"You broke the hair dryer! You gonna replace that?"

"Are you going to replace the powder of mine you used?"

"I did not!"

"It was brand new a week ago, now it's half gone, and you're the only one it matches! Who's going to pay for that?"

It wouldn't be a morning if Rachel and Eva weren't fighting over something. The only reason anyone ever got any sleep was because they had split the two of them into separate bedrooms. Mercedes wouldn't have minded if she had ended up with Rachel - the girl was kid of a diva sometimes, but she was okay one-on-one. The two of them could lie around the living room reading Seventeen and Compact and gossip about the stars without wanting to strangle each other. And Mercedes had even liked her previous roommate, Shirley, whose wispy voice and quiet, polite demeanor made her easy to get along with.

But no. She had gotten stuck with Eva, the alto whose boyfriend liked to take up residence in their shared bedroom for hours. Eva, who left wet towels everywhere and swore like a sailor and slept until 3 if given half a chance.

She had tried to complain about it to their manager. Girls got kicked out of groups like this all the time, no one could stand her, why couldn't they just get rid of her? Or at least put her in a different bedroom before she ripped out Eva's hair by the root one of these days? But their manager, a broad-shouldered man named Larry Rockwell who went by "Rocko" in music circles and "Lawrence" in business ones, had a way of shutting down complaints while making it sound like he cared. He stressed that finding a new alto would shut down all the progress they were making while they found a replacement, and that Mercedes was the only one who could deal with Eva without either being run over or killing her, so she just needed to stick it out a little longer - just until they got the silver-bullet deal and had enough money to get a bigger place for the four of them. But he would talk to Eva, he promised.

Some good that had done. Not that she was surprised.

But she still couldn't complain too much.

The quarters were cramped, the people were annoying, the music wasn't always very good, but she was following her dream - and, looking at Kurt and Rachel, she was much closer to it than they were.

She had started later than they had, too. They had moved to New York practically the day after graduation. She had wanted to - ached to. Itched to feel like she was doing something that would let her realize her dream. Instead she had been shipped off to Spelman to become a educated young woman of colour. She had tried to tell her parents she didn't want that - she didn't want to sit around a school ad study things she had no interest i while all the girls just looked for educated me of colour to marry anyway. She didn't want to go off to school only to come back in four years to raise a family. And she didn't want to spend the next four years focusing on nothing but her race when that was what the past three years in Lima had been anyway. John was happy at Howard, he liked reading Langston Hughes and being around people like him. That last part sounded nice enough, but Kurt was like her, too. If the last few years had proved anything, it was that black-and-white was anything but.

How could the people who had fought for her to be able to go to a school where it wasn't just other negroes fight so hard to get her to go to a school where there weren't any white people? And how could they be so mad at her when she left the school she told them she didn't want to go to in the first place? She had made sure to stay through the whole year because she knew the tuition money wasn't easy to come by, especially with John still in school too, but she told them not to send her because it would be a waste. Why did they get to be so pissed at her when she'd given them warning it wasn't what she wanted to do? Her mom had read her the riot act for weeks, her dad was completely disappointed in her, John thought she was crazy...

Which was why it was a good thing she had something to show for it, then, wasn't it?

The Melodics weren't exactly on the radio yet, but they were getting there. They had a manager, which usually took groups a long time, and they were this close to getting signed, she could just feel it. Their rehearsals were tighter than their harmonies, Rocko was taking them around to label after label and they were getting really good responses. Usually the all-black labels were already saturated with girl groups and the all-white ones were just starting to take on anyone "like them", but they were just that good. They were gonna get signed soon, and then she could send home their record and show her parents: see? She was doing okay - better than okay. She was living her dream. Wasn't that what they should want for her?

Well. Her dream and another bedroom. Because if Eva and Rachel didn't stop shouting about relaxers, the only song she would be singing would be Jailhouse Rock, and that wasn't exactly in her wheelhouse.

* * * * * *

Rachel firmly believed there was no more magical place in the world than a darkened theater. There was a combination of stillness and energy that could only be found in the moments before anyone else arrived, or when only a few members of the tech crew were around, that felt like nothing else in the world. Like waiting for something amazing to happen. Like the night before she and Kurt had left Lima, when she and her mom sat around the dinner table like nothing was out-of-the-ordinary but there was a sense that everything was about to leap into action and life was about to start, to truly begin, and she could barely contain herself even though everything around her remained quiet and still.

