Glee_ The Beginning_ An Original Novel (Glee Original Novels) - Sophia Lowell.mobi

by Sophia Lowell

  After deleting a few spam comments from some Cheerios who had too much time on their hands, and from some creepy guy telling her she had beautiful tonsils, Rachel proceeded to upload her video. Every time she clicked UPLOAD she felt a thrill of excitement—discovery could be only a click away. All it would take was one well-connected person who knew something about talent to see Rachel and be blown away, and then her life could unfold before her like a magical red carpet.

  Rachel was about to concentrate on her history homework, when a bleep notified her that she had an instant message. A window popped up with a message from Sharkfinn5: P.S. Be careful at the show tomorrow. Some Cheerios are planning some sort of prank. From a stranger.

  Rachel stared at the screen. Within three seconds, she realized the IM had to be from Finn Hudson. The spelling of the screen name—two n’s—combined with his football number and the incorrectly used P.S. (you couldn’t have a postscript if nothing preceded it) all pointed to him. Besides, who else could know what the Cheerios were up to except an insider like him? And she knew they’d had a “moment” in the auditorium the other day. She hadn’t imagined that. Her fingers started to tingle. Finn Hudson was concerned about what happened to her!

  He was going against his ranks and facing potential censure to warn her? He was betraying the Cheerios’—and his girlfriend Quinn’s—confidence just because he was worried about Rachel?

  Thanks for the warning, stranger, she typed. But what kind of prank can I expect?

  A minute passed by, then two. Rachel didn’t think he was going to respond. Then suddenly an IM popped up: I don’t know. I just had to say something. Bye.

  Rachel stared at the screen. She didn’t want to write anything more and freak Finn out. He clearly thought he was being sneaky and warning her anonymously. He might not be the sharpest crayon in the box, but he was sweet, at least. And very cute.

  This was an interesting turn of events. She should have known that her assault on the Cheerios’ hom�€Cheerios’ {om�ecoming voting scam wouldn’t go unpunished. Now that she thought of it, it did seem strange that she hadn’t been slushied yet for her dissent. The Cheerios must be up to something.

  But the joy Rachel felt at knowing that Finn had reached out to her made it hard to take the threat seriously. She decided to change into her pajamas to think it all over. She often thought more clearly when wearing her most comfortable clothing. She pulled a pair of neatly folded pink-and-white-striped jammies from her top drawer and quickly stepped into them, tossing her other clothes into the white wicker laundry hamper.

  As she saw it, she had two choices: First, she could warn the other Glee kids of the intel she’d received about the possible attack during the show. If they knew, they would probably back out of the performance instead of take their chances. She had to face it—they were wimps. They didn’t have any of Rachel’s can-do attitude.

  Which brought her to her second option. She needed the...

  She could see the awestruck looks on their faces as they stared at her and wondered what McKinley High had been hiding all this time.

  Her choice was pretty clear. The show must go on.

  sixteen

  McKinley High gym, Friday during school

  Friday morning, Tina grabbed her skull-and-bones messenger bag and rushed out of biology lab the second the bell rang. Three days a week she had biology lab right before lunch, which seemed like a recipe for disaster when they were doing dissections. Mercedes, who sat in front of her, had moved even faster.

  “Whose brilliant idea was it to require all students to know how to dissect a frog before they can graduate?” Mercedes complained, fanning her face with a purple notebook. “Has Mr. Rochna never heard of online learning? I totally found a frog dissection tutorial last night.”

  Tina glanced at her friend, whose face looked a sickly green. Mercedes was Tina’s lab partner, and even though Tina had offered to make all the incisions, Mr. Rochna had come over and insisted that Mercedes be the one to remove the kidneys. She’d almost hurled all over the dissection table. “That doesn’t sound much better.”

  “Are you serious? I can deal with froggie insides when they’re not stretched out in front of me. How am I supposed to eat lunch now?” Mercedes continued. “All I can smell is frog guts.”

