Hey guys. Not a proper chapter, just the first of Rachel's interludes since it seemed to fit here better. Working on updates for most of my stories at the moment so I should have updates out before christmas.

Thank you so much for your patience and thank you for the reviews, alerts and PM's.

Interlude One: Rachel

Rachel Gattina hasn't always been one of the popular people. In fact for the first fourteen years of her life she was anything but.

She was short and chubby and her nose was way too big for her face and when she asked Nathan Scott to go out with her freshman year he'd laughed at her and told her he'd never date her because she was the ugliest girl in the entire school.

She didn't have a single friend in the world and high school wasn't a happy place for her. Some people, like Brooke Davis and Nate Archibald treated her like she didn't exist, some, like Nathan Scott and his older brother Lucas were overly cruel and hurtful but only one had ever taken the time to be nice to her.

Haley Davis had treated her like she was a person, she'd treated her like she mattered and Rachel had never really forgotten that not even when she'd finally had enough of all the name calling and done something about it.

She'd lost the weight. Grew a few inches and had a little surgery to fix the quirks nature had bestowed upon her. When Rachel had turned up to school on her first day of sophomore year, she was ruling by lunch time and suddenly everybody wanted to know her.

She had the entire school at her feet and she could hang with any crowd she wanted, any that is apart from the one that she wanted to be hanging with the most.

The Davis Twins and Nate Archibald lived in a bubble no one could penetrate. They were a clique all on their own and no one, no one could ever join.

They were three of the most popular teens in the school if not the most popular, partly because they were so exclusively each other's and partly because of Haley, who was nice to everybody and who everybody wanted to know.

Rachel couldn't become one of them she knew that, but it didn't stop her from watching them and it didn't stop her wondering.

X-X-X-X

She hears rather than sees the minute Haley takes the bullet for Nate, no one moves to help her bar Nate and no one makes a sound either. Rachel remembers sunny smiles and soft hellos, tiny conversations and tissues being offered to the chubby outcast she was from the pretty popular Haley who was nice just for the sake of being nice.

She's on her knees beside the two best friends before she even registers she's taken a step.