Chapter Text
- JUDY -
The bank statement was addressed to Mrs. Russell Fabray, which was funny, because as of the fourteenth of last month there was no longer any such person.
Judy set it on the kitchen counter next to the other things that were suddenly her responsibility: the bill from the plumber who had fixed a leak on the weekend (who knew plumbers were so expensive), a warning from the electricity company because a payment she hadn't even known about had been missed, and a letter from Russell's attorney outlining the final terms of their agreement. She got the house, and full financial responsibility for the only remaining child under eighteen. Little else. The savings she'd thought they had? Gone. Russell had taken most of the other assets, leaving her with one car and a bare house.
Also on the counter was a notepad on which she had written, an hour ago, in her best hand, RÉSUMÉ, and then nothing.
The kitchen was very clean. She had cleaned it twice. Then she'd noticed a sound she had never heard in twenty-three years of living in this house, searched for it, and eventually identified it as a low electrical hum from the refrigerator. Mystery solved.
She uncapped her pen again.
The trouble with the résumé was not that she had done nothing. She had done a great deal, none of it for money, and the world had a word for work you did for no money: volunteer. Twenty years of it. The St. Mary's harvest gala, four hundred guests. Eleven years running the Junior Dance committee. The hospital auxiliary. The Cheerios booster auction, which had cleared thirty-one thousand dollars because Judy Fabray had personally shamed every car dealership in Lima into donating.
She wrote: Twenty years of volunteer event management, fundraising, and committee leadership.
She crossed out ‘volunteer’.
Then she considered the name that was to go at the top of the page. Fabray was a name in circulation right now, in Lima. Fabray came with a story attached: the husband whose affair had been with the tattooed woman, if you could imagine, and the daughter - well, you remember about the daughter - and the wife, who had apparently had no idea about any of it, which was either very sad or very stupid, take your pick.
So, she wrote Judy Prescott.
It was legal. It would be legal, anyway, in six to eight weeks, her attorney said. She looked at the name and found she had no feelings about it whatsoever, which was itself a feeling. Judy Prescott was a girl she had last seen in 1985. Judy had no idea what had happened to that girl.
Her first and only interview was on a Tuesday, at a place called Maplebrook.
Maplebrook was where Lima put its old people that nobody wanted: a single-story brick building, with good landscaping out front where the visitors parked, and a lobby that smelled of coffee and industrial cleaner. There were eighty residents, give or take. The brochure described it as an assisted living community. But the residents called it ‘the home’.
The director was a man named Dale who wore a putrid green shirt and wheezed as he breathed.
"Events coordinator," he said, reading her résumé. "So, I'll be straight with you, Judy - can I call you Judy - the last coordinator left in April and it's been me ever since. We've got maybe thirty regular volunteers on paper and I can tell you most of them I haven't seen for months. The families want programming for their loved ones. Corporate wants programming metrics. You've got what it takes for that?"
"I've run galas for four hundred," Judy said. "I've managed volunteer rosters of over a hundred people."
Dale looked at her for a moment like he wasn't quite sure about her, but was desperate enough to try anything.
"When can you start?"
It was not until she was back in the car that it hit her, and she sat in the Maplebrook parking lot and laughed until it turned into tears. Forty-six years old. Her first job. And the interview had taken just eleven minutes.
She was mortified, but she was hired. She wasn't proud - she had no business being proud over a job at a retirement home.
She started the following Monday. The name plate said JUDY PRESCOTT, VOLUNTEER SERVICES, and she screwed it to the office door herself with a butter knife, because she could not find a toolbox. It was askew.
She had been there five weeks when the Berry girl happened to her.
Judy would think of it that way for a long time - as a thing that happened to her. The sign-up sheet said only R. Berry, student, Wednesdays 4pm, musical performance for residents, which Judy had assumed meant a teenager with a guitar and a service-hours requirement, fifteen minutes of Taylor Swift and a form to sign.
What came through the activity-room door at 3:41 on a Wednesday, nineteen minutes early, which Judy would learn was Rachel Berry's version of on time, was a very small girl in knee socks pulling a rolling trolley. The trolley contained sheet music in labeled folders, a portable speaker, two backup portable speakers, a printed program (An Afternoon of the American Songbook, curated and performed by Rachel Barbra Berry), and a clipboard with a feedback form, because, she explained, unsolicited, before Judy had said one full sentence, an audience's response data was a performer's most valuable resource.