  Tina giggled. She didn’t totally mind the dissections, and Mercedes entertained her when she ov¿€er when s ~erreacted. It was kind of interesting, in a gross way, to see the secret inner workings of something. The frogs themselves were pretty icky—much longer than any frog Tina had ever seen swimming around in her aboveground pool or jumping into her neighbors’ koi pond. “I’m actually not going to lunch today,” Tina spoke up. “I’m going to a decorations committee meeting in the gym.”

  Mercedes stopped in her tracks. Her eyes bugged out. Tina was interested in doing something social? “Clearly, I didn’t hear you right. Repeat.”

  Tina repeated what she had said, this time with a stutter.

  “For the homecoming dance?” Mercedes asked slowly. She finally started to walk again when some soccer guys walked by tossing a stolen dead frog back and forth. “Oh my God, I’ve got to get out of this school.”

  “Yeah.” Tina shrugged, glad Mercedes was distracted. She always had strong opinions on things, and if Mercedes told Tina that joining the decorations committee was a big mistake, Tina might have listened. “I thought it would be fun.”

  Mercedes nodded slowly. Her huge brown eyes glanced at Tina. “Don’t let them push you around.” She waved a finger back and forth in the air. “Lena Horne didn’t let people push her around.”

  When Tina got to the gym, she paused in the open doorway. It was as unexciting as any school gym. It had rows of bleachers that folded back against one long wall, enormously tall ceilings lined with frosted-glass windows, and all sorts of structural beams and apparatuses on the ceiling that seemed to do nothing but raise and lower the basketball nets. The gymnasium smelled like sweat and the rubber of basketballs, and it always reminded Tina of elementary school, when they used to play dodgeball (Who had decided that was a good idea?) and she was always being hit with the red rubber ball that, even though it was supposed to be soft, really hurt when someone whipped it at your face.

  She took a deep breath and fought the urge to flee.

  Sitting in the corner of the bleachers was the decorations committee, which appeared to consist mostly of Cheerios and girls who wanted to be Cheerios someday. There were no boys, just a dozen or so girls in various states of repose, checking their phones and playing with their iPods. Several giant cardboard boxes sat on the gym floor; they looked as though they’d been pulled out of the basement, where they’d lived for the last two hundred years. One girl was braiding another’s hair while someone else braided hers.

  This was the decorations committee? For some reason, the appearance of incredible incompetence inspired Tina. She could definitely bring something to this group.

  The girls looked up as Tina’s Doc Martens squeaked across the shiny gym floorboards. Why did they have to polish the floor so much? It looked like you could skate on it. Tina concentrated on not stumbling, and she finally made it to the bleachers after what felt like eternity. She sat down on the lowest bleacher. “H-h-hi,” she said, because everyone was looking at her expectantly. “I’m here for the meeting.”

  “Right.” Santana Lopez exchanged glances with Kirsten Niedenhoffer, a curvy blond senior who was on strict instructions from Coach Sylvester to lose ten pounds or ‡€en poundsƒor she could no longer be in the second tier of the Cheerios’ pyramid.

  “We were just about to get started,” Kirsten declared authoritatively. She’d volunteered to lead the meeting. “As we all know, the homecoming dance is an extremely essential social function at McKinley, and it is absolutely crucial that the decorations are suitably cool.”

  Santana stared at the girl who’d just sat down. She was wearing black jeans with giant holes in the knees, a white t
ank top, and a blue-and-black plaid flannel shirt that matched the blue streaks in her hair. Her boots looked like combat boots. Had no one told her that Goth was so over? What was she even doing here? Santana knew it had been a mistake to advertise the meeting. Anyone who was anyone already knew about it.

  Tina let her eyes wander around the gymnasium as Kirsten continued with her opening remarks. Tina found it hard to imagine the space as anything other than a place where she was constantly humiliated each time Ms. Tuft, the girls’ gym teacher, insisted that Tina try to serve the volleyball and it thwocked someone’s head instead of soaring over the net. But she tried to imagine the lights turned down low, with maybe just a little moonlight coming through the high windows and shining onto the dance floor as couples swayed back and forth. She pictured golds and silvers, the colors of sunlight and moonlight, hanging and draping down from above.

  “We need some volunteers to be responsible for decorating the stage, where the king and queen will be crowned,” Kirsten continued. “I don’t need to tell you how important this is.”

