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Professor Mitchell has got to be the greatest teacher at Barden University, barring the excellent talent that spans the music department. This is, of course, Chloe’s personal opinion, but it’s an opinion that stems from not one, but three separate courses taken with the man—which in itself is saying a lot, because only one of those classes was an actual requirement. The others, Chloe signed up for strictly out of love for Dr. Mitchell’s teaching style.
Because, as mentioned, he is freaking awesome.
She normally does okay in English courses; stories are, in their own way, kind of like songs. They’re designed to make people feel, just like music does, and though she’s not, like, scrambling for the library on any given day, she’s learned over the past four years that reading is far, far cooler than it ever seemed in high school. Something about reading Romeo and Juliet for the eighty-third time always made her head pulse with frustration, but now, in the land of The Big Books—and teachers like Mitchell, who are so obviously in love with their subject of choice that it’s actually kind of nerdily adorable—she gets to venture into territories not previously explored.
The likes of Orwell and Tolkien and Poe weren’t exactly unknown before she stumbled into Professor Mitchell’s class, but she really feels like she gets them now. Gets them, and, against all odds, enjoys them. Comparative Lit is a big barrel of stuff that doesn’t feel like it should go together, but Mitchell has this way of threading the pieces into one cohesive whole that just works for her.
It helps, certainly, that he has this system she’s never come across before in any course.
It’s actually sort of sweet, on top of being educationally beneficial. Each day, before handing out printed slides that will follow his lecture, Mitchell leans his weight against the edge of his desk, scrubs his hands through his not-quite-old-man hair, and begins with a story. The stories are usually pretty short—five minutes, ten at most—and simple, and they always seem to star the same protagonist. Her age is impossible to tell—on some days, she might be four or five, while others suggest her to be a full-grown adult—but she is always bold and brassy, prone to acts of rebellion and adventure that make Chloe’s face split in the broadest of smiles. She feels, after one semester, like she actually knows this girl, whoever she may be.
By the time she’s halfway through her second Mitchell course, she finds herself falling in just enough with “the regulars” (a handful of guys and girls who actively seek his classes out each year, as she will come to do) to discover their assortment of theories about The Legend. Some are dead certain she is a long-lost lover, left behind in Dr. Mitchell’s own college years; others believe she is a figment of his imagination, crafted exquisitely to suit any given situation. Still others believe it is his sister, or his mother, or a long-lost best friend, or all of the above rolled into one feisty, sharp-tempered conglomeration.
Chloe, privately, has no idea what to believe. She knows only that this woman—The Legend, they call her, which is sort of ridiculous and vastly fitting at the same time—is amazing. Whether she exists or not doesn’t seem to matter so much as the fact that Dr. Mitchell very clearly loves her. It’s the kind of love that seems sad around the edges, but not quite bitter, as though he understands that love doesn’t always mean acceptance. She wonders what life event must occur, to teach a man that lesson. She hopes, in some backward corner of her own heart, she never has to learn it herself.
***
"It's his wife," this kid named Jim insists one day in a hushed voice. They're sitting in the middle rows, Jim and Chloe and a handful of others, and though Dr. Mitchell is still hunched over his papers, it feels dangerous to be discussing this right in front of him. Like, if he notices, he might quash his storytelling habit altogether.
Chloe watches the top of his graying head for a minute, but Mitchell doesn't look up. She shakes her head.
"Not a wife. There's no way."
"He's a good looking guy," Clarissa argues, tossing her thin black hair over one shoulder. Chloe grins.
"Totally, but that's not what I meant."
"I get it," Aaron chimes in. He pushes his squared-off glasses up on his nose, looking like a strange little hamster with a powerful affinity for The Sun Also Rises. Chloe finds him charming, particularly when he goes on. "He doesn’t talk about her like she’s still in his life. He doesn’t talk about her like he’s happy.”
“So maybe they’re divorced,” Jim argues. “And he still loves her. And he’s using us to work through his trauma.”
They contemplate this for a minute, staring with a little too much intensity at Mitchell’s bent head. He never glances up once. Chloe wonders if he even knows where he is right now.
She’s pretty sure wife—or ex-wife—isn’t right. She doesn’t know how she knows it; maybe it’s the stories that make The Legend seem young that do it. She knows couples pass tales of childhood along to one another, but the way he tells it makes it feel like you’re actually there. Which makes Chloe feel like he must have been present, in turn. If these things have actually happened at all.
Which, given some of the stories, would be pretty fantastic.
***
Like the one about Target. The Target story is one of those you might find in a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, not in real life. In real life, no one is that bold. Even Chloe, who once gave a twenty-minute concert in the middle of an FYE record store (and was ultimately politely asked to leave and never return), is impressed to the point of incredulity.
In the story—which Dr. Mitchell recounted in her third week of his second class—The Legend has to be about six. Six, and already stubborn as can be, and in desperate wanting of a Jedi lightsaber (not a wife, Chloe remembers thinking even then, because the fond expression on his face is not one of romantic love so much as haggard amusement) with which to fight off super-villains.
