Community: The Many Facets of Britta Perry
She Still Wants to Be a Dancer
Britta Perry still wants to be a dancer. When she was eight years old, she took dance classes. She looked like a mini ballerina in her frilly pink dress, pink tights and ballet slippers. She twirled and twirled and twirled until she could twirl no more. Having rich parents meant she could take such dance classes, the really expensive ones where the teachers put their students on vegetable-only diets and make them practice until odd hours of the night.
But she still wants to be a dancer. Sometimes she'll go through the many boxes packed away in an obscure corner of her apartment just to find the box she is looking for. The box with the pink ballet slippers she wore when she was eight. The slippers that had made her toes bleed and her heels develop calluses. She tries to remember why she had stopped her lessons. Oh, right. Her parents.
Even at a young age, Britta started dressing as a tomboy. Perhaps it was the influence of her two older brothers. She remembers a time when she looked up to them, when she wanted to be like them. They were so smart, so cool. They climbed trees. Britta wanted to do the same. She wanted to be one of the boys. Her parents just being, well, her parents saw this and instantly took it upon themselves to find the activity that they thought was the most feminine: ballet classes. Britta rejected the idea at first and deliberately stormed out of her first lesson. Yet, after some coaxing from one of her brothers and the pinky swear promise of a triple scoop ice cream cone, Britta went back to ballet classes.
Then, her rich parents come back into the picture. When she had trouble putting on the dress she's supposed to wear for one of her ballet performances, her mother blamed it on her diet. Too much pasta, her mother had said. Not enough fruits and vegetables. What kind of garbage do they feed you in that school cafeteria?
No more ice cream for Britta. She stayed in ballet for awhile longer, but when the comments about her eating habits became overwhelmingly annoying, she stopped ballet altogether. Her parents didn't seem to mind at this point, though they were happy she didn't subvert back to her tomboyish ways of dress. But frilly dresses wasn't exactly her thing either, so whatever.
So, yeah, sometimes she has those moments where she thinks about that. Then she thinks about last year at Greendale when she took a tap dancing class. The time when Troy Barnes had come out and saved her dance performance. Oh, Troy.
As she sits once again with an open box in front of her, the one with the ballet slippers worn from many times of use, she thinks about Troy and that dance performance. She thinks about what it might have been like had he not come in and saved her from utter embarrassment.
She wonders if Troy is taking interpretive modern dance again this semester. Sighing, she puts the ballet slippers back in the box and shoves the box in a dark corner of her apartment.
It does no good to dwell on memories of one's screwed up childhood, so she puts that memory behind her for now. For now, she thinks about Troy. About the dance. About the awkward moment she shared with him in the space bus.
She thinks of those moments instead and smiles.
She Wasn't Always a Feminist
Despite what her friends at Greendale know about Britta, she wasn't always a feminist. Oh, no. Her attraction to feminism had started in high school, yet grew stronger when she dropped out and joined a bunch of anarchists. They didn't expect anything of her or from her, but it was through them that she learned to be her own person. She learned she deserved to be treated with respect. She wasn't a child anymore. She couldn't be manipulated.
Before Greendale and before the people in the study group she now considered her friends teased her lovingly for being a buzzkill, her older brothers teased her. But that was their job, right? They were her older brothers after all. Even though a part of her aspired to be like them, a part of her also felt used by them. She got made fun of in middle school during one year in seventh grade when she had to wear braces. She got bullied by the boys. Thankfully, it was only one year that she wore the braces, but the name calling also became too much for her to handle.
Metal Mouth. Brace Face.
Damn it. Maybe that's why she hated school altogether. Boys were mean and girls stayed in their cliques. Cliques that she didn't belong in. So she began putting up defenses. She wanted to forge her own identity. She wanted to forge her own identity as a teenager and as a young woman on her way to high school and young adulthood. She wanted to be different, but she wanted to fit in just the same.
It was the experiences in middle school that forged her path to feminism, to hanging out with anarchists. She put together a women's rights campaign during her brief stay in New York City with some girls (and gay guys) who looked like they had come from the '60's hippie era in Berkeley, California. She learned the lingo. She learned what she was passionate about. But she wasn't always this way. She had to learn to stand up for herself. She had to build a wall around middle school awkward Brace Face Britta and become newly liberated feminist Britta.
Now, she sits alone in the study room, flipping through her Women's Studies textbook and reflects on those days. But those were days of the past.
As for right now, she has to look into the future.