  A few Cheerios raised their hands to volunteer, as did Tina. Not that she cared about the king and queen’s coronation stage—she just wanted to show that she was up for anything. “Okay, Alice, Olivia, and Olivia K, you three can be in charge of that.” Kirsten consulted the list she was holding in her hand. “Next, we need some people to come up with ideas for what to stretch back and forth across the gym. Lights? Streamers? Who wants to do that?”

  Tina raised her hand again, but again Kirsten didn’t seem to notice her. “We’ll need some volunteers to take charge of the walls—how can we cover up those awful mats?” She pointed at a few people and instructed them to head over to the walls and try to figure out what to do. Tina glanced around her. No one seemed to be too concerned about their tasks, and Kirsten had even paused in her directions to respond to a text message.

  Tina stood up and then crouched next to the closest box on the gym floor. It was covered in mildew and smelled like Tina’s grandma’s basement. The box contained dozens and dozens of cardboard palm trees and cutouts of hula girls for what must have been a Hawaiian-themed occasion. Lame.

  She had more luck with the next box. She opened it up to find hundreds of cool-looking cutout stars of varying sizes, although they had seen better days. Some were giant, almost as big as the box itself, and others were smaller and more delicate. They’d been made with a thick kind of cardboard that had warped slightly with time, and the gold paint was faded and chipped in spots. Still, maybe Tina could do something with them. Maybe she could flatten them out and cover them with glittery spray paint.

  Suddenly she felt excited. She could contribute to this, after all.

  She took a star over to Kirsten, who was chewing on a carrot stick and talking to Santana. “Do you think I could work on f-f-fixing these stars?” Tina asked. “There are hundreds of them, and we c-c-could, like, hang gold stars everywhere.”

  Kirsten smiled sweetly. “Sure,” she said in the voice she used with her annoying twelve-year-old brother. “You go ahead and do that.”

  Tina nodded her head. She knew that Kirsten was just patronizing her, but she didn’t care. She could already picture the gym, glittery and un-gymlike, and she imagined Artie telling her, again, what an amazing artist she was. What an amazing girl she was.

  Tina eagerly went back to dig through the boxes, checking for any other gems. She started to sing under her breath as she lifted star after star, looking for the least-damaged ones.

  “Right, loser.” Kirsten shook her head as she watched Tina walk away in her clunky black boots. “Like we’re going to do anything you say.”

  Santana just stared at Tina. How did she know that girl? It’s not like she paid attention to people like that. Then it hit her—when she’d walked past the music room the other day, she’d heard some people singing a lame old Broadway show song that her dad always sang to her mother. Santana had poked her head in the room and had almost thrown up. Annoying Rachel Berry was bossing everyone around, telling them to sing certain parts over again, and Tina had been one of the girls. “She’s in Glee,” Santana whispered to Kirsten.

  Kirsten’s blue eyes widened. “Oooooooh.” She lowered her voice. “What are you going to do?”

  “Watch.” Santana got to her feet. Next to the boxes of decorations that the janitor had cleared out of storage for them—he told them to use what they wanted, and he’d incinerate the rest—was a box holding an old fog machine. The Cheerios had tried to use it in practice the day before, during their Black Eyed Peas “Don’t Phunk with My Heart” number, but it was crappy and practically toxic, belching out large, thick clouds of smoke. They’d all started coughing and had to take five, to Coach Sylvester’s chagrin, until the smoke had cleared the field. And that was outside. Santana could imagine what the machine would do indoors, in an enclosed auditorium, onstage, while a certain annoying someone and her friends were trying to perform for the whole school. She and Quinn had already decided to somehow turn it on while the Glee Club was performing, but it would be even better if she could give it to Tina now and have her turn it on herself.

  Santana picked up the box and walked over to Tina. She made her face look innocent and helpful. “Hey,” she said, because she didn’t know Tina’s name. “You’re performing tonight, right?”

  Tina dropped the stars she was holding. They cascaded over the gym floor. Tina bent down to pick them up and, much to her surprise, so did Santana. The Cheerio grabbed a couple of stars with her free hand. With the other, she clutched a box to her side. “Yes. W-w-with Glee Club,” Tina replied.

