Chapter Text
If Quinn Fabray had thought her plan through better, she wouldn't have to carry such heavy bags, because they wouldn't be filled with so many useless dresses.
It was the thought that looped in her head as she climbed the steps of Brittany Residence Hall, arms hooked with luggage, muscles still holding up thanks to years of cheerleading. Her mother's Volvo should have been long gone by now. She'd watched it ease into traffic on Third Avenue from the front steps, Judy's hand waving out the window, her eyes tight at the corners the way they'd been all summer. Quinn had not let her help with the bags. She kissed her cheek, said I'll call when I'm settled, and turned toward the building before her mother could say anything that would make the moment more bittersweet than it needed to be.
Also, NYU Quinn didn't need help with her bags.
She exhaled, adjusted her grip, and kept climbing.
Her room was on the fourth floor. Small, bright white, and smelling faintly of cleaning products and stale air, all things which she'd expected. She dropped her suitcases by the wall and stood there for a moment, hands tucked into the back pockets of her jeans — her only pair, because apparently skinny jeans had never met the Fabray standard of modesty, a rule that never made much sense considering they covered more than her skirts ever did.
She took in the bare mattress, the empty desk, the window that looked directly into the building next door.
At least I got a single, she thought, and sat cross-legged on the floor beside the first suitcase.
The single had been her mother's idea, actually. Judy had upgraded it without asking, sliding the extra cost into Quinn's housing payment in what Quinn suspected was an attempt to say sorry for the poor parenting job she did in most years of Quinn's life. It was the particular language of a woman who had spent years expressing love in the wrong way, and was on the journey to discover the right one.
Rummaging through the items of her cream colored suitcase, she started thinking about her plans.
Quinn wasn't new to makeovers. Her past ones had been impulsive, sure, but she'd never considered that a flaw, impulse had its charm. She had Santana to partially thank for that, actually, since she really believed she was where she was right now because of one of the rare moments where her notoriously mean best friend decided to show true affection.
It had started in this same city, in a midtown hotel room hours before Cheerleading Nationals. Quinn had been crying about feeling unworthy of love (as most girls in high school do), and Santana had been beside her, telling her to straight up get over it because that was not the time nor place and then whispered I know how to make you feel better like a little devil on her shoulder. What followed was Britt handing her a pair of scissors and ten minutes in the bathroom with zero regard for consequences, and the high Quinn had walked away with was something she'd been chasing ever since.
She was searching for that same high when she impulsively dyed her hair — and half of her bedding — pink, started listening to Hole, got a Ryan Seacrest ironic tattoo and lit things on fire with cigarettes in the first weeks of her senior year.
The thing was that this had not been an impulse.
Sure, people who knew the preppy, popular headcheerleader, president of the celibacy club, who got pregnant at 16 and had a different boyfriend every semester might think this was out of the blue.
But this had started, embarrassingly, with a film elective she'd enrolled in during the first week of senior year as another act of rebellion, picking it instead of going for AP Bio or something like that. She'd expected to sit in the back, contribute when needed, and collect an easy A, as good grades came naturally to her. What she hadn't expected was to find herself walking out of class three weeks in with a notebook full of shot compositions and a list of films she'd never heard of and a feeling like a door she didn't know was closed had come open an inch.
So she watched everything on the AFI list. She discovered a fascination for 90s movies that revolved around women, those sparking her interest towards feminism and women in general more than Hole ever did — no offense to Courtney Love. So her focus went there, and before she knew it, Quinn was reading articles about Go Fish's impact on society upon its release and about the rise of Lesbian Chic of the 90s.
It flipped her life — and worldview — upside down. Certain things started making more sense the deeper she went into her rabbit hole of lesbian articles, like why she never really felt anything when kissing any of her boyfriends, and why she stared at girls' legs for too long during class.
Every media she consumed on the matter gave way to a feeling deep in her chest and somewhere down between her legs sometimes — like when she saw Jennifer's Body and her breath got really heavy during Jennifer and Needy's kiss.
And all of that taught her so much more about herself, and made her feel so much more than catching Santana and Britt hooking up in the Cheerios locker room ever did.
So she started writing things down; not journaling because that was for more repressed people, just thoughts like the ones previously mentioned, and images she didn't want to lose. Like the expression on her mother's face when she thought no one was watching. The way people looked at each other across the room at house parties, half-second before they decided to look away. The way girls' hands fit so well together.
Santana had made fun of her for the notebook exactly once, and Quinn had looked at her with her ice queen, stoic expression that often scared boys in a second, and that worked on Santana just as well (most of the time).
All of those things made her courageous enough about this newfound passion for Film and Audiovisual for her to fill out some forms and write essays, and finally send out her NYU application, with strong aspirations to major in Film.
When her early admission came in the mail, she celebrated by getting another haircut. Trimming just enough for more layers to hit her jaw in a way she knew made her more attractive, and that night she watched queer films in her room with the volume low and felt something in her chest that she was no longer scared to embrace.
But I'm a Cheerleader wrecked her completely. She watched it three times in a week, alone in her room with her laptop balanced on her stomach, knowing it would become one of her favorite movies since her first time watching it, when she got about forty minutes in before she had to pause it and just lie there looking at her ceiling for a while. There was something about watching Megan figure it out and say I'm a homosexual out loud for the first time, that just hit her right where it needed to.
After all, she was a cheerleader, and turns out she was a homosexual too.
The fourth time she watched it, her phone rang.
She picked up because it was Santana and ignoring Santana's calls had a known cost. There was a beat of silence on the other end, and then: Quinn. I've been very supportive of this weird journey you've been going through lately. Saintly, even. But I'm done. I gots to know what is actually going on with you.
Quinn looked at her laptop screen. Movie on pause, Straight Rupaul in mid-sentence.
How did you even know I was watching it again?
I didn't, Santana said. I was talking about your general situation. But now I know you were watching something, so what was it?
