7 Degrees of Desire: Hollys BDSM Training - Book I

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In this respect he had already exceeded the expectations I had for most educators. His office had more of a comfy, oolong-scented seventies feel: One of those environmental sound-effects recordings was evidently being played; I could make out the sounds of waves breaking on the beach, and we were a good three miles from the ocean.

All in all, a grand spot to ride out the rest of my high. This was our new hippie counselor? The man before me wore a woolly, regimental-striped tie with a teed-up golf ball monogram. DeMouy sipped an obscure Asian blend from a Far Side mug and read from my folder. For that they just keep sticking you in detention until you see the error of your ways. I eyed it cautiously. According to your transcripts, you had a 4. Then, the last semester of your junior year, it just falls apart. You even failed English III. Do you mind telling me how someone who makes a verbal on his SAT fails English?

DeMouy continued digging through my folder. This third or fourth thing may come as a big disappointment to him. The astronaut had fought desperately for custody of me at the divorce hearing four years before. Sarah, my younger sister, was free to move with Mom to California, but the old man thought my future too important to trust to any non-hero.

I was his heir. As such, I would be disciplined. I would study hard, excel in sports, choose my friends carefully, choose my college even more carefully. In short, bring glory to the York name. I relocated to California after taking the last final exam of my junior year. I walked out of class, got in my El Camino, and drove twenty-seven hours nonstop until I reached the Pacific Ocean. I imagine he had already seen his best laid plans turn to shit. My move allowed him the consolation of getting to share the blame.

Always accessible, day or night—home. DeMouy glanced up from my file, but he kept his composure. I was certain the teen-hating, self-important, petty bureaucrat trapped inside the bodies of all educational administrators would soon appear. He scribbled something on a yellow legal pad. You do have a choice. Summer school would probably be easier. Though I would suggest you choose a topic you know something about.

Croslin, it can be a grocery list as long as I punctuate it correctly. I mean, did all those years spent probing the teen mind leave any room for a true appreciation of literature? My first six years out of college I taught English. I could hear her panty hose—encased thighs rub together as she moved past me to hand a note to DeMouy. Through the open door I could see Sarah. Now if the principal were at all fearful of me, the bad seed, he should have been doubly so of Sarah. Earlier in the year she organized a walkout to call attention to the asbestos-laden dust being stirred up by the contractors who were charged with removing the offending tiles.

CNN even did a forty-five-second piece on it that included a fifteen-second soundbite from Sarah. I think he was embarrassed because they identified her as his daughter. She rubbed one extended index finger across the other. Everything the astronaut wanted in his son had been inherited by his daughter, but the old man was too dumb to notice it. If another York were destined to walk on the moon, it was Sarah, not me. My quick return to the subject at hand, I realized, was a potentially ruinous deviation from thrust-and-parry protocol involved in negotiations with adults.

This was the norm. Sis was out harassing school board members… something about vegetarian lunches in the cafeteria. Mother could have been anywhere in the hemisphere. Her marriage three years ago to a pilot for Delta had been a nonstop honeymoon. I mean, talk about a giant leap down the scale of aeronautic nobility just to make a point. I had only been constant witness to the past five months of the union. I have always been, with the exception of students who failed a grade, the oldest in my class by at least a month. See, the astronaut thought I needed to be held back so that I would be more competitive in sports.

Had I any interest in sports, I might be grateful; but as it stands, it will take me an extra year to get on with my life. Twelve of us so designated were isolated in separate classes, taught Latin phrases, allowed to use expensive telescopes, taken on field trips to ballets, and labeled complete geeks by our classmates. My ears are pierced, both of them. The first earring was a bit trendy, I admit, but in constantly looking for ways to exist outside the mainstream, I was quick to take Dub up on her offer to complete the set, which she did one night with a leather stitching needle, two ice cubes, a potato, and bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

There are those males who merely fill ear holes with tiny stones hardly big enough to offend a marine. Most days I wear big hoops. I grabbed a sleeve of Lorna Doones from the pantry and made my way upstairs to my room. Switching on the Macintosh I had received for my thirteenth birthday in lieu of the CD player I had requested, I sat down at my desk.

Ninety minutes later I was staring at the fireworks screen saver that kicks in after five minutes of inactivity. My one explosion of insanely brilliant creativity came in the form of a title for a story about a young bohemian relishing his first taste of life on the highway. I tried to imagine my first night driving off into nowhere.

More books from this author: Rob Thomas

Who would I meet? What would they look like? More important, what rudely formed yet priceless gems of wisdom would pass from these people of the earth to the wing-footed young traveler? I struggled with several opening sentences. I immediately deleted, with one exception, each attempt.

He had been down roads to nowhere and alleys of sin. He had taken the high road and seen the light at the end of the tunnel, but only one stretch of pavement beckoned without respite—the one leading away from home. Another thirty minutes passed. Needing inspiration, I opened the dictionary, determined to begin my story with whatever word my finger landed on. I flipped to the middle and stabbed a page. Producing eggs that hatch outside the body. Definitely time to give up. Write about what I know.

Sky said I needed to tattoo it to my right hand, so I would remember it every time I picked up a pen. In a way, Sky was more responsible than the astronaut for my relocation to California. My heart had been run through frappe, puree, and liquefy on a love blender. Dub had seen to that. Maybe I did have a topic capable of delivering me from summer school. I hoped DeMouy would appreciate what I was about to do. In order to bypass summer school, I was set to open wounds that had never really healed.

I began to type. I suppose I should have seen it coming, but the warning signs had been such a part of the status quo. Peace prevailed outwardly because the astronaut was concerned about public appearances and would concede anything to avoid a confrontation in front of strangers. From my bedroom, I once eavesdropped on a battle royale. By pressing my ear to the air duct, I could hear them arguing about my future in Little League baseball. Mom fought hard to get me out of a third season of humiliation.

I spent my third and final year of Little League alternating between right field the least skill-intensive position and frequent spaz-repository and the bench. Hearing Bobby Patton, our shortstop and cleanup hitter, beg the coach to bench me in an important game taught me volumes about self-confidence and teamwork.

Sarah, twelve at the time of the divorce conference, patted her father on the back Mom actually did all the speaking. Alan was there to simulate a united front , and told him everything would work out for the best. The astronaut and I moved to Houston a few weeks after the divorce was final, but only forty-eight hours before my first day of high school.

Houston was home base of NASA, and I had lived there before, back when he was still reveling in the celebrity he scored for doing the slow-motion moon hop, but I was too young to remember much about it. Besides, learning about Houston proper would have done little to prepare me for life in the tony suburb of Clear Lake, where we actually settled. Most of the children of NASA lived in the area. The only black kid at Grace High was the son of one of the space shuttle pilots.

Ours was a world of sports cars, designer clothes, fifteen-acre malls, million-dollar homes, cruising Westheimer on weekends, Galveston beach homes, and private tennis coaches. Waddya think it is? I almost wish there had been. The school, only eight years old, still shined: Freshmen were herded to the large gym to pick up schedules. Inside, booths had been constructed by every group conceivable, from the mundane student council, glee club, future teachers to the exotic fantasy war gamers, Russian club, falconry club. There must have been fifty organizations there competing for freshman patronage.

Nope, there it was in carbon—regular English, algebra, biology, etc. As I made my way back through the throng I had to begin searching for the English complex I spotted perhaps the strangest of group structures—plywood supported by clumsily nailed two-by-fours arcing upward in nearly a degree angle resembling an elongated U. At a table in front of this calamity of carpentry sat a refugee from a s southern rock band—long straight blond hair, bangs hanging in front of his eyes, blue jean jacket, plain white T-shirt not the designer Gap variety—the actual three-to-a-pack classic.

He was, I noted with some surprise, reading. His book was called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Zen and the Art of Woodworking would have been a wiser selection, I thought. There was no prominently displayed sign demanding that we freshmen, like lemmings, line up to join whatever group this was. He kicked a skateboard out from under the table and began doing things on that ramp—flipping the board, spinning on his hand—I had only seen executed in rock videos. Soon I found myself at the epicenter of a hemisphere of gaping fourteen-year-olds.

Although I never officially joined Skate or Die, on a social level I might as well have. Doug, the president and founder, became the nearest thing I had to a best friend, at least until I met Dub. Doug had formed Skate or Die because only recognized clubs got their pictures in the yearbook, and the school constitution required every officially recognized club to include fifteen members.

They had been, of course, joiners when they were his age. I never set foot on a board, but I would follow them on a bike and hang out by the drainage ditch as they practiced maneuvers up and down its sides. For almost exactly the same reasons Doug needed to be in the yearbook, I wanted to be excluded. I had a goal in mind—no activities would appear by my name in the yearbook. My freshman year was rounded out by the landing of my first job—concessionaire extraordinaire at the Clear Lake Cineplex.