The story began lightly enough (Chloe thinks he was tying it back to the Bildungsroman concept, the coming-of-age that would infest so many of their literary pieces during the semester), with The Legend’s desire for this lightsaber. She struck Chloe as painfully adorable, the way Mitchell described her: never with outright physical characteristics so much as a gentle humming spirit that Chloe found herself almost in envy of. So young, clearly, and yet so certain of what she wanted out of life. The girl was going to get herself a lightsaber. She was going to be a hero. End of story.
Except it wasn’t the end of the tale, not remotely. Mitchell went on to explain how the girl had squared her jaw and stomped off toward the toy aisle (“As all good budding heroes will,” he’d said with a hint of a smile, “she went alone. You’ll find that a common thread between young protagonists this year.”), only to find it sorely lacking in all things Star Wars. “She’d never seen the films,” he explained in his rolling, casual sort of voice, “but she knew the logo, and when it was nowhere to be found…”
Chloe can’t imagine any toy store lacking a Star Wars section, which—in her mind—lent to the idea that this whole Legend was, in fact, a myth. Not that she minded, as Dr. Mitchell went on to detail the girl’s frustration and solution to her problem: i.e., grasping the first sword she could find (“a He-Man replica too large for her slim hands”) and charging up to a hapless red-shirt with it.
Chloe sank back in her chair, already giggling helplessly along with the rest of her peers as Mitchell got into the full swing of the story. He braced himself in a charmingly-poor fighting stance and mimed swinging the sword at the worker (who was, in his tale, a pimply, slightly overweight teenager with a mild panic disorder). The Legend had whupped the boy soundly around the ass with the fake weapon, and then taken off through the store, pushing and shoving around customers as she went.
The tale ends with the girl—sword still in hand—on top of the highest shelving unit in the store, and no fewer than six red shirts pleading with her to climb back down again.
Chloe is reasonably certain no such child could ever have existed. That said, if The Legend were real, she would absolutely want to be her friend.
***
“Not a wife,” she repeats a few weeks later. Jim shoots her a glare that wants to be pissy, but mostly just comes off interested in the low cut of her top. She smiles sunnily back.
“Right, not a wife. Maybe a childhood friend?” Aaron scratches his head. “He seems like the type who might just sit and—“
“Watch his friend climb a tree just to throw apples at the heads of teachers when they pass?” The most recent story, Chloe figures, was supposed to tie in with the mischievous nature of Tom Sawyer. It mostly just made her wonder how badly one could be concussed by falling fruit.
“I don’t get friend vibes,” Jim counters, still scowling at her boobs. “What about a sister? Didn’t he say he’s got an older sister?”
She’s pretty sure that’s still wrong, but it at least makes the most sense of any theory that’s been postulated so far. Chloe settles back in her chair and tries to imagine Dr. Mitchell at three feet tall, trailing around after a wild sister the likes of The Legend. The image doesn’t come easily; she finds herself picturing a very small boy in an overlarge tweed jacket. With thinning hair.
She’s always been better with music than pictures, anyway.
“If it’s a sister,” Clarissa says, in a tone that very much suggests she doubts it, “why does he talk about her like he hasn’t seen her in years?”
“Maybe she lives in Alaska,” Aaron suggests brightly. Jim shifts his glare away from Chloe for the first time all day.
“Don’t be stupid.”
They’re all pretty stupid, Chloe thinks with a private grin, for guessing this way at all. There’s no way this girl exists. Why would it matter if she were a hypothetical wife, or friend, or sister? In the long run, she’s just a fabrication.
Albeit one Chloe would kill to meet.
But still: no girl alive has ever broken into a radio station at fifteen and jammed out until the morning show.
If she did exist, this Legendary woman would have one hell of a criminal record.
***
By the time Beca wanders—fitfully, and without much interest—into her life, Chloe is knee-deep in her third Mitchell course. She has long-since come to the conclusion that the legendary woman is fictional, but doesn’t mind; the days when Mitchell talks about her (whether she is smuggling home a turtle found in the woods or setting fire to a microwave with an over-done eggroll) are the greatest. He doesn’t always tell tales of The Legend these days; sometimes, he sticks with more mundane anecdotes, clearly stripped from his own childhood, and those don’t catch Chloe’s attention at all. It’s The Legend she’s come to hear about, because The Legend has become her own personal folk hero.
English, in cases like these, can be pretty awesome.
By the time Beca wanders in, Chloe has utterly given up on the idea of The Legend being a real person, and therefore, it doesn’t occur to her to even ask the girl with the dark eyeshadow and the thick line of tension between her shoulders for her last name. Beca is simply Beca, all carefully-maintained sharp edges and crooked smiles that seem to crop up solely when Aubrey is losing her shit in the corner. Chloe is usually too busy dealing with that to even consider Beca’s family history.
She doesn’t consider Beca much at all, in fact, once she’s recruited her, until the Bellas have been a team for almost a month. Beca is quick, and an excellent singer, and improbably pretty for all her pent-up irritation, but Chloe just doesn’t have time to fixate the way she normally would. Aubrey is half a step from the edge on any given day, and the foundation laid for their senior year is crumbly at best to begin with. Chloe sort of has her hands full.