It wasn't a question, really. But Quinn had told her. Not everything, but enough, not just because she knew Santana would relate to some of it, but because sometimes she could take things seriously, this being one of them. Santana had listened, but there was no ceremony to it. She'd just said Okay, fucking finally you say it out loud and I can't believe I made you gay by osmosis, which made both of them burst out laughing, and then, approximately three days later, sent Quinn a list of films she hadn't seen yet with no accompanying message.
That was the other thing Quinn would never tell her: it was the list that had done it, more than anything. Not the conversation. Just Santana at home pulling up a list in her own time and thinking she'll want to see these.
That was that.
When Santana told her she'd gotten into NYU's music business program, Quinn had taken the information with a single nod, congratulated her friend, and had privately felt something loosen in her chest when Santana said something along the lines of how they'd destroy New York City with their joint lesbian power.
Brittany hadn't graduated — she was repeating senior year in Lima with a particularly cheerful composure that made it difficult to feel too sorry for her — and Quinn suspected that was half of why Santana had said yes to New York so fast. Their relationship came to an end as Santana claimed long distance was only going to do them harm, and it stung even if she was right. The Lima chapter had closed for both of them whether they'd planned it to or not, and so they agreed to leave past relationships and past versions of themselves there for something new in the Big Apple.
In her haze of thoughts, Quinn pulled a pale pink dress out of her suitcase, a garment she'd worn to approximately nine hundred Sunday brunches, and held it for a moment. It wasn't even ugly. That was the thing, the clothes weren't really the problem. It was just that they represented an ideal of someone she had ditched being by the first semester of senior year completely, when she started questioning what she would wear if no one had ever told her who she was supposed to be.
That was the moment she'd gotten the garbage bags out.
She folded the dress and set it aside.
By the time she'd worked through both suitcases she had two piles. One small: her good jean shorts, her sweaters and cardigans and long skirt that would be rehabilitated, her lacy bras and lacy underwear she had no intention of surrendering because a lady was still a lady at heart (and they'd look mighty fine peeking out of her to-be-bought jeans), her books, the jewelry box her grandmother had left her. Everything else went into the garbage bags she'd had the foresight to pack for exactly this purpose, tied off and stacked against the wall.
Then she picked up her keys, her wallet, and the list she'd kept folded in her jacket pocket since August, ditched her still undecorated dorm and went to find a few stores.
She hit the obvious ones first — American Apparel, Urban Outfitters, even the Gap, which would have horrified her fifteen-year-old self. Then she went to the real work, because New York had extraordinary thrift stores and Quinn had researched this with thoroughness in the past months. To be able to achieve her dream look, the one she saw often in her favorite films, she had curated the best places into a list. She had cross-referenced Yelp reviews. She was, she had accepted somewhere around the fourth hour of research, going to be the most authentically herself lesbian in Greenwich Village, and if that was pretentious then pretentiousness was clearly in her nature because she felt no qualms about it whatsoever.
She worked through her list methodically, bringing the same focus to rebuilding her wardrobe that she'd once brought to choreographing halftime routines and maintaining a 4.0 GPA.
She felt like she was in a montage sequence as she passed the stores and collected clothes. By the end of the day she had acquired her dream low-rise straight leg jeans. Also a few button-downs with collars, the kind that could sit half-open over a lacy camisole, because rule one in her own book was balance. A white oxford, a faded blue flannel, and a black one with fine white pinstripes that looked very chic.
Loose t-shirts, which were harder to find than expected because they all fit in the wrong kind of boxy. A cream and navy striped long sleeve, an oversized fleece zip-up in a washed-out green that was, somehow, almost exactly the color of her eyes. A jean jacket so broken in it fit perfectly, and made her feel like she had come out of an 80s movie.
She stood in front of the narrow mirror propped against the back wall of the last store and held a cream lace camisole against her chest over her current t-shirt and felt like the garment had come straight out of her Pinterest board.
She used most of her old clothes as store credit and carried the rest back in paper bags through the September light, stopping at the Goodwill two blocks from campus to drop off the remaining bags she'd hauled down from the room.
She walked back to Brittany Hall with her crossed-off list and a really good feeling about her future.
But for now, it was just September, and the light was coming through the Village streets at a glorious angle, and Quinn Fabray was walking through it, feeling, for the first time in recent memory, exactly like herself.
***
The first three weeks of Tisch were, if Quinn was being honest with herself, a little overwhelming.
Not when it came to workload, because the first weeks were always light and she'd proved to be smart and dedicated. What overwhelmed her was that everyone seemed to have a thing, like her classmates all presented themselves as caricatures of people. Like the girl in her screenwriting class who could recite the entire third act of Taxi Driver from memory. The guy who introduced himself during icebreakers saying he would be the next Spielberg.
All talking in cinematic jargon riddles and practically refusing to let themselves just be, have a laugh or admit that Sucker Punch was a misunderstood and visually ambitious movie in the conversations in the hallways and seminar rooms.
And she wouldn't even mention all the theatrical smoking. She'd had her fair share of rebellious cigarettes, and she knew those guys with glasses and turtlenecks were not really inhaling the stuff.
Quinn kept her notebook open and her mouth mostly shut and watched. That was what she did when she was learning something.
By the end of week two she had strong opinions about half the people in her program, glad the other half was normal — she'd keep tabs on them for when the time came to do group projects. She was keeping her opinions to herself though, which was new. Because she wasn't in high school anymore, and she found out that guarding her mean streak between her and Santana's calls and mediocre coffees was just as fun. Also, here nobody knew her name yet and she found she liked the privacy of forming thoughts she didn't have to use as weapons, determining the shape of her social reality.
Yet.
She met Sam Evans on a Tuesday in October, about four days after she'd decided that NYU's coffee was a problem she was going to have to solve externally.
The place she'd found was small, two blocks from campus, good americano, where half the people were on laptops and the other half were having light conversations. Quinn had claimed a corner table, opened her copy of Adventures in the Screen Trade, and was minding her business when someone stood across from her blocking the view.
She looked up.