Judy's first thought was that the girl's nose was far too big for her face.
Her second thought was that somebody should tell her to ditch the knee socks.
Her third was that she had rarely in her life met anyone who could be so tiring in under four minutes.
Then the girl set up her speaker, arranged the residents' chairs, hand-delivered a program to every single person in the room including Mr. Kowalczyk, who was asleep, and sang for fifty minutes.
Judy stayed for all of it. She had paperwork; she stood in the doorway with the paperwork against her chest and did not do it. The voice was… the voice was extraordinary, anyone with ears could hear the voice was going somewhere far beyond Lima. But that wasn't what kept Judy in the doorway. What kept her there was watching this bulldozer of a child stop, mid-set, because Eleanor Petrosky was crying at "Someone to Watch Over Me," and sit down next to her, and hold her hand, and ask if the song reminded her of someone - who that someone was. And then she sat through the whole answer. The girl never once looked at the clock, and Eleanor Petrosky, whose child only visited twice a year, held onto the girl's small hand like it was a lifeline.
Then Rachel Berry stood up, apologized to the room for the unscheduled intermission, and finished the set.
Afterward she presented herself at Judy's office with the clipboard. "Mrs. Prescott. I'd like to discuss expanding to twice weekly."
"It's Miss," Judy said. "And no. Wednesdays, for now."
"Then I'd like to discuss the acoustics in the activity room."
"The acoustics are a retirement home's, Miss Berry."
"Rachel," said Rachel. "And with respect, that's defeatist."
God help her, Judy wrote it on the volunteer log that evening - R. Berry: talented but exhausting.
The highlight of everyone's autumn was Rachel Berry's Wednesdays.
Monday and Tuesday were still a rotating roster - Judy was trying to find acts with a production value even half of Rachel Barbra Berry's, and it was proving to be a feat. Thursday and Friday were activity-focused, Zumba or bingo. And Wednesday itself was the Berry girl arriving nineteen minutes early, docking her rolling trolley beside Judy's office door, and talking.
The talking was the thing no one could have prepared Judy for. Rachel Berry talked in long unbroken paragraphs with footnotes, about her vocal range and her audition binder and NYADA, which was a school in New York that Judy came to know in more detail than she knew her own alma mater, and her dads - plural, said easily, “my dads”, the first time in a sentence about veganism - and her plans for the next nineteen years.
It should have been unbearable. The girl was loud and vain and utterly without edit, but she was also, underneath the production values, kind. She learned every resident's name before her second week. She researched Benny Goodman because Mr. Kowalczyk, who was miraculously awake now during the girl's performances, had once mentioned him.
"You know," Judy said one Wednesday, watching her pack the trolley, "you look familiar to me. Have we met somewhere?"
"It's possible. I have a significant local footprint."
"Mm," said Judy, but she could not place it, so she let it go. A face in a crowd somewhere, maybe.
It was also autumn when the girl asked Judy a favor.
They were in Judy's office. Rachel had taken to sitting in the visitor's chair after her sets while Judy did her rosters. She considered Rachel almost like a background radio she'd grown used to ignoring. But this particular afternoon the radio went quiet, and quiet was so unprecedented that Judy looked up, and found Rachel Berry examining her own hands.
"Miss Prescott. May I ask you something in your capacity as a sophisticated adult woman?"
"That's a generous assessment of me."
"How do you make people like you?"
Judy put down her pen.
"Because I've conducted a thorough review," Rachel went on, "and the data is consistent. I'm not liked. I'm respected, at best, in contexts where respect is compelled, such as when I am singing. The girls at school find me insufferable and the boys don't look at me at all. And there's this … there are people at school who just get liked, effortlessly, girls who walk down a hallway and the hallway rearranges itself, and I have ten times more talent and I would trade - some of it. A portion of it. For that." She looked up. "You're refined. You're the most refined person I know. Was it a finishing school? I'll enroll."
Judy Prescott, née Fabray, née Prescott, was being asked for the one curriculum she had mastered so completely she'd forgotten it was learnable: how to be liked in a room.