She made it a point to get to the theater before anyone else for an audition if she could - and since she wasn't working right now, that was more than possible. She didn't know why the temp agencies didn't understand that her passion had to come first. How was she supposed to pursue her dream if they kept sending her to type financial documents all day for creepy middle-aged men who liked to stare at her more than Jacob ben Israel? They never seemed to understand just how much this meant to her; whenever she would tell them that she was only doing this until she got her big break, they had a habit of laughing at her which she thought was both rude and really strange. Stars didn't come along very often, didn't they recognize one when they saw her?

Though she supposed it was harder than she'd imagined to be discovered. She had planned to be nominated for a Tony by now, at least for a featured actress - she knew sometimes it took a few years to be considered bankable enough to land the lead role, even if she was already vocally on-par with the women who were currently filling those parts. Instead she hadn't landed even a single part onstage - not even in the chorus where she would be miserable but surely could still snag the attention of the critics in the audience; they would come backstage after the show to find out who that stunning brunette chorus girl on the end was so they could add her to their rave review, and then she would have the bankability to move up in the world.

She didn't understand why none of that had happened yet. She was always perfectly prepared for the auditions, she was painfully talented, she had more ambition than anyone else she saw trying out, but for some reason directors weren't recognizing it. They kept casting these blonde girls with no passion and very little talent who couldn't sing nearly as well as she could - they didn''t even look up when she sang, they just called her number and called out a "Thank you! We'll be in touch" before she got halfway through her verse. She didn't understand why; she had tried changing her song a few times on the off chance that maybe the director was just tired of the immortal classics of Rodgers and Hart even though she found they were severely underrated now that everyone favoured the later pairing of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Still no luck. She had tried dressing the part she was auditioning for (with Kurt's assistance - even if he had made snide comments the entire time, the outfits he had helped her prepare had been exquisite. He was very talented, even if she didn't have the accessibility to make him a vocal star in New York), but that had just gotten her sneered at by the other girls auditioning and still no callback. She hadn't even been given the opportunity to showcase her incomparable acting skills yet because she wasn't brought back in to perform a monologue or read a scene, and how they could decide after seeing so little of her that she wasn't what they were looking for was just a travesty of epic proportions.

She kept expecting her mother to tell her to come back home like she had, to go teach somewhere, and she had prepared a speech for when the request came - about how this was her entire life and if she wasn't performing she didn't know how to breathe, but the missive never came. Maybe she really did understand. Maybe she regretted her own choice not to pursue Broadway - Rachel wasn't sure how she felt about that because she knew she was, in large part, the reason her mother had never been able to leave Ohio, but in either event she was glad for the silent show of support. Unlike Kurt's dad who asked every few weeks if Kurt needed money for a bus to come back home. She didn't understand why, since Kurt was doing really well - he had a job in fashion, what more could he want? He was working for a designer and didn't have to go work for a temp agency that tried to keep him from his dreams the way she did (and, though she didn't want to admit it, he was the one paying most of their bills most months, unless she had a particularly bad month and made enough to chip in; she much preferred the months she couldn't make anything because she was simply too busy preparing for and going on auditions, but sometimes the scheduling simply didn't work that way).

She didn't know what was going on with him, but he had looked exhausted when he had gotten home. Of course, staying out all night, he was either working too hard or finally going out and enjoying himself. She knew there were meant to be hundreds of fantastic clubs and bars in Manhattan, but she never had enough money to go to them.

Maybe that was why she couldn't get a role. Maybe it was all pre-decided in smokey bars and piano clubs, and her inability to go because she didn't have enough money because she didn't have a job because they were all given out already, was what was keeping her from advancing her career.