It just never occurs to her to ask.
And, she thinks later, if that night in October hadn’t gone down the way it did, she probably never would have thought about it at all.
***
The night is startlingly chilly for the way the season’s been going—all blue skies and hot sunshine—and Chloe isn’t surprised to find Beca shivering outside of the rehearsal auditorium. Everyone else seems to have cars, or access to cars, or a bus pass, but here’s feisty little Beca, standing all by her lonesome. In the dark. Shivering.
She’s like a puppy, Chloe thinks with a stab of fondness. A puppy who might bite your hand a few times along the way, maybe, but a puppy just the same.
“Hi there,” she greets, and, before Beca can make a run for it, drapes her own Barden U sweatshirt around the girl’s slim shoulders. Beca jumps, her mouth twisting into an instinctive grimace when she realizes who has found her.
“Hey.”
“Don’t be so anti-social,” Chloe tells her cheerfully, rubbing her hands together and blowing on them. Beca shifts under the weight of the sweatshirt, eyeing her uneasily.
“I’m…not.”
“You’re standing by yourself,” Chloe points out. Beca’s eyes flick in a habitual eyeroll.
“Do you see anyone else around?”
Chloe stabs a finger into her own breastbone, giggling when Beca huffs. “Fine. Hi, Chloe. How are you?”
“I’m fantastic, thanks for asking,” she chirps. “Now. Why are you standing around in the dark? Hasn’t anyone ever told you it’s dangerous for pretty girls to be by themselves at night?”
“You don’t have to be pretty to get mugged,” Beca mumbles, but Chloe is pretty sure she’s blushing under the already-rosy chill set into her cheeks. She reaches out and seizes Beca by the shoulders, rubbing fervently over the cotton of the sweatshirt.
“But you are, and that doubles your chances. Luckily, I was here to save you.”
“Lucky,” Beca drawls, eyebrows knitting. “Totally.”
She doesn’t look properly concerned about her hypothetical muggers, but she isn’t backing away like the hounds of Hell are chasing her, either. The mere fact that Beca isn’t pitching her off with a grumble and a shrug is enough to make her forget all about the stack of homework waiting at home.
“So, how do you like it so far?” Beca raises an eyebrow, plainly not tracking. Chloe blows out an impatient breath. “Barden.”
“It’s a school,” Beca says dryly. “Aren’t they all kind of the same?”
Chloe, who has always been a proponent of the kind of school spirit that prompts football game attendance and eventual alumni donations, is horrorstruck. “No.”
Beca winces away from the shrill pitch and seems to fold in on herself. She looks smaller than ever, standing in the yellow light cast from a half-burned-out streetlamp with Chloe’s green zip-up around her shoulders. Smaller and more alone than Chloe has ever seen her, even at the Activities Fair. She bites her lip.
“You’re really good, you know. The singing. I don’t get why you told us you couldn’t do it.”
Beca casts a long look down the street like she’s expecting someone, anyone, to come riding up to her rescue. “I don’t know,” she says at last, pushing her hands into the pockets of the sweatshirt without seeming to think about it. “I just didn’t want to—“
“Be involved?” Chloe guesses with a smile. Beca looks away.
“I don’t want to be here,” she says, almost sharply. Chloe tilts her head, waiting. “Here,” Beca says again, and makes a sweeping gesture that Chloe supposes is meant to encapsulate the entire campus. “This school. This state. The side of the country.”
“Where’s better than here?” Chloe asks, honestly interested. Beca is talking to her. Maybe not of her own free will, exactly; she’s probably only doing it because she can sense Chloe’s determination to get something out of her. Chloe sort of has set a precedent with not leaving until she gets what she wants, no matter how awkward the situation.
I’m nude, she remembers the indignant whisper, and chuckles a little to herself. Beca sets her jaw.
“L.A.,” she says, spitting the word out like she expects Chloe to fall over laughing at it. “L.A. is better. Or, hell, I’d take home.”
She wouldn’t, though; Chloe can see it in the shine in her eyes, in the clench and jump of the muscles in her jaw. Home is the last place Beca wants to be. It’s Los Angeles or bust.
“What’s in L.A.?” she pushes when Beca falls silent, seemingly realizing she’s offered a lot more of herself than she’s used to. Her head shakes, dark hair slipping in chunks from its usual contorted bun.
“Forget it,” she mutters. Chloe bites back a sigh. So much for getting somewhere. She wonders if she shouldn’t have started this bonding thing earlier, rather than giving up after initiation night in favor of dealing with Aubrey’s daily meltdowns. Maybe, if she’d worked harder, Beca would be opening up by now.
Probably not. Beca probably hasn’t opened a door to another person in years. The fact that she’s speaking at all tonight is a miracle.
Her gaze matches Chloe’s for a moment, dark blue and growing more shadowed by the minute as the sparse stars above them slink back into hiding. Clouds mean rain, Chloe notes distantly. Rain is not preferable when one is standing outside.
