Catalyst

Chapter 8

Friday came sooner than Quinn wanted it to. She'd sat with Rachel during lunch for the rest of the week, reading while she napped. Working so close to her bed-time probably exhausted her and Quinn couldn't help but feel a little guilty as Finn and Rachel got into her car after school and Rachel directed her to the clinic. Finn had asked, awkwardly, if Rachel could go with them because she was helping him pay for it. She'd had to work to sound ambivalent to it instead of just plain ecstatic. It was a small building not that far into Akron; the receptionist behind the counter didn't bat an eyelash at the three teenagers standing awkwardly in the waiting room.

A young man came over and handed them a clipboard. "Whoever is pregnant needs to fill this out. It's all relevant information, your name, birth date, ethnicity, where we can contact you, the price for basic things. There are pamphlets up front about genetic testing if either of the parents is a risk."

Rachel asked, hesitantly, "Would you please describe a genetic risk?"

He ticked them off with his fingers, "African-American, Latin-American, Native American, Indian-American, Asian-American, overweight, underweight, Jewish-"

"We'll take one," Quinn finally said. "Finn, please go get one." He opened his mouth, and then snapped it closed and went to get a pamphlet. The girls sat in the hard chairs and Quinn was thankful it was nearly empty. There were three other people besides the three teenagers; one a young woman, and another, a harassed looking father with his daughter, who coughed periodically into his sleeve. She then sneezed and wiped her nose with the end of his jacket. He never flinched. The daughter looked up at them with very gray eyes underneath a mop of straw-colored hair and wiggled her fingers at both of them. Quinn smiled, and she saw that Rachel was beaming at the girl as well.

A nurse stepped out and looked at the clipboard, "Alison Mosshart? The doctor will see you now." The young woman stood up, and Quinn ducked her head down to fill out her form.

Most of it really was simple stuff. It required a social security number, but she'd expected that and had written it on the edge of the note Rachel had left her all that time ago. Rachel looked down at it and gave her a soft smile, "I didn't know you still had it."

She shrugged, "I wasn't upset that week." Quinn was actually still a little upset that she'd ripped up the note that Rachel had left last in her locker. It wasn't often she got such sweet gifts and the blonde would probably gather them all and put them somewhere in a more organized manner then the front pocket of her book bag and her locker one day. Rachel proved just about every few days how easy it was to get into a locker.

Speaking of, how did she manage to do that?

"How do you keep getting into my locker?" Quinn asked, hand above the ethnicity of father question. Damn. Rachel was fairly dark, but she didn't have any African-American or Asian features, but she also didn't look fully Caucasian. She finally checked the multi-racial box.

"Trial and error."

She thought for a second Rachel was being serious, and then she saw the edge of a smirk. "Who'd you pay to get that?" She rolled her eyes.

"Jacob ben Israel knows the locker combination of every Cheerio. I smiled at him and he gave it to me."

Quinn gagged. She couldn't imagine talking to that creep for a long enough period of time to get anything but a case of head-lice. He was just – weird, and not in the way that people said Rachel was weird. Rachel was weird in that way that she was overly sincere in everything, hardly lied at all, liked what she liked with no apologies, and was an old film junkie (she'd talked her ear off last night about Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, and All Quiet on the Western Front and why, exactly, new movies would not live up to their standards). Jew-Fro was weird in that way that you checked outside your window and underneath your bed each night.