But in the meantime, barring the ability to fix that (though she would ask Kurt about money later, she made a mental note), she decided to show up to the theater as early as she could. Pulling open the backstage door to the Schubert, she stepped inside and felt the energized stillness of the space, the darkness that almost felt like it was vibrating with potential. Babes in Arms had been put on here, and Pal Joey, and Philadelphia Story, and that horrible Bye Bye Birdie. She had been here a year earlier - a year? She thought so, at least, but it seemed like it was either October or November, to audition for a show about the Jewish Garment District. She thought she would be perfect as Miss Marmelstein, which was a tiny part with only one song, but one song was all it would take for her to be famous (even if Kurt told her she was wrong). She hadn't gotten it - that other Jewish girl had. Still, it was a beautiful theater, disappointment or not.

At this point, she wasn't sure she could find a reputable theater in town where she hadn't auditioned unsuccessfully for a role, anyway.

The stillness was broken by the sound of a lovely tenor voice ringing through the building. Stepping carefully over a pile of rope and sliding past a half-upholstered chair, she went to investigate its source. As she crept around a table and peeked out past the curtain, she was surprised to hear what song it was - Falling in Love with Love was usually sung by someone with much more vibrato and much more chest voice, despite its high range, but the man singing it onstage sounded better than the original - in her opinion. It had never been one of her favourites, but she liked when he sang it.

He was very talented. And attractive, his sandy hair combed neatly to the side, his shirt fitting close to his slim body but not so close as to be obscene. He didn't have to strain for high notes the way Allan Jones had, letting them float effortlessly as he sang.

Falling in Love with Love is falling for make-believe!
Falling in Love with Love is playing the fool!
Caring too much is such a juvenile fancy!
Learning to trust is just for children in school.
I fell in Love with Love one night when the moon-

"Okay!" barked a voice from the house, and Rachel was shaken from her reverie to see three men sitting at a table in the center of the auditorium - just like every other audition she'd ever been to. The man in the center of the trio barely glanced over his reading glasses as he said, "Thanks. We'll be in touch."

There was a barely perceptible slump of the young man's shoulders, a tightening of his smile as though he were willing himself to appear as unflappable as possible as he got that response. Everyone within earshot knew what that meant: you didn't get the job, kid. Not what we're looking for. Try again later. Or never. No explanation. No idea what to do better next time or what left you so completely expendable.

Rachel felt bad for him; she knew what that was like. She hated it. She hated the feeling of inadequacy that crept in around the edges, because she knew she was good. She knew she was fantastic and was going to be a star and this man - whoever he was - was going to be lucky to be in the same restaurant as her someday, would be lucky if she gave him the time of day enough to give him an autograph when she was the biggest star on Broadway...but for now she was at the mercy of the man who didn't even look up and was left wondering what she had done wrong...or at least, what she could have done better. Could have done differently. Could have changed to give herself the edge she needed.

No amount of self-confidence in the world could erase that.

The tenor forced a bright "Thank you" and slinked offstage toward her. She thought about slipping away unnoticed, but as she saw the way he slumped even further as soon as he was offstage and out of the trio's sight-line, she felt the need to help reassure him that it wasn't his fault that Broadway insisted on employing only men with no eye or ear for talent as the people responsible for casting. "You were fantastic," she stated quietly, with a bright earnestness she couldn't hold back. He jumped, startled by the sudden voice in the darkness, and she immediately apologized. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you. I just heard you singing, and I wanted to say-"

"You don't have to," he flashed a faint smile, a bright row of pearly white teeth - she had a thing for boys with perfect smiles; attention to dental hygiene demonstrated a high sense of self and care for one's self, which was just as important a quality in a boyfriend as it was in a star.

"Of course I do - it's being honest," she stated, a little bit of a flirty oversell creeping into her voice.

"Well, if it's honesty, then who am I to stop you?" he joked, the smile growing.

"Quiet in the wings!" a voice barked, and the boy looked sheepish.

