For She's a Jolly Good Fellow

"And, students, that is why," Duncan slurred, "Why Women Leave redefined the field of evolutionary psychology."

From the middle row, Britta Perry rolled her eyes as hard as she could, fuming silently. Duncan had shown signs of having fallen off the wagon for a while now, but it was indisputable at this point. And he was wasting her god damn fucking time with this shit.

Her last fume may have been less silent than she thought, because Duncan whirled on her suddenly. "What?!" he demanded, red-faced. "Do you disagree with my analysis of the fairer sex, Ms. Perry?" He was slightly cross-eyed as he stared at her.

"No!" she objected. "I mean... yes! But that's not why I'm pissed off at you right now. I'm pissed off because you're drunk in the middle of class! This is supposed to be a psych lab and we haven't done any experiments in two weeks!"

There was a murmur of agreement from the rest of the class. In the corner, Garret raised his hand. Duncan ignored him.

"Oh, and suddenly that's such a crime, is it?" he asked. "Funny, I don't remember you complaining about it when I was instructing you in Anthropolgy!"

"Well, I actually want to fucking do this you fucking jag!" she said, her voice rising now. "I want to be a therapist, and you rambling on about how much your Mommy didn't love you isn't fucking helping!"

Duncan stared at her for a moment. "Everyone else, out. Out! Class ended ten minutes anyone, you dunces!" No one moved for a moment. "GET OUT!" he shouted, scattering them and sending them packing for the exits. Britta tried not to let on how uncomfortable she suddenly felt. "So..." he asked, slowly. "If you 'actually want to do this', I imagine you want to get into graduate school, yes?"

"Uh..." Britta said slowly, not trusting him. "Yes?"

"Well.." the Professor of Psychology said, sitting at his desk and putting his feet up and smiling drunkenly. "I might be able to help there..."

"Okay," she said, holding up hand. "I am not sleeping with you to get into grad school. Full stop."

"Wha-" he sputtered. "No! First off, who said anything about getting you in? What I am offering you is a very rare, very valuable, letter of recommendation from one Ian Duncan. And as much as you poo poo my journal articles-," she snorted, but he just continued on, louder, "-they make me a very influential member of the academic community. And my opinion, as a result, will carry a lot of weight."

"Still not fucking you," Britta said.

"All I want," he said, ignoring her, "is a little look-see at the patient notes for the very mentally-ill friend you've been treating."

"How did you-" she caught herself, too late. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes you do," he said, confidently. "Abed Nadir. He would make an excellent case subject for a paper I'm writing about the infanticidal impulse in women."

"I think Lars von Trier beat you to that subject a while ago, Duncan," Britta said, standing and grabbing her backpack. "And if I did have a patient, there is zero chance I would share any information about him with you. You are the most unethical, repugnant, cowardly-"

"Ah, young Oedipus joins us!" Duncan interrupted her, looking past her to the doorway of the classroom. "Welcome!"

Britta turned. Troy was standing there, grinning confusedly.

"Uh?" he asked.

"Don't call him that, jackass!" she objected. Duncan had been giving her shit about her relationship ever since he'd spied them kissing in the cafeteria. She walked over, grabbing his hand. "Come on, Troy."

#

"What'd he call me?" Troy asked, once they'd made their way out into the hall.

"Don't worry about it," Britta said, "He's just being an asshole."

"Is he hitting on you again?"

"God I wish," Britta muttered under her breath.

"Uh, what?" Troy laughed, grinning.

"I wish it was that simple!" she corrected quickly. She felt heat rush into her face; annoyance flare up inside her gut. "Now you're being an asshole!"

"Hey, come on," Troy said, putting an arm around her. "I didn't mean it like that. You're the one who's always teasing me when I do that with Abed. What d'ya call them again? Fraudulent slips?"

"Freudian," she corrected, smiling a little now. It was true; she did do that a lot. You're not mad at him, she reminded herself. She wasn't really even mad at Duncan, really. Alright, she was, actually, but she knew that he wasn't the reason behind her short temper. Troy pushed the double doors that lead out to the quad open. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have snapped at you."

He squeezed her tighter. "Don't worry about it. You feeling okay? You seem down."

She worked herself a little bit closer, under his arm. "I'm... a little on edge today, that's all."

"Oh," Troy said. "Is it..." he made a circular motion in front of his crotch. "Lady business?"

