Glee fic: A Complete History of Noah Puckerman, Abridged
Fun fact: I always confuse Matchbox 20 and Fall Out Boy when I'm listening to the radio. Idek. Rob Thomas and Patrick Stump sound the same to me. This probably means that I am old.
I had so much fun writing this, you guys. I really wanted to get it up before tonight's episode because I know it's totally going to get blown out of the water. Anyway, I'm not spoiled and I haven't watched leaked clips so please don't talk about them in my LJ until tomorrow! ETA: Have watched the latest ep. Spoil away.
Glee
A Complete History of Noah Puckerman, Abridged
As told by Rachel Berry
Rachel, Puck. E for everyone. Spoilers through Takedown.
“Born with it?” Rachel pauses, meeting Puck’s gaze. “Let me tell you a few things about Noah Puckerman.”
Note: A bris is the religious ceremony that surrounds the ritual circumcision of Jewish male infants and is often attended by family and friends as a way to welcome the baby to the faith (and, more practically, to the rest of the world).
A Complete History of Noah Puckerman, Abridged
As told by Rachel Berry
The Sunday morning of the new Uzick baby’s bris is bright, blue, and utterly freezing. Rachel’s in the kitchen picking at the crusty caramelized edges of the maple French toast when Puck saunters up to the buffet. She’s licking sticky sauce from her fingers when they make eye contact and she sees the joke on his face before it even fully forms in his brain. He says nothing (Ms. Puckerman is nothing if not hawk-like in hearing) but he smirks, even if he does nod genially and asks what’s up, jostling her arms in an almost friendly way when he passes by.
They’re in a weird place right now, a shaky truce-cum-friendship formed since Puck joined glee club. With family, it’s always been a little different between them than at school, the you-will-be-polite-and-like-it ingrained into both of them. There aren’t that many other Jewish kids at McKinley - most of them attend Carmel or Carver for high school - so she’s always walked a fine line with those few people she sees around at things like this. It’s never been weird to say hi to Puck at services those few times of year she goes or run into him at the JCC and have him pause to hold the door for her. Recently though, she’s found herself standing near him, chatting about glee or school or even spreading idle community gossip his way.
Puck starts piling his plate high with beef sausage, French toast, potatoes, rugelach, and the rest of the elaborate brunch spread. Little Joshua Kaplan walks in, slacks at once wide around the waist and flooding up around his ankles, big thick glasses, his thick dark hair curling at the edges of his neck and frizzing up around the crown of his head. His pock-marked face has a bit of a greenish tinge, but he blushes when he greets Rachel. “I can’t believe you’re eating after all that,” he says to Puck, who has taken up residence against the sink. Puck shrugs and, with an evil grin, snaps his teeth at the edge of a sausage link, sniping off just the very tip. Josh blanches and Rachel rolls her eyes.
“Ignore him,” Rachel says. “When we were eight, at Jeremy Shapiro’s bris-” Puck starts talking over her, loud shut-the-hell-up sounds and Rachel raises her voice (he’s been singing with her for weeks and still thinks he can drown her out?). “At Jeremy Shapiro’s bris,” she repeats, loud and clear and Puck starts laughing, “Puck threw up all over Rebecca Shapiro. It was like the exorcist.” When they’d circumcised Jeremy, there had been just the slightest hint of blood and Puck had had to put his head between his legs and count to ten; Rachel remembers her dad going over to rub his slow circles on his back, how Puck had started crying, huge embarrassed wheezing sobs, and he wouldn’t let his own mother touch him. Her dad had lifted him up and taken him to the bathroom to clean up.
“It took years to convince her to go out with me,” says Puck, with a rueful grin. Puck-everyone called him Noah then and it’s funny that Rachel remembers that tear-stained awkward kid as Noah, as someone totally separate from who Puck is now-had come back with a huge Notre Dame sweatshirt hanging off his skinny shoulder. Rachel remembers Heather Shoham murmuring to another mother that she’d never let her little boy go off alone with Rachel’s dad; she’d turned white and then red when she’d turned around and seen Rachel’s other dad, thin-lipped and barely civil, with one hand on her shoulder.
“She still went out with you though,” says Jeremy, a jealous tinge to his voice. Rachel pats his shoulder; she remembers seventh grade.
Puck wags his eyebrows. “Yes. Yes, she did,” he drawls, each word punctuated with a slight pause, although he drops his voice as other people start milling in for food.