“You want a ride home?” she asks, jerking her head in the direction of her little red Beetle. Beca gives the car an appraising, slightly appalled look, and shakes her head slowly.
“It’s cool. My dad—“ She hesitates, and when she says it again, Chloe hears more venom than she’s expecting. “My dad is picking me up.”
She grimaces as she says it, like it’s the last thing on earth she wants to deal with. Chloe gives her shoulders a sympathetic rub. Dads are rough, she knows. Her own has been gone for a lot longer than she ever had him—cancer is like that, sharp and unflinching—but she’s heard enough stories from Aubrey to understand how demanding fathers can be. It’s almost enough, some days, to give her a bit of relief for not having grown up with her own.
Almost. If it weren’t for the photographs littered around the house of the broad-shouldered man with the tousled ginger hair and his arms cradled protectively around a toddler-sized Chloe, she might be able to believe in that.
“Not a fan?” she asks, just to be sure. Just in case Beca feels like talking about it.
“Nope,” Beca replies, short and sweet, and turns her attention back to the street again. A vehicle is approaching—big and black, some kind of SUV, Chloe thinks—and they watch together as it sidles up to the curb. Chloe’s brow furrows. There’s something familiar about that car…
“Bec!” The man who leans out of the window has not-quite-old-man hair and a tweed jacket. He waves like a madman, grinning from ear to ear. “Ready for dinner?”
“God strike me dead,” Beca mutters, almost in Chloe’s ear. Then, for him to hear: “Yeah. Coming. Hang on.”
She shrugs out of Chloe’s sweatshirt and hands it back to her, hastily folded in half. “Thanks. For keeping the muggers away.”
Chloe gets the sense that she wants to say something more—though what could be going on in Beca’s head at any given moment, she has no idea—but instead, she clenches her jaw, gives a terse half-smile, and pivots away. Chloe watches her back for a few steps, calling out to her before she reaches the curb.
“Hey! What’s your last name?”
Beca spins gracefully, walking backwards now. “Mitchell. Why?”
“Just—just curious.” Thank God it’s dark. She must be grinning at least as broadly as Dr. Mitchell in his giant SUV. “See you tomorrow!”
Beca flicks a two-fingered salute of a wave and climbs into the passenger seat. Chloe leans back against the building, arms wrapped around her sweatshirt.
In all that time, with all those regulars, they never once considered this possibility.
Dr. Mitchell has a daughter.
***
He’s never mentioned her outright, she’s sure of it. For all of his personal stories, in fact, Dr. Mitchell hasn’t directly spoken of any family members. She assumed he was married, given the band on his left hand, but otherwise…
A sister, she reminds herself. He mentioned a sister once. Unless Jim made that up, because, come to think of it, she can’t remember that occasion—
It’s all starting to make a bizarre, irrational sort of sense. Beca is so tight-lipped, and, at first glance, Dr. Mitchell is an open book—but, when she thinks about it, has he ever told them something real? Something about a person with a name, a person who wasn’t his childhood self (and, when he’s the head of his own story, he never seems to be older than nine—which is probably a whole different kind of telling), a person who could be traced back to a Facebook page or a yearbook?
He doesn’t tell them where he’s from. He doesn’t discuss his favorite movies, or even what books he likes better than others. He never mentions family at all. The only thing Dr. Mitchell gives to his classes is his ardent love for literature.
And his tales of The Legend.
A legend who, Chloe is dumbfounded to realize, has rumpled dark hair, and wears too many studs in each ear, and has seen her naked on one very memorable occasion.
She can’t believe it.
***
Her first impulse is to catch Beca by the back of her jacket the next day and demand to know if it’s all true. If Dr. Mitchell is indeed her father. If that’s why she’s attending a school she seems to despise. If, most importantly, she has ever smacked a pimply Target employee with a play sword and then scampered up a shelving unit.
If it were anyone else, Chloe would go for it in a heartbeat.
But this is Beca—Beca Mitchell, damn those wiley aca-gods!—and Beca isn’t going to give up a detail that personal without a fight. Hell, Beca didn’t even want to say hello to her last night. In what universe is she going to share intimate stories of her childhood?
She can’t step right up and ask her, not if she expects Beca to ever open up. She has to play this smart.
“So, your dad’s Dr. Mitchell, huh?”
Okay, maybe smart isn’t on par with sneakily cunning, in this case, but whatever. She has to start somewhere.
Beca, an apple halfway to her mouth, stares at her with slightly-frightened eyes. Which Chloe would feel bad about, except lunchtime hangouts are rarely private, and it isn’t like Beca has carved Beca Mitchell’s: Keep Out! into the rough bark of the tree she’s lazing around under. This is campus property, and what’s campus property is Chloe’s.
Which makes it perfectly okay to drop down and lay her head on Beca’s bent knee.
“How did I not know this about you?” she marvels, pushing a lock of hair off her forehead. Beca sinks her teeth into the apple, rolling her eyes as magnificently as ever.
