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Everyone in the school knows her. She’s Rachel Berry. The blind girl. The Jewish girl with two gay dads who is super intense and has no friends. Everyone knows she’s only here because her parents sued the school district for discrimination. She’s the one who always looks like she got dressed in the dark.
“You’d think that the two gay dads thing would mean that she’d at least look good,” Santana says to him one day as they stand by her locker. “Aren’t gay dudes meant to be super into fashion and all that shit? And yet they let her leave the house like someone took the worst things from my grandma’s wardrobe and put them on a Raggedy Ann doll.”
“Yeah.” Puck says, watching intently as the Raggedy Ann in question bends over to pull something from that ridiculous pink trolley case and he thinks for a minute that he saw a glimpse of something yellow underneath that tiny plaid skirt, but then she stands up straight to file some books back in her locker. He lets out a disappointed hiss.
“Hey, asshole--” Santana punches him in the shoulder, hard, and he catches her fist with a frustrated grunt before she can hit him again. “I’m talking to you.”
“I was listening!”
“You were scamming on man-hands, I saw!” The cheerleader narrows her eyes and pushes his hand off and punches him again before stalking off in the direction of the girl’s bathroom.
“Yeah, fuck off.” He calls down the hallway, totally getting the last word in. You’d think that bicurious bitch would be all about appreciating a fine set of pins, no matter who they were attached to. Finn’d appreciate them if he were here. Where is that enormous klutz anyway? They were supposed to have a Mario Kart tournament the day before and he’d bailed, and these days he’s distant or some shit. Puck doesn’t know what that’s about, but he figures that it’s his duty as the best friend to knock him back to normal.
“My mom says that she was dropped on her head as a baby and her brain damage is proof that fags can’t raise children.”
God she’s annoying. She’s that girl in class who always knows the answer, always has been, and Jesus it gets on his nerves. It’s like she has no volume control, too, like, hello, did no one ever explain the indoor-outdoor voice definition? No need to freakin’ yell out to the entire class that the derivative of whatserthing is 43, no one cares anyway. It’s math. He was napping and her yelling woke him up.
So when the teacher’s not looking he leans forward and tugs sharply on her ponytail, making sure to snag the elastic as well to mess it up and make it sit awkward for the rest of the period.
Not only is he pissed at Finn for lying about his mom having and engorged prostate, but he’s pissed that he discovered the lie because he googled ‘engorged prostate’. You can’t unsee the shit you find on google images.
He follows his best friend to the auditorium and watches the five nerds prance around with his best friend, looking like they’re having the time of their life singing that old-ass Journey song. It’s disgusting... But...
Don’t tell anyone, but the first time he hears Berry sing, he’s kind of blown away. People in real life don’t sing like that, and their music doesn’t make his spine tingle and goosebumps erupt all over his skin.
“It was an act of God. No one that ugly should have to look at themselves in the mirror every day and see that so he took pity on her and poked out her eyes.”
He is holding a slushy in his hand, and she’s walking down the hallway, tapping that cane against the ground as she walks. He toys with the lid, getting his fingernail under the lip of it off so he can just toss it on her when she walks past. She’d never know it was him, it’d take her fucking ages to get the corn-syrup out of her moose sweater. Hey. Maybe it’d be an improvement, his inner Santana voice says bitchily.
But then, she glances his way. Well, doesn’t glance, because she can’t see shit, but her head twists and it feels as though she’s looking straight at him, and he realises that he was seriously considering slushying a blind chick. Who the fuck does that? He snaps the lid back on the drink and storms past her down the hall. And all he does is kick her damn cane out of the way of his ankle as he passes.
Later, in the locker room, he confronts Finn about the lie. “Chicks don’t have prostates, asshole. I googled it.” He spits, pushing his friend up against the equipment storage room door. Finn bats his hands away.
“Lay off, man.” Finn says. He punctuates his next words with a shove back: “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“You lied to me!”
“Well you’re being a dick.”
“You’re joining homo-explosion now? What the hell, you’re like, committing social suicide and for what? The chance to bang the blind chick? Quinn will give it up eventually, trust me, you ain’t got no reason to jump to the charity cases just yet.”
Finn stares at him, as though trying to figure out which part of Puck’s hissed little speech he should attack first. “It’s not like that, man.” He finally says and backs away. “I enjoy singing. Rachel is nice and all, but I’m not doing this to sleep with her.”
Puck runs a frustrated hand through his mohawk. Finn just doesn’t get it, the dumbass. “So sing in the shower, where no one can see you do it.”
“No. I’m not quitting glee.” Finn says firmly. “You’ll just need to get over it... and don’t pretend you don’t enjoy singing too. You could join too.”
“What the fuck ever, man. Your social suicide, don’t drag me into it.”
Quinn comes to him that weekend, crying about Finn and Glee and that blind girl and her jeans not fitting, and the only way he figures out how to shut her up is to ply her with his mom’s wine coolers. What happens after that is kind of a blur because she lets him finger her but gets freaked out and leaves when he tells her to return the favour.
