Don't Get Me Wrong, Dear, In General I'm Doing Quite Fine
Britta spends the summer after her first year at Greendale in New York City.
Title taken from "Summer in the City" by Regina Spektor.
Britta leaves the Transfer Dance shortly after Jeff. She smiles sadly at the crowd, who has forgotten her in the Chang-Duncan fight, and places her sash carefully on the punch table. She sees Shirley coming after her but Britta takes a detour around the school to avoid her. She gets in her car, drives to McDonald's, and eats three cheeseburgers before going home and calling her friend Madge in New York for a place to crash. She packs her bags and her cat and drives across the country.
It's not the first time she's driven alone between New York and Colorado. Last summer she used all the money she had saved up to buy this car with no heat and no air conditioning from a creepy guy in New Jersey whose mustache was actually curled at the ends, like he was fucking Dick Dastardly or something. Last summer she drank too much coffee to stay awake and slept in the backseat but it was different because she was going back home, to make something of herself. Now, she's running away because she doesn't know what else to do, but she does know that an entire summer in Greendale will suffocate her. She needs to be moving, to be doing. She's been sitting still for the last nine months.
Her cat hates road trips and she spends most of Indiana and Ohio stinging with scratches up and down her thighs. "Suck it up," she tells him. "We're doing this again in September."
Along the way, she gets a number of texts and calls from Shirley, one saying that Danielle Harmon won Tranny Queen and that both Professor Slater's and Jeff's cars had been mysteriously keyed. She ignores each one.
It takes her only two days to reach Madge's barely-big-enough apartment in Brooklyn, mostly because she can't afford a hotel and so sleeps only when she thinks she's about to crash the car, but she wishes it had been longer. The world is big, and while she once knew that, at Greendale the world seems to consist only of a few buildings and seven students and one to-be-retired table.
The first few weeks she's in New York, she takes long walks through Washington Square Park. She people watches. She reads books and goes to poetry readings and art galleries and soaks up the culture she's been missing in Colorado. She tells Madge the whole embarrassing story, and Madge brings her to the nicest bar she knows, where they flirt for free drinks and Britta makes out with an investment banker in the women's bathroom.
She gives him Jeff's number when they leave.
She doesn't check her email until the first week of June. She's been ignoring Shirley's calls, and Troy's calls, and Abed's calls, and Pierce's one call. Jeff never calls. Annie doesn't either, but she's probably having a perfect time in Delaware, in her perfect relationship with Britta's ex-boyfriend. (Britta's not jealous. Not really.)
Her inbox is filled with capslock subjects from Shirley, wondering if she's alive, wondering if she's okay. She doesn't open any of them, but the subject of one is "R U COMING BACK IN THE FALL?" and for the first time, Britta wonders what would happen if she didn't. She does some research, goes to visit some CUNY schools, thinks of her life as a New York City college student. She meets with a few admissions counselors and while one of them shows her around, he points out the dean having lunch with some colleagues in the cafeteria. It's all strange and normal and feels wrong and when she gets back to Madge's apartment, she pours over a Greendale course catalog. She doesn't register yet, but folds down the page where Anthropology 101 stares up at her.
She spends the rest of June protesting, protesting the hell out of things. She marches and yells and makes signs and gets arrested once, with a group of people outside of a coffee shop that doesn't use fair trade beans. She feels an adrenaline rush when a cop handcuffs her and for the few hours before she is let go she is nineteen again, being served with a restraining order against Thom Yorke outside of Glasgow.
Michelle who? Winger what?
July is when she loses it.
She dreams that she's in the study room with Jeff during paintball and he's telling her that it meant nothing, that she meant nothing, that he only slept with her for priority registration. Professor Slater comes in the room in her Transfer Dance dress and tells Jeff she loves him and suddenly the whole school is surrounding them, chanting "Team Slater!"
She wakes up and cries because she's so embarrassed about the whole situation and wants to go back in time and never go to Jeff Winger's stupid fake study group. She allows herself tears for thirty minutes then wipes her eyes and officially registers for fall classes at Greendale. She regrets it the moment she does it but the truth is she really misses Shirley and Annie and Troy and Abed and even Pierce and what she needs is one of Shirley's brownies and a group hug and to be mocked by her unfortunate pronunciation of the word bagel.
Madge takes her to a male strip club instead.
It's really gross and it smells bad and there's a thin layer of what Britta thinks is body oil on everything. Madge is into it, yelling over the thumping of the bass that this is a great way to show the patriarchy that women are not the only ones whose bodies can be objectified. Britta nods in the right places but tries to avoid looking at the stage and the screaming women throwing dollar bills at men with really bad spray tans and too many muscles and purple g-strings.
(It's pretty bad, but the whole time she can't help thinking that it's only a matter of time before Greendale puts on some sort of burlesque show. She's surprised Dean Pelton hadn't already thought of it.)
A week later she leaves her early-morning yoga class to find a voicemail on her phone from Jeff. "Look Britta," he slurs, "maybe I shouldn't have walked out on you but goddamn, you can't just stand up in front of an entire fucking community college and tell a guy you love him. And you're not in love with me anyway. You're just not. You can't be. You're my best friend."
She listens to the message twice more and then deletes it. She doesn't tell anyone it ever happened and Jeff doesn't call her again for the rest of the summer.