She Likes to Go Dancing in Gay Bars
When Britta was in New York, she used to go dancing in gay bars. No, it wasn't to be a pole dancer. She just liked to go there and dance. She liked to go there and dance her heart out, let out some steam from whatever the day had been like. She'd met a few cute guys there, but felt comfortable with the fact that they wouldn't look at her like a sexual object.
To them, she was just Britta. Or whatever alias she gave to the creepy supposedly gay guy who kept giving her "The Look" with his eyebrows and repeatedly offered to buy her drinks. When she finally admitted to him that she knew some martial arts and could kick his ass across the Atlantic Ocean, he backed off and dropped all further pursuits of her.
Ugh, so maybe every guy in that bar she went to wasn't gay after all. Lesson learned.
Even the gay guys she met were surprised to learn she liked beer and whiskey over the typical girly drinks. Though she could never say no to a good cherry daiquiri if it was made right. She loved cherry daiquiris.
She always wore her hair back, in a pony tail, when she went to such bars. The pattern was much the same and sometimes it grew monotonous and tiresome after awhile. Get to the bar, have a drink, dance, have another drink or two, dance, have a cute gay guy buy her a drink, dance to the pulsing music until the bar closes.
Only the next day, she would be faced with a massive hangover.
Crap.
She laughs quietly to herself, remembering those times, as she listens to Jeff talk about some girl he met at a bar the night before and Shirley's lecture about how having premarital sex one too many times would definitely not earn him his designated spot in heaven.
She was a different person back then. A different person than she was now. And she welcomed that change and the people that came with it.
Sometimes She Has Nightmares
Sometimes she has nightmares. For reasons she can't explain. Sometimes she can't sleep, but on the nights when she does sleep, she has nightmares. Most of them are hazy and she can't remember them the next morning, but they always send shivers down her spine. Sometimes she'll even wake up in a cold sweat, letting out a cry of anguish to no one in particular. And then she manages to fall asleep.
There's this one night in particular she stays in the study room after everyone else has left. She's clearly not studying, but she just sits there. Then she packs up her books and supplies and goes over to the couch, putting her backpack beside it. She lies down on the couch waiting for sleep to make its inevitable descent upon her. She doesn't want to go back to her apartment right now. Her cat, Mr. Meowskers, would be fine for one night. He had plenty of food and water and a litter box.
As she struggles to make herself comfortable on the couch and she drifts in and out of sleep for a few minutes, she hears the unmistakable voice of Jeff Winger. She cracks an eye open to see him standing in front of her.
"You know, you don't strike me as the kind of girl who'd stay here to pull all-nighters and sleep on the couch when you want some last minute shut eye."
She groans noticeably. "I wasn't pulling an all-nighter. Go away."
"Okay, Sleeping Grumpy. I just came back because I forgot my Anthropology textbook."
She opens her other eye and glares at him sleepily. "So get it and leave."
"I would, but I could've sworn I heard you scream a few minutes ago and actually just wanted to make sure you were okay."
"How civil of you," she retorts back. "I'm fine. Just go buy yourself some more hair product or whatever you do in the late hours of a Thursday night and leave me alone."
"As you wish."
But before he leaves, he notices that's she's shivering slightly. He waits until she's asleep before taking off his leather jacket and carefully draping it over her. She stirs slightly, but doesn't wake. He waits a few more minutes and she's moaning again, so he carefully moves the jacket to cover more of her body and tucks some of her blonde hair behind her ear. Without knowing why he does so, he leans over and presses a soft kiss to her forehead.
"Sleep tight, dragon turtle."
Fin.
Author's Note: I absolutely adore Britta, so I wanted to write a Britta-centric fic. I'm mostly a Jeff/Britta shipper, but I'm also leaning towards the idea of Britta/Troy as a second Britta ship. I kinda multi-ship Annie, so why not Britta? And Britta is my favorite character, so… yeah. Hope everyone enjoys this fic as much as I enjoyed writing it! I'm struggling with one of my classes right now and writing helps me work out some of that frustration. Also, this fic was inspired by a fic I read on the Community LiveJournal called "Five Things No One in the Study Group Knows About Britta Perry," so thank you to that writer for inspiring me! And for those of you who are reading this fic from the Community LiveJournal, I don't have one, but thank you all so much for everything that you do! All of the fanworks and everything you post is beyond amazing. This story is for all of you, especially the Britta fans!
Additional Notes: On a more personal note, I go to school in Berkeley, so that's where the Berkeley reference came from. And also, the cherry daiquiri reference came from a movie Gillian Jacobs did in which she played a stripper named, yup, Cherry Daiquiri.