Fictable No. 40
When Rachel was thirteen years old winter had been her favourite season.
With winter came snow; days on end of pure brilliant white magic coating the dull Ohio ground. Snow meant snowballs and snowmen and snow-angels and snow-days; the best thing of all in Rachel’s humble opinion. Whole days filled with nothing but cold noses and wet gloves and watching your breath as it floats in the air.
She didn’t like missing school; obviously, she never took sick days, and was always reticent to miss class. But snow-days couldn’t be helped. School was closed, so she didn’t need to feel bad about wanting to stay at home, she was forced to. And, on snow-days her fathers always insisted she take full advantage of the snow and play outside instead of practicing her music or doing her homework, because the snow was fleeting, and who knew when it would be gone.
But the best thing about snow-days was that everyone seemed to forget that they found her annoying. There was something about snow that just made everyone happy and friendly, and on snow-days they would let her play with them. Her dads would drop her off at the community centre in the mornings before work and she would spend her whole day having snowball fights and building snowmen with the other kids and just feeling normal, feeling liked, for once.
Noah Puckerman and Finn Hudson would run around like ‘ninjas’, whatever those were, and try and catch her and Lucy Richmond unawares as they were building their family of snowmen. Only at the last moment Tina Cohen-Chang would yell at them to watch out and they’d both squeal and duck just in time to have snowballs pelted over their heads and into the face of their snow-mom. And they would retaliate with their stash of snowballs that they had prepared just in case of such an attack. These were her favourite days of the year.
This year, the year she had turned thirteen, was slightly different though. She was a teenager now and so her fathers had deemed it ok that she stay in the house by herself during the daytime. As such her days of running around in the snow with other kids her age were over, she knew. Because as much as they would tolerate her presence if she showed up, there’s no way any of them would ever seek her out. And she could just put on her snow boots and take herself down there, she had a key and everything, but somehow she knew that the difference between her being there because you had to be, and being there because you chose to be was what distinguished normal people from losers. And she didn’t need to add anything else to the long list of things she did that people considered her a loser for.
So she was sitting in the window-seat in her front room with a book that she wasn’t really reading while listening to Bing Crosby and staring out listlessly at the lightly falling snow. She was getting older now, she ought to be able to interest herself in doing the kind of things that grown-ups do when it snows, like sit inside near a fire and listen to jazz and read books, but all she really wants is to be outside, falling about in piles of freshly fallen powdery wonder. And thinking about it, she wasn’t so old. She could enjoy this one last winter of youth couldn’t she? This one last moment of true frivolity before the time came to put away childish things.
And so thirteen year old Rachel Berry got up and went to the hall closet and pulled on her bright winter coat and her gloves and earmuffs and snow boots, and went outside into her front yard to play, for one last time.
Part two
With winter came snow; days on end of pure brilliant white magic coating the dull Ohio ground. Snow meant snowballs and snowmen and snow-angels and snow-days; the best thing of all in Rachel’s humble opinion. Whole days filled with nothing but cold noses and wet gloves and watching your breath as it floats in the air.
She didn’t like missing school; obviously, she never took sick days, and was always reticent to miss class. But snow-days couldn’t be helped. School was closed, so she didn’t need to feel bad about wanting to stay at home, she was forced to. And, on snow-days her fathers always insisted she take full advantage of the snow and play outside instead of practicing her music or doing her homework, because the snow was fleeting, and who knew when it would be gone.
But the best thing about snow-days was that everyone seemed to forget that they found her annoying. There was something about snow that just made everyone happy and friendly, and on snow-days they would let her play with them. Her dads would drop her off at the community centre in the mornings before work and she would spend her whole day having snowball fights and building snowmen with the other kids and just feeling normal, feeling liked, for once.
Noah Puckerman and Finn Hudson would run around like ‘ninjas’, whatever those were, and try and catch her and Lucy Richmond unawares as they were building their family of snowmen. Only at the last moment Tina Cohen-Chang would yell at them to watch out and they’d both squeal and duck just in time to have snowballs pelted over their heads and into the face of their snow-mom. And they would retaliate with their stash of snowballs that they had prepared just in case of such an attack. These were her favourite days of the year.
This year, the year she had turned thirteen, was slightly different though. She was a teenager now and so her fathers had deemed it ok that she stay in the house by herself during the daytime. As such her days of running around in the snow with other kids her age were over, she knew. Because as much as they would tolerate her presence if she showed up, there’s no way any of them would ever seek her out. And she could just put on her snow boots and take herself down there, she had a key and everything, but somehow she knew that the difference between her being there because you had to be, and being there because you chose to be was what distinguished normal people from losers. And she didn’t need to add anything else to the long list of things she did that people considered her a loser for.
So she was sitting in the window-seat in her front room with a book that she wasn’t really reading while listening to Bing Crosby and staring out listlessly at the lightly falling snow. She was getting older now, she ought to be able to interest herself in doing the kind of things that grown-ups do when it snows, like sit inside near a fire and listen to jazz and read books, but all she really wants is to be outside, falling about in piles of freshly fallen powdery wonder. And thinking about it, she wasn’t so old. She could enjoy this one last winter of youth couldn’t she? This one last moment of true frivolity before the time came to put away childish things.
And so thirteen year old Rachel Berry got up and went to the hall closet and pulled on her bright winter coat and her gloves and earmuffs and snow boots, and went outside into her front yard to play, for one last time.
Part two