“Nice outfits.” Jacob appeared suddenly at Rachel’s right, close enough that she could smell his deodorant—which, judging by the growing sweat stains under his arms, was not strong enough. She took a step back. “You look very dazzling,” he added.
“Thank you.” Rachel smiled at Kurt diplomatically. While his wardrobe scouting was industrious, the effect of the whole group wearing identical vests had come off as—she hated to admit it—slightly nerdy. She’d worn her pleated black miniskirt, which she knew highlighted her legs, shapely from the hours she spent each week on her elliptical trainer. Even though her outfit selection was limited to things black, it had taken her an hour to get dressed. This would be her first performance—of many, she hoped—in front of her McKinley High peers, and she wanted it to go perfectly. She’d chosen her favorite black T-shirt with the puff sleeves, and she’d worn her favorite bra-and-panties set—white cotton, covered in gold stars—for an extra boost of confidence. Not that she really needed it. They were going to be great.
“I don’t know.” Artie glanced down at his vest, which he’d put on over a black T-shirt, as instructed, and his black suspenders. The rhinestones were awfully glittery. Maybe it hadn’t been the greatest idea to let Kurt, who’d once come to school in a rabbit fur coat, take charge of their costumes. “I feel like my aunt Linda has this exact same vest.”
“Your aunt Linda must be a style icon, then.” Kurt threw his shoulders back. To carry off the BeDazzled look well, confidence was a must. “We look awesome.”
“Rachel, I do think the vest accentuates some of your best assets.” Jacob grinned nervously at Rachel as he pushed his thick black glasses into place on the bridge of his nose.
Ew, she thought. Just because they had the Jewish religion in common did not mean Rachel Berry owed skeezy Jacob anything. The fact, however, that he wrote a blog reporting on all matters of McKinley High life made Rachel behave a little more kindly to him than if he’d been completely useless to her. It never paid to be rude to the press. And the Glee Club could use a good review. “What are you doing here, Jacob?” Rachel asked, crossing her arms over her chest and trying to keep the annoyance in her voice to a minimum.
Jacob looked back to his clipboard. “Making sure every group is ready. Are you all here?”
“Yes, we’re all here!” Tina’s cried out as she appeared, pushing past a tuba player in a top hat. “I’m sorry I’m so late.” She was lugging the box with the fog machine in it and practically panting. “But I brought a present.”
“What is that?” Rachel asked, curiously peering into the box. She hated surprises.
“It’s a f-f-fog machine,” Tina announced proudly. “It was with all the boxes of decorations at the decorations committee meeting.”
Rachel gasped. “That is so crazy. I had this dream last night where I was performing at this exact recital, singing “On My Own” from Les Misérables, and the fog started to rise up around me, like I was on the streets of Paris while it was under siege.” Rachel had a faraway look in her eyes. Why hadn’t she thought to mention a fog machine for their performance? She would have loved to take the credit for it.
“Notice the lack of any of us in her dream/fantasy,” Kurt whispered to Mercedes. “Not that I’d feel comfortable if she was having nocturnal fantasies about me.”
“It sounds really awesome, but how are we going to run it?” Artie asked.
“I can help,” Jacob volunteered, seeing how excited Rachel was at the thought of the fog machine. Maybe that’s what it would take to get in her pants. “I was the prop manager for three of the last four school productions. I know where all the electrical outlets are.”
Tina handed him the box and dusted off her rhinestone vest. She was wearing a black skirt, black kneesocks, and her beloved Doc Marten Mary Janes. “I’ll show you how to use it.” Jacob and the others watched as Tina set up the machine. It whirred to life when plugged in. “Just point it at the stage, and push this r-r-red button down for ten seconds at a time.” She glanced at Jacob, suddenly dubious. “Can you do that?” Kids rushed around, shoving each other and shouting about amps and receivers. The Glee kids stepped out of the way, trying to let the sounds of Rachel humming and doing other weird vocal exercises soothe them.
Jacob glanced at Rachel, who was doing the sexy brbrbr thing with her lips again. He moistened his own lips and rubbed them together. “Most definitely.”