"'Lady business?'" she asked, incredulous. "No, the lady's pantsuits and shoulder pads are hanging up safely in the closet today, thank you very much." She considered, briefly, telling him why it was important that her cycle had actually started earlier that week. But she didn't. Better to leave that till later... till they were alone. "It's just..."

"Hey, Troy!" a voice called from behind them. Turning, Britta saw a blond haired young man waving to at them from behind a folding metal table. He looked... familiar. And not in a good way. Draped over the front of his table was a banner that read:

THE A/V DEPARTMENT PRESENTS:

STUDENT FILM FEST 2012

"Oh... hey Mark..." Troy said without a lot of enthusiasm. "How's it going?"

"Great!" He said, his excitement much more genuine. Britta was slightly confused by Troy's hesitation. Usually he was the more sociable of the two of them. "Just promoting the film festival. Are you gonna come? You can bring, uh-" he turned to her, blank faced.

"Britta," she said, offering him her hand.

"That's right!" he said, shaking it. "You were doing fundraising for the BP oil spill right? Mark Millot."

Right. That's how she knew him. He'd been one of those pervs throwing money at her and Annie when they'd had that stupid fight over Jeff.

"Well... we're late for class... so..." Britta said, lamely. Troy just stood there being unhelpful.

"Right, right," Mark said, his tone apologetic. He handed her a flier. "Well, like I said, you guys should stop by. Some kid's working a documentary about fracking that you might find interesting."

"That sounds great!" she said, pulling on Troy's hand and tugging him towards Boechester Hall, where their class met. "Well, uh, see you around?"

"Yeah, see ya!" he said, waving after them.

"That guy's a fucking asshole..." Troy muttered, after he was out of earshot. That surprised her, a little. Troy wasn't usually one to hold a grudge, and Mark seemed nice enough, putting aside what a pig she knew he was.

"How do you know each other?" she asked.

"He and Abed have been working on movies together a ton recently," he explained. Ah, she thought, that explains it. "I don't know how he can stand that dude. He's so pretentious. 'Ooh, my name rhymes with a wine. Ooh hoo, I'm so fancy!'" Troy paused. "Abed hasn't... mentioned him, has he?"

"Troy..." Britta said, reaching up to massage the ridge of her nose.

"What?" he asked, frowning.

"Can we just... pretend you spent ten minutes badgering me about this before giving up? Because I really cannot handle it today, okay?"

"I-" a look of guilt crossed his face. "Sorry..."

And now she just felt bad. Sighing, she snaked an arm around his waist and into the pocket of his jeans, pulling him close. "Let's just forget about it. Let's not let Mark Millot ruin Creative Writing for us, 'kay?"

#

"I see a lot of new faces in the class today," Mrs. Estrada said. "This tends to happen as the deadline to add classes approaches. Rumors about so called 'blow-off' classes tend to spread quickly at Greendale, I've come to find."

The idea to take a writing class had been Troy's, and so far it had turned out pretty well. Mrs. Estrada was a nice woman, and a good teacher, if a bit cloying at times.

"Well, I am here to tell you the rumor's are true: all you have to do to pass this class are show up and write something. There are of course written assignments, but they are not graded beyond a pass/fail basis. Every other Wednesday, you will turn in whatever you have written to my desk at the front of the class there. There are two boxes. Place your assignment in the top one if you are alright with it being read aloud in class. Place it in the bottom one if you want for just me to read it. There are written instructions near the boxes, if you don't remember them."

Britta rolled her eyes. Did she really think anyone would forget something that simple?

"Throughout the week, we'll read some of your creative works out loud, anonymously. Community college brings swaths of people from different background together, but all too often we don't take the time to stop and listen to each other's stories. Changing that is one of the points of this class."

Britta had thought this idea had been a little strange, when Mrs. Estrada had first introduced it, but by now she was a willing convert. The readings in this class were always interesting, and never in the same way. Sometimes they were sad. Sometimes they opened Britta's eyes to some part of Greendale that she'd never considered before. Sometimes, especially when Mrs. Estrada picked one of Troy's papers (and Britta had gotten pretty good at picking those out by now) they were funny. So far, none of them had been hers though, because she had always chickened out and put her papers into the top box, just like she'd done two days ago.