The boy looking back at her was tall, blond, broad-shouldered, and was doing something with his face that she eventually identified as an impression of someone she didn't recognize. She waited as he held it for an uncomfortable three seconds and then pointed finger guns at her.
"Jack Ryan, you've just boarded the Red October."
Quinn looked at him. Then at her book. Then back at him.
"I don't know what that is," she said.
He dropped it immediately. "Wait, seriously?"
"Seriously."
"That's—" He looked briefly devastated. "It's The Hunt for Red October. Sean Connery. It's one of my greatest bits."
"I'm sure it is," Quinn said, in the tone she'd perfected for ending conversations with boys who'd approached her with an opening she was supposed to find charming — though this was more peculiar than anything else.
"Okay, I can see what that looked like," he said, reading her correctly enough that she was slightly annoyed. "I'm not… I'm just trying to make friends. I moved here four months ago and I only know four people, and three of them only talk to me because we are sharing a shoebox of an apartment."
Quinn considered him for a moment. He had this really genuine energy, a dorky smile with full lips, and his blonde hair was too light to be natural, which made her think I would've been so mean to you in high school, before shaking her head to get rid of old habits. The truth was, his approach worked, truly disarming her.
"Sam," he said, extending a hand.
"Quinn."
"Are you in film?" He pointed to her book, as if to make sense of the question.
"Yeah, screenwriting."
"Cool." He nodded at her book. "William Goldman, good taste."
She hadn't expected that. "You know William Goldman."
"I love The Princess Bride, watched it a bunch with my little sister," he said, with a shrug that suggested he'd been teased about this and had decided not to care. "Also I'm trying to get into modelling so I have a lot of time in waiting rooms and have read one of his books there."
Quinn looked at him and at his face structure, and thought the modelling ambition at least tracked — and that it explained why he shared an apartment with a bunch of strangers.
"You said you moved here. Where are you from?" Quinn said, gesturing for him to sit in the chair in front of her.
"Oh, I'm from Kentucky," he said, sitting down while grabbing the menu from the table.
"Nice. Ohio."
They talked for two hours, ordered coffee, and shared experiences on what it actually felt like to move to New York and become just one more in the crowd. Sam told her that he was in the area because he was taking electives in music theory, trying to learn something and make connections without having to pay for full four years of college. Quinn thought that was brave.
Then he did more impressions, which Quinn failed to identify, and by the second one she was laughing and not bothering to hide it.
It was riveting to see how naturally she was able to have friendly conversations with this stranger. And that he had approached her because she seemed like someone he could be friends with. One more win for the New Quinn. She was truly herself while conversing with Sam, and even though she didn't go out spilling all of her information — like the fact that she was a lesbian, but was pregnant at 16 — she went back to her dorm feeling like she'd made a real connection there.
Santana called her that Thursday at seven, which was their thing since Santana arrived in the city a week after Quinn and they realized classes would make them busy, but would never separate them from gossiping — or sharing heartfelt stuff, too.
"Tell me something interesting, please," Santana said, by way of hello.
Quinn was sitting on her windowsill with her feet on the radiator. "Let me think… I met someone today."
Santana shifted on her end of the line. "Someone sapphically interesting?"
"Well, no. He's—"
"He," Santana repeated with a whiny tone that Quinn chose to ignore.
"His name is Sam, he's from Kentucky. He just saw me in the café down the street and started making corny impressions."
"That's your bar for letting men hit on you? Impressions?"
"He's funny," Quinn said. "He recognized the book I was reading because he likes The Princess Bride, and he wasn't hitting on me."
"Wow, a simple man. Lock it down."
"Ew, Santana, he just wants a friend, you know—" Quinn stopped, she wasn't Sam's lawyer either, so whatever. "How are your classes?"
Santana let the subject change happen. "They're classes. I did meet this girl in my Marketing and Artist Branding seminar. Honestly, do all college classes have these long ass names?"
"It's weird. So, a girl?"
"Rachel. She's at Tisch too, musical theatre, she's from New Jersey and she's—" a pause that Quinn recognized as Santana trying not to be so mean, "—a lot. Just looking at her overwhelms me."
"Are you into her?"
"Where did I say that."
"You said it was intense to look at her."
"That is not what overwhelming means," Santana said, with dignity. "She's got this whole 'I know I'm talented' thing going on which you know I can't stand," then she added, "She's also the picture perfect straight schoolgirl. I don't know. We'll see."
Quinn made a note of the name of the girl in case any updates came through one day and let it go.
"So how's the rest of it," Santana said. "How's your personal dream of living your own episode of L Word in real life?"
Quinn looked out the window at the street below. A cab going by, a couple arguing outside the bodega across the street, a girl with the tiniest skirt she'd ever seen in her life swaying her hips, clearly on the way to some party.
"It's a work in progress," she said. Which was true because some things you needed to actually live before you could report back on them accurately. "How do you feel about going out this weekend?"
"Oh, now we're talking, Q."
***
The first time it happened Quinn was not prepared for it, even with all the planning in the world.
It was a party in one of the Tisch dorms, the third week of October, just one more excuse for people to dress up in obscure references as if the day of Halloween wasn't enough. Quinn had only gone because Santana was busy and Sam had asked her to, and he had gone because he knew the guy throwing it, and the guy throwing it had a roommate who was in Quinn's screenwriting class and had nodded at her across the room as if to say you're ok to be here.
She'd been standing near the window with her cup full of cheap wine, wearing a black flannel and a tiara with cat ears as her excuse of a costume, when she noticed the girl across the room staring at her.
It wasn't the first time someone had looked at her like that, and Quinn was not new to being looked at. But there was something different about being looked at by a girl who was looking at her like that, with no intention to disguise desire, and Quinn felt that previously mentioned high once again.
The girl was pretty. Dark-haired, a little taller than Quinn, with paint-stained fingers wrapped around her cup. She held Quinn's gaze for a second longer than necessary and then looked away as she took a sip.
Quinn made a decision right then and there.