There were so many things I loved about my job; where to start? He walked three miles to school, uphill, both ways. He might have stayed in Yakima his entire life if not for the first in a series of classic Alan York adventures. In a rare social excursion, he and a couple of friends went tubing down the Yakima River, which runs for thirty miles along the bottom of Kittitas Canyon. Young Alan, in a feat that would today be re-created as an episode of Rescue , pulled some wasted college freshman out of the water and saved her life by administering CPR. Her uncle was an aide to the Republican senator from Washington who recommended the young dogooder for the Air Force Academy.

As if it could get any cheesier, the woman he saved was my mother. That changed at the academy. His scholarship gave him his first modest ration of free time, and rather than spend it with his new bride, he went out for the football team. He played quarterback or cornerback. He was as skinny as me in high school. Hauling around grape crates had given him biceps. Other than girth, the change can be seen in his eyes. But over the next couple of years, he acquires two items indispensable for heroes: All this success landed him—now a captain—in Vietnam where he flew more than sixty bombing missions.

He performed this task well enough to be decorated several times. He returned, became a test pilot, and then was asked to join the space program. The rest, as they say, is history, though in this particular case, it is literally so. If you want to read more, visit your local library. The counselor found a spot on a bookshelf behind his desk for the latest addition to his floricultural collection.

I viewed this as evasion. I could see comments written in green ink throughout the text.

The counselor knows his ed psych. We students subconsciously view red ink as aggressive and critical. Green ink comments merely represent advice from a kindly friend. Yoda would write in green ink. I was gratified to learn DeMouy had a playful side and pleased I had overcome my initial qualms about planting a ganja seed in his fern. In what would become an annual event, Sarah and I traded locales for the summer. While it was grueling work, it did pay significantly better than peddling Junior Mints. I needed the money, as it was the only way I was going to get a car of my own.

I play football; he buys me car. Now, to hear him tell it, the greatest moments of his life were not spent bouncing around the lunar landscape; rather they were those brief instances in which he heard air rushing out of lungs as he separated Army pukes from pigskins. Football, he told me, required time and effort.

It was almost impossible for a young man to devote the amount of time required by the sport and still hold down a job. Therefore, if I were to go out for the football team, he would understand how I might not have time for a job, and he knew how we teens needed to have a few dollars in our pockets. Incidentally, when the astronaut said he would buy me a car, he was talking serious automobiliage, here. I could have been parking right up there in Miata row.

By the end of June I had saved almost thirteen hundred dollars. After weeks of circling potential Yorkmobiles, I found one that I knew I had to make mine. The initial attraction may have been our similar ages.

We were both sixteen, the El Camino and I. She had a metallic purple paint job, an eight-track deck, and shag carpeting. Like a Transformer, she was half car, half truck. Thanks to overexposure to films like Duel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Easy Rider, she had been appalled by the idea of her soon-to-be sophomore son driving solo across a region peopled by cult murderers, gunslinging crackers, and homicidal truck drivers. The drive should have given the former Mrs. Sarah made some feeble excuse for the old man.

He really wanted to see Mom, she said, but he got called into work. I drove Mom and Sarah to the airport, so his avoidance of his ex-wife was complete. In a futile effort at making the house more of a home, Sarah had magneted to the fridge several photos she shot during father-daughter weekend boating trips. Before returning to California, she gave the astronaut and me framed enlargements of her two favorite prints. The one she gave her father was of a salamander. The poor reptile had the misfortune of choosing our boat as a spot to sun itself. Sarah had tried to catch it and ended up pulling its tail off.

The shot of the disembodied salamander tail was displayed appetizingly on the refrigerator. The twenty-four- by thirty-six-inch print given to the astronaut features the panicked lizard pressing itself to the glass in desperate hopes of avoiding the madwoman with the camera. My print was of a swan, wings stretched back, breaking the placid green of the lake.

It was the only thing I hung up in my room. Three girls arrived at the house to see Sarah off. One of them I recognized from school, the others I guessed were older. I had been in California for three months and had barely spoken to anyone my age. The colonial home in which the astronaut and I coexisted had five bedrooms. Keep in mind, only the two of us lived there. We never actually finished unpacking either. We unpacked only as necessity dictated. In other words, toilet paper was out first and things like artwork, photographs, and knickknacks probably remain in their boxes to this day.

No plants, no wall hangings—in short, nothing even remotely nonutilitarian. As a result, the house looked only temporarily occupied for the entire three years I slept there. Initially we had eaten together and made feeble attempts at conversation. We settled into a more comfortable routine soon enough. He would leave for work before I woke but would provide a list of chores by the kitchen sink, paper-clipped to a ten-dollar bill, which was to provide me both lunch and dinner This was the routine we fell into again when I got back from California.

He did make one comment that surprised me. He said my time in California had begun to make a man out of me. I guess he was referring to my now recognizably male, if not Herculean, physique that had developed in some modest form due to the paces my summer employment put me through. In the mirror I could see the faint outline of a chest. Returning to form, however, he made his displeasure known about my choice of vehicle. He also fondled my pierced earlobe, grimaced, and said he thought he had made it clear before I left Texas that I was to no longer wear an earring.

That hole, he said, would have closed up had his edict been obeyed. I never wore an earring in his presence. I returned to my low-paying yet leisurely job at the Clear Lake Cineplex; my enthusiasm delivering vertical movement within the company. I became the newest projectionist. This meant two things: I earned an extra quarter an hour and I got to watch movies. The astronaut and I had never gone to a game—save my Little League efforts—together. Baseball I could comprehend if not play with distinction. The only sport I truly detested was football, and that was as much for the adulation bestowed upon its athletes in Texas as for the sport itself.

Watching a baseball game in the oddly hermetic Astrodome would be fun regardless of my company. George Bush sat three rows in front of us. He even gave the astronaut a little wave. George Strait was one section over, directly behind home plate. The public service announcer helped me clear my head of the damp, pastel-hued haze of sentiment during the seventh inning stretch. Gentlemen, please stand and be recognized. I had seen Mom do it for too many years. I was so stoned when that picture was taken. I had a bandanna pulled low over my sleepy eyes, and, in a dead giveaway, I was out of focus.

My fellow anatomy students roared when the announcement was read. A couple smokers gave me the thumbs-up sign. Reyes shook his head resignedly. Reyes was happy to get rid of me when a reporter from the Wakefield Picayune asked permission to interview me later in the period. Before landing this exclusive, he had been in charge of the student opinion polls and school calendar listings. I waited for the journalist to introduce us, but he sat down and began fumbling through his notes.

I saw you on Wake Up, Wakefield. He wanted to know such vital data as favorite places to study and noteworthy hobbies. The brain-locked frosh asked no follow-up questions. Rather, he plowed heedlessly through his scripted line of inquiry, paying little if any attention to our responses. I guess when I knocked over that liquor store in seventh grade…. Allison said her favorite author was J. How teenaged of her.

I said mine was Gore Vidal. How deviant of me. Allison said her hero was her father. Allison rolled her eyes. When Henry asked Allison what she wanted to be when she grew up, my intellectual rival lost her patience with the cub reporter. I adopted a countenance that suggested a renewed interest in the proceedings.

Allison and I glanced at each other. She bit her lower lip and lowered her head like a frequently backhanded mutt. I likewise tried to appear repentant. Henry composed himself, reshuffled his notes, and, in his dinky freshman falsetto, continued. Though he was a grade ahead of me, I was four days older.

Upon returning to town I called to find out what he had in store for Skate or Die. First of all, I asked, did we really want to be seen with freshmen? But figuring out an alternative proved difficult. They said the founders of any chapter had to be registered voters, and, as surprising as this may sound, women. I broke my board a couple weeks ago when I was working on the Hawthorne pool. Doug worked for his parents at Clear Lake Pools and Spas.

We were pouring stepping-stones for a walkway, and I just stuck half the board into the concrete before it set. They were painters, writers, sculptors in the twenties who believed in art without coherent meaning. Nothing they did had to be justified. The more abstract, the weirder something was, the better. Art for the masses. No one had yet ventured over to our table. Several frightened ninth graders had stood at a safe distance and pointed at the artwork Doug and I displayed.

The first was the original skateboard tombstone. On a television monitor we ran a video Doug and I had produced. I was glad we, as dadaists, were not obliged to explain it. When freshman orientation ended we had yet to hand out any of our brochures, let alone sign up one member. Skate or Die, on the other hand, had swelled its membership to twenty-plus. During the first couple hours of nonfreshmen orientation, events proceeded not unlike the day before. Doug and I had had our first philosophical argument concerning GOD four days earlier when he suggested I produce a brochure on my Mac.

I argued that true dadaists would never produce sensical prose in hopes of increasing their numbers. Their art, I insisted, would serve as their calling card. He maintained, and rightly so I discovered later, that the original dadaists, our spiritual forefathers, had written at great length about their contribution to the art world.

Because we were dealing with his five-hundred-dollar bet and he had already checked out and read Dada: In Theory, in Practice, I relented. Doug and I collaborated on the inside copy, which read: I left my post for a few minutes to pick up my sophomore schedule. Upon returning, I was surprised to see a fair-sized crowd of potential dadaists clustered around our booth. Doug was in the process of explaining dadaist doctrine to three girls.

