Rachel actually was hopeless at math. Quinn wasn't sure why she had assumed that the other girl was just being modest in her self-depreciations—perhaps she really just did not know Rachel at all, or maybe she thought Rachel held herself to far too high a standard, or maybe she secretly hoped that Rachel was just trying to make Quinn feel better about her lousy situation by giving her excuses to focus on things she still did properly.
Regardless of why she was there, though, Quinn found herself marveling inwardly at Rachel's struggles with pre-calculus. Quinn remembered learning these trigonometric concepts long ago, and they made as much sense to her as anything ever had; she could hardly fathom the difficulties Rachel was having.
"Okay," Rachel breathed out tiredly. She drew a perfectly symmetrical square around the solution she'd come up with, sighed, and pushed the paper across the table to Quinn. The sound of her chair squeaking echoed throughout the empty library, drawing a half-hearted glare from the librarian on the other side of the room. The three of them were the only people there, the rest of the students in class or at lunch, the teachers in the lounges. Succumbing to the quiet ache in her stomach, Rachel took the moments of Quinn's inspection of her work to pull her lunch out of her backpack and dig into her tuna on rye with relish.
Quinn pulled the paper closer, eyes scanning over the impeccably neat steps Rachel had written out. After a few seconds, she looked up at Rachel with a slightly raised eyebrow. Rachel groaned, slumping back in her chair. A week of Quinn helping her with math had taught her more about reading Quinn's facial expressions than pre-calculus itself; this raised eyebrow differed drastically from how it looked when her eyebrow raised when Rachel had found the right answer, or when she couldn't understand how Rachel had gotten so far off track, or when she wanted to be anywhere but in the library during lunch with Rachel Berry and a stack of notes from a class she had taken over a year ago.
"What'd I do wrong?"
Quinn handed the paper back to her. "Here," she said quietly. She paused, determinedly tamping down on the wave of nausea rising from her stomach at the smell of Rachel's sandwich, before indicating to an equation midway through the problem with a bitten-down fingernail. "You just dropped the negative from the fraction."
Rachel groaned again and rolled her eyes. "This is ridiculous. I have absolutely no need for pre-calculus. I'll never use trigonometry in theater."
"Probably not," Quinn said absently. She sat back in her chair, arms crossed over her stomach and legs crossed primly, leaning as far back from the wafting scent of tuna as she could without tipping the chair back or losing her carefully-constructed casual posture. She clamped her jaw shut to suppress the nausea in her throat—an act of iron will and nothing more—and forced herself to focus on something else.
Across the table, Rachel had set aside her sandwich and was reworking the problem on a fresh sheet of paper. Quinn eyed her through half-lidded eyes. All week, she had foregone lunch with Finn and Brittany and Santana, even turning down offers from the rest of her glee teammates—who she had undoubtedly started to consider friends—so that she could come to the deserted library and help Rachel with her homework. As awkward as it had been the first few days, she had been surprised to find that it was hardly as uncomfortable as she might have expected. If, that is, she had ever imagined a scenario in which she would willingly tutor Rachel Berry, or even a scenario where Rachel Berry would ask for her help.
Rachel's high-strung personality was fascinating to Quinn. Always determined to be in control, Quinn nonetheless lost that control far too often; the child growing in her stomach and the way she had so often blindly followed the directions of Sue Sylvester proved it beyond a doubt. Rachel, on the other hand, seemed to have a will as strong as her voice. She knew what she wanted, she felt both that she knew what it took to get it and that she fit the bill, and she refused to let anything stop her.
She had seemed as surprised as Quinn had felt when their lunchtime tutoring sessions had fallen into an almost-comfortable rhythm after only a few days. Quinn had imagined that Rachel, even when dealing with Quinn on her own terms, would remain understandably wary of the former cheerleader; after all, they had never been friends before, and Quinn had never been one to spare the feelings of anyone she didn't consider a friend. While Quinn had never tossed a slushie at anyone, she had never stopped one from being thrown at someone she didn't count as a friend, either. The exclusion of Rachel Berry from her friends had been a matter of social necessity, where Quinn had found a comfortable and protected niche at the top and would have done anything to keep herself there.