But when the jazz band, the opening act, burst into Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” the reality of the situation started to sink in. Artie leaned back in his chair and breathed into his cupped palms, trying not to hyperventilate.
“Are you okay, Artie?” Tina asked, leaning over him. His cheeks looked blue.
“I… I think maybe we’re rushing into this performance thing.” He glanced down at his rhinestone vest, wishing he had the comfort of his regular white button-down shirt and suspenders. This felt all wrong. “I mean, how much have we really practiced? Do you think we can really go out there and not embarrass ourselves?”
Tina felt the familiar panic rise in her. It was like when her older sister used to sit on her chest and tickle her stomach until she started to turn blue. How could she sing—in front of everyone—when she felt like she was going to choke? “Maybe Artie’s right.”
“Look, why don’t we just turn around right now before we make a big mistake?” Mercedes pictured the comfort of her own living room, with the huge leather sectional and the flat-screen TV. “We could all go to my house and laugh at High School Musical.”
“Don’t slam Zac Efron,” Kurt warned. “That boy has perfect hair.”
Rachel’s mouth had fallen almost to the floor. “Those kids suck,” she declared. “I can’t even believe you’d consider backing out right now. That sort of attitude is what has prevented you from being a great Glee Club thus far.” She took a deep breath. Just being backstage, waiting in the wings for her chance in the spotlight, made all Rachel’s nerves tingle. The hot lights out on the stage, the polite clapping of the audience as the jazz band completed its first number, the way the red EXIT signs above the back doors of the auditorium stood out in the darkness—they all just made her want it more.
“But we’re scared—” Mercedes started.
Rachel cut her off. “Everyone gets scared. You all need to suck it up. As the incomparable Cher once said, ‘Until you’re ready to look foolish, you’ll never have the possibility of being great.’”
Rachel’s words did the trick. Immediately, Artie stopped hyperventilating, and Tina felt as if she’d shoved her sister off her chest. Kurt and Mercedes were nodding. Rachel was right.
“You’re next,” Jacob hissed to them after the performance of a two-person band called Righteous Annihilation. “Get out there!”
Rachel didn’t hesitate, and the others followed her across the stage in the darkness. The audience was relatively sparse, filled mostly with parents of band kids, a few teachers, and a couple dozen students. Rachel immediately spotted her two dads, off to the left. Her dad Hiram was holding their mini-camcorder to his face.
But she didn’t see the one person she was looking for—Finn. He had to show up, didn’t he? He’d cared enough to warn her of a possible attack; wouldn’t he come to make sure she was okay? And maybe, just maybe, when he saw her there onstage singing, it would take him back to that day in the auditorium, when they’d had their moment.
The music started. The spotlight clicked on, and they began to sing “Tonight.” The fog billowed mystically around them, and Rachel couldn’t help feeling proud of Tina for bringing the extra touch of showmanship to their performance. None of them had noticed a couple of Cheerios sneaking up the side aisle from the back of the auditorium and then disappearing backstage. They sounded… decent. Not great, but not bad, and certainly better than they had sounded before Rachel joined. By the end of the first × of of elirst × overse, they started to get more into it, sounding even better.
But the fog was g
etting pretty thick. Tina had impressed upon J-Fro the necessity of turning the machine on and off in ten-second intervals to keep the air clear. But the stage was starting to fill up with smoke, as if he’d forgotten. Tina found herself almost tripping over Artie’s footrest as she tried to follow the moves Rachel had taught them. But it was getting too hard to see much of anything.
Rachel sang out valiantly, managing to squint backstage. Jacob was standing next to the fog machine, all right, but he wasn’t alone. Next to him, her blond hair cascading over her shoulders, was Brittany in her skimpy Cheerios outfit. In a move that looked like something from a beer commercial, she was applying lipstick to her lips in super-slow motion, and Jacob was completely mesmerized.
Rachel fought a cough. Tina had stopped singing and was trying to clear her throat. Rachel motioned with her hands toward the front of the stage, trying to get the others to step forward, where the air might be a little clearer.