The next day she’s coerced Santana and Brittany in joining homo explosion with her and although he doesn’t really know how it happens, (it’s probably because Glee’s black-hole power knows no bounds) but he joins the stupid club with a couple of the other footballers. Football and Beyonce are involved, and say what you will but that chick is hot. But maybe that’s just his excuse, the one he says out-loud. Maybe he does it because every time he looks at Quinn he feels this strange mix of guilt and burning want. Maybe he does it because Finn was right, and he actually does like singing. Maybe he does it because he knows that dudes who sing get more game than dudes who’s only achievement in life is owning their own pool-cleaning business in Ohio.
So there he is, listening to that Spanish teacher talk about scales and harmonies and accompaniments and he might as well just throw the slushy in his own face now.
“Her mom did it. That’s why she doesn’t have a mom, because she went crazy one day and mutilated her as a baby, now she’s in some facility up in Columbus and she’ll never see again.”
They’re both early to Glee one day, and don’t ask him why, but he decides to talk to her. Curiosity killed the cat or some shit. It’s one of McKinley’s great mysteries anyway: why is Berry blind? Everyone knows the story about Artie and the car crash, and that Becky chick’s deal is sort of obvious, but the rumour mill hasn’t cranked out anything credible about this particular conundrum. “So what happened?” He asks bluntly, unsnapping the latches on his guitar case to pull the instrument out. He wants to use it in a performance today and he decides to tune it before the others get here, save him the trouble of doing it later.
“What happened when? You’ll need to be more specific.” Rachel says from her seat in the front row. Her cane is folded up and on the chair beside her.
“Were you born blind, was there an accident, what?”
She turns her head sharply and says primly: “It’s personal. I’d rather not say.”
“Fine. Whatever.” He plucks his E string and twists the tuning peg a little until it sounds right then moves onto the A string.
“The E is still a little flat.” She interjects as he begins to pluck at the new string.
“How can you tell?” He frowns, and plucks the E string again. “It sounds fine to me.”
“I have perfect pitch.” Rachel says firmly, and angles her head so her ear is facing the guitar. It’s like watching a dog perk up when you blow a whistle. “It’s not very far off, just a little more.”
He twists the tuning peg another fraction tighter. “There?”
“Yes. That’s right.” She smiles and looks accomplished.
He moves back to the A string, plucking at it and slowly tightening the peg until she nods gently to signal it’s right. “Is that like a Daredevil thing?”
“I’m sorry.” She looks blank. “I don’t understand the reference.”
“He’s this blind super hero, but all his other senses are like, super awesome to compensate for it, and he kicks ass and takes names. They made a movie with Ben Affleck.”
“I only watch musicals.” She shrugs. “And while I suppose its a possibility that my hearing is superior to yours because of my ocular deficiency, I don’t see how it’s particularly beneficial, and I certainly can’t use it to capture the criminal element. I can’t even tell who keeps pulling my hair in math.”
He hopes she can’t hear how hollow his laugh is, as luckily the rest of the Glee club start filing into the choir room, Finn and Quinn walking in together hand-in-hand behind Mercedes and the gay kid.
Quinn spares a very brief glance in his direction, before narrowing her eyes at Rachel and pulling Finn to the chairs furthest away from where the brunette is sitting. Rachel, of course, sees none of this and instead stays in her chair impatiently tapping her toes against the vinyl flooring as Mr Schuester is now late.
Puck leans back in his chair and watches them all. Quinn had cornered him the other day, and in a fit of frustration had started bitching about the private singing lessons Rachel and Finn took together with Mr Schuester cutting into her make-out time with her boyfriend, and Puck could tell that her jealousy was starting to ramp up again. This time Puck plans on staying right away from that, because he still feels weirdly guilty about the last time and honestly, Puck doesn’t really know what she’s so worried about-- Finn might be dumb as a post, but he isn’t a cheater, and Berry hasn’t exactly got a rep for being a man-eater or anything. Quite the opposite, really, despite how short her skirts can be.
Mostly he doesn’t want to be used again, and he knows that’s what it was. She wanted to forget for a bit, and sure he was good at that, but there is no way it wont end badly if it happens again.
He sees Rachel at Temple sometimes, sitting between her dads. It’s the only time he’s ever seen her anywhere without that stupid cane, but that’s because her fathers are always holding her hands. They talk quietly amongst themselves and when the service is over and the congregation gathers in the community hall for refreshments they usually don’t stay for very long. Her black Dad gets the Rabbi’s attention at one point and her other father steps away to refill his coffee, leaving her alone in a chair against the wall.
He watches as one of the older ladies approaches her and has what looks like an extremely cheerful conversation for a few minutes before moving onto grab some apple tea cake from the food table.
For a moment, he considers going over and sitting beside her, because he’s bored, and she’s clearly alone-- why he cares that she’s alone, he has no freakin’ idea. It’s just that now that they’re both in Glee they kind of have something in common, even if she’s completely obsessed with it and he’s still not entirely sure why he joined in the first place. Sure, maybe he finds it kind of fun, and he likes being around people who actually enjoy singing and aren’t afraid to hide it.