She crossed the room. She did the thing — the thing she'd done a hundred times with boys in Lima, that slight smile that said I know exactly what I'm doing and I know you like it — except this time she knew what she wanted her target audience to be, and that made it one hundred times better.
The girl's name was Gracie. She was a junior, doing visual arts, and she laughed at Quinn's joke about art majors while putting her hand on Quinn's arm. They spent the rest of the night talking, and at the end of the night they exchanged numbers. A week later they'd kissed outside a bar in the East Village — and yes, Gracie pulling the collar of her button down as they kissed was as good as Quinn had imagined — then Quinn had walked home afterward in the October cold feeling more confident than she had in a long time.
She knew the feeling was being externalized when Sam said something. Santana was always up in her business and always had something to say, so she didn't count.
"You seem different lately, Quinn," he said, two weeks after the party, in the coffee shop that had become their default meeting location. He was eating a muffin with vigor, probably considering it lunch.
"Different how, exactly?"
"I don't know. Good different." He looked up. "Like you're doing something new."
Quinn looked at him. She'd been thinking about how to do this — whether to do this, and when, and what she would do if Sam reacted poorly. In the end she decided to stop overthinking it and just go.
"I'm a lesbian," she said.
Sam nodded slowly, like he wasn't sure how she wanted him to react. Then he said: "Cool. Is that… are you good?"
"I'm good," she said. "I've been good. I—" she gestured vaguely at the general situation. "I'm just telling you. It's my ‘something new’ thing, I guess. Well, it's not that new for me exactly, but…"
"Quinn, it's fine. You don't have to explain yourself, but I'm glad you told me," he said, and meant it, which she could tell because Sam went all smiley like he was a puppy turned human.
Then he said, "I'm bi, actually, so," shrugging like he was reporting mildly interesting weather, and went back to his muffin.
Quinn stared at him for a moment. Then she started laughing, and after a second he did too, and the table shook a little with it, and the woman at the table next to them looked over and Quinn didn't care at all.
***
The casanova thing had not been part of her plan, by the way.
The plan had been: present herself honestly (but still attractively, she was not plain), make good work and connections, figure out the rest as she went. The plan had not included waking up one Saturday in November and realizing she'd hooked up with six different girls in the past three weeks and had enjoyed it immensely and felt no desire to slow down.
It wasn't impulsive either, it happened naturally, when she found out how easy it was to do so. She liked people, liked finding the right angle into a person, the thing that made them light up, the right spots to hit, the moment the careful social surface gave way to something more interesting underneath. She'd always been good at reading people. She was significantly better at it when she was actually attracted to them.
By December Quinn Fabray had a reputation, which was not new. What was new was the content of it. Though she wasn't entirely sure what information it contained, she knew it had an effect on women on campus.
(Rightfully so. Quinn wasn’t that big of an egocentric woman, but she knew she was good at what she did — got better at it every time.)
She felt the eyes while she walked around 721 Broadway between classes. Some admired her with clear desire, some had shy or curious looks, and the odd ones out cast disapproving glances that she found equally flattering in their own way.
Quinn liked the attention, of course. It wasn't so different from McKinley, just pointed in a better direction. From head cheerleader to whatever she was being called now was not the career trajectory anyone would have predicted for Quinn Fabray, but she had to admit the job satisfaction was significantly higher.
Truthfully, she did come to New York to be herself, and being herself turned out to include a need for people to know who she was. She'd spent four years at the top of McKinley's food chain and then graduated and became nobody, just one more in a city of eight million, and that had been fine, she'd expected it, she'd even wanted it. But somewhere between those first few months of liberation, the want had quietly shifted. She wasn't performing anymore, that part was true. But the notoriety — the way her name traveled through rooms before she did, the way certain girls looked at her, the specific satisfaction of being someone people talked about — that part she hadn't accounted for, and she wasn't going to pretend she didn't like it.
Whatever, it wasn't hurting anyone. She'd figure out what it meant about her later.
She found out the shape of it from Sam, who found out from a girl in his music theory class who'd apparently described Quinn to him in enough detail that he'd called her immediately after to demand a coffee meet up.
"She said, and I'm quoting," Sam said, "that you look like you could fix her car but also do her makeup, and that you were the most intense person she'd ever made out with at a house party."
"I don't know how to fix a car," Quinn said, matter of factly. She didn’t address the rest because it felt good on her ego, and she knew Sam knew that
"I told her that, she said it didn't matter. I think it’s got something to do with that baseball hat you wore last week."
Quinn considered this. "Who was she?"
"I'm not telling you that."
"Sam."
"Quinn, no. I'm not facilitating this." He pointed at her with his coffee cup. "I'm staying out of it. I'm a bystander. I'm Switzerland."
She let it go. She didn't need the name anyway. The girl from the music theory class was not the point. The point was that she realized she may have gotten herself too deep into this, but she wasn’t seeing any downsides to it, so why really stop?
***
This far the pattern, if she'd been inclined to call it that, went roughly like this:
A party, or a bar, or sometimes just a seminar that ran long and ended with people going somewhere. Quinn would notice a girl noticing her, or she'd notice someone she wanted to notice her, and she'd cross the room with something already on the tip of her tongue. She got good at finding the thing to say.
The girls she talked to tended to talk back, or sometimes they were even more bold than her, which she appreciated. She liked the ones who met her halfway. She liked the ones who made her work for it too, though those were rarer.
What she hadn't fully accounted for was the aftermath.
She was honest about what she was and wasn't offering, she was clear about it from the start, and that should have been enough. But there was something about the way Quinn gave girls attention, like they were the most interesting thing in the room, that apparently did not read as casual even when she meant it that way. Some would text her the next day. Then the day after. One of them started showing up at the coffee shop she and Sam went to, twice, before Quinn gently had to channel her inner bitch and tell the girl to get over it. One left a note under her door that Quinn read once and then folded very small and tucked into her journal, not because she was keeping it exactly, more because throwing it away felt unkind.
She wasn't leading anyone on. She was just magnetic, apparently? And that was not her fault.