And yet, there they sat together in what Quinn might even venture to call companionable silence while Rachel tried her math problem for the second time. Quinn could not, for the life of her, decipher why someone as goal-oriented and determined as Rachel had been so quick to forgive Quinn her transgressions in the past. The snarky nicknames and sneers that had plagued their every conversation since grade school seemed forgotten to Rachel; she never retaliated by throwing nicknames or cruel smirks Quinn's way, anymore than she seemed to consider the possibility of throwing a slushie at the blonde.
"Okay," Rachel said again. Her voice startled Quinn out of her contemplations, and she nearly tipped her chair backwards; the front legs slammed down onto the thinly-carpeted tile floor with a crack. Both the librarian and Rachel started as the sound echoed off the cheap metal shelving on the walls; Quinn flushed red and bit her lip. She hurriedly reached across and picked up Rachel's paper, holding it up in front of her as a nonchalant shield.
"Okay," she said after a few moments. She lowered the paper and raised an eyebrow at Rachel once more, this time with the addition of a small smile gracing her features. "You got it."
"Finally," Rachel said, relief evident in her voice. With a bright smile, she lofted her sandwich triumphantly. "I can't believe how difficult this stuff is," she said after swallowing a mouthful. "I mean, I'm plenty intelligent, I know that, but it's all just another language to me, you know? It's really impressive that you understand all this." She took another bite, half of the sandwich now gone.
Quinn stayed silent, fighting as much against the desire to vomit as she was to keep her face or posture from betraying the struggle. She lasted an impressive amount of time—in her mind, at least; she was fairly certain that Rachel made it through at minimum four fully-formed complaints about how unnecessary pre-calculus was for someone who would spend their life on stage—before she clapped a hand over her mouth, shoved back from the table, and sprinted out of the library and down the hall to the nearest bathroom. As she burst through the door and made it to a stall just before the remains of her meager breakfast escaped, she thanked God for Sue Sylvester and every wind sprint she had ordered of the Cheerios; she had never been so happy to have suffered through those drills, not even when she first realized that they gave her such fabulous legs, as she was then, when they allowed her to make it to the safety of the bathroom stall.
Once her stomach was empty, she slumped tiredly against the stall door behind her, legs trembling in fatigue. It was barely noon and she was exhausted; she wanted to just go home and sleep for the rest of the day, in a comfortable bed with a down comforter and six pillows and George Winston echoing in her ears as she drifted off.
Instead, she had a bathroom stall in a high school and the telltale burn of stomach acid in her throat and mouth. A disgusted sigh escaped her lips, and she automatically slipped one hand into the pocket of her jeans, retrieving the packet of gum she had taken to carrying with her once the morning sickness started. Popping a piece into her mouth and chewing fervently, she slowly made her way out of the stall. After checking her hair and straightening her sweater unnecessarily, she continued on her way out of the bathroom, only to jerk to a stop at the sight of Rachel standing beside the door in the hallway, arms crossed authoritatively and glaring at anyone who seemed that they might possibly even consider using that bathroom.
They stood in awkward silence for a few painfully long seconds. Rachel moved first, leaning down and picking up Quinn's backpack and jacket from where they rested on the floor next to her own. Quinn accepted them silently, knowing that her eyes were as grateful as they had to have been surprised. Pulling her jacket tightly around her stomach, she winced as the bell rang from directly above the bathroom door.
"Thank you," she said softly. She wondered if she should continue on; thanking someone like Rachel was hardly something she had the benefit of experience in.
"You're welcome," Rachel said, her voice as quiet as Quinn's had been. She seemed to be arguing with herself; Quinn bit her lip and considered what might happen if she broke down and asked if Rachel and her two doctor dads had a guest room with a big bed and a down comforter.
Then, Rachel's eyes flicked over Quinn's shoulder, and Quinn turned to see Quinn and Puck and Artie making their way down the hall towards them, laughing and waving. She turned back to Rachel, who was suddenly unreadable, and instead of speaking simply nodded at Rachel, pushed her hair behind her ear, and started off down the hallway to her physics class.