“I can’t even get Joanna Strauss to look at me,” mutters Josh. He scratches the back of his neck. When Rachel points out that she’ll probably be at his bar mitzvah, Josh looks even more miserable. “Yeah, but only because she has to be.”
Puck shrugs, spreads his hands wide. “What can I say? Some guys are just born with it.”
Josh nods, agreeing with one long, drawn-out yeahhhhhh. He looks so sad and Puck so smug in his fitted coat and tie, boasting to some poor kid, that Rachel can’t stand it. “Born with it?” she says, making her voice as incredulous as possible. She’s had a few mimosas and her voice is a little loud. “Josh,” she pauses, meeting Puck’s gaze, “let me tell you a few things about Noah Puckerman.” Josh leans forward, a hesitant smile on his face while his eyes dart back and forth between them.
Puck raises his eyebrows, meeting her head on. “Go ahead, Berry, I dare you.” He’s still smiling, all white even teeth; he’d been one of the first kids to get braces, had that expander with the key that he’d turn a quarter turn every other day.
“At Puck’s bar mitzvah-” Ms. Puckerman picks that moment to walk into the kitchen and Rachel stops talking, not wanting to bring up contentious memories. They’d been kids then, neither wealthy enough or connected enough be anything other than peripheral in what was known around the JCC as the Jew Crew. Puck, at loss for any friends at his own bar mitzvah, had snuck off to the boys’ bathroom to suck down a bottle of peppermint schnapps he’d found at home. She’d run into him on his way back to the party, remembers the astringent minty smell as he’d pushed passed her. She remembers how Puck got loud, clumsy, how he’d stumbled into the flimsy refreshment table. Pop went everywhere and clear plastic party cups skittered into the far reaches of the room.
Other people start trickling into the kitchen, needing mimosa refills (Rachel wants one, although she’s pretty sure she needs to switch to coffee). The baby, tucked serenely in a cornflower blue blanket now that the most traumatic moments of his short life have passed, gets handed around. His little hand wraps snugly around Rachel’s finger when she puts it in his palm, although she’s a bit afraid to hold him. Babies scare her a little, so fragile and terrifying. Puck gets soft and coos when the cocoon comes to him; his face goes a little far away and sad. Rachel pretends not to notice and even bristles a bit on his behalf when Mrs. Shoham says quietly that Puck’s dad never stuck around long enough even for this part.
The big sister wants to show Rachel her room, and Rachel ends up listening to the individual histories of each stuffed animal long past the time her dads leave, making sure she doesn’t mind walking home. When Rachel finally extracts herself and is getting into her coat, the heavy lacquered grandfather clock in the foyer reads after two o’clock. Puck emerges just as she’s wrapping her scarf around her neck.
“I can’t believe you were going to tell that story,” he says, voice low. She can hear his mother saying good-bye to the Uzicks. Rachel had snuck out of the bar mitzvah after the drink debacle, staying just long enough to make her dads happy, and found Puck retching in a trashcan just outside the ballroom doors. He’d straightened up just as she’d walked by, spitting the puke vestiges into the bin and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I have to go home now,” she’d said. His eyes were watery and red from throwing up. The putrid smell of alcohol vomit rose between them. “Thanks for inviting me.” He didn’t say anything, she remembered, and after too long a pause she turned to leave. Then she turned back, touching her own jaw briefly. “You, um, have stuff on your face still.”
Now, Rachel tucks the ends of her scarf into her coat. “Someone needs remind you that you weren’t always the hot guy,” she says very primly, hoping she doesn’t blush. Then she reaches up and stops just short of poking him in the alcohol-flushed cheek, “And that you couldn’t always hold your liquor.” Puck looms over her, eyes bright with mimosas.
“But I’m hot now,” he points out pragmatically.
“In a prominent brow, Neanderthal kind of way,” she agrees. Puck grasps his heart, wounded.
They’re doing that awkward, dorky smiling thing where they’re just sort of staring at each other on the front stoop when Ms. Puckerman comes out, digging in purse for her keys. She tells Rachel flat out that they’ll give her a ride home and Rachel gives Puck a sunny grin when he opens the front door of the boxy, old two-door BMW for her under his mother’s watchful eye.
“Thank you so much, Puck!” she says gleefully and he nobly does not roll his eyes to her face.
Puck fits himself in the back seat of the car and she slides in front. It’s meticulously clean, the dash well shined and oiled where it’s beginning to crack with age and the mat spotless save for the spots worn out after over a decade of Puck’s feet.