Doug was set upon by the president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. With fists clenched around the GOD brochure, he began shouting before he reached our booth. Did you write this? Predictably, Doug made the most of the spotlight. I finally remembered where I had seen her. She signed her name, Wanda Varner, on our club membership roll; her two friends signed up after her. They beat the rush. Fourteen, however, was the number I dreaded most.

We needed fifteen members, and the onus was on me to provide the last signature. As we walked to the office to apply for our charter, I told Doug I would relent and sign. Of course, everyone sat in front of me in geometry. My punctuality on the first day of classes was owed completely to my desire to sit in the back of the classroom.

Rats Saw God | Book by Rob Thomas | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster

Luckily, my last name usually protected me from anal-retentive teachers who insisted on alphabetical-order seating charts. I liked it when it took a teacher nearly a semester to learn my name. Not speaking, not volunteering answers, not turning in especially brilliant homework—I should market my anonymity strategy. Teachers all call me Steven. On the first day of geometry, Wanda became Dub.

When she said it, Mrs. If she were pretty, she did her best to hide it. Her hair was black, but it was the jet black that indicated the original color was smothered in dye. She wore no makeup. At the risk of sounding redundant, her mouth, too, was uniquely large, but she had those puffy, Uma Thurman lips which, judging from recent Sassy cover models, was the current standard of beauty. Green eyes, B cup, small feet, no jewelry, Whole Earth backpack—the kind favored by outdoorophiles or the studious, as its capacity is sufficient to store the complete Encyclopedia Britannica.

Seven days later she spoke to me. I looked like a goob, standing in the doorway of Mrs. She even patted her thighs encouragingly. She was pleased with how our initial conversation was proceeding. The first time I saw you, you looked like you wanted to kill somebody—you were taking Sarah to the airport.

Dub began walking to her next class, and I followed though it was the wrong direction. Why do you call yourself Dub if your name is Wanda? Every other club, except Skate or Die, is. Dub, on first meeting, had already subjected me to public humiliation and a tardy slip. I should have recognized the omen. On the bright side, the bell prevented me from answering the question. I mean, could you see me working on a homecoming float?

We had been hitting the Sonic Drive-in daily for lunch. The chick is wigging. I mean, imagine it: With Skate or Die, the skaters just hung out in the same places they always had. Neither of us had contemplated anything but the inception of GOD. Responsibility, we sensed, loomed. The following day I acquired an announcement form from an insanely pleasant receptionist. The real chore, though, was composing suitably dadaistic prose. The end product, approved by Doug, read: Defy Mother Nature and her minions. Dadaists unite in secular purgatory, Pizza Hut, tomorrow night at 6. The only two words he enunciated clearly were Pizza and Hut.

Dub looked back at me as the announcement was completed. Pizza Hut, with its uniform, vinyl, mansard-roofed architecture, might not have seemed the most felicitous setting for the birth of a society bent on the overthrow of convention. Nine girls, five guys—six if you included me—the times they were a-changing.

As this was the first assembly of GOD, few of the members knew one another. Chitchat reached the din we associate with spearfishing Eskimos or cloistered monks. Still, I felt antsy. Without standing and without raising his voice, Doug began what I imagined would be the first and last meeting of the Grace Order of Dadaists. Cabaret Voltaire was the name of the club Tristan Tzara had contributed work to in Zurich in the twenties, a haven for fellow dadaist painters, poets, and performance artists.

The standard conventioneer icebreaking opening joke. Would he follow with the one about the traveling salesman? Doug scanned the table. Like our artistic forefathers, we are concerned with the destruction of established mediums. In other words, our goals should include nonparticipation in anything established society—in our case, school—presents.

I have friends in Skate or Die. Doug handled it gracefully. A float only serves as further glorification of the status quo. He mistakenly thought he was having the final say. Dub sat at one end of the tables we had pushed together. Doug sat at the other. The rest of us were forced to rotate our heads in tennis spectator fashion in order to follow the action.

Our float would be a giant rolling sample of dadaistic art. We would be subverting the system. Think about it—a giant rolling carrot or maybe just a flatbed truck with nothing on it but a six-pack of generic cola. Dub turned her attention back to Doug.

We should participate in every cheesy event the school lobs up to us. But every time they do, we put our own spin on it. We should lead the cultural revolution at Grace. She left him speechless. Doug and I discussed the ramifications of the meeting on the ride home from the Hut. Are you in charge of refreshments? You are such a big wuss. That she was right? Or was it that she took charge? For the twelfth time during the last hour, Doug took off his John Deere cap, removed the rubber band from his long blond ponytail, and shook his hair out, letting it fall in front of his face; pulled his hair tightly back into a ponytail, re-rubber-banded it; and weaved it above the adjustable straps of his cap.

Do you want to spend your free time working on a float? Given plenty of light, nutrient-primed soil, and consistent watering, it will shoot up like, well… a weed. DeMouy stood peering into the top drawer of his desk as I entered. His long sigh at seeing me indicated my visit was business, not pleasure.

He ended by looking me straight in the eye. DeMouy obliged me by turning around. I quickly stepped around his desk and pulled the ganja out by its roots. We spent two to three hours each Monday through Thursday in the porta-barn owned by the parents of the Whiteside brothers, Bill and Matt. I probably could have asked for the Apollo 3 spacecraft had I told the astronaut I was working on a homecoming float. Initially I assumed my fellow dadaists had joined the group for the same wiseass reasons Doug and I had founded it, but as I got to know my comrades, I learned their motivations were as varied as the members themselves.

Possibly the sole thing we had in common was a need to be challenged. To be the cleverest member of GOD, though, now that would be a big deal. Dub friend number one. Rhonda consistently dressed two days behind Dub i. Has resisted urge to dye her red hair black, however. Tardy but eventual participant in all activities Dub-borne. Dub friend number two. Missy offered the Pizza Hut idea of peopling the float with faux parade spectators.

Nothing was too radical for Missy: Spoke little, but was right on the money when she did. Least hip member of group. She dressed in early dowdy. No one ever took the time to explain the difference between punk and new wave to Zipper. She worshipped both Richard Hell and Robert Smith. She wore only black and shot for a complexion just on the eggshell side of pale. She was also in the running for valedictorian, but needed to beat out fellow GOD member and debate partner, Samantha Ellis. Samantha, along with Dub, represented the active feminist segment of GOD.

Mistook us for the art club, but gamely stuck with GOD through the first semester despite never quite grasping the notion of dadaistic expression. Ben Kempler aka Veg refused to eat meat strictly on moralistic grounds. Some said, though I never witnessed this, that he apologized to vegetables before downing them. Before his conversion, Veg had been a chicken-fried-steak-a-day man and had the spare tire that often accompanies such a diet. By the time I met him, he could have been sharing clothes with Ghandi. Bill was the Renaissance man of GOD. Bill played guitar, was an assistant editor of Buried Treasure, the Grace literary magazine, and had the lead in the school play.

Everything his brother was. Our one athlete, Mike Collier was the designated gunner on the varsity basketball team. He joined because he was fascinated with dadaistic art. No one needed to explain the work of Duchamp to him. Trey took art three periods a day if you include the period he was Mr. He put himself in charge of bureaucratic concerns—applying for a float permit, attending the drawing of parade order, picking up the list of rules, supplying the thirty-dollar registration fee.

Fifty-dollar prizes would be awarded in three categories: We had no doubt the float we were constructing would be the most original, but as members of GOD, we harbored little hope of winning the cash. What would the judges think of our entry? The sketch evoked different reactions in all who observed it. Given its angle and red handle, I likened it to the hammer and sickle of the old Soviet Communist Party.

Bill converted the naysayers by offering to modify the concept a bit. I think what we experienced was one part Amish barn-raising enthusiasm and one part Chicano gang member group reliance. We went to lunch with fellow dadaists. We waved at each other in the halls. We sat next to each other in classes we shared. As I abandoned my initial aloofness, Dub and I began an ongoing game in geometry. We took turns foretelling the futures of our classmates. Dub killed off an especially perky front rower with invading laser-toting Neptunians who regarded hand-raising as a hostile act.

Dub would have none of that dewy-eyed compassion shit. She went for blood. I no longer feared Dub okay, not as much ; she was a kindred spirit. Rhonda, however, intimidated the hell out of me. She was sending out signals I was not too green to interpret: I would catch her staring at me; she would stand in my very American-sized personal space when speaking to me; she kept finding reasons to touch me, whether it was to try on one of my earrings, rub my shoulder to get my attention, or once, to pull my wallet out of my back pocket to get money for extra paint.

The Wakefield Picayune came out today. He sees a career in high school counseling in his future. Doug had arranged our float work schedule so as to allow social lives, or in my case, enable me to supplement my meager, by Clear Lake standards, allowance. But with a week remaining before the parade, it was obvious we needed the weekend to complete Get Hammered—which had become the working title of our rolling tribute to dadaism.