Even if she liked being someone who left an impression, liked being wanted by people she found genuinely attractive. It felt good and she wasn't going to apologize for it if she used it to her favor.
She was, she told herself, having a good time. She was being herself. She was finally living the first chapter of her life on her own terms, and college was exactly the place to do this kind of thing, and she was twenty percent sure that was completely true and eighty percent sure she wasn't going to look at the other twenty right now.
She got ready for bed one day thinking exactly that, before knocking on her wall to shut her singing neighbor up and going to sleep.
***
Santana found out through a chain of people who'd all assumed she was aware of it by now, because one thing that hasn’t changed from Lima is that people that know them know Quinn and Santana are best friends, so she should’ve known.
Quinn was on her Santana Thursday call, bundled up on a blanket with her laptop half opened to a paused screen of A Tale of Winter, thinking about how she had to finish the movie for tomorrow’s assignment, when Santana went quiet in the middle of a sentence and then said, "Wait. Fucking hold your tits."
"What."
"Quinn Fabray."
"That's my name."
"Quinn Fabray who goes to NYU."
"Santana."
"Blonde. Hazel eyes. Looks like a J.Crew catalog that got into a heated relationship with lace trim camis."
Quinn closed her eyes. "What did you hear?"
"I heard," Santana said, and Quinn could hear her sitting up straighter, "from a girl in my Global Approaches to Music—long ass ridiculous name as always—who heard from her roommate who is apparently a visual arts junior named Jess, that there is a blonde girl at Tisch going around this campus leaving a trail of smitten women behind her like some kind of—" a pause, apparently for effect "—sapphic pied piper."
"That's—"
"And I thought, hm, that's funny, because I know a recently out baby gay at Tisch who I have been very generously supporting through her journey of self discovery, even paved her way in high school for years fearlessly dating Britt and being a poster child for monogamy, and I thought, surely not. Surely she would have mentioned this to me. Her best friend. Her rock. The woman who handed her the scissors."
"You didn't hand me the scissors, Brittany handed me the—"
"I’m talking about the metaphorical scissors of lesbianhood. Quinn."
"I was going to tell you."
"You were going to tell me," Santana repeated. "Okay, slut. Tell me."
So Quinn told her. About how it started in the party in October, Gracie, which Santana already knew, and the general pattern since then. How it’s derailed a bit, though Quinn doesn’t mind all that much. Santana was quiet, which was usually a bad sign.
When Quinn finished there was a long pause.
Then Santana said, "So let me get this straight—"
"Please don't."
"—you have spent the last month essentially running a one-woman gay operation out here, and didn't tell me, and I had to hear about it from a chain of people that started with your very first victim—"
"They're not victims—"
"—Gracie, another visual arts junior." Another pause. "Quinn. Darling. I say this with genuine concern and also a little bit of awe. Because, wow. What is going on with you."
"I'm having fun," Quinn said. "I'm allowed to have fun."
"I didn't say you weren't." Santana's voice shifted, dropping the performance just slightly. "I'm just saying. This isn't really your thing."
"Maybe it is now."
"Maybe," Santana said, like she wasn't really convinced but choosing not to press it. Which was, in its own way, the most unsettling response she could have given.
They went on to talk about other things, and Quinn knew Santana would be on the lookout now, rightfully concerned as a friend, but annoying anyway.
***
The reputation solidified and by the beginning of December Quinn would overhear things occasionally, and feel something that was partly amusement and partly outrage at why people cared that much about what she did with her own time and life.
Sam, for his part, maintained his position as Switzerland with admirable consistency. He listened when Quinn told him things she found exciting and didn't offer opinions she hadn't asked for, which she appreciated. Occasionally he'd look at her across the table with an expression she couldn't quite parse, shake his head and then go back to whatever he was reading, and she didn't want to ask him about it.
He was, she was privately aware, a better friend than she'd known how to have before. The kind who didn't need anything from her, which meant she could be honest with him because he wasn't keeping score.
She wasn't fully sure what she was doing. She mostly didn't let herself get to the end of that thought.
Then it was a week before winter break, everyone discussing their plans for the holidays, and there was Morgan.
Quinn had been half-listening to conversations all week about flights home and family dinners and who was driving back to where, feeling detached from all of it since she was adamant about not going back to Lima for the holidays. Especially not without Santana, who had magically snatched a break internship at a marketing firm in Los Angeles. Her mother had asked her about her presence twice. Quinn had said she had projects to finish, which was true enough to use. The campus was going to empty out and she was going to stay and work, and she was fine with that.
So she was already feeling a little untethered when Morgan walked into her Advanced Screenwriting workshop on the first Tuesday of December as a guest actor for their end of semester short film exercise and Quinn just had to have her.
She was brunette. Bangs cut straight across her forehead, a little taller than Quinn, wearing a worn grey crewneck and jeans, carrying a tote bag with something written on it in a language Quinn didn't recognize. She sat down in the empty chair across the room and pulled out a copy of the workshop brief that someone had sent her in advance and started reading it with her bottom lip caught between her teeth.
Quinn looked down at her own copy of the brief and did not stare at her for approximately four minutes, which was a record.
***
The exercise was straightforward enough. Each screenwriting student had submitted a five page scene at the end of November. The department had brought in four acting students to perform readings and then stay on for notes and rewrites, the idea being that you learned things about your own dialogue when you heard it out loud from someone who was a real performer. Quinn's scene had been selected, which she'd known since last week and had felt really good about.
Morgan read Quinn's scene with such devotion that it was almost uncomfortable to watch. She went through it once silently while the class settled, her pen moving in small marks along the margins, highlighter also in action, and then when the director asked if she was ready she just said yes and put the pages down and did it mostly from memory.
Quinn's scene was two women in a kitchen at two in the morning, one of them trying to leave and the other one not stopping her, both of them in a quiet argument where the unsaid things are loud enough to be heard. She'd written it in October in about six hours and hadn't thought too hard about where it came from.