But her Dads are back at her side within the minute, and soon enough they’re saying their goodbyes and taking their daughter home.
Have you ever tried choreographing a routine with a blind chick, a dude in a wheelchair and Finn? It’s a nightmare. He doesn’t know why Schue bothers trying to up the fancy level--there was some speech about ‘vibrant performances’ and ‘competitive choreography’ that Puck tuned out of. But here they are in the auditorium and the Glee instructor is demonstrating with Brittany the safest way to do a dip without throwing out your back or dropping your partner on the ground. Apparently their performance of Take Me Out needs that particular maneuver to really impress the judges at Sectionals.
Quinn’s attitude towards him has been icy cold this week (which suits him just fine) and is sticking to Finn like glue. Brittany is demonstrating with Schue and Santana is looking to bang Matt so is taking any excuse to get her hands all over him. The Asians partner off and Mercedes and Kurt have their little fag-hag thing going which leaves him with a very nervous looking Berry.
“Mr Schuester, I’m not comfortable doing this.” She says, hands folded in front of her. “Surely Artie and I could partner up during this song, and Brittany and Noah can work together instead.”
“No that won’t really work. Don’t worry Rachel, this is going to look amazing.” The choir teacher says with a dismissive wave. He has a stupid giddy smile on his face like he’s had the best idea since sliced bread or some shit. Puck thinks that this is gonna be a train-wreck and wishes he had his phone on him so he could film when Finn inevitably tripping up and dropping Quinn and the epic tantrum she’ll throw just after. He’d put that shit on YouTube-- serves Quinn right for being a total bitch to him just because she feels guilty or jealous some shit about what they did in his room that night.
“I’m sure it will, Mr Schuester, but...”
Schue shakes his head and gestures for the band to start playing the music at half-time so they can get a feel for the movement in time to the beat. “Just give it a try, Rachel.”
Puck reaches out and grabs her shoulder, and she jumps perceptively beneath his palm. “It’s me.” He says to her so she can hear. “I won’t drop you or anything. I’m not an asshole.”
Rachel doesn’t really relax at all, but she does turn to face him and nods dejectedly. “Teach me what to do.” She says and holds out her hands for him to take.
He places her hand on his shoulder and lets his own drift to her waist. He can feel her muscles tight beneath her argyle vest and even between the layers of fabric he can tell she’s quite fit. He wonders what she does for exercise. “My mom made me take dance lessons before my Bar Mitzvah.” He says casually, taking her other hand and leading her into a very slow back and forth that somewhat resembles a foxtrot. She moves with sudden jerks, resisting his lead. When he steps forward, she only reluctantly steps back when their pelvises bump together, and then he has to tug her with a little more force than necessary so she stumbles back into their original position.
“Geeze, Berry.” He says with a huff at her rigidity. “Relax, already.”
“Surely you understand why this is disconcerting for me.” She says snappishly, her cheeks flushing a deep red. He wonders if she knows she’s blushing, or is that something you only notice if you can see yourself doing it. Either way, he can read her face like a book: She isn’t in control and so she wants to bail.
“I already said I won’t drop you, what else do I need to do to get you to trust me on that?” He asks, leaning close so that the others dancing around them, dipping and swaying, can’t hear their conversation.
She frowns at him and her lips purse into a dangerously thin line. Even her nostrils flare a little. “I don’t know why I shouldn’t trust the person who kicks my cane when I’m walking down the hall and who threw gum in my hair last year. Maybe you can help me figure it out.”
He lets out a groan. Yeah. She’s blind. They all know. “That’s in the past, Berry. We’re in the now, now, and I won’t drop you and you need to loosen up.”
“I am loose.” She says, and he feels a muscle in her neck twitch. He laughs because shit, he’s never felt muscles this tense in his life, and yet she thinks that if she just says it it’ll be true. “I just keep hearing everyone moving around us, and when I step back I worry I’m going to walk into someone. Or that someone will walk into me.”
“That’s my job, to make sure we don’t. That’s why it’s called ‘taking the lead’.”
“I know that, but knowing that and being able to do it are two separate things.”
“It’s because you don’t trust me.”
“No. I don’t.” She lets go of his hand and steps back. “I can’t do this.”
He glances over at Mr Schuester, who has his hands full making sure Finn doesn’t drop Quinn on her head-- really, Rachel is in much better hands with him and here she is, freaking out about it. “Berry.” He says, frustration evident in his voice. “Chill out.”
“No. This is ridiculous, I want to stop. No one expected Stevie Wonder to dance about, they just appreciated his beautiful music.” She turns and takes a few tentative steps towards the piano where Brad is tinkling away. It’s where she left her cane when they spread out across the stage. She has her hands stretched out in front of her a little as she walks, to warn her of any wayward dancers. Puck follows behind her, exasperated, watching as she narrowly avoids Mercedes dipping Kurt to her left. She smooths her hand across the side of the piano, and reaches out across the top of the grand, tapping gently around until her pinky nudges the cane. She snatches it up and flips it open, and before anyone has the chance to stop her, she’s marching backstage and out of the auditorium.