I finagled the Saturday off. The mechanics of the basher assembly had proven more intricate than Bill had originally envisioned, but eventually we had the chicken-wire-and-wooden-dowel hammer frame smacking the roof of the cab every six seconds. We completed the job by midnight. Seven of us were there to see the GOD float project reach fruition: The Dub Club came prepared for the grand finale.

Dub dug further into the sack and emerged with plastic champagne glasses—the kind in which the stem snaps into the bowl. We all sat on the float and began to get hammered ourselves. But if you have done it, you drink. Missy sat back on her heels, happy to be in charge. Rhonda, on the other hand, better make like a fish. Over the next hour I learned much about my allies. It turns out Doug and Missy had kissed in elementary school. Dub had caught her parents getting stoned on a camping trip.

Matt was the only one among us who had had sex with the editor of a high school newspaper. The rest of us were forced to admit we were still lousy with virginity. I was surprised to learn Doug had tried out for, and been cut from, his junior high football team. Dub upped the ante a bit with her next probe. None of the girls drank; they just stared wide-eyed, lips pursed in tight little prunes of giddy anticipation.

Bill and I followed a bit more reluctantly. You best start drinking. He was rewarded with polite, if sarcastic, golf tournament applause from the women. Instead, he blindsided me. No one was drinking. I turned to look out the barn door and tried to sneak a shot, but it was hopeless. From this day forward, your Indian warrior name is No Lips. I tried to stand but managed only an degree angle before crumpling back into an all-fours stance.

My only experience with alcohol had been with beer. A case of Schaeffer Light did you the courtesy of providing a glutted, anesthetized, and somnolent sensation to warn you of oncoming drunkenness. My lurching induced a fresh cannonade of laughter. On my second attempt, I succeeded in standing. I grabbed the remaining bottle and chugged the dregs. Pausing to wipe champagne spittle off my chin, I announced I was leaving. Give me your keys. Don Henley was fervently warning me about life in the fast lane as we pulled into the circular, red-brick drive, but his advice went for naught.

Rhonda put the El Camino in park, turned off the engine, grabbed me by the back of my neck, and began probing my larynx with her tongue. I tried wiggling my own stamp licker—a chore given the incommodious chamber it was suddenly sharing. I wanted to be able to say I kissed back this time. My eyes, I realized, were wide open. She tossed the keys in my lap and loped back to the idling vehicle.

I bumped into Allison Kimble in the hallway on my way to English this afternoon. I told her no. She was entering her classroom. It was rare for the astronaut and me to be home simultaneously, especially on a Sunday morning, but he was in the kitchen nuking Lean Cuisine when I staggered downstairs the following day. Bed gnomes had replaced my blood with battery acid and I was expecting solitude. This was as funny as the astronaut got. He fussily pulled the plastic film off his low-cal chicken fettuccine and tossed it in the garbage can. After one in the afternoon, the meal we have is called lunch.

I appreciate your concern. He bought the instructional videotapes. He took lessons, subscribed to Golf Digest, hit balls at the all-night driving range. Maybe take up cliff diving—something that could really get him hurt. I stepped around the astronaut, who was eating over the sink—the place where most of our meals were consumed at home—and opened the refrigerator door.

I pulled out three tortillas, rolled them up, and devoured them sans toppings. Doug had explained to me once that tortillas, like life rafts on luxury liners, expand exponentially. Once in your stomach they search out loitering alcohol and sop it up into harmless starch mush. I said nothing and plodded back toward the stairway leading to the sanctuary of my room. I returned and took the envelope from his hand but waited until I made it to my room before opening it.

We let her read e. Were she ever to end a sentence with a period, time, as we know it, would freeze—her semicolons, in fact, throw off the atomic clock a smidgen. I snapped open the cover and withdrew the three-inch pipe and sealed Baggie of marijuana stashed in the compartments that once housed aircraft carriers and destroyers. Stuffing the contraband in the front pocket of my cutoffs and throwing on a Dr.

I wandered a half mile down the beach, listening to the Afghan Whigs on my Discman, before plopping down on the sand. I stuffed the bowl of the pipe with what little pot I had on hand. Using a trusty Bic disposable, I lit the pipe and took the first hit. Twenty minutes later I was a kite. Midnight found me torpid, searching the Southern California night sky for a star, any star. Dub and I used to lie naked on the floor of her bedroom and study stars through the glass of her French doors. I stood and wiped my eyes with the sand-free portion of my palm. I began walking home, soon I was jogging.

I vaulted upstairs, flipped on the Macintosh power switch, and wrote. All I can tell you is that I had never felt this way about a girl before and I doubt I ever will again. The fifty-five-minute span I sat behind her every day in geometry was my primary motivation for breathing. The list only gets longer and increasingly pathetic. I drove by her house.

I stopped just short of carving our names in an oak tree on the village green. His phone call awakened me. I looked at my clock and discovered it was four in the afternoon. I had hardly ever considered Rhonda, let alone considered her my girlfriend. I was suddenly grateful I had to be at work in an hour.

Emma Pillsbury Jayma Mays is the school's guidance counselor who has OCD , with obsessions and compulsions primarily focused on contamination and cleanliness. She has romantic feelings for Will. Sure, she's terrified of germs and in love with a married man, so seeing her as the voice of reason for the kids is amazing.

Acknowledging her continuing feelings for Will, Ken breaks up with her on their wedding day. Emma submits her resignation as guidance counselor, but as she is leaving the school, Will finds her and stops her with a kiss. It is subsequently revealed in the episode " Sexy " that her marriage with Carl is facing difficulties and has not been consummated.

She admits that she still has feelings for Will, and she and Carl separate; he later requests an annulment of their marriage. When the third season begins, she and Will are living together. In the penultimate episode, " Nationals ", Emma and Will have sex for the first time. After their first wedding falls through as she runs away after she and Finn lie about kissing, Emma and Will begin to date again. Will re proposes and they marry with all of the New Directions present.

He is a younger half-brother of Puck , whom he has never met. He auditions for New Directions, but when he is stopped midway through his song, Jake is infuriated and deliberately knocks over a music stand. He is not admitted to the glee club, but when director Will Schuester discovers that Jake is related to Puck, he personally invites Jake to join New Directions, telling Jake that he is talented, and he thinks joining will help him as it did Puck, but Jake declines.

In the following episode, " Britney 2. Though there are signs that he and new club member Marley Rose are interested in one another, she is upset to learn he is dating cheerleader Kitty Becca Tobin. Jake soon breaks up with Kitty, but he has a rival for Marley in football player Ryder Lynn. The two of them come to blows over her in the choir room, and are assigned to share their deepest fears with one another by Finn, who is directing the club while Will is in Washington.

Jake eventually admits that he has never felt he belonged anywhere, being mixed-race and Jewish. Ryder in turn confesses that he has trouble reading, and the two soon become friends. Puck invites Jake to spend Christmas vacation with him in California; the two half brothers bond further, and Puck decides to move back to Ohio. They arrange a Christmas Day dinner with their two mothers, who have never met before, and the two women—initially hostile—come to an understanding. Marley asks Jake to the school's Sadie Hawkins dance and he accepts. Kitty tries to get Jake to take her instead, offering sex as the reward, but Puck draws her off.

Jake and Marley attend the dance and become a couple after Jake agrees to Marley's request that they take it slow and that he not also see other girls. In the 5th season, Jake cheats on Marley with Bree, a cheerleader, and he and Marley break up. After the glee club was disbanded he along with the other new glee kids except for Kitty were transferred to other schools. He later appears in the final episode with everyone singing "I Lived". Noah "Puck" Puckerman Mark Salling is Finn's best friend and football teammate, who initially disapproves of Finn joining the glee club.

Puck joins Will's all-male a cappella group, the Acafellas, hoping to impress the mothers at the school's PTA meeting, as he prefers older women. She rejects him when he offers to support her and the baby, calling him a " Lima loser. In season two, Puck is sent to juvenile detention for stealing an ATM. The producers engineered his absence from the series to allow a romance to develop between Quinn and new student Sam Evans. He falls in love with Lauren, and they run unsuccessfully for junior prom king and queen together, but she breaks up with him at the beginning of their senior year in season three.

Shelby Corcoran, who adopted baby Beth, gets a teaching job at McKinley, and invites Puck and Quinn to be a part of Beth's life, provided they both become more responsible. Puck does so, and Shelby allows him to see Beth. Quinn decides she wants to regain custody of Beth from Shelby, but Puck is torn, and tells Shelby of Quinn's plans. He then falls in love with Shelby. She sleeps with him once, though she tells him afterward she has made a mistake, to his disgust, and subsequently resigns from McKinley. Puck later gets into academic trouble, but realizes he needs to graduate after meeting up again with his high-school-dropout father, but he fails a crucial test that will keep him from graduating with the rest of the seniors.

Coach Beiste breaks up a fight between him and another student, and helps him get a retest and to study for it. A kiss from Quinn brings back Puck's confidence: When he and Quinn both return for the end of the McKinley High Glee club, he is dismayed to see she has a rich boyfriend, Biff Macintosh. However, Puck fights for Quinn, after Biff texts through her performance of Toxic with Santana and Brittany and yells at her after she tells the truth about her pink hair, tattoos and Beth, and the two kiss after Quinn asks him to stay with her. In the next episode, the two sing a duet, Just Give Me a Reason, and confess their new relationship to the Glee club Alumni.

