I am seriously being a failure with tense. :( Also, sorry, short chapter, but the next will probably be extra long.

"Guys. I am seriously impressed. This is what I like to see."

Rachel couldn't help but spare a stray thought that he hadn't appreciated the work they'd put into Push It. (On second thought ... not her best work.) "So can we preform it for the Haverbrook glee club?"

Mr. Shue shuffled around. Rachel rolled her eyes. "Mr. Shue?"

He wrung his hands, "Yes, Rachel. You did a very good job. I'm impressed."

She glanced back at the rest of them, watching expectantly. "We all worked really hard on it, Mr. Shue."

When they do the number again, heads poised most of the time for maximum lip-visibility, at least half of them facing the audience at all times, the Haverbrook kids keep tugging at each other's elbows, gesturing subtly. Rachel would be confused, if she wasn't so completely engrossed in preforming.

They do their jazz hands at the end, smiling strangely. "Rach," Mike whispers from behind her, "they, like, talked through the whole song."

"I know," she said through a tight smile. "The show must go on."

Mike shrugged, and smiled back at the deaf glee club. "Thank you, thank you."

---

They sing John Lennon's Imagine, which Rachel or Kurt would call "poignant and touching," because they're both chicks, with them being deaf and the content of the song, and even the fact that their instructor gives them visual clues while he plays, and when Mercedes starts to sing under her breath, Matt puts his arm around her shoulder, squeezing the one farthest from him in a silent reminder to be a good audience.

Rachel doesn't blame her. They're all singers. She's just glad it wasn't her; she somehow doubted that she'd be saved from the snickers of the rest of the group with a physical gesture.

At the end, Puck starts to clap, and Matt elbows him in the back of the neck from behind.

"Audience police," he mumbled, and Matt elbows him a second time. "Fine, I'll do gay hands."

"Thank you, so much for inviting us here today," the lead singer says, signing along when he speaks. "We had planned on singing another song, but then, when we got here..."

He looked around, smiling shyly at them, and sharing a look with the rest of his own glee club. "Well, we figured this song was appropriate -- even people that can hear like the Beatles, you know?"

They all laughed, and then hand-shimmied, just to be clear. Kurt dabbed at his eyes.

---

"You comin', Berry?" he said, catching up with her on her way out of the glee club door. She wasn't headed towards the parking lot, fishing her phone out of her bag.

"Oh, Noah!" she said, feigning surprise. "I'd completely forgotten about our excursion!"

She hadn't, but she'd half-assumed he would "forget" about it. She'd been prepared to walk home, if Kurt wasn't willing to drop her off.

Puck shrugged. "If you've made other plans..."

"No," Rachel said, fingers going up to worry the neckline of her v-neck, "I simply had a momentary lapse of brain function."

He rolled his eyes, taking her bag from her (she'd brought an actually backpack at Kurt's absolute insistence that her trolly-bag made her look like a "complete ninny.") and slinging it over his shoulder casually. "I'm parked over here," he said, pointing. "The red one."

Rachel tried not to smile. "I know." She didn't add we made out in it twice during our week-long relationship, but she thought it was probably hanging in the hair in front of them.

"Right," he said, getting in. She started to walk around, and he leaned over and popped open her door. "Watch your step."

When she starts to describe the turns he's going to take to get to her house, he cuts her off the same way. "I know, Berry, we've made out there at least six times."

Rachel turned red, fiddling with her frayed seatbelt. "That's true," she finally observed neutrally, because, well, they had.