Rachel can see Puck’s profile in the side view mirror while she answers questions from Ms. Puckerman about what she’s been up to since last time they saw each other. Yes, she’s doing well in school. Yes, she’s signed up to take the SAT. Yes, she’s still singing. No, she doesn’t have a boyfriend. To this last one, she ignores Puck’s ill-hidden snort. She resists the urge to remind him in front of his mother that, while he might be taking his pick of the Cheerios now, he was the one who was behind the curve at the beginning.
She was Puck’s first kiss. It’s embarrassing to think about now and she ducks her head like he can hear her thoughts, but Rachel was his first.
She and Puck were in the same Hebrew school class, ostracized by the other kids, most of whom went to the same private school. They were friendly out necessity, but never friends. Usually the two of them loitered outside together, away from the other kids, while they waited to be picked up. Everyone was old enough by then that kids put extra stress on the words when they said that Puck’s mom “worked nights,” leering knowingly at him even if all she did was pick up the graveyard shift at the hospital. It had been cold, nearly dark, and they had been sitting on the curb together, knees knocking. Rachel had been wearing fuzzy gloves with snowflakes on them.
It had been on the coattails of some Jewish Community Center scandal, where one of the lifeguards had been caught kissing someone else’s girlfriend or boyfriend at a party and somehow drinking had been involved. The whole thing seemed so glamorous: high school kids sneaking around, rowdy parties with beer while parents were away. Rachel had wanted so badly to be in high school already, to skip awkward middle school (sixth grade was sucking) and get to high school where her skin would be perfect, her clothes would be fashionable, and she’d have lots of friends and a cute boyfriend. Everyone had been talking about it through the lesson and it was on both their minds while they watched the other kids disappear into their SUVs one by one.
Puck asked her first, she thinks, if she’d ever kissed anyone. Rachel had admitted to Ben Levy, just once, way back in fourth grade when Ben had cornered her in the coat room where all the backpacks and lunch boxes were stowed away, grabbed her hands, and very seriously said, “I’m gonna kiss you now.” She’d withstood it, then cried, and Ben had been sent to the principal’s office, looking bewildered and betrayed.
Puck laughed. “You cried?” He had glasses, the thick black-framed kind, and braces and butterflies formed in her stomach as she defended herself. It had been dark in the coatroom and smelled like mildew from all the coats. Plus, their teacher had opened the door and caught them, red handed. A pause fell after that and Puck threw a few bits of gravel across the U-shaped driveway before he said, “I’ve never done it,” very quickly. “I just want to get it over with.”
She glanced at him, out of the corner of her eye. “It’s not that great.” He laughed again, breath coming out in puffy white clouds in the rapidly-cooling air. “You can kiss me, if you want.” Her face felt hot, red burning fire hot, in the moment after that, and Puck stopped throwing gravel long enough to look at her, considering. He kissed her on the mouth, closed lips. She’d closed her eyes and counted seconds because she wasn’t sure what else to do. She touched his neck, tentatively, and opened her mouth just a bit before they both pulled back.
His mouth was a little shiny and Rachel remembers not knowing whether it would be okay to lick her lips or not. “Thanks,” he said, huffing out a laugh. His face was colored a deep, dusky red. He scooted a little away from her, pressing palms, fingers wide spread, onto the concrete curb. She could have put her hands down too and they’d have been touching. They’d spent the next fifteen minutes until her dad arrived in silence. The next week, neither of them had said anything about it.
Puck taps his foot against the back of her seat now, rhythmically, and it would be annoying if she thought he was doing it on purpose instead of expelling nervous energy.
Puck won points with the other kids for his bar mitzvah scandal and he came back from sleep-away camp that summer different, no longer the scrawny kid he’d been, and with a definite mission. He told anyone who would listen about how he’d hooked up with a counselor-in-training, felt her up beneath her bathing suit. They both worked at the JCC in eighth grade, Puck strutting around the pool in his bathing suit even though all he did was pick up trash and fold towels. Rachel did reception, answering phones and scheduling kids for after-school classes. Sometimes they’d have group events and it was weird to see Puck sitting with all the other kids when she came in on a break to eat a slice of pizza. He’d have his guitar, strumming something by John Mayer or Oasis and other kids would sing along, gratingly, achingly off key.