"Sorry," he whispered, more to Rachel than to anyone beyond the stage. He glanced around, then spied a door and walked over to it, the impact of his shoes on the hard floor echoing in Rachel's ears. He pushed it open, glanced to see what was beyond, then beckoned for Rachel to follow. She felt her heartrate pick up as she followed him on tiptoe, her loafers threatening to slip off the back of her heels and slap against the floor. The entire thing felt a little forbidden, creeping around the back of a mostly-empty theater with a boy this cute. It reminded her of her first romance, her only real relationship - kissing Jesse backstage where no one could see them and tell them they shouldn't be together because their schools were rivals. As much as she had hated not being able to tell anyone how happy she was or why, there was an element of the illicit that made everything feel larger-than-life. More theatrical. More like a movie with a tragic couple that can't be together but the need to see one another is so overpowering they can feel it in their bones, in their hearts, in their souls - so all they can do is see each other in secret and sing wrenching ballads about how they need one another.

He took her hand and led her over the threshold into a stairwell. It was dark and dank, leading to god-only-knew-what, and the way his eyes sparkled as he said, "Now we don't have to be quite so quiet" made her want to cling to him.

"I guess not," she replied, a nervous smile crossing her lips. When he looked at her expectantly, she tried to find the words to tell him how good she thought he was without venturing into territory that was too revealing, too effusive. "I just think you're really talented. I loved what you did with the song."

He smiled almost shyly but with enough confidence underneath that she recognized it; he knew he was good, he was just getting used to people saying he wasn't. Like she was. Maybe. "Thanks. I love that song - I know it's usually done by a more vibrato tenor, but I thought I could do it justice."

"Your voice is really resonant."

"Thanks. Only here would that be a high compliment," he joked. Holding out his hand, he said, "Bobby."

"Rachel," she replied in kind as she took his hand - or, more precisely, let him take her hand, because he looked like that gentlemanly type.

"Break a leg in there. Something tells me we'll be seeing each other on the audition circuit a lot. Hopefully not, because I hope you get this, but-"

"I know what you mean," she nodded. He was babbling in a way that was kind of adorable. "Maybe we could both get lucky and get this."

"You heard what he said to me, I'm a 'no.' Oh well. On to the next." He glanced at his watch and shook his head. "I'm sorry, I have to go meet my manager. I'll see you around." With another flash of a grin, he disappeared out of the stairwell, the door closing with a loud slam that made her jump.

"Hey!" A man who looked to be in his mid-30s, wearing head-to-toe black and carrying a clipboard, stared at her.

"Oh- I'm sorry, I-" She tried to explain, but she wasn't sure what exactly to say: 'I was pulled in here by a brilliant leading man that you're letting get away for no particular reason'?

"What are you doing here?"

"I'm-" She swallowed hard and replied, "I'm here for the audition. I know I'm early, but I wanted to get the first crack at things I could." She flashed him a bright smile; he looked bored.

"C'mon. Rest of the girls are down the hall."

"The rest of the girls?" she asked as he led her around the back of the stage, through a door, and down a long hall. At the end, she could hear sopranos warming up with scales and see girls stretching and doing dance warmups against the wall. As she approached, several turned to stare; she doubted it was because they were wowed by her obvious talent.

"We'll start soon," the clipboard-carrying man informed no one in particular as Rachel turned into the room where he had left her. There had to be a few hundred girls waiting there already.

She had a feeling Bobby was right about them passing each other on the audition circuit again for awhile.

* * * * *

Kurt was so tired he could barely see straight. Of course, he supposed that was what he got for dragging himself into work after literally two hours of sleep and a night in jail.

The nausea at that thought came and went even though the exhaustion remained. On the plus side, it meant he had been able to skip lunch, which made him look better - or at least, less bad - to his boss after he showed up at 10 instead of the customary 8:30. Staying late would help that, too; the more people could see his light still on as they left, the less gossip there would be about him being a slacker. He would never understand how it was possible for a group of grown men with professions and families could act so much like high school girls with the gossip and petty vendettas and catty remarks, but he was quickly finding that was the way people around here just...were.

He adapted the best he could. He had always been the kind of person who did his best to figure out the best way to get through the world without compromising his differences. He never tried to stop himself from standing out, not really, but he did try to game the rules of the system to his advantage where he could. He tried to work around or through policies at school, to slip past the politics and make allies with key Cheerios so he would be less despised - or at least a little protected, despite his firmly-cemented status as a loser. He had always managed, more or less...but for some reason it was harder to do here. He knew he needed to learn to play their games a little better, to gossip strategically to get what he needed, but it was harder to figure out what he was meant to do and whom he needed to say what to, in part because they already had their groups when he had gotten there. That hadn't stopped him before, he'd done well enough at Dalton, but-

Well, let's just say his failure to find a Blaine in New York had hurt him in more ways than just one. It wasn't just a boyfriend he'd lost.