That was a mistake. Kurt, unable to see the edge of the stage, fell right off it. An enormous crash ensued as he landed on a drum set in the orchestra pit. Tina screamed a high-pitched note as Artie rolled over her foot, and Mercedes, in an effort to help Kurt, fell face-first and slid along the stage.
“What you are, what you do, what you say… ” Rachel, unfazed, was the only one who managed to sing the final line of the song. Her extensive vocal training must have prepared her for the challenges presented by the smoke inhalation. But she didn’t feel good about it.
In the back of the auditorium, a bunch of Cheerios and football players were hunched over in laughter. The cheerleaders’ high-pitched giggles were audible over the pitying applause of the audience. Then the jocks started to clap their hands loudly, mockingly.
The Glee kids, sans Kurt, rushed off the stage, humiliated.
Down on the auditorium floor, Kurt quickly made his way to the wings, almost stumbling over the music stands and chairs in the pit. But Rachel felt like she was moving in slow motion as she followed the others off the stage, waving her hands in front of her face to clear the air. She’d been laughed at before—that was nothing new. The other Glee kids, though, weren’t as used to putting themselves out there as she was. They didn’t have the iron backbone that Rachel had developed over the years. When confronted with a challenge, Rachel tended to take a deep breath and charge forward. She knew from spending the week with the Glee kids, however, that they were more likely to sit down and hope they could just disappear.
Rachel worried that Glee was doomed.
eighteen
Choir room, Monday morning
On Sunday night, after a long weekend of feeling sorry for herself, Rachel texted the other Glee kids and called an emergency meeting Monday morning in the choir room. She hadn’ I€om. She Žt been able to bring herself to contact anyone else over the weekend, as she was too crushed by Glee’s humiliation at the hands of the Cheerios. Instead, she watched a couple of her favorite movies, A Star Is Born and Grease, in her favorite flannel pajamas on the cushy couch in the living room and ate butter-flavored microwave popcorn until she started to feel better.
The performance had been terrible, and they hadn’t even gotten to finish their song before they started coughing their lungs up. But Rachel watched the recording her dads had made before the fog overtook the stage and her dad Hiram had to leave the room because of his asthma, and she saw what the other acts had looked like. The jazz band was mediocre at best, and the three guys who had attempted to sing the latest Fray song while hitting some of the correct notes on their guitars were no better. The two members of Righteous Annihilation were jocks—both forwards on the McKinley soccer team—and the small audience clapped enthusiastically when they finished—the families because they were grateful the atrocious racket was over, and the students because they were willing to applaud anyone who knew where the good parties were each weekend.
When Rachel strolled into the choir room and saw the dejected faces of her fellow Gleeks, she knew she had a lot of work to do. “Okay,” she said brightly, “maybe the show didn’t turn out exactly the way we wanted, but I think it was a good first step.”
“Were you even there on Friday?” Kurt asked, jumping to his feet. He’d taken off the pair of dark sunglasses he’d worn to school, hoping that perhaps the football guys wouldn’t recognize him.
“I know the performance wasn’t ideal,” Rachel continued, “but I’ve watched a recording of the show, and we were really good.” She sniffed the air and thought she still smelled traces of smoke. “For like ten seconds.”
“For ten seconds!” Mercedes exclaimed. Walking through the halls that morning, Mercedes had felt as if everyone was whispering about her. Even though there hadn’t been many people in the audience—a fact that she was incredibly grateful for—she knew that the Cheerios had told everyone about their little prank to humiliate Glee. “That’s supposed to make us feel better?”
Artie and Tina exchanged glances. Kurt and Mercedes sounded like they wanted to jump down Rachel’s throat. But Artie found himself kind of impressed with Rachel’s resilience. She was wearing a yellow-and-brown plaid skirt, a white turtleneck sweater, kneesocks, and a brown beret. She looked like a Parisian Nancy Drew—peppy, determined, and ready to take on the world. He glanced at Tina, sitting next to him and nursing a Starbucks drink.
“But as Cher said…” Rachel pressed her hands together.
“I don’t want to hear any more of your inspirational messages,” Mercedes interrupted. “I don’t know why we listened to you.” Mercedes shook her head. “You might be okay with looking like a fool, but you shouldn’t have taken us down with you.”