“You know what’s supposed to make you blind? Touching yourself. You know... there. I bet that’s what happened. It’s not like she’s got other options or anything.”
Puck is in his bedroom, staring at the ceiling at the band posters and magazine spreads he’d stuck up there during the summer. Kim Kardashian is the shit. He closes his eyes. He can hear his sister in her room down the hall, and the Jonas brothers song she’s listening to on his old CD player. He hears the clink of glass knocking against metal, probably his mother downstairs doing the washing up. The space heater in the corner of his room is humming, and he can feel the way the warmth is distributed around the room by the glowing red elements.
He sits up and swings his legs around and off the bed but keeps his eyes closed. The carpet is rough against his toes, and he can feel something just beside his left foot. Maybe one of the shoes he discarded earlier? He stands and walks towards the door, eyes still closed. It’s only about three steps away. He stretches his hand out so that he can feel the door before he hits it. One, two, three, but he still hasn’t felt the door with his hand. He takes a fourth and runs into the closed door, though not hard enough to hurt. Maybe he doesn’t know his room as well as he thinks.
He ghosts his hand out and grasps the doorknob, then reaches with the other to grab the edge of the door at about the level of his face so that he can open it and not brain himself as he does it.
The light changes. It’s darker out here than in his room, he can feel it through his eyelids. The light in the hallway must be switched off, but the sound of the Jonas Brothers is louder now, no longer muffled by the door. It echos down the hallway, and when he breathes in deep he can smell that his mother has lit up a cigarette while she watches The Real Housewives of Atlanta and does the dishes. It’s probably sitting in the ashtray above the sink on the window sill.
He turns and walks towards the bathroom, trailing his hand along the wall so that he knows how far to walk. He passes the door to his mother’s room, fingers noting the ridge of the door frame, the inset door, and then the other side of the door frame about a step away. The Jonas Brothers is loudest now, as he passes his sister’s room on the right side of the hall. He can smell nail polish. So much for doing her English homework.
Then there is a sharp hard pain in his shin, and a crash, and his eyes snap open as he sees that stupid ugly umbrella stand with the sharp edges his mother found at some charity store last year in the hallway. He’d forgotten it was there. He looks down at his shin, there is an angry red line and a bead or two of blood there. Shit.
He stalks straight down the hallway and slams the bathroom door behind him before his mom and sister can check what caused the crash. He snatches a wad of toilet paper and holds it against his shin where it soaks up the blood. It’s red against his palm and stings like a mother fucker.
“Hey Berry.” He calls out across the hall as she arrives at her locker. It has an adhesive braille marker stuck to the metal and unlike the rest of the students she has a regular padlock with a key instead of a combination lock. It’s much easier to pick-- he used to break into it sometimes when she was in class and shift her books around. Dick move, he knows. He hasn’t done it in like, three months.
“Good morning, Noah.” She says primly, resting her cane between her hip and her pink roller suitcase as she inserts her key into the padlock. Again, he wonders if she realises how easy she is to read, her skin flushes red and he knows that she’s embarrassed about how she reacted in Glee yesterday. He wishes that she could see him, that she could just read his face and see his apology written in the lines of his mouth like everybody else can.
“Morning.” He says back, resting against the block of lockers to her side. “I’m sorry you got freaked out yesterday.” He says quickly, wanting to get the stupid thing out of his way. These feelings of guilt and second-hand embarrassment have been eating away at him, and he wants to clear the air or some shit. “And I’m sorry I’ve been a dick to you before, kicking your cane and shit.”
All this time she has been putting things in her locker, braille-labelled textbooks, a clunky looking net book, her lunch tote. The inside of her locker is rather bare, most girls have a mirror and a calendar, and usually a framed picture of Justin Beiber or whatever douche bag actor they’re in love with this week (Quinn has a picture of Jesus in hers) but hers has nothing. She doesn’t stop putting her things away, and she doesn’t turn to face him, but she does say: “Apology accepted.”
“Are we good, now?” He asks, watching her fingers skim the edges of her textbooks until she finds the right one. It’s a novel they’re studying in English, but she has the braille edition. His copy has a cover with a stupid weird abstract tree on the cover, hers is more like a photocopied binder. The only reason he knows it’s the same book is that it has ‘The Garden of Forking Paths - Jorge Luis Borges’ written in a very basic font on the front cover. The rest is just bumpy dots.
“We’re fine, Noah.” She says.
“See you in Glee this afternoon?” He asks and she shuts her locker and clicks the padlock tight again. The key to the lock is slipped into a pocket hidden in the folds of her polka-dot dress.
“I’ll be there.” She grips her cane and her pink trolley case and without so much as a goodbye, she’s off down the hall once more.
