Chapter 3

The following day, Charlie was in the choir room, busy working on some music sheets. Mr. Schuester had asked her to help him choose some songs for the Glee club performance at the Sectional Championship. Five or six different music sheets lay on the piano, and Charlie, standing in front of them, was trying to imagine which songs were the most appropriate to sing. She was so focused on her task that didn't even notice Kurt and Blaine walking in the room.
"I'd choose this one," said Kurt, pointing at a sheet. "It's one of my favorite songs!"
"What are you doing here?" asked Charlie. "Don't you have any lessons?"
"Actually, we wanted to talk to you..." Blaine told her.
"Yesterday, while you were singing at the Assembly, it didn't feel like you were just singing one of your favorite singer's songs," Kurt said. "It felt more like those words were yours, not Nyaga's..."
Someone had noticed that, Charlie thought. In that moment, she didn't know what to choose between denying everything and pretend nothing happened, and explain how things actually were. After all, Kurt was her friend, and knew almost everything about her! Nevertheless, she wasn't sure whether to trust Blaine or not...
She decided to tell everything anyway. She looked straight at the two boys, and hoped they wouldn't decide to throw stones at her, or lock her inside the piano, to run away till the other side of the universe.
"You... know I have two brothers, don't you?" she began, addressing Kurt.
She didn't know where to begin to explain her behavior. She hadn't spoken of it with anyone, except for her little brother, who knew everything about her.
The boy nodded, and Charlie continued.
"I told you that I have wanted everyone to call me Charlie since my eldest brother left home, and isn't that strange that his name is Charlie, as well? He's always been my mother's favorite son, and although parents shouldn't have favorite children, she basically worshipped my brother! She boasted of him in every occasion: with relatives, with her friends, even with her customers! I've never been important to her: she knows that I exist, and it's already too much! Just look at the name she gave me: Charlotte, that rhymes with 'harlot', and Piper, that means someone who plays a flute or something like that… an obvious reference to who my mother wants me to become one day…
"I've always heard her speak about my brother as if he was some sort of God on earth, and she even told me once: 'Why can't you try and be like him?'"
"So you've always been overshadowed by a perfect brother?" Blaine asked her. "I perfectly understand how you feel..."
"Hang on: your brother is the guy in that ad? Now I understand why your face and your surname were so familiar to me..." said Charlie. "And by the way, my brother has never been perfect at all! At least, not to me! I've always thought I was the only one who saw things as they actually were: my brother wasn't special at all! I had started to suspect that when I first discovered he used to do things secretly to our mother, but there was one thing that confirmed my suspicions!"
The two boys kept listening to Charlie, curiously.
"It happened five or six years ago," she began. "We were living in Boston. My eldest brother didn't have a driving license yet, but he decided to steal our mother's car to go with our younger brother for a ride. I didn't go because I didn't trust him, and I did the right thing! They had been out all day, and obviously our mother didn't know anything. They were coming back home, when they were hit by a truck driven by a drunken man! My older brother, that moron, got away with a few scars, while my younger brother lost forever the use of his legs... And despite this accident, my mother keeps thinking that Charlie, that irresponsible idiot, is still God come down to earth..."
"But... it's horrible!" Kurt said.
"Yeah, but then he left home and decided to travel around the world on a boat with a girl I never liked..." Charlie continued. "But after he left, things haven't gotten better at all!"
"What do you mean?" asked Blaine.
"The reason why I was singing that way, yesterday... is not just my brother," said Charlie. "There's also another person..."
Kurt and Blaine looked at each other, wondering if Charlie was referring to one of them.
"Her name was Laura," said the girl, instead. "She was in my class, and she has been my best friend for the two months I've been in San Francisco. Or better, she has been for two or three weeks... This girl had the best marks in every subject, and, since my brother, the genius boy, had sneaked away, my mother didn't have a person to whom I could be compared! Why, then, not compare me just to the only person on Earth who didn't belong to my family and who actually cared about me?"
"And then, how did it end?" Kurt asked.
"I let my mother influence me," answered Charlie. "That girl started to become more and more unbearable to me, I started to envy her, and I couldn't even look at her! At the end, I was almost happy to get away from there! Nevertheless, I felt a little bit sorry: I wish she would have been my friend again, but it would have been impossible..."