“D’unno,” she mutters around the fruit. Chloe is reminded irresistibly of the apple-concussion story. She beams.
“Dr. Mitchell is like the gem of the English department. Which isn’t as aca-excellent as the music department, of course—“
“Of course,” Beca mimics, every syllable laced with thick sarcasm. Chloe pushes at her knee with the palm of her hand, surprised when Beca doesn’t squirm out of reach.
“—but,” she goes on, nestling her head up Beca’s leg until she can feel the flex of Beca’s thigh beneath her cheek, “he’s pretty cool. I’ve taken his class. Three of his classes, actually.”
“Wow,” Beca says, still too sarcastic. “That’s awesome.”
Chloe peers up at her, calculating the meaning behind her furrowed brow and the way her teeth keep gnawing at the inside of her cheek. “You don’t like him much, huh?”
“He’s my dad,” Beca tells her shortly, tossing the half-eaten apple away and leaning back on her hands. Chloe shrugs as best she can while lying down.
“So? Means you have to love him. Doesn’t mean you have to get along. Look at Aubrey.”
The expression on Beca’s face suggests she’d rather not look at Aubrey for any reason ever. “He’s just my dad. Just some guy I share genes with. Whatever.”
There’s a lot more there, Chloe thinks, than just whatever. A hell of a lot more than genes. Beca is hiding something, and not very well. She could push. She could get it out of her, probably right here, beneath this sprawling oak, if she wanted to.
She settles for snuggling closer, laying her hand on Beca’s other knee and sighing, “Well. That’s parents for you.”
Beca grunts, but makes no move to push her off.
***
It becomes a ritual with no real definition. They never run into each other—or, more explicitly, Chloe never runs into Beca—in the same place twice. Not by accident. But all the same, it happens a couple of times a week. At the campus coffee shop. At the library. Before Beca’s Thursday afternoon physics class.
When Chloe greets her with a grin and a hand around her elbow at the gym—in a sports bra and sweats, completely oblivious to Beca’s complaint of, “I was just cutting through, Jesus, do I look treadmill-ready?”—they come to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, this is the kind of friendship that’s going to happen whether Beca wants it to or not.
(It’s really more of Chloe’s decision, as she hauls Beca into her favorite work-out room and shoves her down on an unused bike to watch her daily three-mile run. But, she notes with delight, Beca doesn’t exactly go booking for the door. Even if her nod is a little hastier and less amused than usual.)
She keeps nudging at the Dr. Mitchell situation, tossing out little comments every couple of days just to gauge Beca’s mood on the subject. More often than not, she receives a well-crafted topic shift for her troubles. Every once in a while, Beca simply surveys her with a suspicious glance and says nothing at all.
Not once does she admit something so helpful as, “Of course those stories are true. My father is an honest man, through and through. ‘Honest Abe’ Mitchell, that’s my pop!”
(Naturally, if she did say something along those lines, Chloe would immediately assume she was lying. And also probably deeply inebriated.)
Being friends with Beca, it turns out, is a lot of work—maybe more work than keeping Aubrey’s footing rooted in the sane column, even—but Chloe finds pretty quickly that she doesn’t mind. For all of her loner habits, every instance of throwing a hood over her head and a pair of headphones clamped down on her ears, Beca seems to have at least three powerfully adorable qualities. Qualities, Chloe is heartened to realize, no one else is getting the chance to see.
Not that Beca is showing them off on purpose. If she had the first clue how Chloe is feeling—that she is not only a shivering puppy, but a wildly charming one, at that—she’d probably throw her out of this budding relationship on her ass. But, thankfully, Beca is about as oblivious as she is stoic, and Chloe is left to appreciate the little things all on her own.
Like how Beca is the jitteriest person on the planet before a Bellas rehearsal. She’ll go out of her way to insist she doesn’t care, doesn’t want to be here at all, but Chloe can see the anticipation in the drumming of her sneaker against the concrete floor as she waits for Aubrey to pull herself together. It looks an awful lot, in fact, like Dr. Mitchell’s habit of tap-tap-tapping his long fingers against the desktop as he waits for the clock to strike two p.m. each day.
The hasty scrub of her hands through her messy hair, too, is reminiscent of her father before one of his famous stories. So is the mindless way she steeples her hands together in her lap, bending her fingers until the points touch together with her thumbs, and spreading them again. Beca, it turns out, has adopted a lot of her father’s physical quirks.
Chloe doesn’t see a point in mentioning this. The last thing she wants is for Beca to go growling back into her cage, slamming the door behind her.
Still, it’s impossible to block out the constant stream of adorable that is Beca Mitchell when no one is watching. For someone who once claimed an utter lack of singing talent, she hums all the time—Top 40 hits, more often than not, which delights Chloe to no end. She hums, and she spends much of her time walking around campus with her head tipped back to watch the sky rumble on overhead, and when she catches someone (Chloe) staring, her cheeks pinken instantly.
Beca Mitchell, Chloe is realizing, is much less a rebel without a cause and much more a John Lennon dreamer. Imagine all the people—and wonder, without missing a beat, how Beca sees them all.