“And she looked in the mirror and said three times: Bloody Mary... Bloody Mary... Bloody Mary. They could hear her say it through the door. Then there was a scream, and Bloody Mary had plucked out her eyes... You know. Metaphorically or whatever.”
“Are you kidding me?” Quinn has pulled him aside after football practice one afternoon. They’re in the equipment shed and he can’t get past how it smells like Tanaka’s sweaty feet in here.
“What the fuck, Quinn?” He says grumpily. He just had an awful training session, he just ran something like 40 laps and all he wants is a hot shower, something from Burger King and a few hours wasting time playing Mario Kart before crawling into bed, but this blonde, hormonal teenage girl is getting in his way. She hasn’t turned on the lights, but he can tell that her face is twisted into that ugly expression that girls faces get when they’re being unreasonable bitches. It’s a look he sees on his mom all the time.
“What is it with you boys and... her?”
“What?” He hates vague questions with a passion.
“Rachel Berry. I saw you at her locker yesterday, what are you doing with her?”
Puck stares at her through the darkness. He will never ever understand girls. This one especially. First she ignores him. Then she’s all over him and cheating on her boyfriend with him, and then ignoring him again. Now she’s getting possessive of him? Fuck that.
“How the hell is it your business?” He says hatefully. He usually tries to keep his anger in check, but she has been treating him like shit for weeks. It’s taking more control than he likes not to lash out physically. “You made it pretty clear I wasn’t allowed to talk to you, let alone--”
She starts yapping angrily over the top of him. “You know how I feel about her and yet you go after her anyway. She is stealing my life and she’s getting away with it because she’s basically Helen Keller and can play the sympathy card and everyone is falling for it.”
“You are such a self-centered bitch, you know that? The world does not revolve around you.”
“Oh my gosh that is not even what I said.”
“So you expect me to just stand and wait on the sidelines until Finn finds that I finger-fucked you and breaks it off. I’m not the damn substitute teacher, Quinn, and who I spend my time with is none of your damn business.”
“I know what you’re doing. You’re doing this to make me jealous.”
Puck runs a hand across his mohawk, frustrated with just how stupid this girl is, and also at himself for letting himself get dragged into a storage shed by a 110 pound girl when he knew that this was the sort of shit she’d pull. “I’m not. I’m not doing anything to get back at you.”
“Then what are you doing hanging out with man-hands? Why string her along, or is this some sick thing where you seduce disabled kids now? I guess its your lucky day: Becky is pretty easy now that Coach Sylvester has let her on the squad.”
“Fuck you, Quinn. Oh wait. I basically already did.” He pushes her away from the door she’d been blocking and escapes the stinky equipment shed as quickly as he can. He quickly catches up with Azimo and Mike loudly enough so that Quinn can hear from behind the door. She won’t risk coming out now that there are witnesses around to start rumours and gossip, and Puck makes his escape. Sure, the chick is hot, but she’s got issues and he is so sick of the small-town high school drama that she thrives on to make her life feel important and meaningful.
But he can’t help but acknowledge that she hit a nerve, bringing up Rachel like that. He tries not to think about what that means.
It’s a few weeks later, when Sectionals is looming at the end of the month, that Puck decides that everyone involved in Glee needs to like, get a life, or get laid or something, because Jesus H, it’s fucking show choir not the end of the world as we know it.
Mr Schue is fretting over their performances after an impromptu “Scrimmage” he set up with the choirs they’d be competing against. The group were loud, and proud, and honestly a lot more impressive than everyone gave them credit for, and so Schue was on the prowl, looking for ways to get an edge on the competition.
Even Puck could admit that they’d surprised him. He’d heard things about those Jane Addams Academy girls and their vocal talents, but he’d always assumed that was a euphemism, not a statement of actual fact. They were juvie girls. But they’d certainly been impressive up there on stage, singing that Beyonce song.
“I’ve decided at Sectionals this year we’ll be doing the title song from Hair, the classic musical!” The Spanish teacher says with a cheerful grin.
“Wait-- if we’re going to do a song about hair, shouldn’t we, you know, have more hair?” Finn asks awkwardly, and Mr Schuester grins, like he was just waiting for someone to ask that.
And clearly he was, because he produces from behind his back a duffel bag filled to the brim with wigs, and begins to hand them out to everyone, exclaiming at how cheap he’d found them at a costume shop down on Wellington Av.
Despite the enthusiasm of their leader’s announcement and the generally noisy reaction he gets from the group, who’re now modelling the wigs for each other, no one misses the very loud noise of discontent that Rachel makes-- sort of like a choking noise.
“Are you serious?” She asks, a look of disgust written plainly across her face. She is holding her wig gingerly away from her, pinched between forefinger and thumb.
Everyone looks suitably confused at her reaction. Surely the Broadway lover would be all over the addition of a musical song for their competition repertoire. Mr Schue seems to decide that he misheard her and says: “Pardon, Rachel?”
She doesn’t falter. “Are you seriously changing our song-selection for Sectionals because of that performance we witnessed yesterday?”
“No!” Schue sputters and waves her off, “I think that it’s time we mix thing up a little to give ourselves the competitive edge!”
