Into the Last of the Great Sunrises | Community
Into the Last of the Great Sunrises
~9,000 words
Gen (with background Jeff/Britta and slight Abed/Annie)
Jeff did terrible, unspeakable things for this moment where he could sit on Britta’s couch and have his life together again. And Abed was wrong. Companion piece to I Heard the Streets Were Paved with Gold
Notes: Okay! This is a follow up to I Heard the Streets Were Paved with Gold, and it's not necessary to read it but it might help! If you're too lazy or haven't read it in a long time or just plain old don't want to, here's a quick recap: We're in the darkest timeline, and Pierce is dead, but he's left all of his belongings (including his house) to the study group. Britta moves Jeff, Abed, Troy, and Shirley (who's been kicked out of her house by Andre for being a drunk) into the mansion. Abed and Troy visit Annie in the mental hospital, conspiring to break her out and get to the prime timeline. One by one, everyone goes along with his plan and they break Annie out and plan to cross over. They use the Dreamatorium to do so, choosing Abed's birthday, when they know everyone will be at the apartment in the prime timeline. And they make it! Also Jeff and Britta are sleeping together because why not.
Thank you to Libby for helping me when I wanted to do the technological equivalent of throwing this out the window.
Shirley’s still panting as she turns the key in the lock and opens the door. The clothes-her clothes, but not somehow-don’t fit properly. She’s gained weight in some places but lost it in others. The foyer is dark and she wraps a hand around the neck of the bottle in her purse as if it’s a lifeline.
“Baby?” a voice comes from further inside the house. “Is that you?”
A ring sits on her left finger and it’s heavy and foreign. She remembers taking it, pulling it off a lifeless hand, a still warm and familiar hand.
“Yeah, it’s me,” she calls back, voice shaky, breathless.
Andre appears from out of the shadows with a smile on his face. “Hey, how was the party? Did Abed like his present?” He leans in and kisses Shirley on the cheek.
“Uh, yes, he did.”
“The boys are all sleeping. Ben went down about two hours ago. Jordan’s grounded, though, because he ate a whole gallon of ice cream before dinner after I told him not to.”
Shirley nods. She grips the bottle even tighter.
Andre frowns. “You okay, baby? You look sick.”
“I’m just tired. I think I’ll go to-”
“Wait. Is that a bottle of vodka in your purse?” Andre grabs the arm her purse is slung over and pulls the bag open. “Have you been drinking? Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
His tone isn’t accusatory or harsh, it’s concerned, and Shirley reminds herself that this isn’t the man who kept her children from her, who watched her warily over a Thanksgiving dinner. Her eye catches the band on his finger and she wonders what their wedding was like. She wonders what her children look like now. Does Ben know how to walk? How are the older boys doing in school? She would know all these things if Andre, the other Andre, hadn’t pushed her so far away just for being broken.
“I’m fine,” she says finally.
“No, you’re not. Shirley, what happened tonight?”
---
Jeff holds back Britta’s hair as she vomits into the bushes. There’s blood underneath his fingernails and their cars are parked next to each other a little ways off, waiting for people who will never return. There are two sets of keys in his pocket, identical except for the gold key that gets him into Pierce’s mansion. He thinks of driving there now, of letting himself in the back door and tip-toeing upstairs to his bedroom, hiding under the covers with Britta, wrapping his arm around her and forgetting. But it would be Pierce’s snores coming down the hall, not Shirley’s, and it’s Pierce’s house again, not theirs, and Pierce is alive, went home to bed before they’d left the Dreamatorium and did what they had to do.
Or, what Abed said they had to do.
“Okay,” Britta says weakly, standing up straight. She wipes her mouth on her sleeve. “Okay.”
“You all right?”
“Not really,” she says. “Can we just go now?”
He picks her purse up off the ground. “Sure. Are you okay to drive?”
Her hands, which have been shaking for months, are still unsteady and it takes her three tries to successfully light her cigarette. “No. You have to drive. Just come to my place, okay?”
Jeff doesn’t say anything about her smoking in his car, just rolls the window down for her. “I know we probably should have stayed to help with Annie, but...”
She stares out the windshield, straight ahead, not looking at the apartment building as Jeff drives away. “Thank you. For suggesting that we leave.” She flicks her cigarette butt out the window and it flies, flares in the night. There’s a bottle of water in the cupholder and she takes a swig.
He’s silent, concentrating on the road. It’s been months and months since he’s been to Britta’s apartment, since last year, since they stopped sleeping together the first time. He’s glad she was the one who told him to come over; he wouldn’t admit it to her but he doesn’t want to be alone, doesn’t know if he can sit in his own apartment by himself.
He doesn’t know if he’ll ever sleep again.
“What are we going to tell Pierce?” she asks quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“We’re not the same anymore. We don’t even look the same. You don’t think he’s going to notice when you walk into study group on Monday with one arm? Or when Troy speaks like a robot?”
“I don’t know.”
He pulls up in front of Britta’s apartment and turns the car off, but they sit, staring at the building. It’s the same as it’s always been, but he expects it to look different. He expects everything to look different because everything is different, and these roads and these houses and Britta’s neighbor sitting on his front porch in a bathrobe the way he always does, something is wrong with all of them.
“I have to feed the cat.” She opens the door and slides out slowly, as if her knees are going to give way beneath her at any moment. He follows her inside and watches from the couch as she moves around the kitchen, opening cupboards with a sense of hesitation, looking surprised to see the cat’s dish in its usual spot on the floor.
She picks a stack of mail up off the table and sits down next to Jeff and begins rifling through. She tosses most of the envelopes on the coffee table. Jeff sees the Greendale logo on the last letter and assumes it’s a tuition bill until Britta gasps.
“Oh my god,” she whispers.
She passes the letter to Jeff, who only reads the first paragraph:
Dear Ms. Perry,
This letter serves as the official record of your expulsion from Greendale Community College. As per your disciplinary hearing which took place on March 15, 2012, you take full responsibility, along with the other guilty parties, for the riot in the cafeteria on March 14, 2012, and the damages inflicted.
“‘Other guilty parties’ must mean the rest of you, don’t you think?” Britta asks. “We’ve all been expelled?”
“Expelled,” Jeff repeats, the word tasting funny in his mouth. It means a lot of things, in context. It means that Jeff is no longer on track to get his bachelor’s by next spring. It means that the seven of them are no longer a study group. It means that this timeline-cafeteria riots?-isn’t too much brighter than the one they just left.
Jeff was angry all the time after the housewarming party, his face fixed in an almost-permanent frown. He snapped at Britta, at Abed, at Troy, and at Shirley. It took months for him to agree with Abed, that it could all be fixed and it could all go away. He did terrible, unspeakable things for this moment where he could sit on Britta’s couch and have his life together again.
And Abed was wrong.
---
Annie hasn’t stopped crying since they left the Dreamatorium. As soon as the door opened she sat on the floor in front of the refrigerator and buried her head in her hands. Her screams mixed with the others and Abed was surprised the neighbors didn’t call the cops. Perhaps they were used to strange noises coming from apartment 303.
Annie’s still sitting in the kitchen crying when Troy and Abed finish cleaning up. They push the chairs back in around the table. They throw the pizza boxes down the trash chute. They mop the floor and sweep up the shards of glass.
Abed notices a few things different about the apartment. There’s a lot of Annie’s things lying around: black flats, a red headband, a pair of purple socks. There’s also a giant blanket fort in the middle of the hallway. Abed peeks his head inside and there are the bunkbeds, both unmade. Confused, he goes to the bedroom and finds Annie’s bed and dresser and vanity. There’s a Zac Efron poster on the wall. This is Annie’s room.
“Annie lives with us now,” Abed says. “Look.”
Troy puts down the broom he’d been using to sweep up broken glass and joins Abed in the doorway to what used to be their bedroom. “Whoa. When do you think this happened?”
Abed thinks about it for a minute. “I’d say when I caught the die. Maybe I asked Annie to move in with us.”
They stand in silence and Troy turns to the kitchen. “I know that crossing over was pretty cool, but to see the girls like that... I think I’m going to have nightmares about it. Don’t you?”
Abed shrugs. “Probably not. We knew it was going to happen.” He ignores the look Troy gives him and turns to where Annie is still crying in the kitchen.
“What are we going to do about her?” Troy tries to whisper. “How can we get her to stop crying?”
“Annie,” Abed calls. “Come see your bedroom. You live with us now.”
She looks up and her eyes are bloodshot. She’s still wearing her Geneva dress. Abed wonders if she has a different one in the closet.
Troy gives her a smile which Abed thinks is meant to be reassuring, but he looks too tired. He goes to where Annie’s sitting and holds out his hand. “It’s okay,” he says.
She jumps at his voice and chokes out another sob. But she reaches up and lets Troy pull her to her feet. Slowly, he leads her to the bedroom where the bed is made and the floor is spotless. She looks around at the familiar things and starts crying again. She buries her face in Troy’s chest and he throws Abed a helpless look as he wraps his arms around her.
Abed turns away and leaves, goes back into the Dreamatorium. He doesn’t shut the door behind him, just stands there and stares at the place they had appeared a few hours ago. Annie cries echo through the apartment but Abed doesn’t mind them anymore. They have won.
---
“We're coming over,” Jeff says into the phone Sunday morning. “We'll pick up Shirley on the way.”
He hangs up on Abed and turns to Britta, who has just put her own cell phone down on the bed. “Shirley will be ready in twenty minutes. She said Andre was suspicious last night and found her vodka in her purse. She babbled a little bit before he asked if she was having a hard time because of the expulsion. How's Annie?”
Britta's face is paler than usual. She grabs a cigarette off the nightstand but can't get the lighter to light. Jeff reaches over and does it for her.
“I didn't ask,” he says. “Did you sleep?”
“I pretended to. Did you?”
“Pretended to,” he replies. This earns him what might have once been a smile. He wraps his arm around her (she sleeps on his left, always his left, so he can hold her like a man should be able to hold his... Britta) and she sighs a little.
“I'm not scared. But I'm worried.”
He nods, knows that she'd rather take off his other arm herself than admit to being scared. Being in her apartment, in her bed, he can almost see the girl she used to be. She looks uncomfortable, though, among things that once and now again belong to her. She never quite believed that this would work, and when it did, when they heard Pierce’s voice on the other side of the door, when Abed opened his backpack and showed them what was inside, she put on a brave face and did what she needed to do. He wishes now that he had listened to her. Annie’s cries and Britta’s retching and the screams replay in his head.
“It’ll be okay,” he lies.
Shirley slides into the backseat and Jeff notices Andre watching from the living room window. Jeff gives him a wave and a reassuring smile, which Andre returns, and Jeff pulls out of the driveway before he says anything.
“Everything okay?”
“My boys are so big! I can’t believe that he kept them from me all these months.” Shirley’s voice is thick with hangover.
“But Shirley, you have to remember,” Britta says, “that wasn’t this Andre. This one is good and loves you and the boys and you married him, remember?”