It was Puck that started the transvestite rumor. She knows because he came up to her desk one day, picked up a gymnastics schedule, and said, “So, is it true you’re a tranny? Because it makes sense,” with a sunny smile. From a distance it probably looked like he was being friendly.
Puck leans forward when his mom asks Rachel about glee club. Yes, it’s true that Puck is a member and, as much as she hates to admit it, he’s actually quite good. “Rachel’s the star, Mom,” he says, sing-song, right next to her ear. “Just ask her.” As she’s turning her head to glare, he continues, sounding sincere. “She’s really, really good. She’s the best of all of us.” It’s hard not to blush when she thanks him, even if it’s true. She’s not used to compliments from boys, even if it is Noah Puckerass. On their first day of high school, when the teachers called out, “Noah Puckerman?” he’d replied, “It’s just Puck.” She couldn’t believe he got away with it. Few high school freshman pull off a name usually associated with an Elizabethan fairy, but Puck managed to own it.
They barely spoke through eighth grade, unless he was telling her she had a horse-face. Rachel Scary, Rachel Hairy - the names weren’t Puck’s inventions but he capitalized on them, bring them out of the closet where they’d been left languish since leaving fifth grade. In middle school, she was mostly ignored, until Puck became cool.
There was one time, right after high school began, when they were closing up the JCC for the night. Rachel was flattening pizza boxes to stuff them in trash cans and a few other kids were stacking chairs so that the cleaning crew could come through. It was Danny Shoham who said, and she remembers exactly, that Rachel probably wasn’t really a Jew, since her mom was probably just some crackhead who’d left her a dumpster on prom night. If her own parents didn’t love her, who would? It was the kind of shitty, hateful thing people said to her all the time and she didn’t have the friends or quick-thinking to defend herself, even (or maybe especially) when the accusations were untrue. Back then, before she realized how mean people could be, she’d always been blind-sided by their nastiness. This was no different; she’d frozen, hands full of pizza boxes, and stared at the floor.
She remembers, too, clatter and then deafening silence when Puck shoved Danny into the stacks of chairs and told him to shut the fuck up, asshole, and get the fuck out. Puck had even helped her with the pizza boxes while everyone else shuffled out of the community center in stunned silence.
Two days later, of course, he threw a slushie in her face.
She shakes herself when Ms. Puckerman asks if her family still hosts big Shabbat dinners every week. They do, but they’ve gotten smaller as kids Rachel’s age have grown up and gone to college, breaking up her parents’ little social circle. Now it’s usually just the three of them and the odd couple suffering from empty nest syndrome. Ms. Puckerman glances back at Puck, who is still looming over Rachel’s left shoulder. “You should invite Noah, if it’s not a problem,” she says and Rachel can’t quite bite back a grin at his name. “He hasn’t been to a real dinner in ages.”
Puck’s giving her the eye; she can feel it boring into her skull. “Maybe,” she says dubiously, trying to imagine Puck seated at the opposite end of the table, breaking challah and getting tipsy on wine as the candle wax drips steadily. Ms. Puckerman presses the issue, despite Puck’s protests of embarrassment. “We can figure it out. I’m sure my parents would love to see you,” she adds lamely, although it’s entirely possible. She’s not sure she’s ever caught her dads up to speed on the current incarnation of Noah Puckerman; they probably imagine him as a skinny version of Jacob Israel.
Who knows what the Finn or Kurt or Mercedes would say if any of them found out that Puck might turn up at Friday night dinner at her house. That, more than that, he’d be welcome more often than not. It’s odd to have this extra history with Puck -he’s probably known her longer than anyone else at school.
When they pull up outside of Rachel’s house, she thanks Ms. Puckerman, and hesitates too long before she gets out of the car. She slides the front seat forward to let Puck out and suddenly he’s huge and nearly on top of her. Rachel has to step back fast and tilt her head way back. “I’ll call you? About Shabbat.” She has his number already, in one of the JCC’s directories stashed in a junk drawer in the kitchen. “Maybe.” She tacks it on to save face, even though Puck nods and shrugs as if to say, yeah, whatever, cool. Which of those three isn’t entirely clear.
“See you tomorrow, Rach,” he says to her back, casually, as if he hadn’t been circling her in history a few weeks ago, asking if anyone else smelled fish.
Her dad, whose mission in life is to be hideously creepy and embarrassing, is on her the second she shuts the door behind her, asking if Sarah Puckerman gave her a ride home and was that little Noah all grown up? He hadn’t realized they were still friends.