Rachel doesn’t look convinced. Instead, she turns to Tina who is sitting next to her, in the seat between her and Finn and Quinn. “Finn, could you please describe to me the performance you watched yesterday? Clearly I must have missed a vital element of their performance. Being blind often means I miss out on important details which most people take for granted.”
“Huh?”
“Were they good dancers? It must’ve been very intricately choreographed.” She presses on, then twists a little to get clarification from other members of the group, because even she knows that interrogating Finn about dance steps probably is a little silly. “Mike? Santana?”
“It wasn’t that complicated.” Mike pipes up.
Rachel nods, like she already knew this, but doesn’t let Mr Schue take back control of the conversation just yet. “Alright, so if it wasn’t the dancing, surely they were all extremely attractive girls. Perhaps their costuming was particularly scanty? Kurt, what did you think about their outfits? Puck? Were they attractive?”
Puck knows not to answer that question because there is no way it’s not a trap. Instead, he kicks the back of Kurt’s chair to force him to answer instead. Kurt looks taken aback, both at Rachel for the sudden intense questioning and at Puck for the violence against his seat and glances about the room for support. “Um...”
“You are always commenting on the things I wear, so I assume that you consider yourself fairly knowledgeable on the topic.” Rachel says lightly.
“Well, they weren’t the classiest outfits I’ve seen a show choir wear,” Kurt says slowly, “But honestly I was mostly distracted by their hair.”
“What did they do?”
“Lots of flipping it around everywhere.” Rachel nods smugly, with a strange glint in her eye, as though this was what she was waiting for.
“Mr Schuester,” She says calmly. “You were tricked. They weren’t very good vocally and they’re probably very aware that their strengths do not lie in their choral talents, but in their other assets, and I don’t wish to make a hasty accusation, but this is a school for delinquent girls, if there is anything they can do well, it is distract and seduce in order to pull your attention from the crimes they are committing, which in this case was one against my ears. Their lead singer was flat for a full verse!”
Rachel finishes with a theatrical shudder that wracks her whole frame, and the rest of the club simply stares, until Mr Schuester finally breaks the silence with one final attempt to save his assignment:
“But... It’s a Broadway classic!”
Rachel smiles back at him. “You are very right, it is a Broadway classic and a fantastic song and musical, but it is not right for us and I believe that it would be best if we focus our energy on the wonderful numbers we’re currently working on instead of introducing completely new material to the group so close to the competition.”
And so that’s how they get out of wearing those nasty-ass wigs.
They go on a field trip on a Saturday to the hall where Sectionals is going to be held. Except it’s not really a real field trip where they go on school time. Mr Schue just told everyone to head to the venue on Saturday and gave them a time to meet and stressed that everyone be as punctual as possible. A few months back, Puck would’ve complained about giving up his Saturday for this shit-- Saturdays are reserved for sleeping in til 2 in the afternoon and COD tournaments. But he knows they need to practice their routine a few times on this unfamiliar stage, and Artie needs to get a feel for the disabled access entrances to the theatre. So he set his alarm and drove two towns over to the venue. He’s finishing his morning slushy as he wanders around from the car-park at the side of the building, just in time to see Artie’s mum finish dropping off Tina, Artie and Rachel at the curb. They must’ve carpooled.
“P-puck!” Tina calls out to him from behind Artie’s chair and Puck knows that it’s just easier to come when hollered at, than to ignore them and mosey his way up to their agreed-upon meeting area.
“Yo.” He says, fist-bumping his bro Artie in greeting. “‘Sup?”
“Can you take Rachel in?” Artie asks, nodding to the brunette girl standing primly behind them, clutching her bright pink tote bag over one shoulder while holding her white-tipped cane in her other hand. “Tina needs to help me find the ramp and Rachel’s never been here before.”
Puck shrugs. “Sure, whatever.”
“Thank you, I do appreciate it.” Rachel says with a smile, and Tina and Artie head off in the opposite direction.
He takes her hand and guides it to his elbow where she takes a firm hold. She holds her cane straight and raised up from the ground in her other hand. “What do you need me to tell you?” He asks uncertainly.
“When we’re approaching stairs, if there is anything I should duck to avoid.”
“Uh huh.” He says, and begins walking towards the main entrance. Her grip tightens a little as he is walking at quite a brisk pace, mostly because they’re already a bit late, and Schue had made such a big deal about everyone being on time, and sticking together, and team unity, and while he’s been here before, he doesn’t want to risk missing up on meeting the group. Plus, he’s chaperoning the group’s main soloist, it’s a responsibility or some shit.
“Noah.” Rachel says, sounding rather strained. “Can you slow down a little?” And Puck realises that while her legs may be awesome to look at, they are pretty stumpy. Or rather, she’s pretty stumpy, and yeah, he probably was walking a bit on the fast side.
“Sorry.” He reels it back in and tries to match his steps to hers. She loosens her grip a little, but it’s still firm enough for him to be hyper-aware of it. “We have some steps coming up.” He says.
