was all wrong.

It was a sappy love song that had once been a duet between Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand. I could sing it well enough… but it wasn't right. I couldn't get up on that stage and sing that song. We would lose, for sure. It didn't fit with the setlist. It didn't exactly fit with life, at the moment.

Alas, there was nothing I could do. We had four hours to the competition, and I could do something off of the top of my head, but our accompaniment had already been organized, and knew only the songs on the setlist we'd presented to them.

I had this horrible, cold, gnawing feeling in my stomach telling me that we were going to lose. I couldn't shake it as we ran and stretched to warm up, and then ate, followed by a long vocal warm up that stretched for nearly half an hour. I started biting my nails. We were on first…

I started contemplating going a cappella, if it came down to it, but that would be a disaster in the making. We were going to lose… we were going to lose and it was all my fault. Because I'd been complacent in selecting my ballad.

I bit all my nails to stubs even though biting your nails was devastating for your throat (something about bacteria, or something…)

I don't know how, I just knew that if I went out and sang that ballad, we would lose. I couldn't let the New Directions down…

When we took a break from vocal torture, er, I mean warm up, Gillian came up to me. I, like a certifiably insane person, was sitting in a chair and rocking back and forth. Like, actually rocking back and forth.

"Hello, Rachel. I've been reading your letters. How're things going?"

"Not good…"

"Would you like to talk about it?" she inquired sweetly. I wondered how many of us she'd asked the same question to since she'd arrived the day before.

"No… I mean, I don't have time to worry about the things in my letters right now… I'm in the middle of a musical crisis!"

Gillian furrowed her eyebrows. "A musical crisis? Rachel, from what I've heard from Will, you're the most talented one in the group! What's up?"

"It's my ballad. I can't sing it."

"What do you mean, you can't sing it? You go on in a couple hours… did you lose your voice?"

"No… it's not like that," I began to explain, nervously. "You know how, when you really feel something and you sing it, it sounds true and good and beautiful?"

Gillian nodded perceptively.

"I realized last night, I couldn't feel it. My ballad, I mean. I could sing it, but I was just singing words, and they weren't true. There was no emotion, and in order to win this thing, I need a song that I'm able to…"

"…Sing from the heart?"

I stopped blabbering. Gillian was looking at me like she really, truly understood, and for the first time, I felt a minuscule glimmer of hope.

"What're you going to do?" she asked, like singing my original ballad wasn't even a plausible option, and she hadn't even heard it.

"I don't know."

"Well, you can't give up!" she leaned forward in her seat like she had the answer. "If you've got a feeling you won't be able to sing it the way you want to, then don't sing it! Is there a song you want to sing in its place?"

"There's no way I could… the accompanists…"

"I didn't ask if you could. I asked if there was song."

I didn't answer for a long time. I was afraid of what she would try and pull if I said yes. We didn't have time to change things up… we were locked in place.

But I couldn't just wave the white flag. It wasn't like me to not try.

"Well, there's one…"

"Do you know it?"

"By heart."

"Do you feel it, right now, in your soul?"

"Yes."

"Do you have the sheet music?"

"Um… I think so…"

"Is there a piano on the stage?"

"There's one backstage, but it's being brought out for one of the numbers, I think."

"Do you think Mr. Schuster would be ridiculously mad if I helped you pull of one more New Directions stunt before it all ends?"