Chapter 1
Auditions
About two weeks after his junior year began, Tommy was beginning to settle into his routine. Part of that routine meant getting to school about an hour before everybody else so he and the rest of the orchestra could get a handle on the music they were probably going to have to play for the rest of the year. Though they'd never tell the members of show choir, it was harder then it seemed to just begin playing the numbers that New Directions wanted. Not that they would say it aloud.
Tommy couldn't wait to get out of the house some mornings to school. There weren't a lot of people who couldn't understand why. He had no intention of making things clearer.
"So here we are again," Joshua, the second violinist said. "Looks like it's the same old, same old."
"You know, I didn't even know there were any crackhouses in town," Kerri the drummer said. "How the hell did Rachel Berry know?"
"That is a question I don't want to think about too much," Tommy told them. "All I know is I'm not going to piss her off."
"No respect. A year of doing what they do, and it's like they're invisible," Josh replied.
"Trust me. Invisible people don't get drowned in sugar," Tommy told them. "They wish they were invisible."
"Says the chameleon," Kerri replied.
"Besides, haven't you heard what the world thinks," Tommy said. "Change isn't something we can believe in."
They smiled, though Tommy wasn't sure if his comment went over his friends heads. He never explained himself.
"Anyway, we've got our own work to do," he told them. "Let's get started."
Because everybody respected his talent, the other musicians were willing to tolerate some of the quirks that Tommy had, such as the fact that he consider half of current music intolerable, and that he never watched American Idol. (He had mentioned more than once that he considered Ryan Seacrest 'a ferret" and Simon Cowell, "House without the charm,") They were gifted enough that they needed to hear a song once in order to play it, but halfway through the year, Tommy realized that he was going to have to work a lot harder or he'd be holding everybody back. So they split the difference - forty-five minutes of catching up on Top 40, and fifteen minutes in which they did their own thing, which was code for music more Tommy's speed.
So after spending enough time getting through Beyonce, Kenny Chesney and Pink, they allowed him to work through music that he called 'classic' and New Directions called 'old'.
Ohhh, look at all the lonely people
Ohhh, look at all the lonely people
He didn't sing all the time, just for the songs he felt passionate about.
Eleanor Rigby
Picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream.
Waits at the window
Storing her face in a jar that she keeps by the door.
Who is it for?
All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
Father McKenzie
Writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear.
No one comes near.
Look at him working,
Darning his socks in the night as he watches the air.
What does he care?
All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
Ohhh, look at all the lonely people.
Ohhh, look at all the lonely people.
Eleanor Rigby,
Died in the church and was buried along with her name.
Nobody came.
Father McKenzie,
Wiping his hands of the dirt as he walks from the grave,
No one was saved.
All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
As was so often the case, he had gone inside his head as he did whenever he was performing.
It took him a few seconds to realize what had become clear to the rest of the orchestra.
"You're really good."
Tommy did his best to never appear surprised, and indeed he shouldn't have been. Rachel was almost always here earlier or later than the rest of Glee club.
"Does that mean you're going to send me to a crack house, too?"
It was a cheap shot, and he was sorry he'd said it the minute it was out of his mouth. The fact was, apart from Mr. Schuster discovering him, this was his greatest fear.
"It does seem kind of stupid. We've been playing together for more than a year, and I never even knew that you were that good." She hesitated. "Tom, right?"
Again, he shouldn't have been that surprised. Of all the people in New Directions, Rachel was the only one who might take the trouble to remember the names of the people who made her sound good.
"You're in fifth period History with me."
"So you noticed."
"You're always reading, and you don't try to hide it." Rachel admitted. "I don't know why Mr. Ryan doesn't do anything about it."
"Because I'm passing," Tommy looked at her. "Can we please stop pretending that this is about homework?"
"Like I said, you're really good, and you don't care what other people think about you," Rachel hesitated. "Is there a reason you've been satisfied just playing music for us?'
And here it was. The conversation he'd been trying to avoid for the last year. He turned to his fellow musicians. "Could you give us a minute?"
He got up from the piano. "I like to think I perform a vital service for you and the rest of the group. Besides, I've gone half my time at this school, and I haven't pasted a target on my back. Can you give me a good reason why I should do otherwise?"
He waited to see what kind of argument Rachel would make, figuring she'd make a personal plea about wanting to belong, or something more self-involved, like how it would probably help them win Nationals.
"You obviously like your privacy," she said instead. "But there has to be some part of you that likes performing, or you'd be doing it at home instead of here."
There was a fragment of truth there. Why had he been giving what amounted to concerts for over a year?
"I'm not much of a team player," he countered. "Playing in the orchestra aside, I don't particularly get along with other people."
Rachel raised her eyebrow. "You have been present at almost every meeting last year, right?" she said with a suggestion of humor. "Half of Glee is diva central, and that's not counting my charming personality."
"There's a pool in the orchestra on who and when someone snaps," Tommy countered.
"You actually bet on... forget it," Rachel told him. "If you find it so irritating, why are you playing in the first place?"
"Rachel, if you hadn't known about my inner Springsteen, you wouldn't talk to me."
