Be Free, Be You

“Val?” I called into my sister’s room first thing Monday morning. My head was in a fog from the little sleep I got the night before, thanks to the constant flow of ideas that came for the novel I was working on right when I was about to fall asleep. “Do you think I could borrow that purple tank top?”

She turned away from her mirror, a black eyeliner pencil in her hand. “Uh, sure. It should be hanging in the closet.”

“Gracias!” I ran over to the closet and slid the folding door open. Surely enough, the purple tank top was stuffed into the far side, against the wall. The poor thing looked a little suffocated.

I plucked it off the hanger and shook it out, getting rid of most of the wrinkles. I was almost out the door when Val called after me, “You better be ready in ten minutes or I’m leaving without you.”

I rolled my eyes and grumbled to myself as I stalked down the hallway, back toward my room. The inside was like a tornado ran through it. Unlike my sister, I thought that a room was a good representation of the inside of the mind, and it just so happened mine couldn’t be tamed.

Quickly, I threw on the top I’d taken from Val, a pair of dark wash, straight-legged jeans, and a black cardigan over it. After pulling on my favorite, worn-out black Converse, I ran a brush through my long, reddish-brown hair and darted down the stairs.

Val smirked at me from the front doorway, an apple in her hand. “Good timing.”

“Thanks.” I grinned and went to the cupboard, taking a Cookies N’ Cream Pop-Tart from its cardboard box.

She gave me a disdainful look as we made our way to her car. “I don’t understand how you can eat that crap.”

Just to piss her off, I took a huge bite of the pastry. “Because I don’t have to watch my figure for the Cheerios.”

The Cheerios was the nickname for the cheerleading team at our school. Valarie, always the athletic one in the family, had signed up immediately freshman year, and had quickly earned her spot as one of the best. I was happy for her, and was even happier that Dad hadn’t forced me to join, too. Writing was really a better idea for me, pastime-wise.

Valarie rolled her eyes at me while we climbed into the car. The drive to school only took about eight minutes, which we spent in silence, listening to some pop music on the radio.

Once we pulled into the parking lot, someone cut us off. Val slammed on the brakes, sending both our heads snapping forward. “Nice driving,” I commented under my breath.

“Oh? How would you have handled that?” she retaliated without hesitation.

“Good point.”

As we drove past where the kid who cut us off parked, he climbed out of his truck. “Ugh,” Val grumbled, “I should have known it would be Puckerman.”

I stared at him, watching as he ran a hand through his Mohawk and smiled at himself in his rearview mirror. He was known throughout the school as being a total player and having an ego the size of…well, probably the entire world.

But it didn’t help that he was almost as attractive as he thought he was. He drew in the girls like flies to honey.

“I’m really not shocked that he’s a sucky driver,” I added after a just-too-long-not-to-be-awkward silence.

Val shot me a side-glance as she pulled into her parking space. Thankfully, she had enough tact not to point how disgustingly pathetic I was. Or at least how disgustingly pathetic I appeared.

Before going into the school, Val pulled down the visor to make sure she looked completely perfect. It was bad enough for her reputation that she was my sister, never mind what would happen if she looked even remotely human.

Once she was satisfied, she climbed out of the car. I followed, walking about three steps behind her. Her blonde ponytail swayed back and forth over the back of her neck, hiding and revealing her infinity tattoo. I was so jealous of it, but I had such a low pain tolerance and such a severe fear of needles that I knew getting a tattoo wasn’t the best idea.

The hallways of McKinley High were filled with students, pushing and shoving their ways through the crowd. They parted like the Red Sea when Val walked through, as if she was too holy to touch. But as I tried to make my way through the throng, they closed in again, making me feel claustrophobic.

When I made it to my locker, I spun the combination and sighed. Mondays were rough, always, but after the initial rush of hurrying to get ready, working off four hours of sleep was already starting to weigh on me. My eyelids were drooping and my head started to feel sore.