Hearing it out loud was a different experience entirely.
Morgan played the one who was staying. She was still, mostly — barely moved, kept her hands at her sides — and the stillness did more than movement would have. There was a line near the end, I'm not going to ask you to stay, it’s not my call to make you fight for us, that Quinn had written for impact and nothing else, and hearing Morgan say it to the empty chair across from her Quinn felt something in her chest. She was thankful to have never experienced this kind of heartbreak, but yearned to feel such love for someone else.
The class was quiet for a second after Morgan finished.
Then the workshop director said okay, let's talk about this and the session moved forward and Quinn got very focused on her notes.
Morgan came up to her afterward while people were packing up.
"Your dialogue is really good," she said, without preamble. "You’re great at the ‘show, don't tell’ thing. And I would know, some of these student scripts are really shitty, so congrats, I guess."
Quinn looked at her. The girl had this intense but indifferent posture to her, one that Quinn saw as a good challenge. "Thank you. You made it look like something, which I appreciate."
"I had good material." She tilted her head. "Where did it come from?"
"The scene?"
"Yeah, it felt heavy. Got any baggage?"
Quinn considered making something up to sound more interesting, and then didn't. "I don't know yet," she said. "Sometimes I write things I wish I could live one day, as weird as that sounds."
Morgan looked at her for a moment with the same attention she'd given the script, and Quinn did not look away.
"Morgan," she said, extending her hand.
"Quinn."
"I know," Morgan said. "I asked who wrote it before I said yes."
Quinn walked out of the workshop forty minutes later with Morgan's number in her phone and the distinct impression that this one was going to be different from the pattern, though she couldn't have said exactly why yet, and wasn't sure she wanted to look at it too closely in case it turned out to be less than she thought.
She texted Sam a single question mark. He responded with a thumbs up, which meant he had no idea what she was referring to and was still supportive, which she found endearing.
She asked Morgan for drinks that Friday after finding out she was also staying in the city during break. And while Quinn drank IPAs and Morgan stuck with white wine, both drinks snagged with their fake IDs (not that the bouncers in the NYU city campus area cared much), Quinn found out a lot more about her.
Morgan was a junior in the drama program, originally from Portland, had been acting since she was eight, and had strong opinions about Brian De Palma that she delivered without apology. She was funny in a dry way that snuck up on you, talked about her work the way Quinn talked about hers — not performing enthusiasm but actually having it, while still underselling it a little, which was nice.
Quinn liked her. Not just the surface of her, not just the bangs and the way she held herself like she had nothing to prove, though she was not unaware of those. The actual her, the underneath. The way she thought and held herself and was sarcastic about everything in a way that wasn't mean, just honest.
This was different from the pattern, for now. Not a want she was going to act on and move past too fast, but something that might actually require her to have a little more dedication.
She wouldn't tell Santana yet, because being too detached or too infatuated, Santana would laugh at her either way, and Quinn wasn't feeling like being criticized for her “Lesbian NYC Residency Tour” right now.
So when her best friend called asking about juicy updates on Quinn’s life, she superficially talked about her week and said she had no plans for break. She then silently cheered when Santana called her boring and started complaining about how her classmate had dragged her to see a one-woman show in the East Village last week and had cried twice and that ‘thank God she’s pretty hot otherwise I would’ve told her to fuck off by now, don’t ever say that i told you this, though’. Quinn laughed at her best friend’s dramatics, and there was that.
Winter break emptied the campus out fast. By the second day it was just Quinn and her films and the quiet of a building where half the doors stayed closed, and Morgan, who showed up at her dorm on the third evening with a bottle of wine and a list of things they should watch, which Quinn found she didn't mind at all.
It wasn't romantic, exactly. It was convenient and fun, and someone to escape to since she wouldn’t be able to distract herself with her usual flings, which were three things Quinn had decided she was allowed to have. They watched stuff and argued about the endings. They went to bars that were half empty, walked around the Village in the cold because Morgan liked walking and Quinn liked having somewhere to go, and ended up in thrift stores where Quinn always left with a new item.
She liked the company and Morgan’s dry humor as they laughed at tourists getting lost even if the two transplants were themselves, and the way she took up space in Quinn's small room without making it feel too much.
She took a roll of film. Morgan asleep on her bed with a script across her chest. Morgan making faces at the camera from across the table of their designated booth at a Greek restaurant nearby Quinn’s place. Morgan in a thick scarf outside a coffee shop, mid-sentence, laughing at herself.
It was a good few weeks.
She didn't go home for Christmas, and didn't feel like celebrating it. Her mother called and Quinn answered and they talked for twenty minutes about surface things, and Judy said I miss you and it felt like she meant it, and Quinn said I know, me too and did too, and then they hung up and Quinn went back to whatever she'd been doing before.
***
Morgan ended things on a Wednesday in mid February, sitting on Quinn's bed late at night in the room she'd been coming to without ceremony since December.
"I've been seeing someone," she said, with the directness Quinn had liked from the beginning and was now finding plain insensitive.
Quinn looked at her.
"A guy," Morgan said. "From my program. It's been a couple of weeks, I should have said something sooner and I didn't and I'm sorry."
The tiny heater Quinn had turned on for their movie night was still running. The crunchy M&Ms Morgan liked were on the desk, unopened, and they would remain that way because Quinn found them disgusting.
"Okay," she said.
"Quinn—"
"Stop, I—" She stopped. Started again. "Are you happy?"
Morgan looked at her, puzzled. "I think so."
"Good," Quinn said. "Then I don't really have anything to add. There's not much I can do, is there?"
“I guess not. We had a lot of fun, Quinn, we really did. But I don’t think that’s all I want, and that’s all I feel you could offer someone.” Morgan said that with a soft smile that hid frustration and pity underneath and it pricked Quinn’s skin in a weary way that she just decided to not even respond to what she just heard.
So she stayed silent as Morgan picked up her jacket from the chair where she always left it, her keys, and stood there for a second like she was waiting for Quinn to make it easier or harder, either one.