Rachel pauses on the stairs up to her room. “We’re not friends, Dad,” she says as plainly as possible. “We just have history, that’s all.”
end.
Feedback appreciated.
I had so much fun writing this, you guys. I really wanted to get it up before tonight's episode because I know it's totally going to get blown out of the water. Anyway, I'm not spoiled and I haven't watched leaked clips so please don't talk about them in my LJ until tomorrow! ETA: Have watched the latest ep. Spoil away.
Glee
A Complete History of Noah Puckerman, Abridged
As told by Rachel Berry
Rachel, Puck. E for everyone. Spoilers through Takedown.
“Born with it?” Rachel pauses, meeting Puck’s gaze. “Let me tell you a few things about Noah Puckerman.”
Note: A bris is the religious ceremony that surrounds the ritual circumcision of Jewish male infants and is often attended by family and friends as a way to welcome the baby to the faith (and, more practically, to the rest of the world).
A Complete History of Noah Puckerman, Abridged
As told by Rachel Berry
The Sunday morning of the new Uzick baby’s bris is bright, blue, and utterly freezing. Rachel’s in the kitchen picking at the crusty caramelized edges of the maple French toast when Puck saunters up to the buffet. She’s licking sticky sauce from her fingers when they make eye contact and she sees the joke on his face before it even fully forms in his brain. He says nothing (Ms. Puckerman is nothing if not hawk-like in hearing) but he smirks, even if he does nod genially and asks what’s up, jostling her arms in an almost friendly way when he passes by.
They’re in a weird place right now, a shaky truce-cum-friendship formed since Puck joined glee club. With family, it’s always been a little different between them than at school, the you-will-be-polite-and-like-it ingrained into both of them. There aren’t that many other Jewish kids at McKinley - most of them attend Carmel or Carver for high school - so she’s always walked a fine line with those few people she sees around at things like this. It’s never been weird to say hi to Puck at services those few times of year she goes or run into him at the JCC and have him pause to hold the door for her. Recently though, she’s found herself standing near him, chatting about glee or school or even spreading idle community gossip his way.
Puck starts piling his plate high with beef sausage, French toast, potatoes, rugelach, and the rest of the elaborate brunch spread. Little Joshua Kaplan walks in, slacks at once wide around the waist and flooding up around his ankles, big thick glasses, his thick dark hair curling at the edges of his neck and frizzing up around the crown of his head. His pock-marked face has a bit of a greenish tinge, but he blushes when he greets Rachel. “I can’t believe you’re eating after all that,” he says to Puck, who has taken up residence against the sink. Puck shrugs and, with an evil grin, snaps his teeth at the edge of a sausage link, sniping off just the very tip. Josh blanches and Rachel rolls her eyes.
“Ignore him,” Rachel says. “When we were eight, at Jeremy Shapiro’s bris-” Puck starts talking over her, loud shut-the-hell-up sounds and Rachel raises her voice (he’s been singing with her for weeks and still thinks he can drown her out?). “At Jeremy Shapiro’s bris,” she repeats, loud and clear and Puck starts laughing, “Puck threw up all over Rebecca Shapiro. It was like the exorcist.” When they’d circumcised Jeremy, there had been just the slightest hint of blood and Puck had had to put his head between his legs and count to ten; Rachel remembers her dad going over to rub his slow circles on his back, how Puck had started crying, huge embarrassed wheezing sobs, and he wouldn’t let his own mother touch him. Her dad had lifted him up and taken him to the bathroom to clean up.
“It took years to convince her to go out with me,” says Puck, with a rueful grin. Puck-everyone called him Noah then and it’s funny that Rachel remembers that tear-stained awkward kid as Noah, as someone totally separate from who Puck is now-had come back with a huge Notre Dame sweatshirt hanging off his skinny shoulder. Rachel remembers Heather Shoham murmuring to another mother that she’d never let her little boy go off alone with Rachel’s dad; she’d turned white and then red when she’d turned around and seen Rachel’s other dad, thin-lipped and barely civil, with one hand on her shoulder.
“She still went out with you though,” says Jeremy, a jealous tinge to his voice. Rachel pats his shoulder; she remembers seventh grade.
Puck wags his eyebrows. “Yes. Yes, she did,” he drawls, each word punctuated with a slight pause, although he drops his voice as other people start milling in for food.
“I can’t even get Joanna Strauss to look at me,” mutters Josh. He scratches the back of his neck. When Rachel points out that she’ll probably be at his bar mitzvah, Josh looks even more miserable. “Yeah, but only because she has to be.”