Shirley hmphs and neither Jeff nor Britta push the issue. A bottle of something sticks out of Shirley’s purse.
Britta gets antsy when Jeff pulls into the apartment complex’s parking lot; she flicks her lighter and shuffles her feet against the floor. He hears her take a couple deep breaths and after he shifts into park he squeezes her knee.
“It’s okay,” he says lowly.
“Are we going to go inside or are we going to spend all day sitting out here feeling each other up?” Shirley asks from the backseat.
When they get upstairs, Jeff braces himself, but the apartment is clean. Now that he can pay proper attention, the place looks different than it did all those months ago, on that night. Troy and Abed are sitting at the table with notebooks and papers and pens.
“Where’s Annie?” Britta asks. Abed points to the bedroom and Britta takes off immediately, shutting the door behind her.
“What the hell is going on, guys?” Jeff asks as he and Shirley take seats at the table.
“We’ve been expelled,” Abed says calmly. “Troy and I are trying to piece together everything that’s happened in this timeline since the night of the housewarming party, but aside from Annie moving in with us and somehow starting a riot in the Greendale cafeteria, we can’t figure it out.”
“Well, figure it out. Now. Or find someone who can figure it out for you.”
“There is someone,” Troy says. “But it would mean we’d have to tell them what we did.”
Jeff scrubs his face with his hand. “Pierce.”
“Pierce,” Abed repeats.
---
“How are you, Annie?” Britta asks. She sits on the edge of the bed, where Annie is huddled under the blankets. She’s still wearing her Geneva dress; it’s wrinkled and stained past recognition of the time and effort Troy and Abed put into making it.
Annie’s hair is tangled and greasy and she has dark circles beneath her eyes. She looks like she just stopped crying, and Britta can’t imagine that she’s eaten since lunch yesterday. “What we did,” she starts, and then stops, covering her mouth with her hands.
“I know,” Britta replies. “We’re going to fix it. It’ll all get better.” She looks around the room, at the pictures and the butterflies and the neatly stacked textbooks. Something about it is familiar, tugs at her stomach. It’s almost as if there’s a part of her that remembers this room, as if the Britta who was is now inside of her, sharing her memories. Britta doesn’t want her.
“Why don’t we get you washed up and changed? And then we can make something to eat, maybe some coffee. How about that?” Britta stands up and sifts through Annie’s dresser, pulling out clean underwear and sweatpants.
“I don’t want to be Geneva anymore,” Annie whispers. “She’s not a nice person.”
Britta nods and forces a smile. “Okay. Can you be Annie again?”
“I told you, Britta. I told you I didn’t want to kill anyone. Why did this happen?”
“Sometimes bad things happen,” Britta says slowly. She’s in way over her head here, has the urge to curl up in bed next to Annie and sleep forever. A different timeline is not a cure for poor mental health and Britta hates herself for letting Jeff and Abed talk her into taking Annie out of the hospital. But if they put her back there now, their secret wouldn’t be safe. And maybe they would all get locked up in mental wards. Maybe that’s where they need to be.
“But,” Britta continues, “me and Jeff and Abed and Troy and Shirley are all going to make things good again. I’ll walk you to the bathroom, okay?”
Annie bites her lip and then nods, letting Britta lead her down the hall, past where everyone is huddled over papers at the dining room table. Britta feels a pang of longing for Pierce’s mansion, for their nightly dinners and the optimism in all of their faces.
Britta sits on the edge of the tub as Annie brushes her teeth and washes her face. She waits outside while Annie changes but doesn’t join the others. She doesn’t really want to know what’s going on.
When Annie emerges from the bathroom she looks a little better but still tired. Britta can’t remember the last time she saw her out of that Geneva dress. She looks even younger in sweats with her hair tied back, too many pounds missing from her frame.
“Can you make me buttered noodles?” she asks.
“Sure thing.”
Annie sits in one of the recliners with her knees pulled up to her chest as Britta boils the water. Jeff is saying something about Pierce and Greendale and Dean Pelton, concepts that had seemed so far away yesterday but today are tangible things that exist to her. Britta hums a little so she doesn’t have to listen and boiling water slops over the side of the pot as her hands shake.
While Annie eats Britta finally sits at the table between Abed and Jeff. “Okay, what’s going on?”
“We’re going to call Pierce and have him come here tomorrow,” Abed says. “And we’ll tell him the truth. That way he can fill us in on what’s been going on, why we’ve been expelled, and how we can fix it.”
There’s nothing to fix, Britta thinks. It’s something she said to Annie to get her to brush her teeth. Life is life and sometimes it’s shitty no matter what timeline you’re in. Britta doesn’t gloat that she was right all along. She doesn’t mention it. She nods and watches as Troy doodles Inspector Spacetime, Reggie, and Geneva on the back of his expulsion letter. It reminds her that she needs to pick Annie’s dress up off the bathroom floor and pack it away. She makes a note to check for duplicates in the closet.
---
It’s dark when Jeff drops Shirley off at home. Andre’s sitting in the kitchen, a tray of cooling cookies on the table in front of him.
“What’s all this?” she asks. Her words haven’t started slurring yet.
Andre’s face is set in a hard line and she remembers the day he kicked her out. When he called Britta and threw her into a car and wouldn’t let her hold her children anymore. “You promised Elijah that you’d make cookies for his school bake sale tomorrow. But then you left this morning and just got back. What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing,” she says, gripping her purse tighter. She doesn’t dare move in case he hears the liquid in the bottle sloshing around.
“Look, Shirley, I know things have been tough for you since you got expelled. And I understand that you want to lean on your friends for support. But this isn’t fair. The kids have to come first. I can’t keep coming up with excuses for you.”
She doesn’t reply and he gets up and walks around the table to where she’s standing.
“We’ll get through it, okay? Whatever it is-” He leans in to hug her but stops. “Have you been drinking again? Damn it, Shirley, I can smell it on you.”
“I’m a grown ass woman,” she says.
“I don’t care what you are. You can’t be around the kids like that. You can’t become that person again.”
And suddenly the two Andres aren’t so different anymore. She pulls her hand back and slaps him across the face. It echoes loudly and, far away, she hears the patter of footsteps overhead.
Then everything is silent. Andre stares at her with a look of disbelief for a good fifteen seconds and then his eyes change, are menacing, protective. He points to the door. “Get out.”
He doesn’t call Britta this time. He doesn’t put her in a car and sigh. She knows somewhere that she’s crossed a line but she’s tired and angry and drunk.
She leaves the ring on the table next to the cookies when she goes.
---
“Are you guys on drugs? Did you all do drugs without me?” Pierce asks accusingly. “Britta’s got a lesbian streak in her hair, Troy’s wearing a gay necklace, Jeff’s wearing a gay sweater. You guys are always leaving me out.”
They’re all just sort of staring at Pierce, as if they can’t believe he’s real. Jeff didn’t realize how much they’d been missing an entire piece of themselves without him. Jeff had always secretly thought that Pierce was the most disposable of the group; they would be able to survive if he was kicked out or left or, well, died. And they did. They did survive.
But it cost them too much. Jeff wonders right then if they made the right decision, if the things they did were worth it to have Pierce back. But then he looks at Annie, who hides behind a curtain of hair, at Britta, whose hands shake even when they move over his skin, at Shirley, who drinks even more than she did a month ago. Troy, who watches Abed out of the corner of his eye warily. And Abed, who forged this plan, whose face never wavered as they left the Dreamatorium.
It all went to shit without Pierce, Jeff admits to himself.
“We told you, Pierce, this is all real. We’re really from a different timeline, one where you’re dead,” Abed says. “But we need to know what’s happening in this timeline. How did we get expelled?”
“Fine, I’ll play along. It was at Starburns’s memorial service.”
Annie gasps. “Did we kill Starburns?”
“What?” Pierce asks. “Of course not. He died when the meth lab in his trunk exploded. Something about a drunk driver, I don’t know, I didn’t pay attention. Then we were all mad because Professor Kane quit because he felt bad about Starburns dying, which was a real lame move for a guy who probably saw worse things in prison. And Jeff cried a little because we had to take Biology over again.”
Abed writes this all down. “So what you’re saying is that this timeline has gotten increasingly darker, too? Interesting.”
“All timelines are dark, Abed,” Britta snaps. “Because life is dark. I don’t know what you were expecting, but we’re not going to stumble around until we find a timeline filled with rainbows and puppies. Because that doesn’t exist.”
“You were wrong before,” Abed says.
“That’s enough,” Jeff warns. “We’re not going to talk about who was right and who was wrong. It’s done, it’s over.” He turns back to Pierce. “What happened at the memorial?”
“Instead of eulogizing, we all went up and talked about how much Greendale sucks, and everyone started rioting. Then the board expelled us.”
They sit in silence for a while and Jeff thinks it’s because it’s all real now, the expulsion and the dimension-crossing and Pierce being alive and whole while they are not.
“I need,” Shirley says finally, “a place to stay.”
Britta catches Jeff’s eye. “You can stay at my place,” he says.
He knows from Britta’s glance that she’ll be there, too, that it’ll be the three of them (and probably the cat) in his apartment from now on. He watched yesterday as she led Annie around the apartment and cooked her lunch and he knows she needs to feel needed, especially now. Having Shirley to take care of, to watch over, it will give her purpose and help her forget, at least for a little while.
“I thought Dean Pelton loved us,” Troy says, his face sad.
Pierce doesn’t seem to notice that Troy talks like a computer now and not an actual human. Jeff should probably be worried about this, but he can’t possibly expand his list of concerns to include Pierce’s onset of dementia.
---
Annie cries in her sleep. Or maybe she’s not sleeping at all. But it’s three in the morning and Abed can hear her on the other side of the blanket fort. The fort is a good idea; he commends old Abed and Troy on coming up with it. It’s a good way to get the three of them to live together without having to give up the Dreamatorium, the most important thing he’s ever created.
Careful not to wake Troy, he climbs down from the top bunk and creaks Annie’s bedroom door open. She’s awake, lying on her side, the blankets pulled up to her chin. She hasn’t worn her Geneva dress since that first day. Britta found another one in the closet, an identical dress, in pristine condition. Abed watched as she threw it in a plastic bag and took it with her when she left.
“Abed?” Annie asks, rolling onto her back. “What are you doing?”
“Just seeing if you’re all right. I heard you crying.”
“Sorry if I woke you up.”
He shuffles in the doorway. “It’s fine. You don’t have to be upset or scared, you know. It all worked out. We’re here and Pierce is here. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
She shakes her head. Her ponytail whips back and forth. “Not like this. Not like that.”
“But you knew that’s what was going to happen. I told you.”
“I couldn’t do it,” she says. Her face crumples.
Arc of the Covenant. That Annie had looked at his Annie in shock, eyes wide and mouth agape. Before the timelines had diverged, before he and Troy selected Yahtzee as their game of choice, Abed had kissed her, all lips and tongue and sweetness, but he had to forget about that. It was easy, actually, to clear his mind and do what he did. He hadn’t been afraid, not even a little.
