Chapter Nine

Shelby Corcoran sat at her desk pretending to fill out paperwork. Students were still filing into the choir room, and she wanted to wait until the last possible moment to meet their eyes. It wasn't that she was displeased with them. It was quite the opposite. She was proud of them. Very proud of them. The advanced and entry choirs had just successfully completed their second concert of the year. Although advanced choir had been much closer to perfection than entry choir, entry had managed to improve immensely since their last concert, and if they kept it up, nearly all of its members were sure to make it into Vocal Adrenaline. All of Vocal Adrenaline's members also took advanced choir, and most had taken entry choir their freshman or sophomore year.

Shelby needed to be careful how she expressed her pride to the class. She would have to hold back just the right amount of it. She didn't want them to think that they were too good, otherwise they might get overconfident. But she still had to give them some confidence. A perfect balance between insecurity so they would work harder, and assurance of their abilities so that they wouldn't give up. She was still figuring out what expression to arrange her face into when something at the edge of her desk caught her eye.

"Who left this here?" She blurted out, pointing to the offending object.

She looked around the room, then up at the clock: one minute to the bell.

She glanced down at her desk, waited for the bell to ring, picked up the dandelion and stood, stepping around her desk and drawing herself up to her full height.

There was a tense energy in the room as she paced back and forth slowly. None of the students moved. There eyes were wide when they met hers, as if they were straining to make eye contact; too afraid to blink.

Shelby stood still in the center of the room and raised the flower. "I do not appreciate random things being left on my desk." She was a neat freak, everyone knew that.

She stared around the room. The tension seemed to be getting to be too much for the offender, for a shaky hand shot into the air.

"Yes."

"I'm sorry Ms. Corcoran," the girl said in a high voice. "My little sister must have left that. Yesterday during the rehearsal before the concert, I was supposed to be watching her and stuff...sorry."

Shelby blinked a few times indignantly. "First of all, anyone who is not enrolled in a choir class or in glee club is not allowed to be in the choir room, and secondly, under no circumstances are small children, siblings or otherwise, are allowed at rehearsals!"

Shelby turned to throw the flower in the trash. As she bent down she gave herself an internal shake. She was overreacting. And worse, she was allowing her personal problems to interfere with her job. She was a strict teacher, but random outbursts of anger were not part of her teaching strategies. She needed to cool off.

She turned back to the classroom. "Okay guys, I forgot to make copies of the Music History worksheets you will be doing today, to rest those vocal chords after that great concert yesterday!" This was hardly the way she had wanted to mention their success. The classroom was careful not to groan or verbally protest, but she could tell from their expressions that they were less than happy about the worksheets. It was a lie, too. She hadn't forgotten anything. She had planned to have them sing a nice, easy song for fun today. Worksheets were not part of it.

"Alright. Jesse! Your in charge, run them through warm-ups will you? And if you finish that there's music on my desk that you can pass out." She patted the stack of papers.

Jesse nodded dutifully.

Shelby knew that he was a charmer, and as fake as he was a good actor. But he was also her best singer for Vocal Adrenaline and advanced choir. He was popular enough to keep the classroom in control, either people were scared of him, liked him, or pretended too. He was her most useful student.

Shelby grabbed the Music History textbook from its designated shelf, and slid her keys off of her desk as well, hoping no one noticed.

When she was outside, instead of heading for the office, she veered to the right towards the parking lot.

Shelby unlocked her car, and sat in the driver's seat with a heavy sigh. She gripped the steering wheel of the unmoving car until her knuckles whitened.

Looking down, she allowed a few of the tears to slip from her eyes. She had thought she had the triggers under control. She worked with children every day, and although none of them were remotely similar to five-year-old Rachel, they were about the same age that her daughter would be now. Every now and then, they would do something, and it would ring a distant bell of sadness in her head as she wondered about Rachel. But usually she didn't get angry. Usually the emotions she felt weren't so vivid, usually they felt very, very, far away.

But seeing that dandelion. She hated garbage on her desk, or really littered anywhere in the choir room. She would have been annoyed anyway. And she didn't want little kids in the choir room because there were so many breakable things in it: trophies, the piano, cabinets of filed music to be scattered, coffee to be spilled...

But seeing that dandelion had felt different. It had felt like Rachel had been there. It had felt like making tiaras and blowing wishes could have been yesterday, just a day away. It brought memories that she wanted to experience but at the same time didn't because they carried so much pain. For just a second, it had felt like there was hope.

Shelby glanced down at her cup holder. Perhaps there was some coffee leftover from this morning. She lifted her coffee mug, tipped it up and drained the last drops of cold coffee. Then she got out of her car and went around the back. She opened the trunk where she kept full cases of red bull and rock star energy drinks for Vocal Adrenaline practice.

She pulled out a rock star energy drink, the kind with 240 milligrams of caffeine and a warning label to not drink while pregnant. Crying exhausted her. The outside of the can was still a little cold but the liquid was not. She needed to remember to buy some new coolers. She had lost her old ones in a prank played by a losing glee club, The Warblers, after sectionals when they had decided to steal all of Vocal Adrenaline's energy drinks. She was tired of hearing complaints about warm energy drinks.