Chloe would ask—has tacked it onto her ever-growing list of Questions About Beca—but finds she much prefers learning about Beca by observation. It’s the best she’s going to get, anyway, and no one ever realizes how much they give away without speaking.
Beca Mitchell is at least as fascinating as her Legendary alter-ego. She just doesn’t know it.
***
Chloe wonders if Beca is even aware of how often her father speaks of her in his classes. She hasn’t signed up for Comparative Lit, or any other English course that Chloe is aware of, and she goes so far out of her way to avoid discussing any relation to the man in the tweed jacket that Chloe doubts it. Everyone who has ever taken a Mitchell class knows Beca’s childhood (or some thickly-tweaked version of the same) like the back of their hand, but Beca herself likely has no clue of it whatsoever.
Beca, Chloe figures, probably prefers it that way. She doesn’t seem at all the type to fancy herself a living legend. If she had any idea at all how Chloe thinks of her—or thought of her, before she knew Beca even existed in reality—she’d probably suffer some kind of quasi-nervous breakdown. Self-described loners aren’t too partial to being famous for a child’s sense of adventure.
Still, as time goes on and Beca continues to allow her meager access to her personal life (things like what she tends to order from McDonalds—nuggets, with BBQ sauce, no fries—or what song is stuck in her head this week—“Something To Talk About,” Bonnie Raitt), Chloe begins to think maybe she should bring it up. It feels strange, to know so much about the things Beca may or may not have done as a kid without Beca realizing it. It feels, stupid as it is, almost wrong.
These are stories, Chloe thinks one day as she leans against Beca’s side and tries to focus on a Geology textbook, that should be given freely by the person in question. To have them snatched out of Beca’s past by someone else, even someone as close (or not) as her father, feels ferociously intrusive.
“He talks about you,” Chloe blurts, and gives up entirely on the difference between rock types. Beca peers down at her, half-lost in the music pumping between her ears.
“Sorry?” She lifts one half of the headphones and settles it behind her ear, tilting her head toward Chloe. Her arm, comfortably slung around Chloe’s shoulders, goes rigid, as if she’s only just realized how closely they’ve been sitting. Chloe leans back against her and reaches around to play with her fingers.
“Your dad. He talks about you in class.”
Beca’s forehead does that unhappy wrinkle thing it always seems to do when Dr. Mitchell comes up. “Yeah?”
“Mmhmm.” Chloe is threading her fingers through Beca’s limp ones, batting them until they cooperate. “He tells stories.”
Beca’s forehead is creasing so utterly, Chloe’s a little afraid it’s going to freeze that way. She reaches up with her free hand and thumbs across the lines indenting Beca’s smooth skin.
“Stop that. They’re cute stories.”
Beca hums, clearly not believing her in the least. “Terrific.”
Chloe hesitates, her heart fluttering pleasantly when Beca finally allows their hands to link together properly. Moments like this, moments when Beca not only accepts the physical contact, but actually leans into it, fill her with a muted sense of triumph. Maybe she doesn’t understand a thing about her new friend, and maybe she has no idea what about her is real and what is the imaginative conception of her father, but dammit, Beca is learning to like her. That in itself is worth the world.
“He loves you,” she says, knowing as she does that it isn’t her place to make the observation. Beca makes a noise of dissatisfaction and lets her hand drop away.
“Whatever you say,” she says mildly, pulling her arm free and standing up. “I gotta get to class. Think there’s a quiz or something I didn’t study for.”
Chloe gazes up at her, feeling almost wounded. Beca watches her for a second, then shrugs and stretches out a hand to pull her to her feet.
It’s nice, but Chloe would prefer a conversational end that didn’t feel quite so much like Beca is running away.
***
“You never talk about him.”
They’re stretched out on her bed. Beca is avoiding Kimmy Jin with a violently impressive tenacity (something about having accidentally broken a branch off her bonsai tree, which is probably punishable by death in Kimmy Jin land), and Aubrey has gone reluctantly home to Seattle for her father’s birthday. It makes Chloe’s place the safest place to hang out, especially considering the storm sloshing against the windows.
The rain has the added bonus of keeping Beca firmly indoors. She’s a little like a cat this way, Chloe thinks with a flicker of amusement; unexpected water displeases her just enough to keep her in conversations she’d usually rather avoid.
“What’s to talk about?” Beca arches her back until it cracks, fingers hooked behind her head. Her eyes dip from one glow-in-the-dark star to the next, tracing the constellations set into Chloe’s ceiling. “He’s here. He’s a teacher. Sometimes he drags me to ‘family dinners’.” Her tone suggests air quotes belong around that last phrase, like ‘family dinners’ is synonymous for ‘Hell with a bonus soup-or-salad option.’ Chloe sighs.
“He seems really nice, Beca.”
“To you,” Beca replies, a touch more fiercely than she usually allows herself to stray on the subject of her father. Chloe shifts her head against the pillows, studying Beca’s profile carefully.