Although, in season six A Wedding , Puck is seen dancing with an older woman and Quinn is absent. She comes from a low-income family, her mother, Millie Rose, works at the school's cafeteria and is morbidly obese. Marley is initially introduced as a shy, sweet, intelligent " wallflower " who was frequently bullied and an outcast at her previous schools.

Once she joins the glee club, she forms friendships with the other students in the club. Marley is the only one of the many students who auditioned at the beginning of the school year to be immediately accepted into New Directions. Her goal is to become a singer on the radio, rather than aiming for Broadway. She is attracted to Jake Puckerman, who is also new at McKinley, but although the attraction seems mutual, she is upset to discover he is dating Kitty, a cheerleader and popular girl.

Jake eventually breaks up with Kitty because she mistreats Marley. Marley auditions for the school's production of the musical Grease along with Wade "Unique" Adams, with whom she has formed a friendship, and is cast in the lead role of Sandy. In the episode "Glease", Kitty, who had been the other candidate for Sandy, convinces Marley that she is genetically predisposed to be overweight by secretly taking in her costumes, and that she needs to induce vomit in order to maintain a desirable weight.

Ryder, who plays the male lead Danny, finds Marley trying to vomit in the bathroom, and tries to convince her it's a bad idea; he ends up kissing her backstage as Jake looks on. Jake and Ryder briefly compete for Marley's affections, but she chooses Jake when Kitty convinces her that Ryder called off their date because of her weight when he was really seeing a dyslexia specialist, and they subsequently begin dating. Her bulimia gets worse, and she passes out on stage during Sectionals competition during New Directions' first number; when the glee club leaves the stage to get her first aid, the Dalton Academy Warblers are declared the winners, but they are later disqualified and New Directions gets to go on.

She and Jake are an official couple by the episode "Naked". Ryder helps Jake with ideas for Valentine's Day gifts for Marley, and at Will and Emma's wedding on Valentine's Day, she and Jake think about going "all the way", but Marley decides she isn't ready. Ryder, whose gift ideas were so successful because he'd fallen in love with Marley himself, kisses her when she thanks him for helping Jake with the presents. She tells Jake, which temporarily strains their relationship, and nearly ends Jake's friendship with Ryder.

Finn, who had held the glee club together after Marley's fainting had almost ended it, has to leave New Directions when Will and he are at loggerheads. Marley goes to thank him as he's packing up, and when he says he'll miss teaching them, tells him he's a good teacher, and should get a teaching degree. By this time, Kitty has stopped sabotaging Marley and trying to undermine her confidence; in "Shooting Star", while the glee club is locked up in the choir room after gunshots are heard, Kitty breaks down and admits that she altered Marley's Sandy costumes.

After the shooting incident, Marley decides to openly pursue her songwriting, which she had kept secret to that point, and in "Sweet Dreams" two of her songs are performed. A third, "All or Nothing", is performed at Regionals in the fourth-season finale, and New Directions wins the competition. In "The End of Twerk", Marley discovers that Jake had cheated on her with one of the cheerleaders, Bree, and breaks up with him. After the glee club was disbanded because of the loss in the nationals competition, she and the other glee club new kids except for Kitty were transferred to another school.

She does not return for the rest of the series, though mentioned by Kitty that since she and her friends were transferred, she lost contact with her. Terri Schuester Jessalyn Gilsig was Will's wife of five years, but they were together fifteen years total. Terri briefly believes herself to be pregnant, and pushes Will to take a better paying job as an accountant. Terri manages to seduce a sick and lonely Will in the second-season episode " The Substitute ", but she is rebuffed by him when he recovers.

Near the end of the second season, Terri is recruited by Sue Sylvester to join Sue's League of Doom to destroy the New Directions glee club directed by Will, [] but Terri undoes the damage and tells Will that she's been promoted to manager at work, and is being transferred to a new store in Miami. Gilsig has deemed Terri "a woman of conviction", willing to do "whatever it takes" to keep Will from leaving her. William "Will" Schuester Matthew Morrison is McKinley High's Spanish teacher who becomes director of the glee club, which he renames New Directions, hoping to restore it to its former glory.

Believing her to be pregnant, unaware that she is actually experiencing a hysterical pregnancy , he considers leaving the teaching field to become an accountant. In the second season, though Will tries to win Emma back, she marries Carl. Holly takes a job in Cleveland, leaving Will free to pursue Emma after Emma's marriage ends in an annulment. April Rhodes returns and asks for Will's help with her new Broadway project: At the start of the third season, Will and Emma are living together.

He proposes to her after New Year's, and she accepts. He later switches from teaching Spanish to teaching history, though he continues directing the glee club. New Directions wins Nationals, he and Emma have sex for the first time, and eight of his seniors graduate at the end of the year. Susan "Sue" Sylvester Jane Lynch is the coach of the cheerleading squad called the Cheerios, and the glee club's "arch-nemesis. If that means she has to prostitute herself or take advantage of a year-old boy, she'll do it.

It's all about power and winning. That's her entire world view. It is later revealed that Sue has an older sister, Jean, who herself has Down Syndrome, showing a softer side to her normally abrasive character. In the season one finale, Sue judges in favor of New Directions at regionals, though they come third to rival clubs Vocal Adrenaline and Aural Intensity, and are disbanded for failing to place.

Sue then blackmails Principal Figgins to reinstate the club, giving them another year to prove their worth to the school. In the second season, Sue is appointed acting principal after having Figgins infected with the flu but she later stands down. Sue arranges to have the cheerleading regionals competition moved to conflict with the football championship, and she forces Quinn, Brittany and Santana to quit glee club, which has to perform the halftime show since the Cheerios will be absent; the three of them ultimately perform with the glee club, resigning from the Cheerios.

Missing three of its best cheerleaders, the Cheerios lose regionals after six straight nationals wins. Faking a depression after the loss, Sue joins the glee club for a week; when she can't destroy it from within, she decides to coach one of their rivals, Aural Intensity, to a regionals victory over New Directions, but New Directions emerges victorious. Sue's sister, Jean, dies later in the season, and Sue is devastated and unable to cope; when New Directions helps with funeral arrangements and performs at Jean's funeral, Sue says she's giving up her frequent attempts to destroy the glee club, [] but she's back to her old ways in the third season when school starts in the fall.

She also begins a run for a vacant Congressional seat, which she loses to Burt Hummel. Sue helps coach the glee club, and they win at Nationals, which puts her back in charge of cheerleading. She is later re-hired as principal when Becky confesses. During this time, Roz Washington is coach of the Cheerios. Kitty is one of the very popular students, and is attracted to Jake Puckerman Jacob Artist and starts dating him in " Britney 2. He stops dating her in " The Break Up ". Kitty is unhappy with losing Jake, and with his attraction to Marley Rose; when Marley is favored to win the role of Sandy the school musical Grease , Kitty decides to audition for the role herself, and predicts that Marley will start to gain large amounts of weight to become like her obese mother, who works in the McKinley cafeteria.

When Marley is cast as Sandy—Kitty gets the small role of Patty Simcox—Kitty secretly takes in Marley's costumes, making Marley think she is gaining weight, and gives her advice about purging, which starts Marley on the road to bulimia. After Grease , Kitty joins New Directions in " Dynamic Duets ", and when last year's graduates of the glee club—which won a Nationals championship—return to mentor the new members prior to Sectionals competition, Kitty is mentored by her idol, former head cheerleader Quinn Fabray.

Kitty, while sometimes giving Marley good advice about being more assertive, continues undermining her confidence about her weight to the point that Marley faints during Sectionals competition, causing New Directions to be disqualified. After making another try at Jake, she begins dating Jake's older half-brother, Puck.

Kitty, though still acerbic, becomes more sympathetic to the other glee club members, admitting that she considers everyone in New Directions her friends, and that—since the glee club's disqualification has been reversed—she wants to win a Nationals championship. During the " Shooting Star " episode, while the choir room is locked down after shots are heard, Kitty confesses to Marley about her Grease costume sabotage; she tearfully apologizes, and is forgiven.

In " Lights Out ", she reveals to Ryder, who had been sexually abused when eleven, that she had been sexually abused in sixth grade by her friend's older brother at a sleepover, but when she told people what happened, nobody believed her. She was ostracized by her friends, and eventually switched schools. Kitty later intervenes after Artie Abrams Kevin McHale is accepted to film school but has decided not to attend, and he ends up deciding to go after all. New Directions wins its Regionals competition, and is set to compete at Nationals. Alistair Finneas O'Connell is a McKinley High student who transfers in during the sixth season of the show and was first introduced in " Child Star " as a friend of Roderick who Spencer Marshall Williams is smitten with.