Closing the trunk of her car, Shelby headed back towards the building. She stopped at the restroom to fix her make-up before heading to the copy machine in the office.

Shelby felt fairly confident about Vocal Adrenaline. They had just won Sectionals for their third year in a row, and had just as strong singers as the past years if not stronger. But she wanted something to remind her of why her glee club deserved to be champions, and what set them apart from everybody else.

There were still Sectionals coming up for other school districts in Ohio. As Shelby watched the worksheet copies slide out of the machine, she decided that she was going to attend one, to see just how good the other winning glee club was.

Shelby arrived at Sectionals early so she could get a good seat. Just as she was getting comfortable, she saw a tall man striding down the aisle towards her.

"Hello, Ms. Corcoran," Jesse St. James said.

"Jesse what are you doing here?" Shelby asked in exasperation. She didn't appreciate the feeling of being followed.

"The same thing you are," Jesse said, plopping down in the chair next to her confidently. "Checking out the competition."

Shelby rolled her eyes. "Great minds think alike."

Jesse smirked.

As the glee clubs performed, Shelby mentally corrected their singing. As she began to fall into the thought patterns of coaching she found herself zoning out. When a group called the New Directions hit the stage, her complete focus was regained. There was just this intensity about them, their singing wasn't perfect, but they put so much emotion into their words. As Shelby (a little jealously) marveled at their performance a girl dancing in the background caught her attention. Almost as soon as Shelby saw her, the girl stepped forward and belted out a short solo.

Shelby sat back in her chair, frozen in shock. 'It can't be,' she thought. Her eyes followed the girl more closely, but she was hard to see, she kept moving around the stage and behind other people as she danced. But her voice. It had just sounded so familiar. And even from her seat at the back of the theater, the girl's resemblance to her looked striking.

Jesse was also watching a girl with awe, just a different one who had a lot more solos. "Who is she?" He said as he watched Tina sing.

"I don't know," Shelby said absently, thinking of Rachel.

After the show was over, and the New Directions were announced as the winner, Shelby got up hurriedly from her seat, walking quickly.

"Bye Ms. Corcoran," Jesse said as she brushed past him before he had even stood up.

But she didn't answer, her thoughts were still racing. Half-way across the lobby, Shelby stopped in her tracks. She went to the bathroom, closed a stall door and put her head in her hands. She couldn't just bust into New Direction's dressing room. But she wanted to. The urge to see her daughter was overwhelming. Even if it wasn't her daughter who had been on stage, she had too know. Gathering her strength, and without a thought in her head of what she was going to say, she made her way to the areas backstage.

It took her awhile to find New Direction's room. By the time she opened the door, it was empty except for one person. She was blonde and bent over a jacket, fiddling with a button on it with her back to the door. Shelby recognized her from the stage. Her and the girl she hoped was her daughter had made eye contact quite a few times as they performed, and Shelby had noticed that there had been something more than friendliness to the way that they looked at each other.

"Hello," Shelby said and the girl turned. "My names Ms. Corcoran, I'm the coach of Vocal Adrenaline, I'm looking for a girl named Rachel." Shelby hoped that Rachel hadn't changed her name.

The girl stared at her with her mouth hanging open. "Shelby?" She said softly. She hadn't recognized her at first. In her fancier clothes and make-up that hid stress lines, her resemblance to the Shelby that she had known nine years ago was not strong. "I'm Quinn," the girl said holding out her hand. "Your Rachel's mother."

Shelby shook her hand with a slight smile. "Yes, uh, I am." She said a little awkwardly, swallowing the lump in her throat.

"What are you doing here," Quinn said. Anger was flaming in her eyes.

"I came to talk to Rachel."

"Fine then. I'll go get her." Quinn whirled around.

"No, wait!" Shelby said, suddenly afraid to talk to Rachel.

Quinn turned to face her with an eyebrow raised.

"Not, not yet," Shelby said. There wasn't enough time right now to talk properly, all of the kids would be getting on the bus soon. "I need you to talk to her first. Tell her to meet me at Carmal High's auditorium on Monday."

"And why in hell would I do that?"

"Because you care about her. I saw the way you were looking at her on stage. Believe me, I know a lover's eyes when I see them."

Quinn interpreted the words as a threat rather than a compliment. "Why not just talk to her now."

"Because if I do, she might never talk to me again. I need you to talk to her first, to convince her that she needs her mother."

"Well, I'm not so convinced."

Shelby raised an eyebrow. "If she doesn't know the truth about why I left her she'll spend the rest of her life wondering."

"Tell me then."

"No, I'll tell her." Shelby didn't want Rachel to take the information and run. She wanted to form a relationship with her.

Quinn looked Shelby up and down. She still wasn't completely convinced that this would be good for Rachel, but she knew that she didn't trust Shelby, and the last thing she needed was to be outed by this bitch. "Fine. I'll do it, but I can't promise Monday."

"That's okay, here." Shelby quickly wrote down her email address on a sticky note from her purse. "Email me."

Quinn took the paper and looked down at it in disdain.

Shelby left the dressing room quickly before Rachel could see her. Only when she was in her car did she realize that she should have gotten Quinn's email. There was always the possibility that Quinn would throw her's away.