On the list of disappointments he had in New York, that was near the top. He was pretty sure spending the night in jail for so much as thinking about being on a date with a boy should've been first on the list, but even thinking about that hurt too much to analyze in detail. Besides, who was to say that hadn't just been one big misunderstanding? Surely it was just a random confluence of events that hadn't happened before and would never happen again. After all, people shouldn't be...doing that in public, he shouldn't be able to walk through a public park at any hour and see naked anyone, let alone those kinds of acts no matter who they were, so in all honesty he wasn't sure he could say the police were wrong except the part where they arrested him.

And everything they'd said to him afterward. Everything that had happened to him had been wrong and violative and he couldn't-

His hands clenched as he thought about it, getting more and more furious with how they had treated him - and Ricky, too, he was sure - balling up fabric with his left hand while his right tightened so tightly around the scissors that they quivered against the grey silk. The looks on their faces as they eyed him up and down, the delighted amusement as they made him take off his clothes so they could inspect him like- He didn't even know what analogy he could give that would convey that kind of shame with no ostensible titillation on the part of the observer.

He couldn't start thinking about that. He had a very strict policy of not crying at work, no matter how much his natural state seemed to be one of waterworks, and he was not about to break that now. Especially not over silk, that would stain and there would be no getting the tears out of it once they fell so he really couldn't afford to-

"Working late?" a pleasant voice asked from the doorway, and Kurt's head jerked up suddenly. It was one of the guys who he had no idea what precisely they did. Most of the job descriptions eluded him even a year later, but what Mainbocher lacked in occupational specificity, it made up for in hierarchical clarity. He didn't know what the man a few years older than him did in the design process, but he knew the gentleman was somewhere around the third-highest echelon: he didn't get to make decisions himself, but he got invited to the meetings where decisions were made and would one day - probably someday soon - get to make the decisions. Probably as soon as someone from the second-echelon left. "Sorry, didn't mean to scare you," he added with a warm smile.

Kurt couldn't remember the last time someone had smiled at him. Normally it felt isolating to consider; after last night, it was enough to make him want to start crying again. But if the silk beneath his fingers wasn't enough of a reason to hold back the tears, the fact that no one wanted to promote the resident waterworks was more than sufficient. His own boss thinking he was pathetic was frustrating but seemed like par for the course - his boss hated him in general. He could live with that. But upper-management thinking he was pathetic was one indignity he refused to suffer today. "Just trying to get this done before I leave."

"Is that for the suit coordinates?" he asked, stepping into the room to get a better look at the fabric on the table.

"The dress is done, I'm just finishing up the jacket now," he replied evenly, adjusting the edge of the muslin carefully with his fingertips.

"Great." The warm smile turned more enthusiastic, and it was almost enough to make Kurt's resolve crack - so much like Blaine's...and one of these days he had to get past that, right? It had been more than a year now, and while he firmly believed that his righteous indignation over how it had ended and his lingering anger over the situation (and at the boy who had created it) was perfectly reasonable...at some point he needed to stop feeling like such a mess all the time.

Maybe he was just exhausted. He swore most days didn't feel quite this bad. It was just the combination of last night and today being too long for anyone to handle. He should just go home and get some sleep. Like a week's worth.

"Don't stay too late now," the man told him, an odd fondness in his voice considering he'd never technically met Kurt before and no one was fond of or nice to people that far below their own hierarchical rung for no reason whatsoever. With another flash of a grin, he headed for the door and tossed a "Goodnight!" over his shoulder as he departed.

It was the most friendly interaction he'd had at work since he started.

Which was how his disappointments over work managed to top the list of all broken promises - managed to beat out the loneliness, and the tiny, no-frills apartment that Rachel insisted on trying to 'help' decorate, and the budget that barely left them with enough to eat some months let alone for the type of wardrobe he'd envisioned for himself once he got to the big city, and even the incarceration for not doing anything. He had thought that, at the very least, once he got to New York they would appreciate his keen eye for style. They would be able to understand his passion for design and let him put it to good use. It was hardly a rarity for young designers to make it big after a few years in the business - Givenchy had his own house at 25 after working for the best in the business. And he...