In August she checks her email again but reads it this time. Shirley hasn't stopped her barrage of messages. One of them (subject: "BRITTA THIS ISN'T FUNNY ANYMORE") says that everything has fallen apart since school ended, like Troy moving in with Pierce and Annie breaking up with Vaughn. Shirley hasn't heard from Jeff but she doesn't think he's back with Slater because she ran into Slater at the grocery store and Slater just glared (and Elijah pushed a shopping cart into her). Abed sends her the latest episode of The Community College Chronicles where Señor Chang tries to join the study group and then the school is overrun by robots. At the bottom of the email is a message saying that while her situation made the school year end on a cliffhanger, he's sorry that it happened and hopes to see her in the fall. Troy sends her a link to his new Twitter account that chronicles everything Pierce says. Britta spends about forty-five minutes retweeting almost every tweet, partly because they're funny but mostly to let everyone else know she's not dead.
There's also an email from Professor Duncan asking if she'd like to continue with therapy in September, to which she replies with a hasty "no, thank you."
On her last day in New York she takes a long walk, memorizing the sights and sounds and smells. She sits on a bench and closes her eyes, imagining the bench is a not-so-comfortable chair in a study room in a library two thousand miles away. She'll be back there in two weeks and it seems unreal to her. A touch of anxiety begins to creep up into her throat as she remembers the entire school crowded around the gym and the look on Jeff's face when she told him she loved him. She closes her eyes again and imagines the study room and the dream she had. It would be easy to deny, to say that she didn't really mean it, to take it back.
Because she's not sure herself if she meant it. The whole night was weird and it was the last day of school, and while that shouldn't have meant anything at a real college, at Greendale it kind of meant a lot. Being at Greendale was often like middle school: there were a lot of dances and everyone knew everything about everyone and the politics of popularity were prevalent and important. Maybe she had been in another one of Abed's movie spoofs.
That night she takes Madge out for dinner to thank her for giving her a place to hide out. They have dinner on a restaurant patio and Britta watches the street over her wine glass.
"You sure you want to go back?" Madge asks.
Britta cocks her head to the side and nods. Her bags are packed and her car fueled.
Madge opens her mouth to speak, seems to think better of it, and closes it again. She repeats this process a few times before saying, "I don't get it. You've done a lot of different things, but this thing, this going back to your hometown and enrolling in community college and liking this douchey lawyer guy thing, it just doesn't seem like you."
"I know," Britta says. "Sometimes I don't get it, either. But it took me ten years to get my GED. And I'm going to get my bachelor's in only four. And it sounds stupid and lame, but I really love those people in my study group. They're my friends and we've been through some weird stuff together so I pretty much have to stick it out."
"Do you love Jeff?" Madge asks.
Britta takes a long sip of wine and then a deep breath of New York air. She thinks of chasing a frog around a lab and the first day of study group and kissing Jeff on the quad in front of Professor Whitman. She thinks of cramming all night for the Spanish final and Shirley's Christmas party and paintball. She thinks of the way it felt when Jeff walked out of the Transfer Dance, like all the air was being sucked out of her body and her bones had turned to vanilla pudding and her knees weren't going to hold her up anymore. She thinks about Starburns and Leonard and all of her classmates booing, like her life had become some sort of sporting event and she wasn't going to make that final shot as the buzzer went off. It was one of the most horrifying, humiliating, heartbreaking things that ever happened to her, but suddenly, she doesn't regret it.
"I think I did. When I said it, I think I meant it. But right now, I'm not so sure. He's my best friend, and yeah, the way I've talked about him makes him seem like the worst person on the planet, but he's really not."
There's a moment of quiet, but Britta breaks it with, "Although I will tell you, I really hate that Slater bitch."
She gets in the car and starts off again, back across the country. She downs Red Bulls to stay awake, gagging at the taste and tossing the cans into a pile in her backseat. The cat mews and whines and cries, but doesn't scratch her, thankfully. She hits the Colorado border around sunset and it seems like she's driving straight into the sun, like she's going to hit it with her car. (There's some sort of metaphor here, but she's never been too good with that kind of thing. She'll ask Abed about it, one day.) She goes the long way around town and drives past Greendale, which is empty but still looks the same. She's glad, had worried it would all be different, and she's taken aback a bit by how much idling her car in front of the dark library feels like home.
She spends the next two weeks carefully planning her ventures outside so that she doesn't run into anyone from study group and later feels guilty about it. She thinks of calling Shirley or Annie, even picks up the phone a couple of times, but thinks better of it and watches a lot of romantic comedies.
On the first day of classes she takes everything very slowly and methodically. She wakes up early but stays in bed for a half-hour, staring at the ceiling. She takes an extra-long shower and then stands in front of the mirror straightening her hair because it takes up more time. She drinks an extra large cup of coffee and has to fight herself really hard not to put a shot or two of Bailey's in it. Despite her trying to kill time, in her anxiousness she gets to school about forty-five minutes before study group is supposed to start (Shirley had emailed her the new schedule, subject: DON'T BE LATE!1!) and people are actually staring at her as she walks across the parking lot. Like, there are girls standing in huddles and whispering behind their hands like it was fucking elementary school or something.
So she might draw more attention to herself by running to the library, but whatever. At least she can hide on the couches in the back of the study room and not be seen. If it's going to be like this all day, she thinks she might be better off transferring and she wonders for a minute if she still has the number of that admissions counselor at CUNY. But then she hears footsteps and voices growing louder and Shirley and Annie screech and Britta squeezes her eyes shut and tells herself over and over that she can do this, that it was nothing, deny deny deny.
Later, after they all leave the health center and she's getting into her car to go home, her phone buzzes and it takes her a moment to realize that she doesn't have to ignore it anymore. She slides into the driver's seat and reads Jeff's words on the screen: "I'm sorry."
She thinks about all the things she could say but settles on "Me, too." She has a small smile on her face the whole way home and for the first time all day, is really glad she didn't transfer.
(Somewhere, she thinks, Abed is using this as the last shot of The Community College Chronicles.)