Spencer convinces Alistair to join New Directions, and the two of them become a couple. Azimio is one of the school's bullies, and friends with teammate and fellow bully Dave Karofsky. Although he is usually seen harassing members of the glee club, Azimio was the first of the football players in " The Sue Sylvester Shuffle " to agree to perform in the halftime show the night of the championship game in order to be allowed to play in the second half, saying he wanted to win the game because it would mean so much to his father.

Although he has typically been seen in tandem with Karofsky, he was featured on his own late in the second season, first as part of a "heckling club" organized by Sue to disrupt the glee club's benefit concert in " A Night of Neglect ", during which he states that he writes devastating anonymous commentary in NCIS and CSI: Miami chat rooms, and then as one of Sue's staffers for the school newspaper when she revives The Muckraker in " Rumours " to spread damaging rumors about New Directions members. Karofsky, having given up bullying, confronts Azimio in " Born This Way " about his own bullying.

Azimio appears once in the third season in " Asian F ": Jacob Ben Israel Josh Sussman is the editor of the school newspaper, in addition to running his own gossip blog. He has been compared in the media to Perez Hilton and Gossip Girl. Although he does not sing in the competition, he remains with the club throughout the remainder of the episode, helping them to listen in on the judges. The second, third, and fourth seasons of Glee all open with a documentary made by Jacob, focusing on the recent happenings at McKinley and the glee club in particular.

In addition to helping viewers catch up with the plot as the season starts, the first of these, from the season two premiere, " Audition ", was used by the Glee producers to directly address media criticism of the first season. Rory first appeared in the episode of the third season in " Pot o' Gold ". Brittany was initially convinced that Rory was a magical leprechaun whom only she could see and was there to grant her three wishes. Additionally, Rory is a fan of Finn Hudson, and is persuaded by Finn to join New Directions—he auditions with the song " Take Care of Yourself " in a performance characterized by Rachel as "magical".

Rory looks up to Finn, and tries to defend Finn when Santana insults him, only to get his own share of insults from her. The character of Rory was created for McGinty after he won a recurring role for seven episodes on Glee as a contestant on The Glee Project. The idea of his character interacting with Brittany was first broached in the penultimate episode of The Glee Project , with the judges speculating that Brittany would not be able to understand a word the character said due to his Irish accent.

He does appear in a fantasy dream sequence during that season's Christmas episode, " Glee, Actually ", as Artie's guardian angel. Mercedes, Sam, and Quinn. After Quinn is in an automobile accident and confined to a wheelchair, he prays for her, and also helps her with her physical therapy; she, in return, recruits him into the glee club. Joe finds himself having feelings for Quinn and turns to Sam for advice, since the feelings are partially physical, which is frowned on by his faith.

New Directions wins Nationals, and Quinn graduates. He continues at McKinley and in New Directions in the show's fourth season, and performs in both Sectionals and Regionals competitions, but has not appeared in the fifth season; Larsen cut his trademark dreadlocks after fourth-season filming ended. Joe appears again in season six in " The Rise and Fall of Sue Sylvester " and accuses Sue of having cut off his dreadlocks. Larsen was one of the two winners of The Glee Project 's first season, and his prize was a seven-episode arc on Glee.

Like his character, Larsen is Christian, and had thought "being Christian and trying to make it in this business as opposites working against each other" and that "you have to be very secure in your faith to approach this business". Jane asks Blaine Anderson if she can become a Warbler, but even after a successful audition, the Warbler council vote against her, making her ultimately transfer to McKinley to become a member of the New Directions.

Becky Faye Jackson Lauren Potter , narration provided by an uncredited Helen Mirren [] is a member of the Cheerios with Down syndrome , who becomes a sidekick to Sue. Becky does everything Sue tells her to do, including heckling the glee club in " A Night of Neglect ", though her honest reactions to events have an effect on Sue. Becky is briefly kicked off the cheerleading squad by Sue in " Funeral " after Sue's sister, who also has Down Syndrome, dies; Becky asks to join the glee club, but she is told that it's too late in the show choir season, though she is offered a spot next year.

Sue then apologizes to Becky, reinstates her, and tells Becky she'll be captain of the Cheerios in the fall. To Becky's dismay, when the third season commences she is not the sole captain, but is made co-captain with Santana. She also assists Sue with her Congressional campaign, though Sue loses the race.

She asks him out on a date, and while they do have a good time, he balks at a more serious relationship, to her great disappointment. Sue comforts her afterward. She wins a game of strip poker with Puck after the others go to the prom after all, and he crowns the two of them the anti-prom king and queen. They then go to the real prom, and she helps him spike Sue's punch bowl. In " Feud ", Sue names her Cheerios co-captain again, along with the newly recruited Blaine Anderson. Sue takes the blame for having the gun, which she gets rid of, and is fired by Principal Figgins.

She returns in the final season during homecoming, and in the series finale , she become the head of the secret service for the vice president Sue. Potter is a member of the Down's Syndrome Association of Los Angeles, and was contacted about auditioning through the association's in-house talent agency, Hearts and Hands. Fourteen actresses auditioned for the role, which Potter deemed "a great experience" to perform.

He is a member of the hockey team who slushies Finn, [42] but by " Theatricality " he's on the football team with his friend and fellow bully Azimio James Earl ; [44] they regularly target members of New Directions. He is expelled for his death threat, but allowed to return by the school board as no physical violence was witnessed—and Kurt had not revealed the kiss. In the episode " Born This Way ", after being blackmailed by Santana, he issues an apology to Kurt at a group meeting involving their fathers, Principal Figgins and Will.

In " Prom Queen ", when Karofsky wins prom king and Kurt, shockingly, wins prom queen, the two walk onto the floor for the traditional king and queen dance, but Karofsky is unable to come out as Kurt suggests, and leaves. He next appears in the third-season episode " The First Time ".

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He has transferred to another high school from McKinley for his senior year; he sees Kurt in a gay bar, and tells Kurt he has become a regular there and feels accepted. He is later outed at his new school and bullied so mercilessly that he attempts to commit suicide but is saved by his father; Kurt visits him in the hospital and they agree to become friends. Adler had previously questioned his character's motivations, but was surprised by the scene in which Karofsky kisses Kurt. But I also love Max and I love that character and I sorta want that character to have a happy ending.

The two of them are shown to be incredibly close and are referred to by Kitty Wilde as the "creepy incest twins". She and her brother successfully audition for the New Directions and become the third and fourth members of the newly reformed club. He and his sister successfully audition for the New Directions and become the third and fourth members of the newly reformed club. Later, during " Jagged Little Tapestry " he performs a duet with Jane, though it is negatively received by Kurt, which inspires the two to do better. Her father Al is the wealthy owner of a piano business who donates three repossessed pianos to the glee club in " The Purple Piano Project ", the episode in which she first appears.

Sugar has self-diagnosed Asperger syndrome , which she uses to explain why she can say whatever she wants. After the glee club performs in the school cafeteria in the hopes of recruiting new students, Sugar shows up to audition, telling the club that they're terrible but she's awesome and will be their new star.

Her audition is a stunningly horrendous rendition of " Big Spender ", and she becomes the first person who fails to get into New Directions after auditioning. After the Troubletones place second at Sectionals, Shelby resigns as director, and the Troubletones are told they are all welcome in New Directions, Sugar accompanies Mercedes, Santana and Brittany when they return, and sings "We Are Young" with the group.

In " Heart ", she gives Will money to pay for costumes and makeup for Regionals, and throws a big Valentine's Day party. Artie and Rory compete to be her date at the party, and Rory is chosen after his claim that he is being deported at the end of the school year wins her sympathy. According to Lengies, Sugar's self-diagnosed Aspergers is part of her character.

She said that it was difficult to sing poorly on purpose, especially with piano accompaniment. She's also an entitled little snot She's a great character, and I hope we haven't seen the last of her. Totah is the nephew of School Superintendent Bob Harris Christopher Cousins who was first introduced in " Child Star ", when he has New Directions serve as his opening act at his bar mitzvah.

He describes himself as a "post-modern gay teen. Spencer eventually joins the New Directions and competes with them at Sectionals, and later at Regionals and Nationals, where they win. In voiceover, Roderick talks about how he is a transfer student and that music is his only friend and it wouldn't hurt to make some real friends, just as someone places a "wide load" sticker on his back.

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It is later revealed he is the voice Rachel heard singing, and later becomes the first official member of the newly reformed New Directions after a successful audition of " Mustang Sally. Matt Rutherford Dijon Talton is a football player who joins New Directions in the fourth episode, "Preggers", [47] and appears for the remainder of the first season of Glee. He does not return in the second season; Will says that he transferred to another school. Talton explained that Finn joining the glee club made it more acceptable for Matt to be honest with himself about what he wanted to do, and that he is becoming more comfortable being in the glee club, "what it stands for, how it makes him feel".

During the first season, Kurt tells his father that Lauren's parents had to sue the school district to get Lauren a spot on the wrestling team. Lauren has an acerbic personality and is admired by Puck for being "a bigger bad-ass" than he is. She is overweight and has a love of candy, specifically Cadbury Creme Eggs. Lauren has occasionally been seen dressing in the Goth style and is a fan of the Twilight book series. She joins New Directions in the episode " Special Education ", enabling the club to meet the member quota for sectionals.