“We did something bad, Abed.”
“We did something amazing,” he corrects. “No one else could have done this.”
She wipes her eyes with her shirt sleeve. She would still be in the hospital in too-big pajamas if he hadn’t broken her out.
“I hope you’ll be our Geneva again,” he says. “Goodnight.” He closes the door behind him and climbs back into bed.
“Is she okay?” Troy asks from beneath him.
“She’ll be fine,” Abed answers.
“But what if she’s not? She seems almost worse than she was before. This is like when we took her out of the hospital and she screamed for two days.”
“But we’re here now. Once she realizes that she’ll be okay.”
“I’m still worried.”
“Don’t be. Go to sleep. Goodnight, Troy.”
Troy shifts and the whole bunk shakes. Abed waits but Troy never returns his goodnight.
---
Britta goes back to doing what she does best. Jeff hands her takeout menu after takeout menu and she piles them high next to the phone. She orders dinner every night for the three of them and they sit at Jeff’s Ikea table and eat.
Shirley drinks and drinks and calls Andre so many times he must eventually unplug the phone because after a few days it stops ringing and Shirley can’t get through.
Britta goes to check on Annie every couple of days but she makes Jeff come with her because she doesn’t want to talk to Abed. She’s still mad at him, maybe about telling her she was wrong, maybe because he got them into this mess. But Jeff goes with her and he talks to Abed and Troy so Britta doesn’t have to.
“At least in the other timeline we were together,” Troy says one day when Britta disappears into Annie’s bedroom without a word.
Britta moves her things into Jeff’s apartment, her clothes and her all-natural laundry detergent and her CD collection. The cat’s litterbox sits in his kitchen and her leather jackets fill up his closet. He pees while she brushes her teeth and he wakes her up when she falls asleep on the couch. It’s domestic and marriage-y and once upon a time, Jeff would grow moody and bail. He wonders what their relationship was in this timeline, if she had to lean on him when they got expelled, if he needed her to keep him steady.
They sleep in spurts. Britta whimpers in her sleep but doesn’t mention nightmares when she shakes herself awake. Jeff dreams of the harsh lines of the Dreamatorium closing in on him, squeezing all of the air out of his body while Abed watches, unconcerned. They nap in the afternoons, mostly, staring at the ceiling all night while Shirley calls Andre’s disconnected line over and over and over, muttering to herself about her sons. When she passes out, her snores fill the apartment the way they filled Pierce’s mansion and Jeff pretends they are there instead.
And there’s nothing else to do, no plans to hatch, no dimensions to cross. Jeff feels restless, cooped up. He drives around, past Greendale, where he watches students walk from class to class. He spots Garrett and Fat Neil and Vicki and Quendra, reminds himself that Starburns is dead.
One day he drives to City College and speaks with an admissions counselor about transferring his credits over. He’s given a brochure about classes and professors and extra-curricular activities. And for a few minutes, for the drive back home, he imagines that he can turn it all around. Greendale doesn’t want him, fine, he can go elsewhere. He can go to Greendale’s rival and he can get his bachelor’s and he can become a one-armed lawyer. He can he can he can.
But then he gets home and Shirley’s yelling at Britta and Britta’s yelling back. Troy sends him a text saying they need to talk, all of them, and can they please come over. The car ride is silent except for Shirley muttering under her breath about Britta being a busybody and Britta smokes three cigarettes but she doesn’t retaliate.
“I think something happened to Dean Pelton,” Abed says when they’re all-Pierce included-sitting around the table. “I went to Greendale today and there was someone in the dean’s office but it wasn’t Dean Pelton. It was a doppelganger.”
“A doppeldeaner,” Troy corrects proudly.
“Don’t you see? That’s how we got expelled. Someone kidnapped the real dean and replaced him with an imposter to get us kicked out of school. We find out who, we stop him, we reinstate the real dean, and we get back into Greendale.” Abed closes the notebook in front of him. “I think it’s Chang.”
Britta scoffs loudly. “So now we’re after Chang? What’re you gonna do, kill him, too?”
Abed cocks his head to the side. “If we have to.”
“No!” Annie shrieks.
Troy grasps her hand and gives her a smile. He shakes his head. “Of course that’s not going to happen, Annie. Right, Abed?”
“Abed, come on,” Jeff says, tone light. “We can check out if your theory is true, but couldn’t we just, I don’t know, call the police?”
“It’s our job to make this timeline brighter. We have a chance here. We didn’t have a chance before.”
“If we can get back to school…” Shirley begins.
“Greendale is not a band-aid,” Britta says. “It’s not going to make everything perfect. I told you all that. Look! Look what happened! We did something so horrible, and for what? Are we any better than we were before? If we had stayed where we were, we could have left Annie in the hospital and she would heal. We could have gotten Shirley into a rehab program. We could have gone back to school. We could have done it.”
She leans back in her chair, breathing heavily. It’s the most and loudest Jeff’s heard her speak in weeks. There’s truth to what she said and Jeff lets that settle in his chest. Britta being right always catches him by surprise but it shouldn’t, really, because she somehow is always right, whether she means to be or not.
“It’s a good thing everyone here is on the same page with what’s going on,” Pierce interjects loudly.
“We’re going to kill Chang,” Abed says, “and rescue Dean Pelton so he can reenroll us in school.”
“No, we’re not,” Britta objects.
“Abed, you don’t even know the dean’s been kidnapped. And you don’t know that Chang’s guilty of being anything other than a sociopath, which, if we went after him for that, well, that would be quite the case of calling the kettle black. So drop it,” Jeff says with what he hopes is finality.
Abed doesn’t answer and it’s quiet until Pierce breaks the tension with, “But the kettle’s Asian, not black.”
---
“I know she’s had a tough time with the expulsion,” Andre says. “And I’ve tried so hard to be understanding. I didn’t complain when I was home with the kids for two straight days because she was at school for a pillow fight. Or when she left on Christmas Day to make Abed feel better. But I can’t allow her to start drinking again in front of my children. I have to draw the line, you know?”
Jeff stirs his coffee and nods, filing away the mentions of the pillow fight and Christmas. “I do. We’re trying to help her, Andre, but… we don’t know what to do. It’s been-we’re all a little lost right now.”
“Are you going to tell me what happened to your-”
“No,” Jeff interrupts. “Not now.”
Andre stares at him for a minute as if sizing him up. He watches Jeff over his mug as he takes a sip of coffee. “You two have gotten really close this year.”
“Andre, if you think I’m having an affair with your wife-”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’m sleeping with Britta.”
Andre nods and takes a deep breath. “The first time this happened, it was after her dad died. She scared Elijah and Jordan and it was such a point of contention between us. She’d disappear for days at a time and when she was home she was hungover. She was grieving and that was how she grieved. But it drove me away.”
“How did it end?”
“I cheated. And she snapped out of it. Stopped drinking, smiled through withdrawal, helped the boys with their homework. She kicked me out and started classes at Greendale.”
Jeff thinks for a second. “But what if other bad things don’t snap her out of it this time? What if other bad things just make it worse?”
“Look, you guys have your study group and your secrets and I’ve never, ever tried to infringe on that, not even a little. But you don’t get to know more about my wife than I do, Jeff.”
And maybe it’s a dumb move and maybe Abed and Britta will hate him after it for entirely different reasons. But Jeff opens his mouth anyway, leans in a little bit, his elbow propped on the table. “Do you believe in alternate dimensions?”
---
“I think Annie should move in with us.”
Jeff looks up from his takeout container. “Here? Should I set her up in the kitchen or in the bathroom? Maybe that corner behind the couch?”
“I’m serious,” Britta says. “She can share a room with Shirley.”
She’s never been good at masking how she feels-not with him, anyway-and he knows, can see it in her face that she wants them all under one roof again so she can feed them and look after them. Shirley, in the beginning, had accused Britta of treating them all like her cats, and maybe she was right.
“I don’t want her over there,” she says quietly. “I don’t trust him.”
“But that’s where she lives. Annie’s an adult. She can make her own decisions about her living arrangements.”
“She needs somebody to take care of her. She needs-”
“She needs to be in a hospital,” Jeff says softly. “I can’t believe we took her out. I’m so sorry that I talked you into it.”
Britta lets out a shaky breath. “What would happen to us if we committed her? She’d tell. And they’d probably commit us right along with her.”
Jeff laughs dryly. “Maybe that’s what we need.”
He imagines them all then in straightjackets and a padded room. It happened once before, just briefly, just a misunderstanding between them and some police officers. But this time it would be real. He would tell doctors about the fire and his arm and Abed’s ideas. He would describe their time living in Pierce’s mansion. He would recall the blood everywhere, the insanity of seeing yourself dying. The way Britta vomited in the bushes and Annie cried and Shirley prayed.
“Maybe what we need is to go back,” Britta says. “No, no, think about it. We can live at Pierce’s again and get jobs and get back in school. We can put Annie back in the hospital because they know how unstable she is and they wouldn’t take her as seriously when she tells them what happened. And we’ll bring Pierce with us!”
“Britta…” he begins.
“I don’t want to do this anymore, Jeff.” She sounds so utterly defeated. She’s not the same person who spent all day learning how to cook a turkey for Thanksgiving or baked batch upon batch of cookies for Christmas. She made sure they ate and she picked happy movies for them to watch and she kept them together, kept them safe, kept them sane.
Something broke the night they crossed over and Jeff isn’t used to being the one doing the fixing.
“You went along with Abed because you were out of ideas. Well, I’m out of them, too,” she says.
He stands up and begins clearing the dinner plates. He’s gotten too good at doing things with one hand. He drops a kiss on the top of Britta’s head on his way to the sink and it’s not until he turns on the water does he see her shoulders start to shake as she cries.
---
It happens like this:
Abed sneaks out one morning while Troy and Annie are still sleeping. He and Troy have spent weeks and weeks planning and researching. He was right, of course, it is Chang. The school is covered in banners with Chang’s face on them. The whole thing is over-the-top and terribly unsubtle. Abed can think of a million ways he could have done it better.
Chang uses teenage boys as security. Not just teenage boys, but prepubescent boys, with cracking voices and greasy faces. They’re pretty vicious, but Abed is smarter. The seven of them-for some reason known as the Greendale Seven-are plastered on posters everywhere. Greendale’s Most Wanted.
But the boys don’t recognize Abed with his goatee. It’s kind of silly, really, Clark Kent in glasses, but Abed sneaks right into the school. Classes are over for the day. He finds the fake dean first.
Chang is in the study room at the table. Abed knew all along that’s where he’d be. Chang was once their teacher, once their peer, had once slept with Shirley. They were Netflix friends.
It does not escape Abed that these things happen in places that are important to him. These places would be ruined, destroyed, for some people but for him, these places are now more powerful.
He goes back to the dean’s office and finds the expulsion paperwork. It’s not hard to forge the reverse. It’s too late for this semester but maybe the fall, maybe in September they can sit around the study table again. It’ll be like it was. It’ll be bright.