...he was stuck cutting out hideous jackets from streaky pale grey silk.

The silk wasn't the problem, not really; it appealed to their particular demographic and wasn't awful in and of itself. It would've looked nice as an evening gown...or a cocktail dress...or an elegant sofa...but that wasn't the point. The fabric choice for the garment in question was all wrong, and the garment itself was just hideous. A ballooning top over the bust that nipped in at the waist with an almost pencil skirt, worn with a Chanel-style jacket over it? Who thought that looked good? But the jacket couldn't just be ripping off Chanel - that wouldn't be creative enough. Chanel, who rated somewhere below the person who decided that midwestern women's dresses should be indistinguishable from their sofas in Kurt's eye, at least had designed something clean in its boxiness; this had large same-fabric buttons and a sewn-on placket and a strange collar that more closely resembled that of a baseball uniform, curving from the placket up into a collar that neither stood up nor folded down. He couldn't imagine any woman alive who would think it looked appealing or would want to buy it based on aesthetics; that left only buying it based on the label, and Mainbocher...well, it wasn't Givenchy. Or Dior. Or even Chanel. It was a house more remembered for designing the WAVES uniforms during the War than anything else, and that wasn't much to speak of two decades later.

How had a label that had kept its relevance by designing essentially suits for women come up with something so utterly unappealing? He shook his head as he resumed cutting it out. He could've made this work, had he been part of the design process. Well- First of all, he would have told them not to do it, but if they had insisted, he would have at least cut it differently. Made it less boxy and more tailored, more like the Dior New Look jackets. That would've meant tailoring the top of the dress more, but what a shame that would be - not making it look like a woman could fit herself and a six-course dinner complete with roasted turkey in the top at the same time. The bottom of the dress was perfectly fine, though not particularly interesting. Which left only the collar.

What to do about the collar? The ridiculous ring of fabric that neither made a statement nor got out of the way of the rest of the garment.

If he were being forced to mitigate the horrible things about this design, rather than starting fresh, what would he do about the collar? A basic men's-style lapel might be a bit much, regardless of whether he made it peaked or notched; a grown-on collar would just make the entire thing completely uninteresting, but it might be what he would end up with if nothing else looked right - at the very least, it wouldn't make anything worse; a standup collar would be too unconventional for the fabric and for the dress, though they intrigued him generally and if he were starting over from scratch he would redesign the entire thing around being able to add a standup collar; that left only-

Turndown.

Yes, a turndown collar. it would need to be a point of interest in order to make up for the boringness of the rest of the garment and to balance the dress, to be a feature instead of just another out-of-place, poorly-conceived detail. An exaggerated turndown collar like on an overcoat was exactly what this was calling for.

If only he were designing this instead of whatever second-echelon simpletons had signed off on it.

With a final snip of the scissors, he began to gather the pieces. The silk that was to become the dress was already neatly folded on the table by the door, and Kurt carefully counted the jacket pieces as he moved them. Fronts, facings, backs, sidebacks, upper arms, lower arms, plackets-

He had cut the wrong collar. Lying on his table was a turndown instead of what the jacket was meant to have. He had to admire how well it was cut considering it was the product of wistful-thinking and daydreaming when he had barely had enough sleep to remember his own name; apparently he was getting good enough to literally do this job in his sleep. He wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not, but he was guessing it wasn't. For sake of his own sanity, at least.

He needed to go to bed. He would fix it in the morning - because if he tried to fix it now, he had a feeling he would somehow cut the same thing again. Or cut the entire thing so badly off-grain he had to redo it anyway. At least now he had only wasted a small amount of silk; if he kept going, he could only imagine how much he would ruin.

With a deep sigh and a roll of his eyes, he pulled on his coat and flicked off the light on his way out of the room. He really hoped Rachel's audition had gone poorly - not for her sake, but for his own. He didn't know if he had the energy to pretend to listen to her gushing about how wonderful it had been right now.