She gets this very specific look when Dr. Mitchell comes up—when Chloe brings him up by force, rather—like she’s trying her hardest to appear nonchalant and failing miserably. Her mouth goes tight around the edges, her eyes darkening well beyond their usual deep blue, and even her ears seem to go rigid. Chloe reaches out by force of instinct and grasps one soft lobe between finger and thumb, massaging around the metal stud.
Beca’s eyes slide to hers, almost amused. “I don’t get why you want to keep talking about this,” she says, pointedly disregarding the intimacy of Chloe’s fingertips against her skin. “He’s not anybody special to me. I get that he’s your favorite teacher or whatever, but…” She trails off, closing her eyes as Chloe’s hand wanders down the line of her jaw.
If she starts purring, Chloe thinks with a bare smile, I’m never letting her live it down.
“He’s not my favorite teacher,” she says out loud, which is kind of a lie, but Beca doesn’t call her on it. “I just don’t get how you can’t love your dad.”
“I do love him,” Beca tells her, moderately aggrieved. “Of course I love him.”
“Right, I know. I just…I don’t have one. A dad. I can’t imagine having one and not wanting to spend every minute getting to know him.” It’s the first time she’s said something like that out loud in years, and the first time she’s admitted it to anyone at Barden. Even Aubrey doesn’t know much about her dad and his getting sick; fathers are too sore a topic for it to be broached.
Beca, however, sits up and lets her gaze rove across Chloe’s face. “When did he die?” she asks, and though Chloe can’t remember ever telling that detail, it feels natural. Natural, and like that same old strike to the pit of her stomach. His death just never gets comfortable, no matter how long she deals with it.
“A long time ago,” she says when the lump in her throat dissipates enough for words. “I was little. Not even in school yet. So I don’t remember him much at all.”
The sentences taste of copper of her tongue, short, staccato bursts of emotion that make Beca’s eyebrows pull together. It’s strange to talk about this to someone who isn’t her mom; stranger still that Beca isn’t pushing, pasting on an overly concerned face, asking questions about how’d it happen and how do you feel about it and whatever else her old high school friends would have said. Beca is just sitting there with her hand resting on the bedspread between them, saying nothing.
“I miss him,” Chloe says at last, surprised by the hollow timbre of her own voice. “I know that’s kind of stupid, to miss somebody you never really knew, but I do. Sometimes I wonder if he’s who I got the music from.”
“Your mom doesn’t sing?” Beca asks. Chloe smiles.
“My mom, God bless her, is about as pitch-sensitive as an Etch-a-Sketch. She loves music, but…”
Beca’s smile is sweeter than Chloe is used to. It lights up her whole face, making the sharp angles of her features look somehow softer, more open. She’s beautiful this way, Chloe realizes. Beautiful, and not at all like the girl who stood shivering in the October chill those weeks ago.
Astonishing as it seems, though she still won’t talk about herself the way a normal person might, Beca Mitchell is opening up. And it’s all Chloe’s fault.
It’s one of her greatest achievements to date.
“I’m sorry,” Beca says quietly, interrupting her private victory dance. Her head is tilted low, her lips twisting. “It’s pretty insensitive, the way I talk about my dad, huh?”
Chloe reaches out without thinking, her palm cradling Beca’s cheek. The skin flames beneath her touch. “No,” she replies, thumbing across Beca’s cheekbone. “I’m used to it. It’s okay.” Because of Aubrey, she doesn’t say. Because this is how Aubrey has always been about her dad. Because I’m used to people not loving what they’ve got.
Beca flinches a little, like she can hear what Chloe is thinking and feels immeasurably guilty about it. Her face leans away from the hand cupping it, her teeth finding her lower lip on impulse. “I’m still sorry.” She pauses, collecting herself. Chloe lets her hand drop away, gripping the comforter instead. “It’s…complicated. My dad and me. I do love him, I swear, but…”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Chloe begins, but Beca is already shaking her off.
“They split up,” she says, all in a rush so it sounds like a single pained word. “My folks divorced when I was fifteen. He had somebody else. The stepmonster.” She pulls a nasty face, and Chloe notes with some amusement that she probably shouldn’t find it so desperately endearing.
“That sucks.”
Beca nods slowly, rolling onto her back and doing the finger steepling trick against her stomach. “He left,” she mumbles dully. “He left, and he never looked back until it was time for me to go to college. And then he decided to get all invested in how I live my life. He wasn’t there when my first boyfriend dumped me for an older girl, and he wasn’t there when I got my first tattoo, and he wasn’t there when Mom was losing her mind trying to find a decent job to live on, but as soon as he realized I wasn’t planning on going away to college…”
Her voice trails off. When Chloe reaches over and closes a hand over hers, she doesn’t pull away.
“He wasn’t there,” she repeats softly. “So you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t find the beloved Dr. Mitchell as impressive as everybody else. I won’t be taking his class, no matter how many stories he has under his belt.”
It’s amazing, Chloe realizes, squeezing Beca’s hand and swallowing against the weight of her newly-bared pain, how quickly a hero can lose his shine in the face of accusations like those.
