TO: [ Abed Nadir x]

CC:

BCC:

SUBJECT: Going dark

Thu, 20 August 2015 at 9:35am

Abed — As you may already know, Annie isn't returning to Greendale; after a short visit this weekend she'll be returning to Washington DC to work full-time at the FBI. If she hasn't already told you about this, please do me the favor of responding as though you were hearing it for the first time when she does; it's her news to tell you, not mine.

On a closely related note, I am leaving Greendale forever, removing myself from social media, changing my phone number, and closing this email account. I've realized that there's nothing tying me to Greendale any longer, and I need to move on. I won't be reachable for some time after I go. Not sure how long. When I think it's safe, I'll contact you.

Goodbye until then,

Jeff

TO: [Jeffrey Winger x]

CC:

BCC: [Annie Edison x]

SUBJECT: Re: Going dark

Thu, 20 August 2015 at 11:18am

I understand. Good luck.

Abed

PS Troy says hi

"There must be something you aren't telling me," Abed said into the phone. He stood in the living room of the small LA apartment he shared with Troy, in front of a cabinet full of DVDs of movies that were mostly older than he was.

"No! There's not… we just talked."

Abed scowled. "You just talked, you say. That doesn't make any sense."

"Well, I'm sorry if it seems anticlimactic to you, but yes. We just talked."

"One of two things should have happened. Either you should have run into one another's arms and kissed and spouted trite nonsense about love, or else you should have gotten into a screaming fight that only ended when police intervened."

"I'm sorry to disappoint you, Abed, but it wasn't like that at all. I told him I wasn't ready to make any kind of commitment, that I was settled in my new life, but that he would always have a special place in my heart. And he said he understood, and that I was the best baker he'd ever had —"

"Hold on, Shirley, I'm getting another call." Abed checked the number: an unfamiliar one, with an area code he didn't recognize. Odds were good it was a wrong number or some kind of telemarketer and/or scam, but the story of Shirley's reunion with her former employer had turned out to be a big letdown. He put Shirley on hold. "Hello?"

"Hello, Abed?"

Abed gasped.

"Abed?" Jeff repeated.

"I was responding appropriately to your dramatic reappearance," Abed said. "Did you get my email? Did you know Troy said hi?"

"What? I don't —" Jeff's voice cracked.

"Jeff, you sound emotionally drained. Are you emotionally drained?"

"Yeah… yeah. I — I didn't know who else to call about this."

Abed really wanted to rattle off his guesses as to what might have put Jeff through such a wringer, and also been something that his first impulse was to call Abed, rather than someone more emotionally open like Shirley, Britta, Troy, or, of course, Annie. His first guess involved something bad happening to Jeff's mother and his second guess was that Annie had changed her relationship status on Facebook, or something along those lines.

However he was too well-socialized to just blurt these things out; they ran the risk of harming his friend. So instead he just said "It'll probably be okay, Jeff."

"Yeah?"

"Most things are eventually okay."

"This might not be. I think I made a mistake leaving the way I did."

"Yeah, many people thought so," Abed agreed. "I thought you were spinning off. Making a big change. I spun off."

Jeff laughed mirthlessly.

"I have Shirley on hold," Abed said. "I'm going to put you on hold, so I can tell her that you called and you're going through something dramatic."

"Don't —" Jeff began, but he was cut off as Abed put him on hold.

"Sorry to make you wait," Abed told Shirley. "Jeff called. He seems upset."

"Jeff? Jeffrey called?" Shirley sounded extremely intrigued.

"Yes…"

"What's his new number?"

Abed hesitated. Jeff had trusted him enough to call him. "I'm not sure I should give it to you."

"Give me his number, Abed." Shirley's voice was low and menacing. Though she was on the other side of the continent, Abed shivered.

"Jeff was really clear. He wants to cut ties so he doesn't —"

"Abed if you don't give me that man's number I'll reach right through this phone and beat your ass!" Shirley declared.

"You can't —"

"I'm going to count to three. One…"

Abed let out a high-pitched whine.

"Two…"

Abed gave her the number.