She had taught it before. She'd had a pupil once, a round-faced girl who cried at the kitchen table over the things children said, and Judy had …drilled that girl. Posture, food portions, the right ponytail, the right laugh. And the Prom Queen crown at the end of it all. Judy had worn one of those herself, at seventeen, and had handed the ambition down like an heirloom. And it had worked, God forgive her, it had worked so well that the round-faced girl was gone, and what walked her halls now was a beautiful stranger where a daughter used to be.
Judy looked at the Berry girl. Somebody else's daughter.
"There was no finishing school," Judy said slowly. "There were rules. I can tell you the first one now, if you'd like, but then I must get to work, because your set ran long and I have a roster due." Rachel's nod was instant, and she pulled her notebook from the trolley. "The first rule is that interest is a gift you give. People do not like people who are impressive, Rachel. They like people who make them feel impressive. Ask a question. Then - and this is the entire secret - listen to the answer."
Rachel wrote it down word for word. Judy watched her do it.
The lessons became a standing item. Rachel called them ‘sessions’ and gave them agenda numbers. Judy called them nothing, because naming them was stupid. But they were the best hour of her week, and she did ponder how she had become a woman whose best hour belonged to a teenage stranger at her workplace.
Each day Quinn was home when Judy returned after work, she ate whatever was offered - ever wary of her portion sizes - answered in complete, polite, empty sentences, and went upstairs. She was never rude. Rudeness would have been something to work with.
Judy had tried. And Quinn had responded to each offer - of shopping, of dinner out, of a walk - with a that's fine, thank you, I'm fine.
Judy was lonely. And the Wednesday sessions made her feel less so. They gave her the modest professional satisfaction of watching her coaching take - because it took immediately; Rachel was a perfect student. She came back with field reports. "I asked Tina about her weekend and then I listened to the entire answer," she announced, "and at the end she said ‘anyway, you're being weird’, but she didn't seem annoyed, so I've logged the interaction as a positive result."
"It is one."
"I'm also trialing your advice on a more advanced subject." Rachel flipped a page in the notebook. "A girl at school. Extremely hostile baseline. But we were assigned as duet partners, and I employed Rule One, and she rolled her eyes forty percent less than her established average, which I know because I keep records."
"Mm," said Judy, and initialed a timesheet, and thought nothing of it. A girl at school. There were hundreds of girls at school.
The connection was made on the second Wednesday of November, at 5:12 in the afternoon.
Rachel was mid-monologue - the monologue was about the duet assignment, and the advanced subject, the one who only rolled her eyes forty percent of the time now - and Judy was half-listening, when Rachel said:
"- and I realize that pursuing an actual friendship with Quinn Fabray, of all people, may be my greatest challenge to date, but-"
Judy's pen kept moving. Her face stayed pleasant. Inside, she felt the blood drain out of her body.
Quinn Fabray.
She should have known. Except - Quinn had never once said the name Rachel Berry inside the Fabray house. Judy scoured her memories. There had been that girl in glee. There had been man hands, and the dwarf, and RuPaul, said with a venom Judy had put down to teenage cruelty about some rival. And there had been descriptors - the argyle, the knee-high socks, the hideous sweaters.
It was Rachel. It had been Rachel the whole time.
And she'd seen Rachel. Heard her. At Regionals, when everything happened with Quinn's …pregnancy. But the glee club had just been a dozen anonymous faces in matching outfits, and then Quinnie had gone into labour, and the rest of that night was a blur.
You look familiar to me, she'd said to Rachel when they'd met. Why hadn't she tried harder to connect the dots?
Rachel talked on. She said "Quinn" twice more, easily, as if she had been saying Quinn's name the entire time. When she hadn't.
Judy understood what she was required to say: Rachel, stop. I'm Quinn's mother. I've been coaching you on my own daughter without either of us knowing it, and now that I know, everything about this is different, and you have a right to know it too.
But then Judy looked at the girl in the visitor's chair. This child who saw Quinn Fabray every single day. Who kept records. Who had handed over, without knowing it, more true information about Judy's daughter than Judy had gathered herself in the past eight months.
Quinn liked drawing.
Quinn was struggling in algebra.
Quinn was topping her class in Spanish.
Quinn was seeing a boy named Sam.