Charlie couldn't bear those memories. She was about to burst into tears, but she managed to hold them back.
"Is that why you wanted your mother not to know anything about me?" asked Kurt.
"No, I did that because, if she knew about your existence, she would come searching for you, she would kill you, she would tear you to pieces and play bowling with them!" Charlie answered. "She never said anything nice about anyone of my ex-boyfriends, not even about my ex-friends... She wouldn't like you, no matter what, and you don't really want to end up like poor Laura..."
Charlie thought that maybe that would never happen, but since she had thought the same thing about Laura, she was afraid she would have ended up hating Kurt too. She went to sit down on one of the chairs in the room, followed by the two boys.
"I've been compared to other people for so long that I never discovered I had some talents or qualities that everyone else appreciates!" said Charlie.
"But you are talented!" Kurt told her. "You've got a fantastic voice!"
"And you're particularly good at disguising yourself!" Blaine added.
"And your drawings are wonderful!" said Kurt. "Aren't these talents for you? Maybe no one ever noticed or appreciated them, so you've always believed you weren't special!"
Charlie thought the boy was right. No one, except for her brother, ever saw her sing or draw: if no one ever had the occasion of knowing that Charlie had some talent, no one could have ever appreciated it!
"What if I was just good at falling in love with the fist idiot passing by?" said Charlie. "What if you're wrong about me?"
"Don't forget I saw your drawings!" Kurt said. "They are beautiful, I told you!"
"What could a sketchbook be, compared to all my flaws?" replied Charlie. "I have an incredible bad luck, my human relationships never last very long, I've always been overshadowed by an apparently perfect brother, and there are many reasons why I can be easily mistaken for a boy! Without even mentioning my infinite list of ex-boyfriends..."
"Don't be so mean to yourself..." Blaine told her.
"Why don't you try to forget your flaws and focus more on your qualities?" suggested Kurt. "You're so blinded with your negative side, that you can't see the positive one!"
Charlie seemed resigned, as if she knew it was pointless to try and look for something positive in her.
"You would do anything for your brother, and you care about him more than your mother would," Kurt began. "When your brothers stole your mother's car, you didn't give in and you didn't go with them; you always try not to hurt the people you love; when you left last year, you told me that very soon I would have found my soulmate, but I know that in that moment you thought of me before thinking of yourself! Aren't' these good qualities? What do you think?"
Charlie thought about it for a few moments.
"Am I really like this?" she said then, almost in disbelief. "Do I do so many things for other people?"
"Of course you do!" Blaine answered. "It's just that no one makes you notice it!"
"If only I weren't so... wrong!" said Charlie.
"You're perfect, Charlie!" Kurt told her. "You may be full of flaws, but, to your real friends, you will always be perfect!"
Charlie was starting to believe to those words. After all, she wanted to change, didn't she? So why not starting to appreciate herself? If two people she had teased in one of the worst ways had been able to override her so-called 'little flaws', maybe she would have succeeded too... Maybe her constant need to fall in love with someone, even with the wrong person, was caused by the fact that she had never felt appreciated by anyone, she had always felt nothing but a pile of flaws, and had reached the point of hating herself.
Charlie hugged the two boys. No one had ever told her she was perfect, before that time. For the first time in her life, she was happy to have two friends that would never turn their backs at her, when she would need them. And, after more than a year spent thinking he was nothing but a heartless and brainless moron, she started to think that it wouldn't be a bad thing to have Blaine as a friend.
"Thank you, guys!" said Charlie. "You know, you brought me a fantastic idea about a song you could perform at Sectionals..."

To tell the truth, at a certain point I started to hate Charlie. This chapter was an occasion to make the readers (and me!) like her, a bit. I know of people who liked her anyway, so, it is possible.
As regards Charlie's backstory (and please, notice her name, a nod to her mother's non-existent love for her LOL), is partly inspired by my autobiographical poem/song "I'm Not" (which I partlially quoted in one of the previous chapters of this story), and a series of plot-twists, suggested by my sister, to the movie "Charlie St. Cloud" starring Zac Efron (who she hates very much!). Who has seen the movie could have recognized some little references to the movie, and who hasn't... well, shouldn't have had serious comprehension problems!
As usual, if you liked or even disliked this story, please, let me know with a comment, a message, whatever: it would really make me very happy! :)