"Was that so hard?" Shirley asked, the dark timbre of her voice replaced by a lyric coloratura.

"Don't tell Jeff I gave you his number," Abed implored her, but she'd already hung up. He tried to switch to Jeff, but Jeff too had disconnected.

Rattled, he had to watch both Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II to calm down.

"Hello?"

Jeff's mouth was dry. On the one hand, he'd done so much to get away from her, that seeing all his efforts thwarted — seeing Annie, in Boston, having tracked him down — should have stung him.

On the other hand, she'd come for him. She'd chased after him. Until he saw her, he hadn't realized how badly he'd wanted her to find him. He was so, so happy to see her. Also nervous. Suddenly running away from her seemed like such a foolish plan, in retrospect — of course she would find him; she had always been good at that.

"Hello," Annie said. It was hard to tell over the phone but she sounded pleased to see him.

"So this is Boston." Jeff wasn't sure how to proceed — apologize to her? Thank her? Get up and run away, then move again, to Phoenix or Portland or Miami?

"I'm aware." Maybe he'd been mistaken. Maybe she wasn't pleased to see him.

"Listen," he said, because that usually preceded important statements and he was stalling for time. "I appreciate your tracking me —"

"I didn't track you down," she interrupted. "This is a big dumb coincidence, us meeting like this in this stupid cold park." Yeah, his initial impression seemed more and more like wishful thinking. She sounded like she was about to burst into tears, or maybe like she was about to throw something at him.

He chuckled nervously. There had been a time when he was unflappable, when he could have had a conversation like this without a change in his heart rate, when he could have just smiled and shrugged and walked away from Annie Edison, if it came to that. But that time was long gone, years gone. "Well, you found me."

"I wasn't looking for you," she said. "If you had been… you would have found out. My job isn't in Washington. It's here. Downtown. Like five blocks that way." She pointed towards his office, in the city center.

Jeff took a ragged breath and tried to think of something to say.

"I saw you yesterday," Annie continued. "In a coffee shop over there, the one with the big kettle on the sign. I thought you had come to me, actually. But then you were gone, and Britta said —"

"You talked to Britta?" Jeff winced, imagining her opinions and advice to Annie.

"Yes, Jeff, I spoke to her," Annie said coldly. "And I texted. Like people do."

"What? I mean, uh…" Jeff cleared his throat. "I didn't know you were here either."

"Yeah, she said that. And Frankie —"

"Frankie, too?"

"Yes, and…" Annie's voice caught. "What the hell, Jeff?"

Jeff's shoulders sagged. "I was… I thought it would be better to just rip the band-aid off and end it clean, but that was wishful thinking."

"More like magical thinking! I got your stupid letter, you know…" Across the pond Annie produced something that was probably a sheet of paper from somewhere that was probably a jacket pocket — darkness and distance made it hard to be definitive. " 'I know you need to move on,' " she read. " 'Maybe someday we can meet again when we've both changed enough it wouldn't be awkward.' " She stared at him, over the water. "This awkward enough for you?"

"You carry that around with you?"

"That's not my point!" Annie tucked the paper away someplace. "My point is that you should have talked to me before — what is this? I don't even know what to — you're impossible!" Her raised voice carried over the pond, reaching him a fraction of a second out of sync with the reproduction over his phone.

"I just wanted to let you go." Jeff winced at the bitter laugh that echoed over the water. "I thought — I think about you every day, and you deserve more than you can get from me."

"You think about me every day," repeated Annie. "Sure Jeff, whatever. I suppose you have that clipping hung up in your office and you can't help seeing it…"

"Next to my bed, actually," Jeff said, "with the picture of you from when I graduated. Back when we were…" He trailed off, realizing that there weren't any good ways to end that sentence. Sort-of-not-really-make-believe-I-only-realized-it-after-it-was-over dating? "Whatever."

"What's that supposed to mean? You missed me? You could have called me any time!"

"I couldn't, though. You would have…" He struggled for a way to explain it. "Well, this would have happened."