When he gets home, they’re both awake, eating cereal at the kitchen table. “Hey,” Troy says. “Where’ve you been?”
“What if I told you that we could go back to Greendale in the fall?”
Troy’s eyes widen and a smile appears on his face. “Did you call the police? Did they find the dean?”
“We’re not expelled anymore,” Abed says carefully.
Annie stares up at Abed and he knows that she knows, even if Troy hasn’t caught on. She gives him a watery look and suddenly this is it. He knows he’s pushed her too far and that even if she does get better, it’s not going to be the same. He can try his hardest to keep her close but she’s already gone.
---
Shirley’s hands are damp as they wrap around Ben’s middle. He fits in her lap so snugly and perfectly and doesn’t seem to mind her sweaty palms. Her head is pounding and she feels so incredibly nauseous but Elijah is on her left and Jordan is on her right and she can deal with all of it.
Her children are so beautiful, so wonderful and perfect, that maybe all this was worth it to get them back. She still has nightmares about the night of Abed’s birthday, when they defied science and nature and maybe even God. She hasn’t been to church in so long.
“I think,” Andre says, “that this could work. But you and I have to talk about something. Boys, can you take your brother and go upstairs for a little while?”
Shirley doesn’t want to let go of Ben, but she hands him to Jordan anyway and the three of them scurry off and she relishes in their footsteps on the stairs.
“Jeff came to visit me last week,” Andre begins.
Shirley doesn’t know anything about that, but she hasn’t really been paying much attention to Jeff lately, or Britta, or Annie, or any of the group. She spends most of her days holed up in Jeff’s guest bedroom, drinking and calling Andre repeatedly. Now that her mind’s a little clearer she reminds herself to go and check on Annie, to make sure Troy and Abed have food in their kitchen, to apologize to Britta, to visit Pierce, to thank Jeff.
“He told me everything. About what happened in October and who you really are and what you did. And it was a lot for me to process, as you can imagine. I don’t have a reason not to believe Jeff but I don’t know if I do. All I know is this: you are my wife and the mother of my children. I love you very much, Shirley. But I think it would be best if you come back here and live and don’t talk to them anymore. If you want to go back to school, that’s great, and I’m sure you’ll find another school that will accept you. But I don’t want you to have anything to do with them.”
The first thing she feels is anger because she’ll be damned if she lets Andre tell her what to do. But her lap is still cold from the loss of Ben and she thinks of all she did in order to get her family back. And everything she did would be for naught if she walked away from them.
But her study group family… They took care of her when no one else would. They love her unconditionally and after everything that’s happened in the last three years, leaving them would be like leaving a piece of herself.
Either way, she will lose, will be incomplete. But to choose anything or anyone over her kids would make her unable to stomach her own face in the mirror. Andre holds the highest, most precious collateral over her head.
“You have to understand, I can’t cut them out of my life completely all at once. I’ll move out of Jeff’s apartment and I won’t see them anymore, but I have to be able to call. For now.”
Andre is still for a moment, then nods. “Okay. I want you to get better, Shirley. I don’t want this to be like last time.”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out her wedding ring. He holds it out and his face is so hopeful and for the first time since that first night she sincerely regrets not knowing what their second wedding was like. She holds out her hand and he slides the ring on her finger and it weighs there like the loss of her friends. She knows then that she will always feel it.
She smiles despite herself.
---
“We could leave.” She says it without any conviction at all. “We could get in the car and go. Drive east, to New York.”
“Okay,” Jeff replies with equal unenthusiasm. “You could change your blue streak to pink.”
“People would give you their seats on crowded subways because you have one arm.”
“You could give people free therapy in Central Park.”
“I could go out early on Sunday mornings and bring home baggles for breakfast.”
“I would keep making fun of you for saying it like that.”
“But you’d still eat them.”
“Of course. They’d be delicious. I’d have to run off all those carbs afterward, though.”
“I hate running. I’d sunbathe on the balcony while you’re gone.”
“We’d have a balcony?”
“Duh doy. We’d be filthy rich. But we would still give to charity and do volunteer work.”
“So we’d be trendy filthy rich?”
“Sure.”
He rolls onto his side to face her. It’s sunny outside and they didn’t pull down the shades before they went to bed. The room is bright and the breeze coming in the window is cool. It’s almost summer. “We have to start living our lives. We need a plan.”
They’ve all been still for more than six months, talking about getting to places and points, but nothing has changed, not really. They’re still broken and messed up and they’ve done awful things. They should have stayed where they were, Jeff thinks for the millionth time.
“I think we should put Annie back in the hospital. We can’t be selfish anymore. And we’ll help Shirley through a twelve-step program and we’ll call the police to investigate about the dean and we’ll go back to school. You’re right. No more excuses.”
The blue streak is fading from her hair, which is sticking up a little in the back. She still looks so tired, dark circles lining her eyes.
“I’m in love with you,” he says.
A smile, a small one, ghosts across her face, the first time he’s seen her smile in so long. She reaches out and traces the spot where his arm used to be with her fingertips. “I think I’ve been in love with you for quite a long time,” she says quietly, not meeting his eyes.
He leans in to kiss her but his phone rings. He groans but she laughs and climbs over him to grab it off the nightstand.
“It’s Troy.” She punches the answer button and brings the phone to her ear. “Hi Troy.”
He watches her face as it changes from-well, not happy, but content, at least-to horrified. Jeff feels a chill in his chest and it spreads down to his stomach and his toes. She hangs up the phone and runs her hands over her face a couple times before turning back to him.
“Abed went to Greendale yesterday,” she says, her voice uneven. “He got us un-expelled. Wanna guess how he did that?”
“Fuck,” Jeff mutters. He throws back the blankets and gets out of bed, starts rummaging around for clothes. “Go wake up Shirley, will you?”
Britta nods, puts on a t-shirt off the floor, and disappears. Jeff’s pulling up his jeans when she comes running back in. “Shirley’s not here.”
“What? Where the hell is she?”
“I’m calling Andre,” Britta says as she dials. “Hi, Andre, it’s Britta. Have you seen Shirley? What do you... Oh. Um, okay then. Bye.”
Britta throws her head back and yells in frustration. “Shirley’s moving back home. On the provision that she no longer sees any of us.”
“I told him,” Jeff says softly. “I fucking told him everything because I thought it would help Shirley but I didn’t think...”
She moves to stand in front of him and stands up on her tiptoes to place a hand on his cheek. “We’ll worry about that later. One crisis at a time, okay?”
They don’t speak in the car, but she keeps a hand on his thigh. She smokes five cigarettes on the way there. The brick sits in the front door of the apartment building and Jeff kicks it aside as they enter. He’s so angry at Abed, at Andre, at everyone, because how on earth are they supposed to heal if something keeps messing it all up?
Troy answers the door after Jeff pounds on it.
“What the fuck is going on?” Jeff demands.
“Abed got us back in school...” Troy says, his face meek.
Jeff pushes past Troy and finds Abed in his recliner, watching TV. “What did you do?”
Abed shrugs. “I made the timeline brighter. I did what I had to do.”
“No,” Jeff says. “No. That’s not the answer, Abed. It wasn’t the answer before and it wasn’t the answer this time. You think this is brighter? You think getting caught and going to jail is brighter?”
“We’ll be back at Greendale.”
“I don’t care! That doesn’t matter anymore, Abed! Shirley’s gone, did you know that? Andre took her back but she can’t see us anymore. And we have to put Annie back in the hospital. Real bright, huh?”
There’s a creak and Jeff turns around to find Annie standing in the doorway to her bedroom. “I have to go back there?” she asks, eyes full of tears.
“Annie,” Britta says, “we want you to get better. You’re not getting better here. We can take you somewhere else, to a better hospital.”
“You two don’t get to make those kinds of decisions,” Abed says. “You’re not really our parents.”
“So we should just sit back and watch as you commit murder? We love you, Abed, but this has got to stop,” Britta bites.
“Did you even find the real dean?” Jeff asks.
Abed shakes his head and Jeff closes his eyes and sighs. “I can’t do this anymore,” he says. “Annie, can you pack some of your things? You can come stay with me and Britta until we can find a doctor for you.”
Abed stands up. “You don’t get to take her away.”
“I have to go, Abed,” Annie says. “I can’t do this, either.”
Britta helps her pack a duffel bag and Jeff slings it over his shoulder. She hugs Troy and kisses Abed on the cheek. And she leaves with Jeff and Britta, walking between them, shuffling her feet slowly in a pair of slippers. Jeff closes the door behind them and he sees that Troy’s eyes are watering as he looks at Abed accusingly but Abed is stoic.
---
In the days after Annie leaves, Troy mopes around the apartment a bit. He sits in his recliner and watches sad Disney movies like Bambi and The Fox and the Hound and Abed leaves him alone for the most part. Instead of joining him, Abed goes to the Dreamatorium and scribbles in his notebook about the other timelines and how they could possibly be different. He makes charts and graphs and by the time he’s finished and leaves the Dreamatorium, Troy is watching Toy Story 3.
“Abed,” Troy calls. He’s still facing the TV.
“Yeah?”
“Did you really kill Chang?”
“I did what I had to do.”
Troy can’t sigh anymore: it sounds like a squeak, like a mouse or old brakes on a subway car. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
“I thought you would have figured it out. Annie did.”
“Jeff and Britta found a hospital for Annie. They’re taking her there next week.”
Abed doesn’t reply and Troy still doesn’t turn around to face him.
“Do you remember when we first got here and I asked you if it freaked you out to see Britta and Shirley and Annie like that? And you said no? I didn’t understand how it couldn’t and I still don’t. I don’t get it, Abed. That girl sitting there, she was as much our Annie as this Annie is.”
“She wasn’t, though. They were all different. Our Annie is here. Or, she was.”
Troy stands up and Abed is surprised to see that he’s wearing clothes, not pajamas, jeans and sneakers. “Look at that bedroom, Abed. That’s Annie’s bedroom. No matter the timeline, Annie is Annie. Britta is Britta, Shirley is Shirley. But you’re not you.” There’s a duffel bag next to the recliner that Abed didn’t notice before. Troy picks it up and slings it over his shoulder. “I’m going to stay at Jeff’s for a little while and help him and Britta with Annie. I want her to get better, Abed.”
Abed just watches as Troy claps him on the shoulder before leaving. The apartment is so quiet that it buzzes. He walks from room to room and wonders what each of them looks like in another timeline. He imagines Annie lives with them in each one, that he and Troy always eventually realize that she was the missing piece. He doesn’t want to think about her in the hospital, though, hair lank and eyes sunken. He wants to watch her laugh again, feel her hand warm inside of his, listen to her sing off-key in the car.
He saves the Dreamatorium for last. He closes the door behind him and pulls out the die in his pocket. He tosses it in the air and it lands on the floor with a clatter. He pushes buttons on the control panel. “Begin crossover. Evil Abed to timeline four.”