Quinn didn't.
"I'm sorry," Morgan said at the door.
"Yeah," Quinn said. "Close it on your way out."
Morgan opened her mouth and then closed it, turning around. The door clicked and Quinn stood in the middle of her room for a moment.
It’s not that Quinn was devastated or anything, she wasn't in love with Morgan, hadn't imagined a future with her. She just liked her company, had liked the weeks they'd spent together and the easy warmth and convenience of having someone around. But she was still frustrated, that was the feeling.
Morgan had left, even though she’d known exactly what Quinn was and had seemed fine with it. She was fine during break and seemed fine in the weeks after it, when classes were back and Quinn maybe found reasons to not bump into her during lunch. And when they would only really see each other in their dorms, at night, but Quinn kissed her—amongst other things—the same way she did weeks before, so she seemed fine if Quinn didn’t really hold her hand in public or refer to her as a girlfriend.
Because Quinn had been very clear she was not looking for commitment.
But apparently she wasn’t, and she found someone to commit to her, seriously. A guy in her program who she liked enough to end something else for, which meant she'd been thinking about it, which meant Quinn had been in the middle of something she didn't know was ending.
She put on her headphones and opened her laptop and did not watch But I'm a Cheerleader, because she was not doing that to herself right now. She put on Empire Records instead, because it was light and fun and always made her feel good, and got about twenty minutes in before she realized she wasn't really watching it.
Quinn wasn't ready to be serious, she knew that about herself. She hadn’t even given the possibility of a relationship that much thought, to be real. She wasn’t lying when she said she was having fun, at least until now.
Because sometimes reality has to hit a door on your face to try to wake you up, not that that was going to work with Quinn just yet.
She picked up her phone and called Santana.
Third ring.
"It's midnight, bitch," Santana said.
"I know, hm, sorry."
She heard Santana move, sitting up. "Let it out."
"Morgan ended our… She ended thing. She’s been seeing a guy from her program."
"Oh." A beat. "Quinn—"
"It's fine, honestly," Quinn said, and half meant it. "She did me a favor. I was getting too comfortable."
"Too comfortable," Santana repeated, a weary tone in her voice. "Okay. And how are we actually feeling."
"I'm fine."
"Quinn."
"I'm annoyed," Quinn said, which was more accurate. "I'm annoyed that she left and I'm annoyed that I'm this annoyed about this. It’s not like I was in love with her or something."
Santana was quiet for a second. Then: "You're allowed to be, I mean, it’s a blessing I never met her in person because she sounds like an asshole. You never did have taste when it came to partners, actually,” she said and paused, as if she was waiting for a jab back from Quinn, who was too tired to do so. “So, maybe later, when you're ready, we can laugh about the fact that Morgana there left you — you, Quinn Fabray — for a guy in an acting program who will statistically almost certainly come out within the next eighteen months. They'll be broke and sharing a hot plate in Bushwick while you're getting your first screenplay optioned. I'm manifesting it as we speak."
Quinn was quiet.
"Also," Santana continued, "an actor. She left you for an actor, and those people are insane. You dodged a bullet."
"She's also an actor."
"I know. I'm not going to comment on your bad taste again."
"You just did."
"Quinn."
"What."
"Are you smiling?"
Quinn was, slightly, against her will. "No."
"Good. Because this is tragic and I want to be clear that I'm taking it very seriously."
"Sure you are."
"I am," Santana said, dropping it just enough. "I just needed you to breathe first." A pause. "I would come over but I have an early thing tomorrow and I'm already in bed."
"It's fine."
"It's not," Santana said. "But you'll be okay. You always are, unfortunately, because you never let anyone actually take care of you."
Quinn didn't have an answer for that.
"Call me tomorrow," Santana said. "Actually call me. Not at midnight."
"Okay."
"Quinn."
"Yeah."
"Morgan's loss. Genuinely."
She hung up and Quinn lay there for a while, the room quiet except for taxis outside and the faint sound of Empire Records still playing on her laptop.
She put on Celine Dion, and cried into her pillow. Not for Morgan exactly, but maybe for the roll of film she just wasted and the comfortable stupid bubble of it, and for being the kind of person who wasn't ready yet and knowing it, and for the fact that knowing it didn't actually make it any less suckier.
Karma, probably. The universe giving back what she'd put out during the lesbian pied piper era, which she should probably go back to instead of processing her feelings alone.
She was still crying, with no dignity whatsoever, when she heard a knock on her door.
"I swear to God, Morgan, if that's you—" She didn't bother finishing the sentence or hiding the indignation in her voice, having gone through enough motions in the last hour to just accept her fate and admit she wasn’t as indifferent as she acted a while ago towards her now ex-girlfriend.
She stomped toward the door, which wasn't far because the room was the size of a generous closet, pausing in front of the mirror to check the damage. Bloodshot eyes, swollen nose, short blonde hair and side bangs disheveled in a not-cool way. She looked a lot, she thought, like someone who had been crying, which was inconvenient but at this point irrelevant.
Another knock, more tentative this time. Then a small, muffled sorry from the other side that did not sound like Morgan.
Quinn rolled her eyes anyway, turned the handle, and opened the door ready to send whoever it was back to wherever they came from.
What she found instead was a girl.
Shorter than her, wrapped in a black polka dotted robe that was loosely tied—Quinn had to work a little hard to only focus on her face, she was only human—and had a towel around her shoulder too. Her long brown hair was dripping onto the hallway carpet while she clutched a pink shower caddy to her chest. She had bangs that were currently plastered to her forehead, and black makeup smudged from her waterline. She looked, somehow, completely unashamed about all of it — standing straight, chin up, and that was admirable, Quinn thought.
She stared at her.
The girl stared back, then seemed to remember where she stood, and launched in.