Puck shrugs, spreads his hands wide. “What can I say? Some guys are just born with it.”
Josh nods, agreeing with one long, drawn-out yeahhhhhh. He looks so sad and Puck so smug in his fitted coat and tie, boasting to some poor kid, that Rachel can’t stand it. “Born with it?” she says, making her voice as incredulous as possible. She’s had a few mimosas and her voice is a little loud. “Josh,” she pauses, meeting Puck’s gaze, “let me tell you a few things about Noah Puckerman.” Josh leans forward, a hesitant smile on his face while his eyes dart back and forth between them.
Puck raises his eyebrows, meeting her head on. “Go ahead, Berry, I dare you.” He’s still smiling, all white even teeth; he’d been one of the first kids to get braces, had that expander with the key that he’d turn a quarter turn every other day.
“At Puck’s bar mitzvah-” Ms. Puckerman picks that moment to walk into the kitchen and Rachel stops talking, not wanting to bring up contentious memories. They’d been kids then, neither wealthy enough or connected enough be anything other than peripheral in what was known around the JCC as the Jew Crew. Puck, at loss for any friends at his own bar mitzvah, had snuck off to the boys’ bathroom to suck down a bottle of peppermint schnapps he’d found at home. She’d run into him on his way back to the party, remembers the astringent minty smell as he’d pushed passed her. She remembers how Puck got loud, clumsy, how he’d stumbled into the flimsy refreshment table. Pop went everywhere and clear plastic party cups skittered into the far reaches of the room.
Other people start trickling into the kitchen, needing mimosa refills (Rachel wants one, although she’s pretty sure she needs to switch to coffee). The baby, tucked serenely in a cornflower blue blanket now that the most traumatic moments of his short life have passed, gets handed around. His little hand wraps snugly around Rachel’s finger when she puts it in his palm, although she’s a bit afraid to hold him. Babies scare her a little, so fragile and terrifying. Puck gets soft and coos when the cocoon comes to him; his face goes a little far away and sad. Rachel pretends not to notice and even bristles a bit on his behalf when Mrs. Shoham says quietly that Puck’s dad never stuck around long enough even for this part.
The big sister wants to show Rachel her room, and Rachel ends up listening to the individual histories of each stuffed animal long past the time her dads leave, making sure she doesn’t mind walking home. When Rachel finally extracts herself and is getting into her coat, the heavy lacquered grandfather clock in the foyer reads after two o’clock. Puck emerges just as she’s wrapping her scarf around her neck.
“I can’t believe you were going to tell that story,” he says, voice low. She can hear his mother saying good-bye to the Uzicks. Rachel had snuck out of the bar mitzvah after the drink debacle, staying just long enough to make her dads happy, and found Puck retching in a trashcan just outside the ballroom doors. He’d straightened up just as she’d walked by, spitting the puke vestiges into the bin and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I have to go home now,” she’d said. His eyes were watery and red from throwing up. The putrid smell of alcohol vomit rose between them. “Thanks for inviting me.” He didn’t say anything, she remembered, and after too long a pause she turned to leave. Then she turned back, touching her own jaw briefly. “You, um, have stuff on your face still.”
Now, Rachel tucks the ends of her scarf into her coat. “Someone needs remind you that you weren’t always the hot guy,” she says very primly, hoping she doesn’t blush. Then she reaches up and stops just short of poking him in the alcohol-flushed cheek, “And that you couldn’t always hold your liquor.” Puck looms over her, eyes bright with mimosas.
“But I’m hot now,” he points out pragmatically.
“In a prominent brow, Neanderthal kind of way,” she agrees. Puck grasps his heart, wounded.
They’re doing that awkward, dorky smiling thing where they’re just sort of staring at each other on the front stoop when Ms. Puckerman comes out, digging in purse for her keys. She tells Rachel flat out that they’ll give her a ride home and Rachel gives Puck a sunny grin when he opens the front door of the boxy, old two-door BMW for her under his mother’s watchful eye.
“Thank you so much, Puck!” she says gleefully and he nobly does not roll his eyes to her face.
Puck fits himself in the back seat of the car and she slides in front. It’s meticulously clean, the dash well shined and oiled where it’s beginning to crack with age and the mat spotless save for the spots worn out after over a decade of Puck’s feet.