The room begins to shake and the lights go off.
~9,000 words
Gen (with background Jeff/Britta and slight Abed/Annie)
Jeff did terrible, unspeakable things for this moment where he could sit on Britta’s couch and have his life together again. And Abed was wrong. Companion piece to I Heard the Streets Were Paved with Gold
Notes: Okay! This is a follow up to I Heard the Streets Were Paved with Gold, and it's not necessary to read it but it might help! If you're too lazy or haven't read it in a long time or just plain old don't want to, here's a quick recap: We're in the darkest timeline, and Pierce is dead, but he's left all of his belongings (including his house) to the study group. Britta moves Jeff, Abed, Troy, and Shirley (who's been kicked out of her house by Andre for being a drunk) into the mansion. Abed and Troy visit Annie in the mental hospital, conspiring to break her out and get to the prime timeline. One by one, everyone goes along with his plan and they break Annie out and plan to cross over. They use the Dreamatorium to do so, choosing Abed's birthday, when they know everyone will be at the apartment in the prime timeline. And they make it! Also Jeff and Britta are sleeping together because why not.
Thank you to Libby for helping me when I wanted to do the technological equivalent of throwing this out the window.
Shirley’s still panting as she turns the key in the lock and opens the door. The clothes-her clothes, but not somehow-don’t fit properly. She’s gained weight in some places but lost it in others. The foyer is dark and she wraps a hand around the neck of the bottle in her purse as if it’s a lifeline.
“Baby?” a voice comes from further inside the house. “Is that you?”
A ring sits on her left finger and it’s heavy and foreign. She remembers taking it, pulling it off a lifeless hand, a still warm and familiar hand.
“Yeah, it’s me,” she calls back, voice shaky, breathless.
Andre appears from out of the shadows with a smile on his face. “Hey, how was the party? Did Abed like his present?” He leans in and kisses Shirley on the cheek.
“Uh, yes, he did.”
“The boys are all sleeping. Ben went down about two hours ago. Jordan’s grounded, though, because he ate a whole gallon of ice cream before dinner after I told him not to.”
Shirley nods. She grips the bottle even tighter.
Andre frowns. “You okay, baby? You look sick.”
“I’m just tired. I think I’ll go to-”
“Wait. Is that a bottle of vodka in your purse?” Andre grabs the arm her purse is slung over and pulls the bag open. “Have you been drinking? Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
His tone isn’t accusatory or harsh, it’s concerned, and Shirley reminds herself that this isn’t the man who kept her children from her, who watched her warily over a Thanksgiving dinner. Her eye catches the band on his finger and she wonders what their wedding was like. She wonders what her children look like now. Does Ben know how to walk? How are the older boys doing in school? She would know all these things if Andre, the other Andre, hadn’t pushed her so far away just for being broken.
“I’m fine,” she says finally.
“No, you’re not. Shirley, what happened tonight?”
---
Jeff holds back Britta’s hair as she vomits into the bushes. There’s blood underneath his fingernails and their cars are parked next to each other a little ways off, waiting for people who will never return. There are two sets of keys in his pocket, identical except for the gold key that gets him into Pierce’s mansion. He thinks of driving there now, of letting himself in the back door and tip-toeing upstairs to his bedroom, hiding under the covers with Britta, wrapping his arm around her and forgetting. But it would be Pierce’s snores coming down the hall, not Shirley’s, and it’s Pierce’s house again, not theirs, and Pierce is alive, went home to bed before they’d left the Dreamatorium and did what they had to do.
Or, what Abed said they had to do.
“Okay,” Britta says weakly, standing up straight. She wipes her mouth on her sleeve. “Okay.”
“You all right?”
“Not really,” she says. “Can we just go now?”
He picks her purse up off the ground. “Sure. Are you okay to drive?”
Her hands, which have been shaking for months, are still unsteady and it takes her three tries to successfully light her cigarette. “No. You have to drive. Just come to my place, okay?”
Jeff doesn’t say anything about her smoking in his car, just rolls the window down for her. “I know we probably should have stayed to help with Annie, but...”
She stares out the windshield, straight ahead, not looking at the apartment building as Jeff drives away. “Thank you. For suggesting that we leave.” She flicks her cigarette butt out the window and it flies, flares in the night. There’s a bottle of water in the cupholder and she takes a swig.
He’s silent, concentrating on the road. It’s been months and months since he’s been to Britta’s apartment, since last year, since they stopped sleeping together the first time. He’s glad she was the one who told him to come over; he wouldn’t admit it to her but he doesn’t want to be alone, doesn’t know if he can sit in his own apartment by himself.
He doesn’t know if he’ll ever sleep again.
“What are we going to tell Pierce?” she asks quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“We’re not the same anymore. We don’t even look the same. You don’t think he’s going to notice when you walk into study group on Monday with one arm? Or when Troy speaks like a robot?”
“I don’t know.”
He pulls up in front of Britta’s apartment and turns the car off, but they sit, staring at the building. It’s the same as it’s always been, but he expects it to look different. He expects everything to look different because everything is different, and these roads and these houses and Britta’s neighbor sitting on his front porch in a bathrobe the way he always does, something is wrong with all of them.
“I have to feed the cat.” She opens the door and slides out slowly, as if her knees are going to give way beneath her at any moment. He follows her inside and watches from the couch as she moves around the kitchen, opening cupboards with a sense of hesitation, looking surprised to see the cat’s dish in its usual spot on the floor.
She picks a stack of mail up off the table and sits down next to Jeff and begins rifling through. She tosses most of the envelopes on the coffee table. Jeff sees the Greendale logo on the last letter and assumes it’s a tuition bill until Britta gasps.
“Oh my god,” she whispers.
She passes the letter to Jeff, who only reads the first paragraph:
Dear Ms. Perry,
This letter serves as the official record of your expulsion from Greendale Community College. As per your disciplinary hearing which took place on March 15, 2012, you take full responsibility, along with the other guilty parties, for the riot in the cafeteria on March 14, 2012, and the damages inflicted.
“‘Other guilty parties’ must mean the rest of you, don’t you think?” Britta asks. “We’ve all been expelled?”
“Expelled,” Jeff repeats, the word tasting funny in his mouth. It means a lot of things, in context. It means that Jeff is no longer on track to get his bachelor’s by next spring. It means that the seven of them are no longer a study group. It means that this timeline-cafeteria riots?-isn’t too much brighter than the one they just left.
Jeff was angry all the time after the housewarming party, his face fixed in an almost-permanent frown. He snapped at Britta, at Abed, at Troy, and at Shirley. It took months for him to agree with Abed, that it could all be fixed and it could all go away. He did terrible, unspeakable things for this moment where he could sit on Britta’s couch and have his life together again.
And Abed was wrong.
---
Annie hasn’t stopped crying since they left the Dreamatorium. As soon as the door opened she sat on the floor in front of the refrigerator and buried her head in her hands. Her screams mixed with the others and Abed was surprised the neighbors didn’t call the cops. Perhaps they were used to strange noises coming from apartment 303.
Annie’s still sitting in the kitchen crying when Troy and Abed finish cleaning up. They push the chairs back in around the table. They throw the pizza boxes down the trash chute. They mop the floor and sweep up the shards of glass.
Abed notices a few things different about the apartment. There’s a lot of Annie’s things lying around: black flats, a red headband, a pair of purple socks. There’s also a giant blanket fort in the middle of the hallway. Abed peeks his head inside and there are the bunkbeds, both unmade. Confused, he goes to the bedroom and finds Annie’s bed and dresser and vanity. There’s a Zac Efron poster on the wall. This is Annie’s room.
“Annie lives with us now,” Abed says. “Look.”
Troy puts down the broom he’d been using to sweep up broken glass and joins Abed in the doorway to what used to be their bedroom. “Whoa. When do you think this happened?”
Abed thinks about it for a minute. “I’d say when I caught the die. Maybe I asked Annie to move in with us.”
They stand in silence and Troy turns to the kitchen. “I know that crossing over was pretty cool, but to see the girls like that... I think I’m going to have nightmares about it. Don’t you?”
Abed shrugs. “Probably not. We knew it was going to happen.” He ignores the look Troy gives him and turns to where Annie is still crying in the kitchen.
“What are we going to do about her?” Troy tries to whisper. “How can we get her to stop crying?”
“Annie,” Abed calls. “Come see your bedroom. You live with us now.”
She looks up and her eyes are bloodshot. She’s still wearing her Geneva dress. Abed wonders if she has a different one in the closet.
Troy gives her a smile which Abed thinks is meant to be reassuring, but he looks too tired. He goes to where Annie’s sitting and holds out his hand. “It’s okay,” he says.
She jumps at his voice and chokes out another sob. But she reaches up and lets Troy pull her to her feet. Slowly, he leads her to the bedroom where the bed is made and the floor is spotless. She looks around at the familiar things and starts crying again. She buries her face in Troy’s chest and he throws Abed a helpless look as he wraps his arms around her.
Abed turns away and leaves, goes back into the Dreamatorium. He doesn’t shut the door behind him, just stands there and stares at the place they had appeared a few hours ago. Annie cries echo through the apartment but Abed doesn’t mind them anymore. They have won.
---
“We're coming over,” Jeff says into the phone Sunday morning. “We'll pick up Shirley on the way.”
He hangs up on Abed and turns to Britta, who has just put her own cell phone down on the bed. “Shirley will be ready in twenty minutes. She said Andre was suspicious last night and found her vodka in her purse. She babbled a little bit before he asked if she was having a hard time because of the expulsion. How's Annie?”
Britta's face is paler than usual. She grabs a cigarette off the nightstand but can't get the lighter to light. Jeff reaches over and does it for her.
“I didn't ask,” he says. “Did you sleep?”
“I pretended to. Did you?”
“Pretended to,” he replies. This earns him what might have once been a smile. He wraps his arm around her (she sleeps on his left, always his left, so he can hold her like a man should be able to hold his... Britta) and she sighs a little.
“I'm not scared. But I'm worried.”
He nods, knows that she'd rather take off his other arm herself than admit to being scared. Being in her apartment, in her bed, he can almost see the girl she used to be. She looks uncomfortable, though, among things that once and now again belong to her. She never quite believed that this would work, and when it did, when they heard Pierce’s voice on the other side of the door, when Abed opened his backpack and showed them what was inside, she put on a brave face and did what she needed to do. He wishes now that he had listened to her. Annie’s cries and Britta’s retching and the screams replay in his head.
“It’ll be okay,” he lies.
Shirley slides into the backseat and Jeff notices Andre watching from the living room window. Jeff gives him a wave and a reassuring smile, which Andre returns, and Jeff pulls out of the driveway before he says anything.
“Everything okay?”
“My boys are so big! I can’t believe that he kept them from me all these months.” Shirley’s voice is thick with hangover.
“But Shirley, you have to remember,” Britta says, “that wasn’t this Andre. This one is good and loves you and the boys and you married him, remember?”