Quinn read a book a week at lunch, the covers folded back so no one could see the titles.
All things Judy had not known. Things Quinn had not shared. And Judy felt … greedy for it. She clung to the information desperately, replaying it while Rachel rambled on.
"Miss Prescott?" Rachel said. "Are you okay?"
"Long day," said Judy, in a pleasant voice. "Go on. You were saying-"
Every mother is a spy, she told herself on the drive home, in their own way. Reviewing report cards, double-checking browser histories, working the mothers' network at church. But she knew this was different. This was sitting across a desk every Wednesday from a girl who trusted her, taking information about her daughter that she had no right to.
She went back the next Wednesday anyway.
It was appallingly easy. She barely had to do anything. Rachel Berry required no steering, no leading questions. All Judy had to do was keep the sessions running, and the information simply arrived, delivered between monologues about NYADA, and solo choices for the week, and complaints about the glee club coach, who Judy now realized was the infamous Mr. Schuester.
"Quinn ate lunch with me on Monday. Not with me, technically - but adjacent to me, at the same table, at the far end, reading. But she chose the table. I said nothing about it, and she came back Tuesday."
Quinn had been reading ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ last week. Judy knew, because Rachel had told her. And Quinn read fast, so she had probably finished it by now. Judy wanted to ask what Quinn was reading this week, and bit her tongue. Why would Judy Prescott care about Quinn Fabray's choice in literature?
Luckily for her, Rachel's favorite topic was Quinn Fabray.
"She's on Harry Potter now. Prisoner of Azkaban. She reads so quickly. I think she must be lonely at home, to get through books at that rate."
Judy swallowed.
"She's running for Prom Queen in the spring. She informed me of it. I've offered my services as campaign manager and she said, and I quote, ‘God, no’."
Prom Queen. Judy had kept her own crown in a hatbox through four moves. She'd assumed that particular ambition had died in this house along with everything else last year. Apparently it had survived. She wasn't sure whether to be glad.
Rachel confided in Judy that Quinn was always more quiet on Mondays; Rachel had a theory that the weekends were the problem - her home life, probably. And one Wednesday, in a hushed tone, Rachel had laid out Quinn's past in painful detail: the pregnancy, the cheating, the lies, and how Quinn had been thrown out - thrown out, Miss Prescott, while pregnant - by the people who were supposed to love and protect her.
"I've never actually met them. But I've heard they're cold, horrible people. Her parents are divorced now, though, so it's just her mom. She doesn't talk about her. She doesn't talk about her family at all."
Judy sat very still while a stranger's daughter chatted casually about her failures as a parent. She initialed the same line of the timesheet three times.
Quinn doesn't talk about her at all.
Meanwhile, the coaching continued to work. Rachel bloomed. All she needed was some steering.
"Lose the knee-highs. And the sweater vests. You've got nice legs, and the skirts work for you, but the dark socks and flats make you look stumpy."
Rachel nodded earnestly and wrote down the feedback without comment.
"You're lucky with your complexion," Judy continued. "You suit both dark tones and warm light ones - champagne, off-white." Rachel smiled at that, a small blush forming on her cheeks, and Judy felt warmed by it - warmed that she had brought such joy to this child's face. She shook it off quickly and continued. "But everything you wear is so busy. And juvenile. No boy looks at you because they probably think you're twelve years old." There. It had to be said.
The following Wednesday, Rachel's trolley contained a selection of outfits for Judy's review and approval. Then they scoured the internet together for more options Rachel could purchase - her fathers had given her a generous shopping budget, so they weren't too restricted.
In the beginning Judy had intended to sculpt Rachel, as if her natural state were the problem. Somewhere along the way it had become technique instead, the way you'd coach a tennis serve - small, fine adjustments. Because this girl's natural state was not the problem. Her natural state made her unique, made her special, made her her. It just needed refining. Even the nose seemed less ghastly the longer Judy knew her. It - suited her, somehow?
Rachel's fathers had clearly never once asked her to be smaller. Less loud, less colorful, less talkative. And Rachel's sense of self was so sturdy that Judy's criticisms landed on her as tools instead of verdicts.
