Gleeboot (Season 1)

8. Perfect Partners

"You all know I'm all about traditions," said Sam, standing before the New Directions in the choir room. "With the musical and the festival behind us, what we have to look ahead to is Sectionals. This is our first major competition of the year."

"Woo!" exclaimed Mia, clapping her hands in excitement.

Not everyone shared her enthusiasm for competing, but Sam continued, "Now, we're gonna be preparing setlists soon enough. But there's one last task you have to get through before we can do that."

He grabbed his marker and wrote the word DUETS on it. 

"We have to sing duets?" muttered Alex.

"Do we get to choose our partner?" asked Lucas.

Turning to the kids, Sam said, "This is a very special opportunity. In preparation for Sectionals, you are going to have to earn your solos. This one's the fun one because whoever wins it gets to sing the duet at Sectionals."

This got their attention. "So my getting a solo could come down to someone else's talent," said Floris, glancing around the room. There was only one person he was dying to sing with... But Teddy wasn't the most vocally talented. Perhaps he should start branching out.

"It's how I got my big number at Sectionals a decade ago," Sam explained, "and it was one of the highlights of my time in the New Directions."

He was seeing a lot of kids start pumping each other up, but there were still a few who had not seemingly been convinced. He walked over to the table by his office door and grabbed a small envelope.

"I thought there might be some of you that don't care about competition solos," he said. "But I noticed how much fun you all had at Breadstix during the cast party and I'm upholding another glee tradition. The winners will not only be getting that Sectionals duet... They will also be winning free dinner for two at Breadstix."

From out of the envelope, he pulled out two complementary gift cards for Breadstix and those who hadn't cared about the duet, like Mona, Lola, and Kat, were suddenly interested, too.

"It is so on," said Dominic, turning to Mia. She smiled back at him but then looked away. The guilt of her betrayal was killing her.

***

"Hey," said Lola, stopping by Ricky's locker. 

"Hey," he briefly turned to her. His attention was split between her and trying to set up a new bookshelf in his locker. 

Nevertheless, she continued, "So as you know, the Findlay club is very elite and one of the gymnasts there actually won silver at the all-around men's Olympics this summer. So they've been invited to this really fancy Invitational in Phoenix and they'll be focused on that, without me, which means my gymnastics for now is all here, local. My training hours aren't really built yet but it does mean for the next week or so I'll have a lot more free time."

"That's great," he smiled down at her. 

"Agreed," said Lola. "See, we're always on the same page about things. So how about we get on the same sheet music, too, and pair up for this duet thing..?"

He began to respond - it was an obvious yes - until he turned to her and saw that she wasn't even looking at him. He followed her glance and saw it glued to Lucas and Perla, who were either roughly flirting or having a fight at the other end of the hall. It was unclear. But what wasn't was where her feelings lay.

"Ahh," he said. "So is this because the guy you wanna sing with is... singing with everyone else?"

"What?" Lola snapped back to look at him. "Oh no. I mean, I can't deny that I would've loved to sing with him because I do like his voice, but the thing with Lucas was barely a thing and it's fizzled out entirely. I just wanna sing with my friend."