"That's not entirely fair..."
"What are the names of my fellow violinists? When was the last time you even asked any of us what time it was, let alone what kind of music we might want to play? Some of us have hopes and dreams of our own."
Tommy wasn't entirely proud to say that he took a little pleasure in seeing Rachel dismayed.
"This was a mistake. I'm sorry I bothered you." Rachel turned around, and began to walk away.
Tommy was never entirely sure what made him get off the stage and follow her.
"Rachel, wait." He took a moment. "I realize I'm not being particularly fair, but you have to understand, it's sort of a package deal. If I join Glee, doesn't that mean you lose a vital part of your musical backup?"
"We've been living hand to mouth since we got started," Rachel told him. "I don't know where we'd get the money to pay for costumes. But you've been in the same room, you know how difficult it is for all of us. We've handled tougher problems before, and we will again."
That hadn't exactly been his strongest argument, so he went a little deeper. "On my best days, I'm so prickly that I bet I could make Santana blush."
"I seriously doubt that." Having heard some of the things Santana had said over the past year, he could believe her skepticism. "Besides, they accept me, and I'm nearly as bad."
"You're giving yourself too little credit." He gave this a moment's thought. "And you're not gonna let this go, are you?"
"I royally screwed up with Charice," she admitted. "I need to make amends, and this may be my best chance to fix things. I realize that's not the best reason to ask you to do this, but it's all I have."
The truth was Tommy was one of the few people at McKinley who respected Rachel as a performer, and could understand some of her insecurities as a person. Despite the fact that she was dating Finn Hudson, she still thought she was on the fringes of everything. She needed to be good here for any kind of... anything.
Besides, all things considered, he had an issue with Mr. Schuster that he had wanted to raise for a year, and this might be his best opportunity. Hell, it might be his only opportunity.
"I have two conditions," he told her. "First one is, you don't tell any one of your friends about this for the rest of the day. When show choir meets, tell them you have somebody who wants to audition in the auditorium."
He expected her to argue this, but she didn't. "And the other?"
"When I finish my audition, and if it goes as well as you obviously think it will, I'm going to make a request. When I make it, I want you to support it."
Now Rachel seemed a little troubled. "I can't just do that without knowing what it is."
"Trust me. All I'm going to suggest is something that your club has needed for a very long time."
Tommy didn't talk to a lot of people, and even then, he wasn't perfect at things like subtlety. But he must have done a good job this time, because Rachel just nodded, and told him: "You'll be here at three-thirty?"
"I'll just need some time to go over my number." And just like that, the first bell rang. "All right, I'll see you later."
Rachel clearly didn't want to let it go, but she could see that he was serious. She began to walk away.
When she left the auditorium, Tommy walked over to the band where they were now gathering their instruments. "Remember what I talked about last year?"
"It's pretty hard to forget it," Kerri told them.
"Keep your eyes open, and your cells ready," Tommy looked back at the exit. "Let's hope that the gods are with us today."
Unfortunately, they weren't. In more ways then one.
Unlike the average high school day seems like for a teenager, this day flew by for Tommy. The way his schedule worked, he had classes with almost everybody in New Directions, but their reaction upon seeing him was the same indifference he'd worked so hard to maintain for the last year. He knew that one way or the other, none of them was going to be able to look at him the same way after this afternoon, and he still wasn't sure whether this was good or bad. All he knew was that he was probably going to stop being invisible to the kids in Glee, and perhaps to the student body.
With his nerves in an uproar, he entered the auditorium, and sat at the piano. To try and settle his jangled nerves, he played a piece of music that always relieved his body: 'Linus and Lucy', the theme music behind almost every Peanuts special he'd ever watched.
Around about the second movement, he became aware that the members of Glee were slowly assembling. And they sounded irritated.
"I swear, unless Rachel managed to get here, I don't know how she thinks she can make things right," Santana was telling Brittany and Quinn.
"Guys, we need to give her another chance," Finn told her. "She said that this guy came to her."
"Like Jesse did?" Mercedes was saying. "I'm just saying, Vocal Adrenaline has sent us a mole in the past. They could do it again."
"Hey, if we had a singing mole, we'd win no contest." Brittany, naturally.
"All right, Rachel, we're all present," Mr. Schuster had appeared on the stage. "Where's this great performer?"
It had taken a lot more effort than Tommy had thought it would to keep playing without interruption. When Schuster said that, he stopped, turned around, and said: "I'm right here."
The double takes and whispering would probably have been done his nervous stomach a world of good. But he had one last thing to do that he considered more important. He turned to Reese, another pianist who never performed very much because he was almost never absent, and asked: "You ready for this?"
"Are you?" Reese countered.
It was a fair question. For the first time in his life, he was going to be performing in front of an audience larger than the orchestra, and far more likely to be critical. For someone who had made his life at McKinley about not putting himself out there, this could be a fiasco.
Hey, worst case scenario, you're back to making these guys look good first thing tomorrow. It was not a charitable thought, but it had a soothing effect on his nerves. "As I'll ever be. You know what to do."