Rachel can see Puck’s profile in the side view mirror while she answers questions from Ms. Puckerman about what she’s been up to since last time they saw each other. Yes, she’s doing well in school. Yes, she’s signed up to take the SAT. Yes, she’s still singing. No, she doesn’t have a boyfriend. To this last one, she ignores Puck’s ill-hidden snort. She resists the urge to remind him in front of his mother that, while he might be taking his pick of the Cheerios now, he was the one who was behind the curve at the beginning.
She was Puck’s first kiss. It’s embarrassing to think about now and she ducks her head like he can hear her thoughts, but Rachel was his first.
She and Puck were in the same Hebrew school class, ostracized by the other kids, most of whom went to the same private school. They were friendly out necessity, but never friends. Usually the two of them loitered outside together, away from the other kids, while they waited to be picked up. Everyone was old enough by then that kids put extra stress on the words when they said that Puck’s mom “worked nights,” leering knowingly at him even if all she did was pick up the graveyard shift at the hospital. It had been cold, nearly dark, and they had been sitting on the curb together, knees knocking. Rachel had been wearing fuzzy gloves with snowflakes on them.
It had been on the coattails of some Jewish Community Center scandal, where one of the lifeguards had been caught kissing someone else’s girlfriend or boyfriend at a party and somehow drinking had been involved. The whole thing seemed so glamorous: high school kids sneaking around, rowdy parties with beer while parents were away. Rachel had wanted so badly to be in high school already, to skip awkward middle school (sixth grade was sucking) and get to high school where her skin would be perfect, her clothes would be fashionable, and she’d have lots of friends and a cute boyfriend. Everyone had been talking about it through the lesson and it was on both their minds while they watched the other kids disappear into their SUVs one by one.
Puck asked her first, she thinks, if she’d ever kissed anyone. Rachel had admitted to Ben Levy, just once, way back in fourth grade when Ben had cornered her in the coat room where all the backpacks and lunch boxes were stowed away, grabbed her hands, and very seriously said, “I’m gonna kiss you now.” She’d withstood it, then cried, and Ben had been sent to the principal’s office, looking bewildered and betrayed.
Puck laughed. “You cried?” He had glasses, the thick black-framed kind, and braces and butterflies formed in her stomach as she defended herself. It had been dark in the coatroom and smelled like mildew from all the coats. Plus, their teacher had opened the door and caught them, red handed. A pause fell after that and Puck threw a few bits of gravel across the U-shaped driveway before he said, “I’ve never done it,” very quickly. “I just want to get it over with.”
She glanced at him, out of the corner of her eye. “It’s not that great.” He laughed again, breath coming out in puffy white clouds in the rapidly-cooling air. “You can kiss me, if you want.” Her face felt hot, red burning fire hot, in the moment after that, and Puck stopped throwing gravel long enough to look at her, considering. He kissed her on the mouth, closed lips. She’d closed her eyes and counted seconds because she wasn’t sure what else to do. She touched his neck, tentatively, and opened her mouth just a bit before they both pulled back.
His mouth was a little shiny and Rachel remembers not knowing whether it would be okay to lick her lips or not. “Thanks,” he said, huffing out a laugh. His face was colored a deep, dusky red. He scooted a little away from her, pressing palms, fingers wide spread, onto the concrete curb. She could have put her hands down too and they’d have been touching. They’d spent the next fifteen minutes until her dad arrived in silence. The next week, neither of them had said anything about it.
Puck taps his foot against the back of her seat now, rhythmically, and it would be annoying if she thought he was doing it on purpose instead of expelling nervous energy.
Puck won points with the other kids for his bar mitzvah scandal and he came back from sleep-away camp that summer different, no longer the scrawny kid he’d been, and with a definite mission. He told anyone who would listen about how he’d hooked up with a counselor-in-training, felt her up beneath her bathing suit. They both worked at the JCC in eighth grade, Puck strutting around the pool in his bathing suit even though all he did was pick up trash and fold towels. Rachel did reception, answering phones and scheduling kids for after-school classes. Sometimes they’d have group events and it was weird to see Puck sitting with all the other kids when she came in on a break to eat a slice of pizza. He’d have his guitar, strumming something by John Mayer or Oasis and other kids would sing along, gratingly, achingly off key.
It was Puck that started the transvestite rumor. She knows because he came up to her desk one day, picked up a gymnastics schedule, and said, “So, is it true you’re a tranny? Because it makes sense,” with a sunny smile. From a distance it probably looked like he was being friendly.