“Me?” Rachel squealed. She looked around the room and realized, for the first time, that everyone was angry with her. Her. After all she’d done to take this Glee Club to the top, this was the thanks she got. That was gratitude for you.
“If you hadn’t pushed us with your blind ambition, we never�€ion, we n“ver would have embarrassed ourselves on that stage.” Kurt unscrewed the cap of his water bottle and took a sip. His pores were a mess today after a weekend of stressing out, and he could feel a giant underground pimple threatening to break out on his left cheek. “We would have backed out days ago.”
“At least we knew our limits before you came along,” Artie finally spoke up. He felt like Kurt and Mercedes were partly right, at least. Just because Rachel knew she was an amazing performer didn’t mean she knew anything about the rest of them.
“That’s not fair.” Rachel felt as though she’d been slapped. Even Artie was mad at her? “I pushed you hard because you needed it.” Rachel didn’t believe a person could be pushed too hard—you could either rise to the occasion or let it defeat you.
Part of her knew she was to blame, at least in a teeny way, for the debacle, but she wasn’t about to admit it, even to herself. Buried deep in her subconscious was the truth: Finn Hudson had warned her of what was going to happen, and she’d chosen to ignore it. If she’d just told the others about it, Tina might have realized that the “gift” of the fog machine from the Cheerios wasn’t made out of love but, rather, a jealous desire to ruin Rachel. But Rachel was not someone to plumb the depths of her subconscious, especially if doing so would reveal her own complicity.
Instead, she turned to Tina. “You didn’t just find that smoke machine at the committee meeting, did you?”
Tina’s eyes widened. “N-n-no…. Santana gave it to me.”
“And you didn’t think that was weird?” Rachel threw her hands in the air. How could Tina be so trusting? Didn’t she know that the McKinley High student body was so socially stratified that someone from the upper echelon would never deign to help one of the lower creatures, like a Glee kid? “That one of the Cheerios suddenly cared about a Glee performance?”
“I didn’t think about it, okay?” Tina stared at the toes of her black sneakers. “I thought she was just being nice.”
“Nice?” Rachel shook her head furiously. “Mayb
e if you weren’t trying so hard to fit in with the brainless and unscrupulous Cheerios, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
“Hey, that’s below the belt.” Artie spoke up, wheeling toward Rachel. “You can’t blame Tina for not knowing how devious the Cheerios could be.”
Rachel rolled her eyes. She felt as if the ground beneath her feet were starting to crumble away. “Big surprise that you’re defending her. Everyone knows you have a big fat crush on her.”
“That is way out of line, girl.” Mercedes jumped to her feet and walked threateningly toward Rachel. “Didn’t your daddies teach you any manners?”
“You’re just jealous of my talent.” Rachel felt like her back was against the wall, and she couldn’t let the others keep putting her down. Everyone blamed her, and it wasn’t fair. “You have been since the moment I walked in that door.”
“Oh my God.” Mercedes sat back down in her chair. She covered her eyes with her hands. Maybe if she couldn’t see Rachel, she wouldn’t feel the urge to stºthet="0reao stºthrangle her. “What planet are we standing on? Did she really just say that to me?”
“I think she did.” Kurt crossed his arms over his chest.
“Look, you’re all mad at me for telling it like it is.” Rachel eyed each of them in turn. “But basically, Cher was totally right. If you’re not prepared to fail, you shouldn’t be a performer.” She shook her head, suddenly sad. “And you’re not performers. You all care too much about what other people think. Which is just a stupid way to live your lives.” She was about to quote Olivia Newton-John, but she realized it wouldn’t make any difference. “It doesn’t matter. I won’t taint your little Glee Club with my presence anymore. I’m applying to performing arts schools, and I don’t need any of you.” With that, she spun dramatically on her heel and stomped out of the room. If there was one thing Rachel knew how to do, it was make an exit.
Because it was homecoming week, each school day had a different theme. Monday was Seventies Day, and she passed a gaggle of Cheerios wearing bell-bottoms, peasant blouses, and obscenely short minidresses. They snickered as they passed Rachel. “Nice singing, loser,” one of them spat out.
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