Annie scoffed. "You are just mister mixed messages, you know that? Ugh!" He saw her jerk the phone away from her ear as she put her head down for a moment. Then she sat back up. "You act like this, and you almost married Britta!"

"What?" Jeff searched his brain. "Shirley's wedding? That was years ago, and I was drunk, because —"

"No, not Shirley's wedding," she snapped. "The day Subway almost shut the school down. Remember? There was a magic door, and the school board, and 'Borchert Borchert loved computers?' We thought Greendale was ending — and you decided to console yourself in Britta's arms!"

"Oh." Jeff had forgotten about that part of it, in all the confusion and excitement. The last day he'd been able to deny his feelings to himself, and maybe not coincidentally, the last day before she'd frozen him out. "Is that why you hardly spoke to me all last year?"

"What are you talking about?" Annie sounded like she thought it was a non sequitur. "Hardly spoke to you? We were — are — friends! You, me, Abed, Britta —"

Jeff felt a lump growing in his throat as his frustration mounted. Of course they'd been friends, but once the two of them — Jeff and Annie — had been something else. He'd been closer to her than Abed or Britta, not further away, and then she'd reversed it. He struggled to find a way to explain. "The three of you lived together and…"

"And what?" Annie didn't seem interested in giving him a chance to explain. "That makes it okay that my best friend just suddenly vanishes right when I'm moving to a new city and I really needed you?"

Jeff barely heard her. A year's worth of missed opportunities galloped past his mind's eye. He could have said something that night at the speakeasy, or after Chang's Karate Kid, or the night they'd separately snuck out of Britta and Abed's party. They should have left that party together — they should have done so many things together! "God, we didn't even dance at Garrett's wedding!"

"What? What does that have to do with anything?"

He was quiet for a moment. That was dumb, he thought. Back up, come at it from a different angle. "It's getting cold and dark. You want to continue this conversation indoors? There's, uh, there's a bunch of good places over on Columbus."

Annie was silent.

"I make real grown-up lawyer money again. I'll buy you a steak and a lobster and a cheesecake for dessert," he offered. "And wine."

"I don't believe you," she finally said. "I just — I can't."

"What's the —" Jeff began, but his phone clicked. She'd hung up.

Across the pond he could see that she'd stood and was frantically doing something with her phone. She started walking away from the water at an angle, and he raced around the pond to catch her.

Jeff reached Annie just as she opened the door to a car that had pulled up for her — she'd called an inconveniently close Uber. "Annie!" he cried.

She turned to face him with eyes like knives. "Now — now — you want to date me? Go home, Jeff!" Annie snarled, and climbed into the car. She dramatically slammed the door, so dramatically in fact that she had to open and reclose it for it to latch properly.

As the car pulled away, Jeff growled breathlessly and texted her.

JEFF to ANNIE, 1822:

This is so like you

He regretted it almost instantly. After all, she wasn't wrong: he did want to date her. The message had been received, and her response was just as clear.

JEFF to ANNIE, 1823:

I've missed you so much. Please.

Jeff was pretty sure he knew who was calling but he answered anyway. "Hello?"

"Jeffrey Tobias Winger, what the hell is the matter with you?"

"Hi, Shirley."

"First you run off without telling anybody where you're going! And you don't even tell me to my face, I have to hear about it from Annie!"

"I know."

Shirley fumed. "And then apparently you're talking to Abed, and Britta, and I don't even merit a text message?!"

"I know."

"And you break poor Annie's heart, running off!"

"Believe me," Jeff said with a sigh, "I know."

"Who raised you? Raccoons?"

"Shirley…"

"Or those colorful fish you see in pet stores in the little tiny fishbowls, who can't share space with other fish because they'll murder them? Betta fish? Were you raised by Betta fish, Jeffrey?!"

"I just talked to Annie," Jeff said quietly.

"Hold on, I'm not done being furious with you for vanishing and not telling me!"

"I didn't tell my mother, either," he offered. "Annie did, though, it turns out. Mom gave me a real earful on her behalf last week, I can tell you."

"You don't deserve that girl, Jeffrey."

"I know. I mean, I know I know." He sighed. "And I don't have her, and I never did, so, here we are."