For which Judy was grateful. Because somewhere across town was the original - the round-faced girl she'd bullied into a stranger, a cold, angry girl in perfect wrapping. Here was her chance at a do-over. So she gave Rachel the best of what she had, every Wednesday.
"Quinn asked me if I wanted to go see a movie with her," Rachel reported in early December, glowing. "It's a Wonderful Life - the cinema on Elm runs old pictures in December. I said yes, obviously. We're going Friday. We share a passion for old movies. I didn't know that about her before, but I'm asking people questions about themselves now, like you taught me. It's amazing what people tell you when you ask them questions and actually listen to the answers."
"That is how conversation is supposed to work, Rachel."
"Also, she wore her hair differently on Friday - pinned back at the sides - and she looked like a Renaissance painting. She's very beautiful. I know you don't know what she looks like, but I should show you a picture sometime. She's very pretty-" she caught herself, waved a hand, breezed on, "-objectively speaking, of course. As a performer, I notice faces. Anyway. Did you know she's read Mrs. Dalloway three times? She lent it to me. I'd never read it. She's even made notes in the margins."
"That's wonderful," Judy said, and meant it sincerely.
She meant it more than Rachel could know. Quinn did not lend books. Had stopped lending them altogether years ago. If Mrs. Dalloway had been allowed out of the house, then whatever was happening between these two girls, Quinn was in it too.
Rachel pulled the copy of Mrs. Dalloway out of the trolley and opened it to her bookmark, holding it across the desk to show Judy the annotations, the highlights. “She had a perpetual sense of being out, out, far out to sea and alone” was the quote she had highlighted, and beside it, in her daughter's small, upright hand, were the words: existential loneliness.
Was that how Quinnie felt?
"So you're friends now?" Judy asked, when she could. "Mission accomplished?"
Rachel nodded. "Yes. I think we are. At least - the start of being friends."
Judy mulled it all over on the drive home. Rachel was intense about everyone; the girl kept feedback forms on the ninety-year-olds she sang to, for heaven's sake. But she was particularly intense about Quinn.
In the beginning, Rachel had prompted her about how to get the attention of boys - a topic Judy was well versed in, and on which she had offered ample advice. But Rachel had stopped talking about the boys. The Finn and the Puck and the Jesse. Now she almost solely talked about Quinn.
She supposed it was nice, Judy decided, turning into her street. That someone cared about Quinn so wholeheartedly.
The last Wednesday before Christmas, Rachel gave Judy a card. It had a gold star on it. Inside, in ferocious cursive: To Miss Prescott, thank you for bestowing your wealth of knowledge onto me. You have made me a better person. A happier person. And you have helped me achieve goals that will serve me on my journey to stardom. Your protégée, Rachel Barbra Berry. And underneath, smaller: Happy Hanukkah slash Christmas.
Judy read it in her office, alone, after Rachel had rolled her trolley away down the corridor. Then she put it in her purse, inside the zip pocket, and drove home to make dinner for her daughter.
Chicken, green beans, the butter rolls Quinn used to fight her sister for. They sat. Quinn said grace.
"How was school?" Judy asked.
"Fine."
"Glee?"
"Good." Salt was passed. Fork and knife clicked against the plate.
"These rolls are the ones you like," Judy said.
Quinn looked up. For one second something crossed her face - surprise, maybe, at being known.
"They are. Thank you."
They ate in silence for a few moments. Then Judy heard herself say, "I was wondering if you had any book recommendations. I used to read a lot, but I haven't in years, and-"
God. What was she doing?
But Quinn's eyes lit up. She finished her mouthful quickly.
"Actually - yes. I have a few upstairs."
She was gone before Judy could blink, and came back with an armful: worn spines, a paperback held together at the corner with tape. And Quinn talked. Whole sentences, plural, unprompted, about which one to read first and why, and what to skip until spring, and this one's better the second time, and it was more words than that table had heard in eight months.
The night ended with Judy carrying a stack of books up to her room. She sat on the edge of her bed with a worn copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray - Quinn's copy, Quinn's pencil in the margins - and found herself grateful to the seventeen-year-old stranger who had, without ever knowing it, handed her this olive branch to extend.
She knew it was wrong, the Wednesday arrangement. She knew what she was taking, and from whom, and under what name.
She opened the book anyway. And she knew that next Wednesday, she would do it all again.