Transferred

The worst part for Matt is that nobody really misses him when he's gone.

His mom's diner goes under—they all thought she was crazy to locate her start-up in Lima, Ohio, of all places, and it looks like they were right about it all along. She's been paying the bills with their savings for a few months now, but they get behind on the mortgage payments, and all of a sudden, the court rules that she's not a capable caretaker, and he winds up back in his dad's custody for the first time since his parents' divorce.

Matt doesn't like being in his dad's custody.

His dad lives in Akron, a straight shot from Lima across the U.S. Route 30, and in a few short hours, his mom has dropped him off and kissed him goodbye and insisted that he call her if it gets bad. He promises it won't. Matt Rutherford Sr. is an absent workaholic with a bitch of a fiancé, but he's never done anything, you know, bad.

He moves to Akron and enrolls at Carmel High for his junior year. He wonders if he'll audition for Vocal Adrenaline. Right now, he's thinking he won't.

Now that he thinks of it, Matt never really understood how his fellow glee clubbers found the time to drive back and forth between McKinley and Carmel after school to spy. For crying out loud, the drive is nearly three hours long; who has the time for that? He can only imagine: Mercedes and Rachel duking it out over a solo or something, Quinn losing patience at the wheel. Road trip, New Directions style.

Matt never really understood a lot about the other glee kids, honestly, like what really happened between Rachel and Jesse. So Shelby turned out to be Rachel's biological mother, and Jesse was planted at McKinley to lead Rachel to the truth. That didn't justify egging her in the parking lot, did it? If he'd been planning to transfer back to Carmel from the start, how did that make Rachel the heartbreaker in the relationship?

Or how exactly Finn believed he was the father of Quinn's baby for so long without ever having slept with her. Matt knew that Finn wasn't smart, but he never would have believed he was that stupid.

He never got close to the others, though, not like Mike did, and maybe that's why he doesn't understand. Mike—he's the only one who bothers keeping up a friendship with Matt after the move to Akron, calling every couple days to ask how Matt's doing and give him updates on the McKinley front.

Mike's started dating Tina, apparently, and word has it that Rachel sent a potential new club member to a crackhouse and scared her into transferring to Carmel. Two days later, a tiny little Filipino girl named Sunshine introduces herself to Matt as a fellow transfer from McKinley and glee club member.

He auditions for Vocal Adrenaline, at her recommendation. The new director's a nut job, but he tells Matt that he's lacking in technical skill but has a voice ten times more passionate than anyone already in the club, and since Jesse's gone on to UCLA, he ends up becoming the club's new male lead.

What do you know.

His problem at McKinley, Matt imagines, was that everyone there was too and he was just not. Maybe in another school he could have rocked the dumb, sweet, lovable jock angle, but at WMHS, Finn had already claimed that niche in the social ladder. Matt was left as the sidekick without a cause, a little too quiet and with far too few social entanglements to find himself in the thick of that dramatic mess.

However much he doesn't like it here, Akron is a clean break from Lima, and maybe Lima was what had been holding Matt back from figuring out his identity all along.