Shirley hmphs and neither Jeff nor Britta push the issue. A bottle of something sticks out of Shirley’s purse.
Britta gets antsy when Jeff pulls into the apartment complex’s parking lot; she flicks her lighter and shuffles her feet against the floor. He hears her take a couple deep breaths and after he shifts into park he squeezes her knee.
“It’s okay,” he says lowly.
“Are we going to go inside or are we going to spend all day sitting out here feeling each other up?” Shirley asks from the backseat.
When they get upstairs, Jeff braces himself, but the apartment is clean. Now that he can pay proper attention, the place looks different than it did all those months ago, on that night. Troy and Abed are sitting at the table with notebooks and papers and pens.
“Where’s Annie?” Britta asks. Abed points to the bedroom and Britta takes off immediately, shutting the door behind her.
“What the hell is going on, guys?” Jeff asks as he and Shirley take seats at the table.
“We’ve been expelled,” Abed says calmly. “Troy and I are trying to piece together everything that’s happened in this timeline since the night of the housewarming party, but aside from Annie moving in with us and somehow starting a riot in the Greendale cafeteria, we can’t figure it out.”
“Well, figure it out. Now. Or find someone who can figure it out for you.”
“There is someone,” Troy says. “But it would mean we’d have to tell them what we did.”
Jeff scrubs his face with his hand. “Pierce.”
“Pierce,” Abed repeats.
---
“How are you, Annie?” Britta asks. She sits on the edge of the bed, where Annie is huddled under the blankets. She’s still wearing her Geneva dress; it’s wrinkled and stained past recognition of the time and effort Troy and Abed put into making it.
Annie’s hair is tangled and greasy and she has dark circles beneath her eyes. She looks like she just stopped crying, and Britta can’t imagine that she’s eaten since lunch yesterday. “What we did,” she starts, and then stops, covering her mouth with her hands.
“I know,” Britta replies. “We’re going to fix it. It’ll all get better.” She looks around the room, at the pictures and the butterflies and the neatly stacked textbooks. Something about it is familiar, tugs at her stomach. It’s almost as if there’s a part of her that remembers this room, as if the Britta who was is now inside of her, sharing her memories. Britta doesn’t want her.
“Why don’t we get you washed up and changed? And then we can make something to eat, maybe some coffee. How about that?” Britta stands up and sifts through Annie’s dresser, pulling out clean underwear and sweatpants.
“I don’t want to be Geneva anymore,” Annie whispers. “She’s not a nice person.”
Britta nods and forces a smile. “Okay. Can you be Annie again?”
“I told you, Britta. I told you I didn’t want to kill anyone. Why did this happen?”
“Sometimes bad things happen,” Britta says slowly. She’s in way over her head here, has the urge to curl up in bed next to Annie and sleep forever. A different timeline is not a cure for poor mental health and Britta hates herself for letting Jeff and Abed talk her into taking Annie out of the hospital. But if they put her back there now, their secret wouldn’t be safe. And maybe they would all get locked up in mental wards. Maybe that’s where they need to be.
“But,” Britta continues, “me and Jeff and Abed and Troy and Shirley are all going to make things good again. I’ll walk you to the bathroom, okay?”
Annie bites her lip and then nods, letting Britta lead her down the hall, past where everyone is huddled over papers at the dining room table. Britta feels a pang of longing for Pierce’s mansion, for their nightly dinners and the optimism in all of their faces.
Britta sits on the edge of the tub as Annie brushes her teeth and washes her face. She waits outside while Annie changes but doesn’t join the others. She doesn’t really want to know what’s going on.
When Annie emerges from the bathroom she looks a little better but still tired. Britta can’t remember the last time she saw her out of that Geneva dress. She looks even younger in sweats with her hair tied back, too many pounds missing from her frame.
“Can you make me buttered noodles?” she asks.
“Sure thing.”
Annie sits in one of the recliners with her knees pulled up to her chest as Britta boils the water. Jeff is saying something about Pierce and Greendale and Dean Pelton, concepts that had seemed so far away yesterday but today are tangible things that exist to her. Britta hums a little so she doesn’t have to listen and boiling water slops over the side of the pot as her hands shake.
While Annie eats Britta finally sits at the table between Abed and Jeff. “Okay, what’s going on?”
“We’re going to call Pierce and have him come here tomorrow,” Abed says. “And we’ll tell him the truth. That way he can fill us in on what’s been going on, why we’ve been expelled, and how we can fix it.”
There’s nothing to fix, Britta thinks. It’s something she said to Annie to get her to brush her teeth. Life is life and sometimes it’s shitty no matter what timeline you’re in. Britta doesn’t gloat that she was right all along. She doesn’t mention it. She nods and watches as Troy doodles Inspector Spacetime, Reggie, and Geneva on the back of his expulsion letter. It reminds her that she needs to pick Annie’s dress up off the bathroom floor and pack it away. She makes a note to check for duplicates in the closet.
---
It’s dark when Jeff drops Shirley off at home. Andre’s sitting in the kitchen, a tray of cooling cookies on the table in front of him.
“What’s all this?” she asks. Her words haven’t started slurring yet.
Andre’s face is set in a hard line and she remembers the day he kicked her out. When he called Britta and threw her into a car and wouldn’t let her hold her children anymore. “You promised Elijah that you’d make cookies for his school bake sale tomorrow. But then you left this morning and just got back. What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing,” she says, gripping her purse tighter. She doesn’t dare move in case he hears the liquid in the bottle sloshing around.
“Look, Shirley, I know things have been tough for you since you got expelled. And I understand that you want to lean on your friends for support. But this isn’t fair. The kids have to come first. I can’t keep coming up with excuses for you.”
She doesn’t reply and he gets up and walks around the table to where she’s standing.
“We’ll get through it, okay? Whatever it is-” He leans in to hug her but stops. “Have you been drinking again? Damn it, Shirley, I can smell it on you.”
“I’m a grown ass woman,” she says.
“I don’t care what you are. You can’t be around the kids like that. You can’t become that person again.”
And suddenly the two Andres aren’t so different anymore. She pulls her hand back and slaps him across the face. It echoes loudly and, far away, she hears the patter of footsteps overhead.
Then everything is silent. Andre stares at her with a look of disbelief for a good fifteen seconds and then his eyes change, are menacing, protective. He points to the door. “Get out.”
He doesn’t call Britta this time. He doesn’t put her in a car and sigh. She knows somewhere that she’s crossed a line but she’s tired and angry and drunk.
She leaves the ring on the table next to the cookies when she goes.
---
“Are you guys on drugs? Did you all do drugs without me?” Pierce asks accusingly. “Britta’s got a lesbian streak in her hair, Troy’s wearing a gay necklace, Jeff’s wearing a gay sweater. You guys are always leaving me out.”
They’re all just sort of staring at Pierce, as if they can’t believe he’s real. Jeff didn’t realize how much they’d been missing an entire piece of themselves without him. Jeff had always secretly thought that Pierce was the most disposable of the group; they would be able to survive if he was kicked out or left or, well, died. And they did. They did survive.
But it cost them too much. Jeff wonders right then if they made the right decision, if the things they did were worth it to have Pierce back. But then he looks at Annie, who hides behind a curtain of hair, at Britta, whose hands shake even when they move over his skin, at Shirley, who drinks even more than she did a month ago. Troy, who watches Abed out of the corner of his eye warily. And Abed, who forged this plan, whose face never wavered as they left the Dreamatorium.
It all went to shit without Pierce, Jeff admits to himself.
“We told you, Pierce, this is all real. We’re really from a different timeline, one where you’re dead,” Abed says. “But we need to know what’s happening in this timeline. How did we get expelled?”
“Fine, I’ll play along. It was at Starburns’s memorial service.”
Annie gasps. “Did we kill Starburns?”
“What?” Pierce asks. “Of course not. He died when the meth lab in his trunk exploded. Something about a drunk driver, I don’t know, I didn’t pay attention. Then we were all mad because Professor Kane quit because he felt bad about Starburns dying, which was a real lame move for a guy who probably saw worse things in prison. And Jeff cried a little because we had to take Biology over again.”
Abed writes this all down. “So what you’re saying is that this timeline has gotten increasingly darker, too? Interesting.”
“All timelines are dark, Abed,” Britta snaps. “Because life is dark. I don’t know what you were expecting, but we’re not going to stumble around until we find a timeline filled with rainbows and puppies. Because that doesn’t exist.”
“You were wrong before,” Abed says.
“That’s enough,” Jeff warns. “We’re not going to talk about who was right and who was wrong. It’s done, it’s over.” He turns back to Pierce. “What happened at the memorial?”
“Instead of eulogizing, we all went up and talked about how much Greendale sucks, and everyone started rioting. Then the board expelled us.”
They sit in silence for a while and Jeff thinks it’s because it’s all real now, the expulsion and the dimension-crossing and Pierce being alive and whole while they are not.
“I need,” Shirley says finally, “a place to stay.”
Britta catches Jeff’s eye. “You can stay at my place,” he says.
He knows from Britta’s glance that she’ll be there, too, that it’ll be the three of them (and probably the cat) in his apartment from now on. He watched yesterday as she led Annie around the apartment and cooked her lunch and he knows she needs to feel needed, especially now. Having Shirley to take care of, to watch over, it will give her purpose and help her forget, at least for a little while.
“I thought Dean Pelton loved us,” Troy says, his face sad.
Pierce doesn’t seem to notice that Troy talks like a computer now and not an actual human. Jeff should probably be worried about this, but he can’t possibly expand his list of concerns to include Pierce’s onset of dementia.
---
Annie cries in her sleep. Or maybe she’s not sleeping at all. But it’s three in the morning and Abed can hear her on the other side of the blanket fort. The fort is a good idea; he commends old Abed and Troy on coming up with it. It’s a good way to get the three of them to live together without having to give up the Dreamatorium, the most important thing he’s ever created.
Careful not to wake Troy, he climbs down from the top bunk and creaks Annie’s bedroom door open. She’s awake, lying on her side, the blankets pulled up to her chin. She hasn’t worn her Geneva dress since that first day. Britta found another one in the closet, an identical dress, in pristine condition. Abed watched as she threw it in a plastic bag and took it with her when she left.
“Abed?” Annie asks, rolling onto her back. “What are you doing?”
“Just seeing if you’re all right. I heard you crying.”
“Sorry if I woke you up.”
He shuffles in the doorway. “It’s fine. You don’t have to be upset or scared, you know. It all worked out. We’re here and Pierce is here. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
She shakes her head. Her ponytail whips back and forth. “Not like this. Not like that.”
“But you knew that’s what was going to happen. I told you.”
“I couldn’t do it,” she says. Her face crumples.
Arc of the Covenant. That Annie had looked at his Annie in shock, eyes wide and mouth agape. Before the timelines had diverged, before he and Troy selected Yahtzee as their game of choice, Abed had kissed her, all lips and tongue and sweetness, but he had to forget about that. It was easy, actually, to clear his mind and do what he did. He hadn’t been afraid, not even a little.