She campaigns with Puck for prom king and queen, though they both lose, and the two are still a couple at the end of the second season. However, after the glee club finishes twelfth at Nationals, Lauren concludes that being in New Directions is hurting her credibility, so she quits the group and breaks up with Puck at the start of the new school year.

She returns in the fourth season's " Sadie Hawkins " as a member of Tina's "too young to be bitter" group, but regains her confidence, dances with Joe Hart, and announces that she's applied to go to Harvard on a wrestling scholarship. Sandy Ryerson is said to have behaved sexually inappropriately towards him, leading to Sandy's dismissal and a restructuring of the glee club. For unknown reasons, Hank does not audition to re-join the club, unlike Rachel, who does. In the season one episode "Ballad", Sarah Drew makes a guest appearance as Suzy Pepper, [] a senior with "an insane, absurd, psychotic crush on Mr.

While this student ensemble was introduced in the pilot episode, with numerous appearances throughout the series, none of these instrumentalists were given character names. The only instrumentalist to receive an acting credit is Scott Henson as "Scott T. Henson, guitarist" for having a line of dialogue in " A Very Glee Christmas ". Regular members of the group include a drummer played by John Lock [] [] and a bassist played by Scott Henson later a member of the real band Nightmare and the Cat , [] both introduced in the pilot; a guitarist played by Spencer Conley in the first two seasons, [] first seen in " Throwdown "; a guitarist played by Derik Nelson in seasons three to five, [] replacing Conley in season three opener " The Purple Piano Project "; and a keyboardist played by Mark Nilan Jr.

Lock and Henson temporarily abandoned their instruments to sing and dance with New Directions for Sectionals competition in the episode " Hold On to Sixteen ". Other student instrumentalists regularly accompany New Directions, alone or with the Jazz Ensemble, including string and horn players, additional guitarists, keyboard players and percussionists, and a harpist. Lillian Adler Jane Galloway Heitz was the glee club director until when she died of unknown causes. She was the director of glee club when Will Schuester was a member.

Adler first appears in the uncut version of the premiere episode, " Pilot ", and her memorial plaque serves as inspiration for Will to take over as glee club director. Her plaque was viewed during the course of the series by Will and other glee club members as a further source of inspiration. The plaque resided in the choir room until the episode " ", when it was moved to the auditorium.

Adler's final appearance is seen in a flashback by Will to the pilot episode in the series finale " Dreams Come True ". The last scene of the series showed Adler's plaque alongside a plaque of the rededication to the auditorium and a memorial plaque for Finn Hudson. Fans had lobbied for Menzel to be cast as Rachel's biological mother, due to the strong resemblance between Menzel and Michele. She had signed a contract that stated that she could not seek out her daughter until she was eighteen. She leaves Vocal Adrenaline before the beginning of the next school year.

Shelby returns in the second episode of season three, " I Am Unicorn ", having been recruited to lead a second glee club at McKinley High by Sugar Motta's father when Sugar is refused entry into New Directions. Shelby offers to include both Quinn and Puck in Beth's life. Puck falls in love with her, but Shelby tells him in " Mash Off " that the kiss was a mistake. She resigns in the following episode, however, and he is reinstated.

Near the end of the season, he hires the glee club to perform at the school's junior prom. In the fifth season, Sue takes over the role of Principal and makes Figgins the school janitor. Although Figgins was initially conceived as White , Pakistani American actor Theba was cast in the role.

He finds Figgins a challenging character to play, as it entails finding "the right mix of someone who is an authority figure but who is also very insecure about his own strengths as a person. Her first appearance was in the second-season episode " The Substitute ", when she temporarily takes over as the director of the glee club while Will Schuester is out sick. Paltrow's Glee appearance marked her first ever scripted-series guest performance. In that same episode she also begins a romantic relationship with Will. Holly's third and final appearance that season is in the episode " A Night of Neglect ", in which she breaks off her relationship with Will because she knows he is in love with Emma.

Murphy stated at PaleyFest in March that Paltrow as Holly would be returning in season three for a series of guest appearances, but she has not appeared on Glee in the two years since that announcement. Although he claims to have a girlfriend, Rachel refers to him as a " closet case ", and he is fired for his inappropriate sexual behavior towards a male student.

Following his firing, he becomes a drug dealer, reselling medical marijuana. While Groban does attend, he does so only to serve Sandy with a restraining order for constantly sending him inappropriate photos and messages over the internet. The casting notice for the role of Sandy read, in part, "He's gay, but covers it With a pastel sweater thrown over his shoulders, Sandy is the former Glee Club teacher, who is given the axe after an episode of inappropriate touching. The second-season episode " A Night of Neglect " confirmed this, with Sandy characterizing himself as a "predatory gay".

In that episode, he joins Sue Sylvester's "League of Doom", using the codename "The Pink Dagger", [] but ends up donating money to support the school's academic decathlon team, spoiling Sue's plans. Ken Tanaka Patrick Gallagher was the head coach of the football team and was previously engaged to Emma. You understand where the bitterness comes from, and people may start to like him a little.

Ken will keep going [after Emma]. Ken will go after what he wants. The one thing Ken won't do is give up. I realized I was going for what I like to think as an older version of me from years ago. I think Ken is not happy with where he is in life. I think he's still got a good heart, but there's this insecurity and bitterness piled on top of it.

I think love is in Ken's head, and love for me is kind of an idealistic concept. But one thing I really respect about him is that he goes after something: He just doggedly pursues Emma. I wish I was more like that. In some ways, he's a little bit braver than I am. I mean—look at what he wears. He did not return for the second season; the new football coach, Shannon Beiste, is played by Dot-Marie Jones. He is briefly seen in the season four episode " Shooting Star " as a potential match for Coach Beiste on an online dating site.

It is here revealed that he is currently living in Medford, Oregon. Roz manages to convince Principal Figgins to appoint her as cheerleading co-coach, which outrages Sue who doesn't want to share power, though the two team up to teach the glee club girls that spousal abuse is nothing to joke about. Sue makes a deal with Figgins: The club wins Nationals, and Sue is triumphant. Roz returns late in the fourth season to take over the Cheerios after Sue is fired, and is still coach early in the fifth season after Sue returns as school principal.

The role of Roz was created by Ryan Murphy, who noted that Leakes herself was part of the inspiration for the character, from her appearances on The Celebrity Apprentice and The Real Housewives of Atlanta , and only afterward did he realize he could offer the role to Leakes herself. Ian Brennan writes most of Roz's dialogue, much as he write most of Sue's. Pierre, "a retired wood shop teacher with an excellent singing voice". Hagberg, who appears in " Prom Queen " teaching home economics, in " I Am Unicorn " teaching geography, in " I Kissed a Girl " teaching math, and retires from her tenured position as a history teacher in " The Spanish Teacher ", though she returns for an end-of-the-year ceremony in " Nationals ".

Rachel invites her to join the glee club after seeing Sunshine sing along to New Directions' version of " Empire State of Mind ", mistakenly thinking that Sunshine idolized her, but when the two sing " Telephone ", Rachel feels threatened by Sunshine's singing prowess and tricks her into going to a crack house instead of the auditions. Rachel is found out, and Sunshine eventually does audition, amazing the club with " Listen ".

Though she is immediately accepted into the club, Sue Sylvester contacts Dustin Goolsby, the new director of rival glee club Vocal Adrenaline, who secures permanent U. Sunshine confesses that she would have loved to be in New Directions, but she felt that Rachel would have made her stay a "living hell". In that episode, Sunshine hears of New Direction's fundraising benefit for the McKinley team's finals expenses and volunteers to perform, promising to ask her Twitter followers to attend. They accept her offer after she sings " All By Myself ", but Dustin Goolsby pulls her out of the fundraiser and her fans do not come.

Sunshine reappears in the season two finale " New York " for the National show choir competition. Sunshine tells Rachel that she has come to hate being in Vocal Adrenaline, and desperately wants to leave on the day of competition. Rachel encourages her to perform and apologizes for what she did to her at the beginning of the year. Sunshine sings the original song "As Long As You're There", and her group finishes in second place, while New Directions places twelfth.

Dustin Goolsby Cheyenne Jackson is the director of rival glee club Vocal Adrenaline who replaces Shelby Corcoran Idina Menzel when she leaves the post after leading the team to four national championships in a row. Murphy described Dustin as "a complete villain", stating that he will "become very intertwined in Will's life". He returns in " A Night of Neglect ", joining Sue's "League of Doom" to help her sabotage the McKinley glee club, and returns again at the National show choir competition in the season two finale, " New York ", where Vocal Adrenaline comes in second—as is subsequently revealed in the third-season episode " I Am Unicorn "—and Goolsby is fired as director for failing to win a fifth national crown.