Puck leans forward when his mom asks Rachel about glee club. Yes, it’s true that Puck is a member and, as much as she hates to admit it, he’s actually quite good. “Rachel’s the star, Mom,” he says, sing-song, right next to her ear. “Just ask her.” As she’s turning her head to glare, he continues, sounding sincere. “She’s really, really good. She’s the best of all of us.” It’s hard not to blush when she thanks him, even if it’s true. She’s not used to compliments from boys, even if it is Noah Puckerass. On their first day of high school, when the teachers called out, “Noah Puckerman?” he’d replied, “It’s just Puck.” She couldn’t believe he got away with it. Few high school freshman pull off a name usually associated with an Elizabethan fairy, but Puck managed to own it.
They barely spoke through eighth grade, unless he was telling her she had a horse-face. Rachel Scary, Rachel Hairy - the names weren’t Puck’s inventions but he capitalized on them, bring them out of the closet where they’d been left languish since leaving fifth grade. In middle school, she was mostly ignored, until Puck became cool.
There was one time, right after high school began, when they were closing up the JCC for the night. Rachel was flattening pizza boxes to stuff them in trash cans and a few other kids were stacking chairs so that the cleaning crew could come through. It was Danny Shoham who said, and she remembers exactly, that Rachel probably wasn’t really a Jew, since her mom was probably just some crackhead who’d left her a dumpster on prom night. If her own parents didn’t love her, who would? It was the kind of shitty, hateful thing people said to her all the time and she didn’t have the friends or quick-thinking to defend herself, even (or maybe especially) when the accusations were untrue. Back then, before she realized how mean people could be, she’d always been blind-sided by their nastiness. This was no different; she’d frozen, hands full of pizza boxes, and stared at the floor.
She remembers, too, clatter and then deafening silence when Puck shoved Danny into the stacks of chairs and told him to shut the fuck up, asshole, and get the fuck out. Puck had even helped her with the pizza boxes while everyone else shuffled out of the community center in stunned silence.
Two days later, of course, he threw a slushie in her face.
She shakes herself when Ms. Puckerman asks if her family still hosts big Shabbat dinners every week. They do, but they’ve gotten smaller as kids Rachel’s age have grown up and gone to college, breaking up her parents’ little social circle. Now it’s usually just the three of them and the odd couple suffering from empty nest syndrome. Ms. Puckerman glances back at Puck, who is still looming over Rachel’s left shoulder. “You should invite Noah, if it’s not a problem,” she says and Rachel can’t quite bite back a grin at his name. “He hasn’t been to a real dinner in ages.”
Puck’s giving her the eye; she can feel it boring into her skull. “Maybe,” she says dubiously, trying to imagine Puck seated at the opposite end of the table, breaking challah and getting tipsy on wine as the candle wax drips steadily. Ms. Puckerman presses the issue, despite Puck’s protests of embarrassment. “We can figure it out. I’m sure my parents would love to see you,” she adds lamely, although it’s entirely possible. She’s not sure she’s ever caught her dads up to speed on the current incarnation of Noah Puckerman; they probably imagine him as a skinny version of Jacob Israel.
Who knows what the Finn or Kurt or Mercedes would say if any of them found out that Puck might turn up at Friday night dinner at her house. That, more than that, he’d be welcome more often than not. It’s odd to have this extra history with Puck -he’s probably known her longer than anyone else at school.
When they pull up outside of Rachel’s house, she thanks Ms. Puckerman, and hesitates too long before she gets out of the car. She slides the front seat forward to let Puck out and suddenly he’s huge and nearly on top of her. Rachel has to step back fast and tilt her head way back. “I’ll call you? About Shabbat.” She has his number already, in one of the JCC’s directories stashed in a junk drawer in the kitchen. “Maybe.” She tacks it on to save face, even though Puck nods and shrugs as if to say, yeah, whatever, cool. Which of those three isn’t entirely clear.
“See you tomorrow, Rach,” he says to her back, casually, as if he hadn’t been circling her in history a few weeks ago, asking if anyone else smelled fish.
Her dad, whose mission in life is to be hideously creepy and embarrassing, is on her the second she shuts the door behind her, asking if Sarah Puckerman gave her a ride home and was that little Noah all grown up? He hadn’t realized they were still friends.
Rachel pauses on the stairs up to her room. “We’re not friends, Dad,” she says as plainly as possible. “We just have history, that’s all.”
end.
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