“We did something bad, Abed.”
“We did something amazing,” he corrects. “No one else could have done this.”
She wipes her eyes with her shirt sleeve. She would still be in the hospital in too-big pajamas if he hadn’t broken her out.
“I hope you’ll be our Geneva again,” he says. “Goodnight.” He closes the door behind him and climbs back into bed.
“Is she okay?” Troy asks from beneath him.
“She’ll be fine,” Abed answers.
“But what if she’s not? She seems almost worse than she was before. This is like when we took her out of the hospital and she screamed for two days.”
“But we’re here now. Once she realizes that she’ll be okay.”
“I’m still worried.”
“Don’t be. Go to sleep. Goodnight, Troy.”
Troy shifts and the whole bunk shakes. Abed waits but Troy never returns his goodnight.
---
Britta goes back to doing what she does best. Jeff hands her takeout menu after takeout menu and she piles them high next to the phone. She orders dinner every night for the three of them and they sit at Jeff’s Ikea table and eat.
Shirley drinks and drinks and calls Andre so many times he must eventually unplug the phone because after a few days it stops ringing and Shirley can’t get through.
Britta goes to check on Annie every couple of days but she makes Jeff come with her because she doesn’t want to talk to Abed. She’s still mad at him, maybe about telling her she was wrong, maybe because he got them into this mess. But Jeff goes with her and he talks to Abed and Troy so Britta doesn’t have to.
“At least in the other timeline we were together,” Troy says one day when Britta disappears into Annie’s bedroom without a word.
Britta moves her things into Jeff’s apartment, her clothes and her all-natural laundry detergent and her CD collection. The cat’s litterbox sits in his kitchen and her leather jackets fill up his closet. He pees while she brushes her teeth and he wakes her up when she falls asleep on the couch. It’s domestic and marriage-y and once upon a time, Jeff would grow moody and bail. He wonders what their relationship was in this timeline, if she had to lean on him when they got expelled, if he needed her to keep him steady.
They sleep in spurts. Britta whimpers in her sleep but doesn’t mention nightmares when she shakes herself awake. Jeff dreams of the harsh lines of the Dreamatorium closing in on him, squeezing all of the air out of his body while Abed watches, unconcerned. They nap in the afternoons, mostly, staring at the ceiling all night while Shirley calls Andre’s disconnected line over and over and over, muttering to herself about her sons. When she passes out, her snores fill the apartment the way they filled Pierce’s mansion and Jeff pretends they are there instead.
And there’s nothing else to do, no plans to hatch, no dimensions to cross. Jeff feels restless, cooped up. He drives around, past Greendale, where he watches students walk from class to class. He spots Garrett and Fat Neil and Vicki and Quendra, reminds himself that Starburns is dead.
One day he drives to City College and speaks with an admissions counselor about transferring his credits over. He’s given a brochure about classes and professors and extra-curricular activities. And for a few minutes, for the drive back home, he imagines that he can turn it all around. Greendale doesn’t want him, fine, he can go elsewhere. He can go to Greendale’s rival and he can get his bachelor’s and he can become a one-armed lawyer. He can he can he can.
But then he gets home and Shirley’s yelling at Britta and Britta’s yelling back. Troy sends him a text saying they need to talk, all of them, and can they please come over. The car ride is silent except for Shirley muttering under her breath about Britta being a busybody and Britta smokes three cigarettes but she doesn’t retaliate.
“I think something happened to Dean Pelton,” Abed says when they’re all-Pierce included-sitting around the table. “I went to Greendale today and there was someone in the dean’s office but it wasn’t Dean Pelton. It was a doppelganger.”
“A doppeldeaner,” Troy corrects proudly.
“Don’t you see? That’s how we got expelled. Someone kidnapped the real dean and replaced him with an imposter to get us kicked out of school. We find out who, we stop him, we reinstate the real dean, and we get back into Greendale.” Abed closes the notebook in front of him. “I think it’s Chang.”
Britta scoffs loudly. “So now we’re after Chang? What’re you gonna do, kill him, too?”
Abed cocks his head to the side. “If we have to.”
“No!” Annie shrieks.
Troy grasps her hand and gives her a smile. He shakes his head. “Of course that’s not going to happen, Annie. Right, Abed?”
“Abed, come on,” Jeff says, tone light. “We can check out if your theory is true, but couldn’t we just, I don’t know, call the police?”
“It’s our job to make this timeline brighter. We have a chance here. We didn’t have a chance before.”
“If we can get back to school…” Shirley begins.
“Greendale is not a band-aid,” Britta says. “It’s not going to make everything perfect. I told you all that. Look! Look what happened! We did something so horrible, and for what? Are we any better than we were before? If we had stayed where we were, we could have left Annie in the hospital and she would heal. We could have gotten Shirley into a rehab program. We could have gone back to school. We could have done it.”
She leans back in her chair, breathing heavily. It’s the most and loudest Jeff’s heard her speak in weeks. There’s truth to what she said and Jeff lets that settle in his chest. Britta being right always catches him by surprise but it shouldn’t, really, because she somehow is always right, whether she means to be or not.
“It’s a good thing everyone here is on the same page with what’s going on,” Pierce interjects loudly.
“We’re going to kill Chang,” Abed says, “and rescue Dean Pelton so he can reenroll us in school.”
“No, we’re not,” Britta objects.
“Abed, you don’t even know the dean’s been kidnapped. And you don’t know that Chang’s guilty of being anything other than a sociopath, which, if we went after him for that, well, that would be quite the case of calling the kettle black. So drop it,” Jeff says with what he hopes is finality.
Abed doesn’t answer and it’s quiet until Pierce breaks the tension with, “But the kettle’s Asian, not black.”
---
“I know she’s had a tough time with the expulsion,” Andre says. “And I’ve tried so hard to be understanding. I didn’t complain when I was home with the kids for two straight days because she was at school for a pillow fight. Or when she left on Christmas Day to make Abed feel better. But I can’t allow her to start drinking again in front of my children. I have to draw the line, you know?”
Jeff stirs his coffee and nods, filing away the mentions of the pillow fight and Christmas. “I do. We’re trying to help her, Andre, but… we don’t know what to do. It’s been-we’re all a little lost right now.”
“Are you going to tell me what happened to your-”
“No,” Jeff interrupts. “Not now.”
Andre stares at him for a minute as if sizing him up. He watches Jeff over his mug as he takes a sip of coffee. “You two have gotten really close this year.”
“Andre, if you think I’m having an affair with your wife-”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’m sleeping with Britta.”
Andre nods and takes a deep breath. “The first time this happened, it was after her dad died. She scared Elijah and Jordan and it was such a point of contention between us. She’d disappear for days at a time and when she was home she was hungover. She was grieving and that was how she grieved. But it drove me away.”
“How did it end?”
“I cheated. And she snapped out of it. Stopped drinking, smiled through withdrawal, helped the boys with their homework. She kicked me out and started classes at Greendale.”
Jeff thinks for a second. “But what if other bad things don’t snap her out of it this time? What if other bad things just make it worse?”
“Look, you guys have your study group and your secrets and I’ve never, ever tried to infringe on that, not even a little. But you don’t get to know more about my wife than I do, Jeff.”
And maybe it’s a dumb move and maybe Abed and Britta will hate him after it for entirely different reasons. But Jeff opens his mouth anyway, leans in a little bit, his elbow propped on the table. “Do you believe in alternate dimensions?”
---
“I think Annie should move in with us.”
Jeff looks up from his takeout container. “Here? Should I set her up in the kitchen or in the bathroom? Maybe that corner behind the couch?”
“I’m serious,” Britta says. “She can share a room with Shirley.”
She’s never been good at masking how she feels-not with him, anyway-and he knows, can see it in her face that she wants them all under one roof again so she can feed them and look after them. Shirley, in the beginning, had accused Britta of treating them all like her cats, and maybe she was right.
“I don’t want her over there,” she says quietly. “I don’t trust him.”
“But that’s where she lives. Annie’s an adult. She can make her own decisions about her living arrangements.”
“She needs somebody to take care of her. She needs-”
“She needs to be in a hospital,” Jeff says softly. “I can’t believe we took her out. I’m so sorry that I talked you into it.”
Britta lets out a shaky breath. “What would happen to us if we committed her? She’d tell. And they’d probably commit us right along with her.”
Jeff laughs dryly. “Maybe that’s what we need.”
He imagines them all then in straightjackets and a padded room. It happened once before, just briefly, just a misunderstanding between them and some police officers. But this time it would be real. He would tell doctors about the fire and his arm and Abed’s ideas. He would describe their time living in Pierce’s mansion. He would recall the blood everywhere, the insanity of seeing yourself dying. The way Britta vomited in the bushes and Annie cried and Shirley prayed.
“Maybe what we need is to go back,” Britta says. “No, no, think about it. We can live at Pierce’s again and get jobs and get back in school. We can put Annie back in the hospital because they know how unstable she is and they wouldn’t take her as seriously when she tells them what happened. And we’ll bring Pierce with us!”
“Britta…” he begins.
“I don’t want to do this anymore, Jeff.” She sounds so utterly defeated. She’s not the same person who spent all day learning how to cook a turkey for Thanksgiving or baked batch upon batch of cookies for Christmas. She made sure they ate and she picked happy movies for them to watch and she kept them together, kept them safe, kept them sane.
Something broke the night they crossed over and Jeff isn’t used to being the one doing the fixing.
“You went along with Abed because you were out of ideas. Well, I’m out of them, too,” she says.
He stands up and begins clearing the dinner plates. He’s gotten too good at doing things with one hand. He drops a kiss on the top of Britta’s head on his way to the sink and it’s not until he turns on the water does he see her shoulders start to shake as she cries.
---
It happens like this:
Abed sneaks out one morning while Troy and Annie are still sleeping. He and Troy have spent weeks and weeks planning and researching. He was right, of course, it is Chang. The school is covered in banners with Chang’s face on them. The whole thing is over-the-top and terribly unsubtle. Abed can think of a million ways he could have done it better.
Chang uses teenage boys as security. Not just teenage boys, but prepubescent boys, with cracking voices and greasy faces. They’re pretty vicious, but Abed is smarter. The seven of them-for some reason known as the Greendale Seven-are plastered on posters everywhere. Greendale’s Most Wanted.
But the boys don’t recognize Abed with his goatee. It’s kind of silly, really, Clark Kent in glasses, but Abed sneaks right into the school. Classes are over for the day. He finds the fake dean first.
Chang is in the study room at the table. Abed knew all along that’s where he’d be. Chang was once their teacher, once their peer, had once slept with Shirley. They were Netflix friends.
It does not escape Abed that these things happen in places that are important to him. These places would be ruined, destroyed, for some people but for him, these places are now more powerful.
He goes back to the dean’s office and finds the expulsion paperwork. It’s not hard to forge the reverse. It’s too late for this semester but maybe the fall, maybe in September they can sit around the study table again. It’ll be like it was. It’ll be bright.