"The rest of the time, we'll break into small groups to do peer review and talk about what we've read that day. So, I hope that is all perfectly clear. Right now, I'd like to introduce today's reader. Vicki, come up here, please," Vicki Cooper stood up, smiling shyly and making her way to the front of the class. "Vicki and I talked in my office hours this week, which you should all feel free to stop by during, and she expressed an interest in doing this weeks readings. And luckily enough, I received a very brave, very well written piece that I thought would be perfect for her to read." She handed the younger woman a typewritten piece of paper.

"Thanks, Mrs. Estrada," Vicki said, blushing and glancing over at her boyfriend, who was seated in the front row. "Alright. So... I guess this paper doesn't have a title?" She cleared her throat, and began reading:

"Her mother had bought her the cat when she turned six, which was five years ago now to the day," Vicki began. "It was another in a long line of attempts by her mother to try and impose a more traditionally feminine outlook on her only daughter."

"Oh shit," Britta said to herself. She knew those lines. She'd written those lines.

"What's wrong?" Troy asked, leaning across his desk to whisper to her.

"Hey," Fat Neil said, turning around in his seat in the front row to glare at them. "Could you guys be quiet? Vicki's trying to read." Troy mumbled an apology, chastened. Britta said nothing.

Vicki gave Neil a quick, grateful smile before continuing on. "And just like the Barbie doll she'd received for her fifth birthday that she'd ended up exploding in the back yard with a firecracker stolen from her oldest brother, this gift ended up backfiring. But neither of them had known that at the time.

"He'd just been a kitten then, when she'd taken him out of her mother's hands and cradled him to her chest. Not the d-" Vicki stumbled for a moment, frowning, but quickly recovered. "Not the dead, limp thing, dried blood caked into its now matted white fur, that was lying in front of her now."

Britta kept her eyes locked on the chalkboard at the front of the room, not daring to look around.. She'd been drunk and high out of her mind when she'd written this piece of shit. And yes, okay, maybe the aftereffects of that had something to do with her putting it in the wrong box. But why did Mrs. Estrada have to choose this story to read aloud? It was so...

"He'd been missing for a day now. Her brother had left the door open, yet again, but this time she hadn't been there to stop the cat from getting out. She'd yelled at her father later, tears streaming down her cheeks, when he'd told her coldly that as a lifelong indoor cat, he was almost certainly already dead. She'd called him a liar, and told him that she hated him.

"She could admit to herself that she'd been wrong about the first part, standing now in the field out behind her school. The cat had been dead for awhile, that was pretty obvious. Something had torn his throat out. Something with sharp, cruel teeth. She could picture it in her mind, scaly and inhuman, its eyes lit up by an unthinking, reptilian hunger.

"She knew she should go find someone, a teacher, the principal, a janitor even. They could give him a little burial, a place to rest peacefully safe from the maggots and the flies. But she didn't. She moved on, continuing her journey back to her father's house. She didn't tell anyone what had happened to her that day."

Vicki stopped, clearing her throat. "Uh, and that's the end of it, I guess." She turned to look at Mrs. Estrada.

Don't move. Don't show any emotion. Nobody except you and the teacher knows you wrote it. It's fine. Keep your head down during the discussion and you should be able to get out of here with a minimum of-

But then she heard a choked sobbing sound coming from her right, and as much as she wanted to continue to bore a hole into the "s" in Mrs. Estrada's name, she knew she couldn't. She turned. Troy sat there, one hand clapped over his mouth, tears just starting to stream down her face. God damn it, she thought, feeling her heart twist itself into a knot. She reached out, rubbing his shoulder. "Hey..." she whispered, the corners of her vision clouding with stinging, tickling tears. "It's okay."

He turned, then, to look at her, and she watched as his eyes widened, his face contort even more sharply. He sobbed again, louder, and pushed his chair back, standing and blurting to the class, "Sorry. Sorry. I have to go- bathroom-"

"That's- that's alright Mr. Barnes," Mrs. Estrada said, coming back to the front of the class, but he was already half-way out the door. "Now, does anyone have any thoughts to share about that piece? Ms. Perry, are you-"

Britta didn't stop to answer her. She pushed the door to the classroom open and followed Troy out into the hall.

#

He was still crying when she found him, standing next to a locker near the men's bathroom. She approached him slowly, unsure of what to say. She felt a strange mixture of emotions. Guilt at hurting him like this (as she tended to do), definitely. But also... a kind of closeness. Kind of like what she felt back when she thought he'd been... when she thought they'd shared the same pain.