“Up or down?”
“Up.”
He slows down a little as they hit the stairs, and lets her dictate the pace they take them. “So how come you don’t have a guide dog?” He asks as step up one, two, three, four, and then the last step before it levels out once more. “Don’t they help blind people get around without help?”
“Yes they do.” She nods. “In the sense that they are trained to warn me of environmental features I can’t navigate myself, but they don’t come with on-board GPS, I’d still need to know the route for one to be useful.”
“So why don’t you use one at school?”
“Several reasons. It’s a familiar setting already, and consistent, each floor of the school has the same layout, bathrooms at the same position on every floor--”
“Steps up, soon.” He interrupts, and she nods.
“Then there is the fact that dogs are not so effective when surrounded by crowds of people, which is inevitable at a school.”
“They get distracted.” He says, catching on. He’d never had a dog as a pet, but he’d played with his neighbours dog a lot when he was younger. Dogs were fun, sure, but lost interest in stuff pretty quickly sometimes.
“No, not really. They’re highly trained to focus on their task. The issue lies with the fact that most people don’t realise that they are not pets to be fawned over, too many people at school would try and pet it, or encourage its attention elsewhere.”
“Oh.” They reach the stairs and take them without incident. Rachel adjusts her grip on his elbow a little, flexing and twitching her fingers around the muscles there.
“Also, I’m allergic to dogs.” She says flippantly.
He chuckles. “Bummer.”
“Yeah. It sucks.”
He asks his mom a few nights later, if she knows why Rachel is blind. She’s a nurse, but she works in that nursing home near Lincoln Park, and she has done since before he was born, so she wouldn’t know from first-hand knowledge or anything, but if there is one thing his mother is, it’s a gossip.
“Rachel Berry, the one with the two dads?” She asks, cigarette dangling from one hand while she prods their TV dinner with a fork in her other hand.
“Yeah, that’s her. She’s my age. You’ve seen her at temple.”
She shovels a pile of mashed potato onto her fork and scrunches her face up in consideration. “I remember when they adopted her, I was 6 months along with you, they brought her along to temple to show her off. She was this little runty thing, a bit sickly and she was always crying and interrupting Rabbi Greenberg so one of them was always taking her outside to calm her down.”
She draws on the cigarette a little, and gestures to him. “Then you were born. I was in hospital for about a week, and I think she got sick or something, they took her to some fancy kids hospital in Columbus.”
“How was she sick?” He hacks of a bit of his own chicken fillet and shovels it into his mouth.
“I don’t remember.” She snaps, flicking ash off the end of the cigarette into the ashtray beside her. “I had other things on my mind, you were a fucking nightmare child, crying all the time, I never got any sleep, I wasn’t thinking about other people’s babies. Why do you care anyway? You should leave that poor girl alone.”
He considers playing the offended card at her tone, but decides he can’t be bothered. His ma knows him and the shit he pulls, and honestly it’s not worth the effort to fight back sometimes... “She’s in glee club.” He says.
“That choir thing?”
“Yeah. She has a really good voice.”
She narrowed her eyes at him again. He’d told her about Glee before this, but he wasn’t completely sure she believed him. In fact, he was like 90% sure that she thought it was just him making up shit so that he could get out of picking his sister up from school twice a week. Which sure, was the sort of shit he pulled, but not this time. “If I find out you’ve done anything to that girl, so help me, I will...”
He tunes her out, and focuses back on Sister Wives and the nasty-ass dinner they’re eating. He’s heard this shit before, he could probably recite it himself.
“She has AIDS. That makes you blind. Doesn’t it?”
It was always going to happen. Secrets don’t stay secrets in Lima, least of all at McKinley High. He knows the cat is out of the bag-- that Quinn blabbed to someone, who told someone else, until finally Finn found out, when Finn storms straight into the choir room and sucker-punches him right in the jaw.
One of the girls screams in surprise, and the punch dazes him for long enough for Finn to get him twice more, once high up on the cheek, and then just after he finally gets it together enough to bring his hands up to protect his face, Finn hits him hard in the solar plexus before Mr Schuester, Matt and Mike finally pull Finn and his pummelling fists off him.
It all comes out then, Finn demands the truth, and though Puck stays stonily silent behind the wall of Gleeks standing in between him and his best friend, the look on Finn’s face makes him feel like the worst sort of dirt. Quinn starts crying, and it’s all a big fucking mess.
Everything is always such a fucking mess, with him, isn’t it.
The last rehearsal before sectionals, he stays in the choir room long after everyone else leaves, plugs his ipod into the stereo system and pulls out his guitar to figure out the chords of this song that’s been stuck in his head. Don’t ask him why, but he doesn’t really want to go home just yet, and this song has been bugging him for so long, if he just figures it out maybe the damn ear-worm will leave and he can get back to listening to more upbeat music and being generally less depressed.