In my first period class, English, I slumped down in my seat and struggled to keep my eyes open. Usually, English was my favorite class (pretty obvious, since I was a writer, or wanted to be, anyway), but it seemed more like a hassle that day.

The teacher, Mrs. Norton, smiled as she went over what we were going to cover in class: basic grammar rules. Nothing I didn’t already know.

I rested my cheek on my fist, blinking as often as I could to keep awake, trying to focus on the obvious grammar rules, like when it was necessary to put a comma in a sentence.

“Stephanie!” Mrs. Norton yelled angrily, hitting her hand down on my desk.

I didn’t realize I had fallen asleep until my head snapped back up. “What?” I asked, struggling to suppress the yawn that was crawling up my throat.

A couple of kids around me giggled, but I just ran a hand through my hair, not wanting to make eye contact with my teacher, knowing that she was giving me daggers. “I understand that Monday mornings are tough, but I’d appreciate it if you’d work a little harder at staying awake in my class. Who knows? You might actually learn something.”

Doubt it. But I kept that thought in my mind, since I had a reputation to uphold. Kind of. Everyone knew me as Valarie’s quiet, smart, nice, but a little weird younger sister. If they knew me at all, that was.

Instead of listening to the lesson, which would certainly put me to sleep again, I thought of my sister.

The fact that was perfect and gorgeous and blonde was plain to anyone who saw her. And even though our faces were similar in structure, most people didn’t realize we were related right away, as we had such different colored hair and my eyes were a light brown, while hers were a strange gray-green.

It didn’t help that she was at the top of the food chain at the school, since she was a cheerleader. And my greatest aspiration was to be a part of the Glee Club, a nice way of saying social suicide.

When I voiced my thoughts to Valarie, I thought her eyes were going to pop out of her head. “Don’t you dare,” she warned me. Val was pretty cool, and we got along well most of the time, but if there was one thing she was adamant about, it was that I stayed away from the Glee Club.

Not that I could get in anyway. Even though I loved the idea of being able to sing with the talented group of kids in there, there was a small problem: I couldn’t sing. A nice way of describing my voice would be a cat getting run over by an eighteen-wheeler truck.

And those are precisely the kinds of voices that Glee Club does not want.

Another thing, I couldn’t dance. Some kids, like Mike Chang, didn’t have great singing voices (as far as I knew), but their dancing ability made up for it. Not me. I had nothing but a dream.

What wasn’t fair was that Valarie, who hated the idea of singing anywhere more public than our house, had a beautiful singing voice. It was controlled and powerful and perfect, even though she’d never had a lesson a day in her life.

“Alright,” Mrs. Norman’s voice broke through my thoughts shrilly, “to practice proofreading sentences, turn to page 29 in your grammar books.”

I did what was asked, making a pretty good show of pretending like I’d been listening the whole time instead of daydreaming. And, of course, the work was so easy, I finished in ten minutes.

The rest of the time, I doodled in the margins of my notebook absentmindedly, knowing that if I just stared at the clock, I’d get called out again.

Across the classroom, Tina Cohen-Chang and Artie Abrams were having a heated discussion about some kind of comic book or something. It was easy to hear them, since everyone else was dead silent.

Tina and Artie were two other kids in the Glee Club that I envied for their singing abilities. Unfortunately, they were kind of the perfect definition of Glee kids: quiet, not very social, and complete outcasts.

At least they could be outcasts together.

I dragged my eyes away from them and looked down at my paper, noticing that thinking about Glee Club again had made the lines of a once-pretty and loopy design much harsher and dark. In one place, it ripped right through the notebook paper.

My face flushed, surely noticeable clearly under my super fair skin. I hoped more than anything that Mrs. Norman wouldn’t ask for us to hand in the papers, since she’d probably think that I was crazy or had anger issues.

Of course, the second that thought crossed through my mind, Mrs. Norman plastered on a grin and said, “Alright, pass your papers up.”

There was a chorus of groans, and some kid said, “But I’m not done.”

“Life isn’t fair, James,” she told him.

She said it.