"Hi, I'm so sorry for the inconvenience at this hour, I'm completely aware of what time it is… I live next door, I heard some chatter and really good music, and I want to preface this by saying I would absolutely not be asking this under any other circumstances—" she wiped her wet bangs out of her face with the hand not holding the caddy, "—but I have a very significant audition early tomorrow morning and I was in the middle of my pre-sleep shower when the water went completely cold and I have waited twenty minutes and it is not warming up, and I cannot risk catching a cold before something like this, so I was wondering—" a breath "—could I use your shower? I'll be quick. Also—" she paused, seeming to actually look at Quinn for the first time "—are you okay? You look sad."
Quinn stood in her doorway, red eyes starting to sting at the bright white lights of the hallway, All By Myself still audible behind her, looking at this gorgeous girl who had shown up soaking wet and uninvited and somehow still managed to make her feel like the more disheveled one.
She looked cold, started shivering now. She had an audition in the morning and had clearly decided that knocking on a stranger's door in a towel at one in the morning was the reasonable solution, which suggested either admirable pragmatism or complete insanity, and Quinn wasn't sure which one she preferred.
She was also, against all odds and in direct defiance of the evening Quinn had been having, a little entertaining.
Quinn stepped aside and held the door open.
"Bathroom's on the left," she said. "Don't use my conditioner."
The shower ran for exactly eight minutes, which Quinn knew because she was lying on her bed staring at the ceiling counting the seconds between tracks and had nothing else to do. She'd turned the volume down when the girl went in, out of some instinct toward basic courtesy that surprised her a little given the day she was having.
When the water stopped she sat up and looked at the state of her room. She tried tidying it up a bit, folding her throw blanket that she was using as a cocoon, closed some tabs on her laptop, debated throwing the M&Ms on the trash before thinking she could offer it to the strange neighbor that was currently using her shower.
She turned off the music next, because there was no version of a stranger emerging from her bathroom to My Heart Will Go On that wasn't going to be weird or comical, at least.
The girl came out in her black robe tight around her now, hair wrapped in the towel. She had her caddy in one hand as she offered the other to Quinn in a formal handshake.
"Thank you," she said, with scary sincerity. "Genuinely. I know this was an imposition."
"It's fine," Quinn said, taking her hand briefly so as to not be rude, even if it was weird.
The girl looked at her. Then the room. Then back at Quinn like she was remembering how she found her eight minutes ago.
"You were crying," she said.
"I'm aware."
"Before I knocked. And a little bit after, I think, from what I could hear over the water, though I want you to know I wasn't listening on purpose."
Quinn looked at her. "The walls are thin."
"They really are," the girl agreed, with no apparent embarrassment. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"I don't even know you," Quinn said.
"That's sometimes easier," she said, and sat down on the desk chair with her legs crossed like she'd been invited to, which she had not. She tucked her robe around herself and looked at Quinn with an expression that was equal parts genuinely curious and completely certain she was going to get an answer.
Quinn looked at her for a long moment.
Then she said: "I just got broken up with by my kind-of non-girlfriend."
"I'm sorry," the girl said, and meant it. “How long were you… together?"
"Eight weeks."
"That's enough time to sting."
"Yeah," Quinn said. "I guess. Things happen fast in college, though, so whatever."
“Still, it is an upsetting thing and the environment should not excuse your feelings.”
She sat down on the edge of her bed, which put her above the girl, and they stayed like that for a second because they were two strangers who just met in an odd scenario.
"She left me for a guy," Quinn said, because apparently she was still going. “That she was seeing for weeks, apparently.”
The girl's expression did something complicated. "That's—"
"Awful? Ironic? A little funny? You can laugh."
"I was going to say that's genuinely terrible and she sounds like she handled it badly. Also, I am simply shocked that she left someone as pretty as you,” the girl said, with a firmness that was oddly comforting. "I wouldn’t laugh at you, I promise.”
Quinn looked at her, choosing to ignore the compliment. "You're very sure of that for someone who just met me.”
"I'm just sure about things in general," she said, without apology. "It's one of my more polarizing qualities."
Quinn almost smiled. "How's the audition anxiety?"
"Manageable now that I don't have hypothermia." She tilted her head. "I have a whole routine for things to go well. It takes two and a half hours and I've never once successfully abbreviated it."
"Two and a half hours," Quinn repeated.
"It sounds excessive, I know. But I have a very specific relationship with preparation. It's the one thing I can actually control before an audition, so I take it seriously." She said it plainly, without defensiveness, like she'd long ago stopped caring whether people found it odd. "My dads think it's neurotic, but I must’ve learned it somewhere, so I blame them."
Quinn almost smiled. "Practical."
"I prefer thorough," Rachel said.
Quinn looked at her and felt something shift in her chest that was not grief and not attraction exactly but something adjacent to both. The vague, disorienting sense that this person was going to be significant to her somehow.
“I’m Quinn," she said.
The girl looked up. “Rachel Berry."
"Rachel," Quinn repeated. "You should probably go get some sleep before your audition, Rachel."
"Probably," Rachel agreed, and made no immediate move to leave. "Are you going to be okay?"
Quinn considered the question honestly, taking the chance to truly be in the moment for the first time in a while.
"Yeah," she said. "I think so."
Rachel smiled a little, and stood up, gathering her caddy and her clothes.
"Thank you," she said again at the door. "You said the walls are thin… If my singing bothers you any time, just let me know, I do hear you banging on the wall sometimes. I can’t promise I’ll stop but I’ll do it mindfully.”
"Will do," Quinn said.
Rachel smiled at her. It was a kind smile that landed soft in Quinn’s chest.
The door closed.
Quinn sat in her quiet room and looked at the chair where Rachel had been sitting, the forgotten M&Ms on the desk that she finally threw in the trash, the slight damp patch on the carpet from her hair, and thought about the fact that thirty minutes ago she'd been crying into her blanket and had somehow ended up here instead.
She turned the music back on, changing it to something a little less depressing, and laid back on her bed.
She felt, against all reasonable expectations, slightly better. Still, she wasn’t about to dwell on the meaning of feelings, and she was still pissed at her current situation.
So maybe it was time for her to get back into action. She sure as hell would benefit from the confidence boost.