When he gets home, they’re both awake, eating cereal at the kitchen table. “Hey,” Troy says. “Where’ve you been?”
“What if I told you that we could go back to Greendale in the fall?”
Troy’s eyes widen and a smile appears on his face. “Did you call the police? Did they find the dean?”
“We’re not expelled anymore,” Abed says carefully.
Annie stares up at Abed and he knows that she knows, even if Troy hasn’t caught on. She gives him a watery look and suddenly this is it. He knows he’s pushed her too far and that even if she does get better, it’s not going to be the same. He can try his hardest to keep her close but she’s already gone.
---
Shirley’s hands are damp as they wrap around Ben’s middle. He fits in her lap so snugly and perfectly and doesn’t seem to mind her sweaty palms. Her head is pounding and she feels so incredibly nauseous but Elijah is on her left and Jordan is on her right and she can deal with all of it.
Her children are so beautiful, so wonderful and perfect, that maybe all this was worth it to get them back. She still has nightmares about the night of Abed’s birthday, when they defied science and nature and maybe even God. She hasn’t been to church in so long.
“I think,” Andre says, “that this could work. But you and I have to talk about something. Boys, can you take your brother and go upstairs for a little while?”
Shirley doesn’t want to let go of Ben, but she hands him to Jordan anyway and the three of them scurry off and she relishes in their footsteps on the stairs.
“Jeff came to visit me last week,” Andre begins.
Shirley doesn’t know anything about that, but she hasn’t really been paying much attention to Jeff lately, or Britta, or Annie, or any of the group. She spends most of her days holed up in Jeff’s guest bedroom, drinking and calling Andre repeatedly. Now that her mind’s a little clearer she reminds herself to go and check on Annie, to make sure Troy and Abed have food in their kitchen, to apologize to Britta, to visit Pierce, to thank Jeff.
“He told me everything. About what happened in October and who you really are and what you did. And it was a lot for me to process, as you can imagine. I don’t have a reason not to believe Jeff but I don’t know if I do. All I know is this: you are my wife and the mother of my children. I love you very much, Shirley. But I think it would be best if you come back here and live and don’t talk to them anymore. If you want to go back to school, that’s great, and I’m sure you’ll find another school that will accept you. But I don’t want you to have anything to do with them.”
The first thing she feels is anger because she’ll be damned if she lets Andre tell her what to do. But her lap is still cold from the loss of Ben and she thinks of all she did in order to get her family back. And everything she did would be for naught if she walked away from them.
But her study group family… They took care of her when no one else would. They love her unconditionally and after everything that’s happened in the last three years, leaving them would be like leaving a piece of herself.
Either way, she will lose, will be incomplete. But to choose anything or anyone over her kids would make her unable to stomach her own face in the mirror. Andre holds the highest, most precious collateral over her head.
“You have to understand, I can’t cut them out of my life completely all at once. I’ll move out of Jeff’s apartment and I won’t see them anymore, but I have to be able to call. For now.”
Andre is still for a moment, then nods. “Okay. I want you to get better, Shirley. I don’t want this to be like last time.”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out her wedding ring. He holds it out and his face is so hopeful and for the first time since that first night she sincerely regrets not knowing what their second wedding was like. She holds out her hand and he slides the ring on her finger and it weighs there like the loss of her friends. She knows then that she will always feel it.
She smiles despite herself.
---
“We could leave.” She says it without any conviction at all. “We could get in the car and go. Drive east, to New York.”
“Okay,” Jeff replies with equal unenthusiasm. “You could change your blue streak to pink.”
“People would give you their seats on crowded subways because you have one arm.”
“You could give people free therapy in Central Park.”
“I could go out early on Sunday mornings and bring home baggles for breakfast.”
“I would keep making fun of you for saying it like that.”
“But you’d still eat them.”
“Of course. They’d be delicious. I’d have to run off all those carbs afterward, though.”
“I hate running. I’d sunbathe on the balcony while you’re gone.”
“We’d have a balcony?”
“Duh doy. We’d be filthy rich. But we would still give to charity and do volunteer work.”
“So we’d be trendy filthy rich?”
“Sure.”
He rolls onto his side to face her. It’s sunny outside and they didn’t pull down the shades before they went to bed. The room is bright and the breeze coming in the window is cool. It’s almost summer. “We have to start living our lives. We need a plan.”
They’ve all been still for more than six months, talking about getting to places and points, but nothing has changed, not really. They’re still broken and messed up and they’ve done awful things. They should have stayed where they were, Jeff thinks for the millionth time.
“I think we should put Annie back in the hospital. We can’t be selfish anymore. And we’ll help Shirley through a twelve-step program and we’ll call the police to investigate about the dean and we’ll go back to school. You’re right. No more excuses.”
The blue streak is fading from her hair, which is sticking up a little in the back. She still looks so tired, dark circles lining her eyes.
“I’m in love with you,” he says.
A smile, a small one, ghosts across her face, the first time he’s seen her smile in so long. She reaches out and traces the spot where his arm used to be with her fingertips. “I think I’ve been in love with you for quite a long time,” she says quietly, not meeting his eyes.
He leans in to kiss her but his phone rings. He groans but she laughs and climbs over him to grab it off the nightstand.
“It’s Troy.” She punches the answer button and brings the phone to her ear. “Hi Troy.”
He watches her face as it changes from-well, not happy, but content, at least-to horrified. Jeff feels a chill in his chest and it spreads down to his stomach and his toes. She hangs up the phone and runs her hands over her face a couple times before turning back to him.
“Abed went to Greendale yesterday,” she says, her voice uneven. “He got us un-expelled. Wanna guess how he did that?”
“Fuck,” Jeff mutters. He throws back the blankets and gets out of bed, starts rummaging around for clothes. “Go wake up Shirley, will you?”
Britta nods, puts on a t-shirt off the floor, and disappears. Jeff’s pulling up his jeans when she comes running back in. “Shirley’s not here.”
“What? Where the hell is she?”
“I’m calling Andre,” Britta says as she dials. “Hi, Andre, it’s Britta. Have you seen Shirley? What do you... Oh. Um, okay then. Bye.”
Britta throws her head back and yells in frustration. “Shirley’s moving back home. On the provision that she no longer sees any of us.”
“I told him,” Jeff says softly. “I fucking told him everything because I thought it would help Shirley but I didn’t think...”
She moves to stand in front of him and stands up on her tiptoes to place a hand on his cheek. “We’ll worry about that later. One crisis at a time, okay?”
They don’t speak in the car, but she keeps a hand on his thigh. She smokes five cigarettes on the way there. The brick sits in the front door of the apartment building and Jeff kicks it aside as they enter. He’s so angry at Abed, at Andre, at everyone, because how on earth are they supposed to heal if something keeps messing it all up?
Troy answers the door after Jeff pounds on it.
“What the fuck is going on?” Jeff demands.
“Abed got us back in school...” Troy says, his face meek.
Jeff pushes past Troy and finds Abed in his recliner, watching TV. “What did you do?”
Abed shrugs. “I made the timeline brighter. I did what I had to do.”
“No,” Jeff says. “No. That’s not the answer, Abed. It wasn’t the answer before and it wasn’t the answer this time. You think this is brighter? You think getting caught and going to jail is brighter?”
“We’ll be back at Greendale.”
“I don’t care! That doesn’t matter anymore, Abed! Shirley’s gone, did you know that? Andre took her back but she can’t see us anymore. And we have to put Annie back in the hospital. Real bright, huh?”
There’s a creak and Jeff turns around to find Annie standing in the doorway to her bedroom. “I have to go back there?” she asks, eyes full of tears.
“Annie,” Britta says, “we want you to get better. You’re not getting better here. We can take you somewhere else, to a better hospital.”
“You two don’t get to make those kinds of decisions,” Abed says. “You’re not really our parents.”
“So we should just sit back and watch as you commit murder? We love you, Abed, but this has got to stop,” Britta bites.
“Did you even find the real dean?” Jeff asks.
Abed shakes his head and Jeff closes his eyes and sighs. “I can’t do this anymore,” he says. “Annie, can you pack some of your things? You can come stay with me and Britta until we can find a doctor for you.”
Abed stands up. “You don’t get to take her away.”
“I have to go, Abed,” Annie says. “I can’t do this, either.”
Britta helps her pack a duffel bag and Jeff slings it over his shoulder. She hugs Troy and kisses Abed on the cheek. And she leaves with Jeff and Britta, walking between them, shuffling her feet slowly in a pair of slippers. Jeff closes the door behind them and he sees that Troy’s eyes are watering as he looks at Abed accusingly but Abed is stoic.
---
In the days after Annie leaves, Troy mopes around the apartment a bit. He sits in his recliner and watches sad Disney movies like Bambi and The Fox and the Hound and Abed leaves him alone for the most part. Instead of joining him, Abed goes to the Dreamatorium and scribbles in his notebook about the other timelines and how they could possibly be different. He makes charts and graphs and by the time he’s finished and leaves the Dreamatorium, Troy is watching Toy Story 3.
“Abed,” Troy calls. He’s still facing the TV.
“Yeah?”
“Did you really kill Chang?”
“I did what I had to do.”
Troy can’t sigh anymore: it sounds like a squeak, like a mouse or old brakes on a subway car. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
“I thought you would have figured it out. Annie did.”
“Jeff and Britta found a hospital for Annie. They’re taking her there next week.”
Abed doesn’t reply and Troy still doesn’t turn around to face him.
“Do you remember when we first got here and I asked you if it freaked you out to see Britta and Shirley and Annie like that? And you said no? I didn’t understand how it couldn’t and I still don’t. I don’t get it, Abed. That girl sitting there, she was as much our Annie as this Annie is.”
“She wasn’t, though. They were all different. Our Annie is here. Or, she was.”
Troy stands up and Abed is surprised to see that he’s wearing clothes, not pajamas, jeans and sneakers. “Look at that bedroom, Abed. That’s Annie’s bedroom. No matter the timeline, Annie is Annie. Britta is Britta, Shirley is Shirley. But you’re not you.” There’s a duffel bag next to the recliner that Abed didn’t notice before. Troy picks it up and slings it over his shoulder. “I’m going to stay at Jeff’s for a little while and help him and Britta with Annie. I want her to get better, Abed.”
Abed just watches as Troy claps him on the shoulder before leaving. The apartment is so quiet that it buzzes. He walks from room to room and wonders what each of them looks like in another timeline. He imagines Annie lives with them in each one, that he and Troy always eventually realize that she was the missing piece. He doesn’t want to think about her in the hospital, though, hair lank and eyes sunken. He wants to watch her laugh again, feel her hand warm inside of his, listen to her sing off-key in the car.
He saves the Dreamatorium for last. He closes the door behind him and pulls out the die in his pocket. He tosses it in the air and it lands on the floor with a clatter. He pushes buttons on the control panel. “Begin crossover. Evil Abed to timeline four.”
The room begins to shake and the lights go off.