Shirley was silent a moment.

"Aren't you going to rant at me some more?"

"Ugh, what's the use? You keep making terrible choices…" She sighed into the phone, a burst of static in Jeff's ear. "You spoke to Annie? So she knows where you are and how to contact you?"

"Uh, heh, yeah."

"Well, good." Shirley sounded pensive. "You two take a little time apart and you'll both feel better, I can understand that, but you can't unilaterally decide that, it has to be mutual and why am I trying to advise you at this late date? You're a lost cause. Where are you?"

"Working at a law firm in Boston."

"Boston? But —"

"Yeah."

"Oh, Jeffrey."

"I didn't know she was here!" Jeff insisted. "If I had known I would have gone to, I don't know, San Diego."

"It's not too late!"

"I talked to Annie. We bumped into one another earlier tonight. What am I going to do, Shirley? I mean, maybe in retrospect it was a bad idea to do what I did, but I did it, and —"

Shirley was silent for a few seconds, long enough Jeff wondered if she'd hung up on him. "You have options," she finally said.

"I don't!" Jeff replied. "If she calls me I'll come, I can't help it, I'm not strong enough to —"

"It's not about strong, it's about doing right by the people you care about. Do you even know what the right thing is?"

"Yes. I think so." Jeff lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling. "Probably. Maybe."

The allusion went over Shirley's head. "Well, no use crying over spilled milk. For starters, you need to just be her friend, Jeffrey. You know how to do that — you've been her friend for years."

"You think?" Jeff sighed. "Sometimes I wonder if she and I were ever really friends, after…" He tried to remember when it had really started. "After I stopped sleeping with Britta, maybe. We weren't dating, but… I didn't have a girlfriend and she was the girlfriend I didn't have."

Shirley hummed noncommittally. "I remember."

"Then she stopped. After you left… it started before you left, actually," he said thoughtfully. "It used to be I'd make a joke about showing a documentary in my class instead of giving a lecture, and she'd give me a hard time, and then one day I made a joke like that and she didn't say anything. So I showed the documentary, I went ahead and did it, because I thought that would get her attention back… and she didn't say anything. I did it again and she didn't say anything. I started drinking during the day and she didn't say anything. She'd moved on."

"Oh, Jeffrey," Shirley said quietly.

"Don't get me wrong, we still hung out. Me and her and Abed and Britta, and Craig… Chang. And Frankie and Elroy."

"I know," Shirley said.

"But whenever there was a thing it would be her and Abed, or her and Abed and Britta, off doing the one thing, and I was stuck at the grown-ups' table with Craig and Frankie. And I was miserable." Jeff's eyes filled with tears, and his voice grew thick. "I don't think I even knew until, hell, until I found out she was staying in DC… I mean, coming here, it turns out… that's when I realized just how miserable I was."

"It's okay," cooed Shirley in his ear.

"Because before that, suddenly right before she left she was there, again, like she'd taken a year off from being my not-girlfriend but she was done and she was back, and I was grateful. So pathetically grateful. She went to DC, but she was coming back, and we were texting and talking like it was…" He let out a ragged sigh. "And then she was leaving me again, she'd moved on, and I had to do something."

"It's okay," Shirley repeated.

"She would have talked me out of it, or you would have, or Frankie even, so I didn't give any of you a chance to…"

"It's okay."

"What am I going to do?" Jeff asked plaintively.

There was a moment of silence on the line. "Well," Shirley said slowly, "the first thing I would suggest is prayer, but you're you, so… have you thought about going back to therapy?"

Vicki wasn't home when Annie got in. She'd spent the car ride distracting herself from the conversation with Jeff by focusing instead on how she was going to pay for the Uber. The pittance the FBI paid her was only temporary, but it was all she had to live on for the next few years.

Instead of getting Jeff to buy her an expensive meal she'd spent money getting away from him, Annie mused as she flopped onto the couch and started playing a random romantic comedy on Netflix. She stared at it for some amount of time, exhausted and blank, until someone came in the apartment.