Luckily, he took the decision out of her hands when he saw her. He quickly closed the distance between them and threw his arms around her, burying his face in the crook of her neck. She held him, rubbing his back while she made sympathetic noises.

"What was his name?" he managed to choke out finally. She tensed, confused, thinking for a moment that he'd managed to guess at the deeper meaning behind that stupid story. "The cat, I mean."

"Oh," she said. "That story was... it wasn't really about... what it was about..." She winced at how lame that sounded. "I mean, I had a cat when I was a kid and I'm pretty sure my Mom really did expect it to help me be less of a tomboy but..."

Britta heard a door open behind her and the click-clack-click of someone in heels walking down the hall towards them. Troy let go of her quickly, and she turned to see Mrs. Estrada, a concerned look on her face.

"Are the two of you alright?" she asked.

"Yeah," Troy said, sniffling a little. "Sorry about running out and everything it's just..."

"Don't apologize Mr. Barnes, it's quite alright." She turned to Britta. "I take it, Ms. Perry, that you uh, did not intend for that to be read aloud?"

"Um... not really no. I guess I must have put it in the wrong box." Britta felt her cheeks redden. I am such a fucking dumbass.

"I'm sorry about that, then. Maybe I need to come up with a better system..." Mrs. Estrada shook her head, quickly. "Never mind about that now, though. Why don't you two take the rest of class off? Go be young and in love. Only... Ms. Perry?"

"Yeah...?" Britta asked, hesitantly. Mrs. Estrada put a hand on her arm.

"Did you really never tell anyone about what happened to you that day? Do you need... someone to talk to about it with?"

She glanced at Troy quickly. He looked confused by the question. "Oh, no," Britta said. "I mean... I appreciate it but it happened a long time ago and..." She swallowed, a sudden wave of emotion sweep over her. Why did this have to happen today? "I got help."

Mrs. Estrada smiled, pulling her hand back. "Alright, I'm glad to hear that. Here. This is your original." She handed Britta a piece of paper covered in handwriting she recognized as her own. "I thought it was very powerful. And I really did think it was brave of you to write it, even if you didn't intend to share it in class."

"I... thanks," Britta said, looking down at the floor. She felt Troy lay an arm over her shoulder.

"Well, I've got to get back to class. Buenos tardes." She shot Britta one last, weak smile, then turned and walked away.

"So," Troy asked, after Mrs. Estrada had re-entered the classroom. "I don't have any other classes today. What do you want to do? Go get some food? Catch a movie?"

"Do you know what I really want to do right now?" Britta asked, stroking his face. He seemed to be better spirits now. He'd stopped crying, and even though his voice was still a little wavering he was smiling again. It made her happy.

"What?"

#

She dug the blade of her knife into the flesh of the apple, cutting out the core and carving out a wide opening that went about halfway through the red fruit. There was a time, when she was younger, where she'd made a game out of what she could do this with: fruit, soda cans, plastic bottles. She'd gotten good at it too; it brought her a lot of respect with the stoner crowd in high school. As she got older, and pot became more and more of a solitary experience, she'd stopped bothering. But she liked to impress Troy, now. To show him he wasn't the only one who was good with his hands.

"I was... nine. Maybe ten? I'm not sure. My neighbors had this dog, this old Cocker Spaniel named Peanut. He was really old, older than I was. And he got sick," Troy said as he watched her work. They were sitting in the back seat of her car, parked out behind the Gymnasium, back in the corner flanked on three sides by fence and bush and building. "They had to put him down."

"I'm sorry," Britta said. She cut a much smaller hole out of the apple's side, making sure it connected with her first incision.

Troy shrugged, frowning. "I mean, it happens to everything eventually, right? I didn't really get that at the time, though. I cried so hard, the day they took him to the vet. I was still at it by the time my Dad got home for work. He told me to man up, to stop acting like a baby about a dog that wasn't even mine."

"Dads fucking suck," Britta observed as she cut a third hole, the carb, into the apple.

"I hear that."

"Hand me the grinder?"

"Damn, you made that fast!" Troy said as he passed it to her. She knew that it really wasn't that big of a deal, that all she'd done was poke three holes in the thing. She blushed anyhow. She opened the grinder and tapped a generous amount of weed into the top of her newly crafted pipe. "Anyway... my Grandma, the one on my Mom's side, the one that wasn't evil, she was having health problems at the time so that's probably why I reacted the way I did. She uh... she died maybe half a year after that..."