But as he plays, all he thinks about is that he fucked everything up, and maybe he deserves to be a little depressed. Finn still isn’t speaking to him, and Quinn still looks like she’s on the edge of tears every time someone talks to her. By all rights their performance tomorrow will probably be a train wreck, with half the choir not speaking to the other half, but whatever. Mercedes still sounds kick-ass doing that song from Dreamgirls, and their performance of Don’t Stop Believing doesn’t rely on Finn having to have chemistry on stage with anyone other than Rachel, so they’ll still be fine with that.
He just wishes that none of this had happened. He didn’t like being that guy, the one that fucked over his best friend. Things had been starting to actually go well, since he joined Glee he and Finn had gotten closer, and Finn had been right all those months ago. He did like to sing, and fuck him but he even liked singing with these losers.
Puck plucks away at the strings of his guitar, picking out chords and matching them to the song, riffing a little in the bridge, plucking the strings quickly until a the melody resonates out. He barely hears the door open, but stops playing when he sees Rachel shuffle her way over to the piano.
“Don’t stop because of me.” She says. “It sounded beautiful, I shouldn't have interrupted.”
“Nah.” He shrugs. “I should be going home anyway.”
“What is this song?” She asks, talking over the stern piano chords that fill the otherwise empty choir room.
He chuckles a little, “Colorblind, by The Counting Crows.” He says, slipping his guitar back into its case. “I heard it in a movie once and thought maybe I could learn to play it on my guitar.”
“Which movie?”
“You wouldn’t know it.”
“I might!”
“Cruel Intentions.” He says evenly, and then laughs a little when she frowns a bit, clearly not recognising it. ”It isn’t a musical.”
“You remembered!”
“Yeah.” The song finishes, and begins again. He had it on repeat to memorise it quicker.
He closes the space between them and takes Rachel’s hand gently. She doesn’t start or jump away this time, though he’d forgotten to warn her he was coming. “Can I have this dance?” He asks quietly.
She nods. “Yes.” and holds her other hand out for him to take. He places it on his shoulder and settles his free hand lightly on her waist. He moves slower this time, the music necessitates it, and also he knows it makes her more comfortable.
“The last time I danced I was four and standing on my daddy’s shoes.” She says quietly. “I remember it felt like I was flying.”
“Well you can stand on my feet if you want,” He offers, pulling her towards him in a gentle spin. “You weigh, what, 100 pounds? I bench press more than that at the gym.”
Pull me out from inside, Adam Duritz croons to them from the stereo. I am ready, I am ready, I am fine.
“Can I ask you something?” He says quietly, as they sway gently from side to side.
“Sure.” She says and turns her head to face him more directly. Standing this close to her it’s all the more disorientating that her eyes are out of focus-- and yet he’s never had the chance to really see what a deep shade of brown they are. They’re really very pretty.
“Why keep it a secret?”
“Why keep what a secret?” Small wrinkles form on her forehead, and he has to admit that the question is a bit left of centre. He lifts their clasped hands and pushes gently at her hips, twirling her around once before catching her again, sweeping them gently away from the piano they’d drifted closer to.
“How you got this way. You know. Blind.”
“What does it matter to anyone?” She asks in return. He considers it for a moment. He knows he mostly wants to know out of his desire to sate his curiosity. The united powers of the gossip mill of McKinley, his Temple, and Lima in general haven’t been able to give him a solid, reliable answer, and he can’t for the life of him think why the source herself is so tight-lipped on the issue.
“It doesn’t...” He admits begrudgingly, after a moment, and shrugs.“And if you want it a secret, that’s fine, I ‘spose... I just don’t know why it has to be.”
“There’s no reason why everyone has to know, except to sate their curiosity. It isn’t something anyone could’ve prevented, it isn’t contagious, and it isn’t something that can be cured. I came to terms with that a few years ago, and I don’t want people to find out and pity me, or treat me any differently.”
“You do know that people still talk about it though, right? They say some pretty awful shit.”
“Oh, what, like ‘Rachel Berry is blind because god is punishing her dads for being sinful, faggot abominations’? Because that is so believable.” She says flippantly, and waves the hand at his shoulder dismissively.
Puck laughs, then says in a mock serious tone: “This is Ohio, Rachel. They have a direct line to God, here.”
She laughs as well, then shrugs. “The rumours will be there whether or not we tell everyone the truth. My family is private by nature, my fathers keep it that way for a reason. What matters to me is that they love me, and that I love them, and I would not be here if it weren’t for them and their love, and whether or not I’m blind, I know it doesn’t change that at all. The rumor-mongers in our community can pry all they like, but until they prove that they care about me and my family for more than simply new fodder for the fire, then I see no reason why I should tell anyone.”
“I suppose I get that.” He says, finally. “I wouldn’t tell anyone, you know.”
He lowers her into a dip, and pulls her back up to his chest
“That’s nice to know.” She says with a wan smile. “Maybe one day I’ll tell you.”
He smiles back, then tugs gently on her pony-tail. The song ends on a note that resonates throughout the room. I am ready, I am fine. “Come on.” He says. “I’ll drive you home. Big day tomorrow. ”
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