He got to his feet, and looked straight at his audience. "My name is Tom Grayson, and I've chosen 'Finishing the Hat' from Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George."
Despite his best efforts, his voice had shaken a little. Easy does it, he thought. Just do like you always do. Pretend you're the performer, not yourself.
For a long moment, he just stood there. Then before any of them could engage in snark, he began:
Yes, she looks for me.
Good.
Let her look for me to tell me why she left me-
As I always knew she would.
I had thought she understood.
They have never understood,
And no reason that they should,
But if anybody could...
They were all silent.
Finishing the hat,
How you have to finish the hat,
How you watch the rest of the world
from a window
While you finish the hat.
Mapping out a sky,
What you feel like planning a sky,
What you feel when voices that come through the window
Go
Until they distance and die,
Until there's nothing but sky.
And how you're always turning back too late
From the grass or the stick
or the dog or the light,
How the kind of woman willing to wait's
Not the kind that you want to find waiting.
To return you to the night,
Dizzy from the height,
Coming from the hat,
Studying the hat,
Entering the world of the hat,
Reaching through the world of the hat.
Like a window,
Back to this one from that.
Studying a face,
Stepping back to look at a face
Leaves a little space in the way like a window,
But to see-
It's the only way to see.
And when the woman that you wanted goes
You can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give."
But the woman who won't wait for you knows
That however you live,
There's a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat,
Starting on a hat,
Finishing a hat...
Look, I made a hat
Where there never was a hat.
Tommy had read about the expression of 'thunderous applause' in a couple of books on theater, and he'd seen it on a couple of occasions in glee itself, but he had never expected to hear it directed at him. It probably lasted no more than half a minute, but he knew it well enough to know it meant acceptance.
The problem was he wasn't sure he could accept it. The whole reason he had chosen 'Finishing the Hat' instead of any of the dozens of other songs he had memorized by now, or for that matter, any other Broadway song, was because this song was, in its own way, more personal. Even as he enjoyed the moment, there was a part of him that was still apart from all of this, watching through a window. He knew that this was mother's milk to people like Rachel and Kurt; it wasn't enough for him.
Still, he had managed to spend the last few years putting up a mask; he could keep it up a bit longer. Besides, it was time to see how much they really wanted him.
"Tom, God, that was amazing," Mr. Schuster told him. "I can't believe you've been right under our noses for this long."
"Does that mean I'm in?" It was a stupid thing to say, given what had just happened, but it needed to be said.
"Of course,"
"Even if I have a condition?"
And just like that, the wide smile on Mr. Schuster's face diminished. "Um, that would depend what it is," he started.
"Mr. Schue, unless it involves some kind of devil worship, I think we should take it," Puckerman told him.
Here we go. "Nothing that extreme, I think," Tommy took a deep breath. "All I need is the same thing the rest of this club needs."
"Which is what, exactly?" Quinn asked.
"Protection. From those who seem to have made it their mission to make everyone on this clubs life a living hell," Tommy looked out at the glee club. "I can't be alone in being concerned about it."
He thought he'd gotten everybody's attention.
"What exactly do you want us to do?" Finn asked.
"There have been at least a dozen assaults on members of this club just since school started up again," Tommy said slowly. "One of which happened as recently as this morning. Right, Tina?"
"I'm still getting raspberry out of my hair," Tina admitted.
Mr. Schuster looked a little uncomfortable for the first time. "Tom, I understand as well as anyone here how frustrating this has been for all of us. But I've gone to Figgis about this over and over the last year. Unless I have more than his word against hers..."
"That argument might have been valid when I was in junior high," Tommy interrupted. "If a student gets slushied in the middle of the hallway, and nobody owns up to it, that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Sally?"
He turned to the lead drummer, who brought up the picture that she had taken when the incident had happened. "It's even time-stamped," she pointed out.
This caused a bigger uproar than Tommy's audition had, as the majority of Glee gathered around the phone with a new respect for just about everybody in the band. "Tell me you haven't been doing this for longer," Kurt asked.
"I've been trying to coordinate something like this over the last couple of weeks," Tommy told them honestly. "I was going to give this to Figgis after the audition anyway, but I figure you'd want to see People's Exhibit one yourselves."
"I'm trying to rehabilitate my rep right now, but I could still kiss you," Quinn told him.
"I'm straight, and I'm seriously considering it," Puck added, probably in jest.
"Why are you sticking up for us?" Tina asked. "You don't know us at all."
"That's not entirely true," Tommy admitted. "Let's just say I have a genuine loathing of bullies in general, and leave it at that."
Mr. Schuster walked over to Sally, and asked her to bring this over the principal's office. Before he did, he turned to her and told her: "This isn't going to be easy for any of us. But what you and your friends have done, it took a lot of courage."
"We've done our part. Now it's time for you to do yours." Tommy told them.
Unlike the people who seemed willing to accept him as one of their own, Tommy was not naive enough to think that this was the end of their troubles with the jocks. Had any of them asked, he was expecting things to escalate. And there was a part of him that was actually looking forward to it.
They were about to find out they'd unlocked more than Tommy's inner performer that day at Glee.