Cheerio

“God,” Puck grumbled as he scrolled through a list of inductees on some website he found. I was sitting on the edge of his bed, Indian-style, keeping my mouth shut and watching him click around. He was starting to get pissed off. I could tell from the fact that his left hand, resting next to the monitor, kept clenching into a fist at around fifteen to twenty second intervals. “Are there any Jewish people on this thing?”

“There has to be at least one Jewish person on there,” I responded, looking around at the walls. They were basically bare, almost like he didn’t want to look like he was going to stick around long. “Why does it matter, anyway?”

Puck turned around so quickly in his rolling chair that I jumped back a little in shock. “What do you mean, ‘why does it matter’?”

I thought over my statement in my head a couple of times, wondering if I had been too harsh. The more I lingered on it, the more confused I got. I hadn’t said it harshly at all. “Just what I said…”

“It matters because I am a grade-A Jew,” he told me cuttingly, as if he was offended that I didn’t know already. How could I have? It’s not like I paid much attention to anyone other than myself. “And I only perform songs by Jews for Glee Club. Is that a problem?”

“No,” I mumbled. “You don’t have to get pissed at me. I honestly didn’t know, okay?”

Puck just shook his head and turned around. “I figured everyone knew it.”

“I don’t know why you think you were important enough to land on my radar.”

He shot me a look over his shoulder and opened his mouth to say something, but decided to drop it.

After a couple more minutes of scrolling and clicking and sighing and groaning, Puck smacked the top of the desk so loudly everything on it rattled and I jumped about a foot in the air. “FOUND SOMETHING!”

“What?” I gasped, my hand over my chest, trying to slow my pulse down before I had a heart attack.

“Simon and Garfunkel. They’re Jews and they were put in the Hall of Fame in 1990. We should totally do one of their songs.”

When I didn’t say anything right away, he turned to face me, his expression anticipating and inquisitive. “What? You have a problem with Simon and Garfunkel?”

“No. Considering I have no freakin’ idea who the hell they are,” I replied.

Once again, he opened his mouth to argue with me, but shook his head, deciding it was not really an issue worth discussing. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter. I’ll just pick the song, and you can go through the motions and get through Glee Club.” He turned around and continued to mumble, which I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to hear or not. “Not like anyone will be listening anyway, since everyone hates your fucking guts.”

My face reddened as I got to my feet. “Look, I’m not trying to fight with you. I want to get this assignment done just as much as you do. I didn’t mean to offend you, okay?”

There was an awkward silence, and I felt too uncomfortable to sit back down. Instead, I just wrung my hands together and looked around the room, not wanting to stare at one place too long.

“There,” Puck said, reaching toward the printer that was spitting out a slip of paper. “Here’s the song.”

At the top was the title, The Boxer, and underneath was the entire, ridiculously long song. I wanted to make a crack at it, but considering Puck was PMS-ing and would probably freak out and cry, I kept my mouth shut.

“How do we know which parts we’re going to sing?” I questioned, still staring at it.

He sighed and took it out of my hand, proceeding to mark off different parts that we could both sing. “Now all you have to do is memorize your parts, okay? Did I make it easy enough for you, princess?”

“Hey,” I interjected, starting to get pissed, “I thought you were the one person in the club that actually still treated me like a human being.”

“I think I’m treating you better than any of them would. But get real. You totally dissed Kurt, and I’m not going to take that lightly. We need our token gay kid.”

I gnawed on my cheek, trying my hardest not to get emotional in front of him. Nobody was allowed to see me cry. “I’m sorry about what I did to Kurt. It was bitchy. But in my defense, I’m kind of still in my transition period. I was still in Cheerio mode.”

“Don’t try to sell me that bullshit.” Puck rolled his eyes. “You were just born a bitch.”

No I wasn’t. It was nurture, not nature, that made me the way I was. Not that I was going to stand there and tell him that. He could find out for himself. Instead, I changed the subject. “What happened to you? You used to be all over me. You would kill for the opportunity to have me home alone with you, in your room, with the door closed. And you haven’t even made a move on me.”

Puck shrugged. “Not only did you totally humiliate Kurt, Rachel, Finn, and Quinn, but you’re not a Cheerio anymore. You’re not special. You’re just one other chick in the school that I haven’t fucked yet. And, frankly, you’re not at the top of my list. There are girls who aren’t Cheerios that are way hotter than you.”

I swallowed the lump that was starting to form in my throat. “No, really,” I mumbled. “Be blunt. It’s not like I have feelings or anything.”

“Do you?” he snapped, getting out of the chair and taking a step toward me. “Because it kind of seems like you’re a robot to me.”

“What did you do, pretend to be nice to me so that I’d willingly come over your house to work with you so you could scream at me?”

“Kind of. I mean, we had to work on the project, too, but you’re nuts if you think that I wouldn’t get defensive. The Glee Club gets enough shit from the football players. We don’t need someone trying to take us down from the inside.”

“I protected you guys in the hallway today with those meatheads, didn’t I?” Instead of my temper starting to flare, I was just feeling more and more helpless. Maybe because I was naïve enough to think that he didn’t hate me as much as everyone else.

“What? Do you want Brownie Points or something? A fucking Medal of Honor?” Puck rolled his eyes. “Just face it. Nobody likes you. If you disappeared, no one would care. In fact, they’d probably be thrilled.”

My eyes immediately started to tear up as my anger finally decided to make an appearance. “I am so sick and tired of people just passing judgment on me when they don’t even know what I’m going through!” I screamed, putting more space between us. “Nobody knows what I’ve been put through.”

“Oh, wah wah. Welcome to the real world, princess.”

“Fuck you, Puckerman,” I hissed at him, throwing open his bedroom door. “Go to hell. And you know what?” I tore the paper in half. “You can do the assignment by yourself. I’m not doing Glee Club anymore. I’d rather take an F in Spanish than submit myself to being tortured.”

“Good. I have a feeling there’ll be a party tomorrow.”

I slammed the door behind me and stormed down the hallway, trying to fight the stinging in my eyes.

I was on the last step of the stairs when I heard Puck’s voice call after me, “Now you have a taste of how Kurt felt. Sucks, doesn’t it?”

I didn’t even give him the satisfaction of acknowledging it visibly, his words went right through my soul.

As the cold air smacked me in the face, it occurred to me that I needed to have some sort of universe-shifting epiphany sooner or later before I made my world even worse than it already was.

Preferably sooner, considering I didn’t even want to know what would happen next.