Jackson was originally considered for the role of Will, [] and in was initially cast in the Glee episode " Acafellas " as Vocal Adrenaline choreographer Dakota Stanley, but he was unable to perform due to illness. She has been working in show business since before birth—an ultrasound of her was featured in an episode of Murder, She Wrote , and she later appeared in commercials for Gerber baby food. Harmony is portrayed by The Glee Project runner-up Pearce, [] and her debut was met with critical acclaim.

Club wrote that hers might be "the best new character ever", [] and TVLine 's Michael Slezak felt that Harmony was "brilliantly bought to life" by Pearce. She and rival glee club director Dalton Rumba give Principal Figgins proof that Sue helped them cheat, leading to Sue's suspension. I'm the teacher of a reform school. I'm used to being very strict. When the first pilot episode came out, I figured it was something different and something we haven't seen on TV before. I didn't want to turn it down! Kennedy for the Los Angeles Times was impressed by Eve's acting and "on-screen charm", and felt that she worked nicely in the "Hairography" episode.

Sebastian Smythe Grant Gustin is a student at Dalton Academy who transfers into the school in the show's third season. When Blaine Anderson comes to Dalton to invite his Warbler friends to see a musical he's starring in at McKinley, Sebastian is attracted to him and propositions him. However, Blaine is happy with his current boyfriend, Kurt Hummel , and turns him down. Sebastian becomes captain of the Warblers, and in " Michael ", he spikes the New Directions plan to do Michael Jackson songs at Regionals by adding Jackson's music to the Warblers setlist.

When the McKinley glee club challenges the Warblers for the right to use Jackson, Sebastian throws a slushie spiked with rock salt intended for Kurt that injures Blaine - damaging his cornea and requiring surgery to repair. Santana gets him to privately admit his perfidy, but unknown to Sebastian his admission was taped and the other Warblers are made aware of his actions. Sebastian had cruelly rebuffed Karofsky at a gay bar and blames himself. The Warblers lose to New Directions at Regionals. He is a part of the effort to persuade Blaine to rejoin the Warblers.

Rats Saw God

It seems that he is the Warblers' captain again when he is the one to announce that they agree to do so. When Gustin made his first appearance, it was reported he was playing a new "major" recurring character, [] a "gay Dalton Academy Warbler who sets his sights on Blaine". James Jonathan Groff is the male lead of Vocal Adrenaline and one of the main antagonists of the first season. Once the truth about Shelby is revealed, however, Jesse transfers back. He ends his relationship with Rachel by egging her in the McKinley High parking lot along with his fellow members of Vocal Adrenaline, humiliating her.

In the episode " Prom Queen ", he returns, after having flunked out of college, in an attempt to befriend Rachel again, claiming that his biggest regret was choosing Vocal Adrenaline over love. He joins Rachel, Sam and Mercedes, who have teamed up to go do "prom on a budget", at the McKinley junior prom; however, after getting into a fight with a jealous Finn, he's kicked out of prom. He sets up a consulting business to help show choirs with their performances; his first client is New Directions. His resumed relationship with Rachel ultimately fails when Finn suddenly kisses her in the middle of a Nationals performance and Rachel chooses to get back together with him.

Jesse returns in the latter part of the third season as the new coach of Vocal Adrenaline, replacing the fired Dustin Goolsby. He also somewhat mockingly congratulates Finn on being engaged to Rachel. Later, after sadly watching Rachel perform on Nationals and implying he still has feelings for her , Jesse talks to Carmen Tibideaux Whoopi Goldberg and tells her Rachel's the most talented person he knows. In a controversial essay for Newsweek , critic Ramin Setoodeh wrote that Groff, who is openly gay, was unconvincing as the straight Jesse "he seems more like your average theatre queen; a better romantic match for Kurt than Rachel".

He makes a return near the series finale after being absent since season three. He convinces Rachel to join him in the new Broadway show. In the series finale, it was shown that Jesse is the director of Rachel's Broadway show and they are now married. Whit Hertford appears as Dakota Stanley, a glee club choreographer who worked for Vocal Adrenaline early in season one, and was briefly hired by New Directions. Hunter Clarington is introduced in the fourth season's seventh episode as the new captain of the Warblers. Played by Nolan Gerard Funk , Hunter is a new Dalton transfer student, recruited from a Regionals-winning military academy.

She influences many of Terri's decisions during her hysterical-turned-fake pregnancy by assisting Terri in her schemes, and predicting disaster whenever Terri contemplates confessing the truth to Will. In the episode " Throwdown ", Kendra and Terri bully their obstetrician, Dr. Wu Kenneth Choi , into faking an ultrasound to convince Will the baby is real. Entertainment Weekly ' s Wendy Mitchell deemed Kendra "hilarious" and wished to see more of her, [] while her colleague at the magazine, Ken Tucker, described Kendra as "a garish cartoon who exists only to further the pregnancy plotting".

He dislikes Emma and Will spending time alone together, aware that Will has feelings for her. However, after Emma naively advocates abstinence to the glee club with a performance of "Afternoon Delight", a song actually about the joys of sex, Carl requests a private couples counseling session with Holly Holliday, the acting sexual education teacher, as his and Emma's marriage hadn't been consummated after four months. Holly forces Emma to admit she is still attracted to Will, leading to Carl walking out and filing for annulment.

When Finn was young, she had a relationship with a lawn-care worker who left her for a younger woman. He commented that in the pilot episode, Carole was "just the slightly pathetic figure we saw pining after the lawn-care guy", however her reaction to Quinn's pregnancy was "a brilliant bit of characterization through small moments", an example of how Glee was "becoming very good at showing how life happens in small exchanges in people's laundry rooms and finished basements".

She is made fun of by students and the glee club members initially for her weight, but when they discover she is Marley's mom they stand up for her. She makes all of Marley's clothes and is particularly fond of Marley's boyfriend Jake Puckerman and the rest of New Directions. In the episode " Glee, Actually " Sue breaks into her house and stocks it with presents and money.

Millie tries to give it back, but Sue refuses to take it, so she brings Sue to the auditorium where the New Directions perform " Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas " for her. Jean, who has Down syndrome , lives in an assisted living facility, and is the only character Sue consistently treats with care and compassion. Sue reveals that, as a child, people laughed at and were mean to Jean, and Sue prayed for it to stop, but it didn't; this is why Sue believes there is no God.

Jean dies near the end of the second season, in the episode " Funeral ". First season guest stars include Victor Garber and Debra Monk as Will's parents, [] and Gina Hecht plays Puck's mother in the eighth episode, and is seen again in the third-season finale and the fourth season's holiday episode. Gregg Henry and Charlotte Ross play Quinn's parents Russell and Judy Fabray in the tenth episode; Ross makes additional appearances in each of the first three seasons.

Keong Sim appear as recurring characters starting in the season's third episode. The parents of Sam Evans appear in " Hold on to Sixteen ": Rod Remington Bill A. Jones is a television news anchor on the newscast where Sue Sylvester has an opinion segment "Sue's Corner". Rod and Sue had a brief relationship shortly after his wife drowned that began and ended in the episode "Mash-up"; she caught him making out with his co-anchor, Andrea Carmichael Earlene Davis.

Rod and Andrea later marry and announce it during a newscast in the episode " Furt ", humiliating Sue. As a local celebrity, Rod has been tapped to judge show choir competitions—he has appeared as a judge for four of those that New Directions has competed in: April Rhodes Kristin Chenoweth is a former member of the glee club who never finished high school and ended up hitting rock bottom, [] as well as Will's high school crush, who never acknowledged his existence. She briefly rejoins the glee club as an adult, during a period in which Rachel had left the club and it was in need of a female lead.

During her revisit to the school, she gives muscle magazines and alcohol to Kurt, she teaches Mercedes and Tina how to shoplift, and has a brief romance with Puck. April then decides to buy the glee club their auditorium back, now called The April Rhodes Civic Pavilion, and return to Broadway to back an all-white version of The Wiz.

The show flops, and she returns in the season 2 episode "Rumours" to get Will's help with her new one-woman show, CrossRhodes. If it means hearing Chenoweth sing, we can put up with any explanation the show cares to offer. Bryan appears in " Dream On " as a school board member, out to cut district arts programs and the McKinley High glee club in particular as revenge for the latter giving him false hope back when he was its lead singer.

Guest stars have included Josh Groban and Olivia Newton-John , who appeared as themselves both separately and acting as judges at the first-season show choir regionals competition. She quits as co-anchor midway through the fourth season, but is seen again as a co-anchor in the following season. Shane, a psychiatrist treating Emma Pillsbury. Sarah Jessica Parker is introduced in the third episode of the fourth season as Isabelle Wright, who is Kurt's mentor at Vogue.

She appears in several episodes during the season. Adam's Apples, which Kurt looks into joining when he starts classes at the school for the spring semester. Kurt and Adam subsequently begin seeing each other, though the relationship doesn't become serious. Another employee is Dani, played by Demi Lovato , a "struggling artist" who becomes Santana's romantic interest, and who debuted in the season's second episode, " Tina in the Sky with Diamonds ".

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