"Hey, have you seen Vicki?" Quendra asked. "Because she's late." She set down her purse and sat at the other end of the couch, by Annie's feet. "What are you watching?"

"Uh…" Annie realized she had no idea, not about the title of the movie or its plot or even who was in it. "Something with… that guy." She pointed feebly at the screen.

"Ethan Hawke?"

"Okay," Annie said listlessly.

Quendra stared at her a moment. "You seem tired."

"I saw Jeff," Annie groaned. She hadn't meant to tell anyone, but it just spilled out.

Quendra nodded. "I know, I know. Vicki told me this morning," she added. "I can't believe he's in your city — you totally had dibs!"

"I did, didn't I?" Annie blinked. "But I mean, I saw him saw him. He saw me."

"Aw, honey," Quendra murmured sympathetically, and patted Annie's calf. "Was he with another girl? He's an asshole."

"No. He wanted to… he said he thought about me all the time and he wanted to buy me dinner."

"Bastard!" Quendra cried, then did a double take. "But you're here… it was the way he said it?" she guessed.

Annie sat up. "He acted like… I don't know. Like my not going back to Colorado was some kind of great betrayal. And, ugh. Look at this." She called up the two text messages he'd sent her on the drive back, then passed her phone to Quendra.

Quendra read the messages carefully. "Ugh. Talk about mixed messages."

"He's the guy for mixed messages," Annie agreed. "I mean, you remember, that one time he tried to get —"

"I know, I know," Quendra said, cutting her off. The story of the time Jeff tried to stop Annie from bringing a guy she liked into their circle of friends by importing Quendra, AKA the time Jeff used Quendra to try to make Annie jealous, was one Annie and Quendra had told one another several times. It was, after all, one of the few things they had in common. "So he just vanishes, pfft, nothing but the note —"

Annie wrinkled her forehead. "Did I tell you about the note?"

"Vicki again," Quendra said with a shrug. "He leaves you that stupid I-love-you-but-I-can't note and then a month later you just stumble across him, and he's like, 'hey, let's make out'? I mean, give me a break!"

"Yeah," Annie said, swallowing. "It was really hard to say no, too."

"Did he say where he wanted to take you for dinner?"

Annie shook her head. "Someplace by Boston Common."

"Lot of good places over there. Seafood, cocktails… I bet that was hard, yeah."

"No, it wasn't that. I really miss him." She leaned back against the couch cushions. "And he says he misses me, so… maybe I should have listened to him. I wanted to hug him —"

"More than that, I bet," Quendra muttered.

Annie shrugged. "Maybe. But that's not… I can't do that. He jerked me around for so long, and he was going to marry someone else, and I tried to move on, and then…" She held her head in her hands. "He just has this power over me. I can't shake him from my system no matter how much I know better."

"You did, though!" Quendra said encouragingly. She patted Annie delicately on the shoulder. "You moved all the way here."

"The last time I saw him before that, he kissed me goodbye like he was going to kiss me again the next time he saw me. And then he was just gone, and… I miss him."

"Kissing you goodbye was probably just more of him jerking you around." Quendra shook her head dismissively. "Listen, I don't usually badmouth my friends' exes, because it can backfire on you when they get back together, but you and I aren't very good friends and also Jeb is a total douche, okay?"

Annie sniffed. "Yeah."

"Yeah is right. If he wants you back he's going to have to do more than just be like 'sorry, babe.' " She affected a deep voice. " 'I been real busy but I'm free tonight so let's do Netflix at your place. That's code for sex.' "

Annie laughed a little despite herself. "Your Jeb impression isn't very good."

"Seriously, though, you've got to take care of you," Quendra said. "No one else is going to."

ANNIE to JEFF (OLD NUMBER), 2258:

I can't believe you, you know that?

[ERROR MESSAGE DELIVERY FAILED]

You act like you were doing me a favor, blah blah I deserve better, and then you ask me out

[ERROR MESSAGE DELIVERY FAILED]

The worst part is I really wanted to say yes

[ERROR MESSAGE DELIVERY FAILED]

I miss you. Jerk

[ERROR MESSAGE DELIVERY FAILED]