***
“I have to ask,” she says one day, a week after Beca’s admission. They haven’t spoken of it since (Beca, she is certain, is working strenuously to forget the conversation ever happened), but there’s this one last loose end Chloe can’t resist tying up. Even if Dr. Mitchell isn’t all she’d hoped he would be, even if the ache of Beca’s hurt glimmers too brightly when his name is mentioned—she has to know.
Just this one last thing, she promises herself. And then she’ll never speak of Professor Mitchell and his stories again.
“I have to know,” she begins again. Beca peeks up from her laptop, fingers still clacking rhythmically away at the dimly-lit keys.
“You are quite the seeker of knowledge.”
“The stories,” Chloe goes on, ignoring the playful jab. “His stories. How many of them are…”
“True?” Beca arches an eyebrow. She doesn’t want to talk about this; it’s written all over her face, the way her teeth clamp together and her teasing expression shuts down. She doesn’t want to have this conversation.
But for Chloe, who lost her father to cancer before she learned to ride a bike, this is necessary.
“Just tell me,” she pleads, jostling Beca’s arm. Her fingers spasm, spilling an array of mismatched letters across her sociology essay. She grimaces.
“Which ones?”
“Target,” Chloe responds immediately. Beca’s face splits in a slow, lopsided grin.
“True.”
“Seriously?” Chloe breathes. “You were, like, my hero in that one.”
“I was five,” Beca says solemnly, “and very, very certain of my career choices.”
Chloe slaps at her arm. “You’re ridiculous. Okay. Apple tree?”
Her brow furrows in thought. She pushes her fingers through her hair. “The time I fell out and broke my wrist, or the time I coaxed the neighbor’s dog halfway up and cried when he wouldn’t come back down?”
“You—how did you get a dog into a tree?”
“Magic,” Beca replies, wiggling her fingers and laughing. Chloe shakes her head.
“Neither. Although you really have to explain that last one. I meant the time you chucked apples at teachers—“
“Oh!” Beca presses a hand to her forehead, smiling ruefully. “I accidentally sent Mrs. Millen to the hospital that day.”
Chloe puts on her most dramatic gasp. Beca shrugs.
“She was a wuss. And, like, 90. Apparently, she had a very soft skull.”
“And they called your dad?” Chloe guesses. Beca’s smile fades.
“They called my dad,” she agrees. “He shouted himself hoarse for twenty minutes, and then laughed until he cried. He was…” She shrugs. “A very divided parent when it came to discipline.”
Chloe gets that, just from watching his face when he recounts the stories of his daughter’s many small rebellions. His expression always wavers somewhere between haggard amusement and a strange, distant sort of unease. Like, if he talks about her enough, he believes she somehow can hear him. And maybe, if she can hear, she will find herself listening. Someday.
Chloe’s not sure that’s ever going to play out in his favor. But Beca is talking about him now, in small doses, and maybe that’s a start. It’s better than running away.
It isn’t really what matters right now.
“You’re a legend,” she informs Beca, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and knocking their heads gently together. Beca winces.
“Ow. I’m not. I was just a messed up kid.”
“You are,” Chloe insists. “That’s what we used to call you, before I knew who you were. The Legend.”
If Beca’s face goes any redder, Chloe is going to have to call a medical professional to check her for brain damage.
“You haven’t—did you—“ She sucks in a breath, steadying herself even as Chloe noses against her neck. “You haven’t told anyone, have you? Who I am?”
“Of course not!” Chloe laughs. Beca’s shoulders sag, visibly relieved.
“Thank god. I don’t care that he tells the stories, but if the lit geeks start seeking me out as some kind of weird idol…”
“They won’t,” Chloe swears. “I won’t tell a soul. Honestly, I kind of like it. Being the only one who knows.”
Beca is biting her lip again, glancing furtively up at Chloe and away again. Chloe beams.
“I like having a secret with you. Because, I don’t know if you know this—you’re kind of great.”
“I’m not,” Beca protests again. Chloe reaches up, palms the side of her head furthest from her own face, and holds her still.
“You are,” she repeats, and smacks a loud, wet kiss against Beca’s cheek. She cries out in mock-horror, wriggling to get away from the death-grip Chloe has on her face.
“You’re evil.”
“And you,” Chloe pronounces, her lips pressed to Beca’s over-warm cheek, “are even better than he said. In every possible way.”
She releases, pleased when Beca wrinkles her nose, but doesn’t reach up to wipe the remnants of her kiss away. It’s the truth; Beca is absolutely astounding. Quiet, and sarcastic, and none too polished—she is definitely the sort of woman who, at fifteen, might have broken into a radio station in the dead of night—she is the most complicated person Chloe has ever had the pleasure of cracking open. And regardless of her father being the greatest storyteller on Barden’s treasured staff, Chloe has to admit what Beca will never realize on her own.
It isn’t the stories that make the legend so wonderful. It’s the fact that those stories can be contained in someone so very real.
Beca Mitchell, Chloe is beginning to think, is the best story anyone could ever come up with.