  “I just thought you might want to use this fog machine during the performance.” Santana tried to smile sweetly. She could act—she’d had three lines in McKinley High’s spring performance of Anything Goes, and her mother said she was very convincing as “Old Lady w™as ana pridy w™asith Monocle.” “We used it at practice the other day, and it had a really awesome effect. It would look super-professional if you had someone run it during your performance.”

  Tina stared at the box Santana was holding. This was weird.

  But also nice. Maybe the Cheerios weren’t as bad as she’d...

  “Th-th-that’s really nice of you.” Tina dropped the stars back into the box and took the fog machine from Santana’s hands. She could already picture the fog billowing out onstage, and then the Glee Club emerging from it, singing in their rhinestoned uniforms. It was going to be awesome. “Thanks.”

  “No problem whatsoever,” Santana replied, spinning on the toe of her sneaker. This was going to be even better than she’d imagined.

  Maybe once Rachel Berry realized who she was messing with, she’d learn to keep her mouth shut.

  seventeen

  McKinley High auditorium, Friday night

  Nervous tension hung in the air like heavy fog on Friday night as the Glee kids huddled together backstage before the start of the Fall in Love with Music recital. There wasn’t a real greenroom, and so students with instruments crowded in the wings, trying not to get their guitars tangled in the long cords that pulled the weighty maroon curtains back and forth across the stage. Jazz band members stuck reeds in their mouths and polished their instruments. A boy named Jacob, whose frizzy mop of light brown hair had earned him the dubious nickname “J-Fro,” was acting as one of the stagehands. He carried a clipboard and was going from group to group, making sure everyone was present. He wore a thick black tie over his short-sleeved blue button-down, the armpits already damp, for the occasion.

  Rachel stood near a background wall painted with a scene of a Russian dacha in the countryside from an old performance of Fiddler on the Roof. She’d scouted the entire backstage area for Cheerios, but she hadn’t spotted a single one lurking among the music kids and plotting against Glee. Maybe Finn had been wrong. That was entirely possible, as he didn’t seem to always have his thumb on what was going on.

  Or, more likely, the Cheerios were just al
l talk. What could they do, anyway? Nasty, blatantly false rumors about Rachel were already Sharpied across bathroom stalls. Maybe the cheerleaders had just planted the rumor of a planned prank to mess with Rachel’s head. That was it. Well, that wasn’t going to happen.

  She closed her eyes and blew air out her mouth, letting her lips vibrate and make a brbrbr sound.

  “Is she blowing kisses to her imaginary lover?” Kurt whispered not too softly in Mercedes’s ear. In his black Amer¸€his black†ican Apparel shirt and his slim-fitting Armani pants, he knew he looked good.

  “It’s called a lip trill, or ‘the bubble,’ as my old voice instructor liked to call it.” Rachel quickly turned to Kurt. “It’s an extremely useful warm-up exercise for any singer, whether to warm up before a performance”—Rachel made a grand gesture with her arm to indicate that that’s what she was doing now, in case they couldn’t tell—“or to build a strong and healthy voice.” Her eyes landed on Kurt, Mercedes, and Artie in turn. “You might all want to try incorporating it into your vocal warm-ups.”

  “Where is Tina?” Mercedes pointedly turned her back to Rachel. It would do no good to lose her temper now. Besides, they had a more pressing issue if Tina wasn’t here. For a moment, her eyes got wide as she thought of how terrified Tina had been last year in Spanish class when Mr. Schuester had made them all act out a skit of “The Three Little Pigs,” or “Los tres cerditos.” Mercedes had been thrilled to play Cerdito número dos. Tina, however, had been terrified of her role as a tree with no lines, and she’d skipped class the day they were supposed to put on the skit for a group of elementary school kids. “It had better not be ‘Los tres cerditos’ again.”

  “It’s all falling apart, isn’t it?” Kurt asked, his eyes glazing over. “I’d prefer it if we fled now, rather than be humiliated onstage.”

  “She’ll be here.” Someone almost tripped over Artie’s wheelchair. He rolled backward, bumping into a table with a plastic vase with fake flowers glued inside.