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Nothing at Greendale could ever be normal. It may have been May, and the soft breeze may have been ruffling the flowering cherry trees on campus. Students may have been gearing up for final exams and commencement. But not every student. Instead of worrying about subletting their apartment and packing for their summer adventures, Abed and Annie were about to partake in what had been dubbed “Troy and Shirley’s Ultimate Congratulations and Happy Summer Paintball Tournament.”
The prize wasn’t even that great. It was a $100 check, courtesy of Troy, a pan of Shirley’s brownies, two movie tickets, and a credit for a free class. The dean had agreed to let Troy and Shirley sponsor the game as long as the prize wouldn’t inspire people to brutally hunt each other down and totally trash the school. To make sure things didn’t get completely out of control (and of any expense to Greendale), Frankie would be overseeing the game and had the authority to call it off at any time.
“I wonder what theme we’ll go with this year,” Abed mused at the study table. “We’ve already exhausted guerrilla warfare, cowboys, and Star Wars.”
“You don’t need a theme, Abed,” Jeff said, not looking up from his phone. “This is a good luck present from your boyfriend and Shirley. Just get through the game and then start your summer like everyone else.”
“Jeff’s just mad because he’s a professor now and faculty can’t participate,” Annie speculated.
The rest of the committee, Britta, Abed, Chang, and Elroy chimed in with a chorus of mhmms and ahas in consensus.
“As moving as that thought is, I really don’t care,”Jeff responded. “There’s no stakes this year.”
“Shockingly, I agree with Jeff,” Britta said. “What’s the point? $100 isn’t even a dent in my debt. Shirley sends me brownies all the time anyway. I don’t have time to go to the movies. And I already paid for my summer classes.”
“See? No appeal for real adults,” Jeff said, giving Britta a high-five. Annie exchanged a look with Abed and they rolled their eyes at real adults.
“Dean-ings, mortals!” announced the Dean as he burst through the door in a full wizard costume.
“Craig, what the hell?” Jeff sputtered. “I thought Frankie threw out all of your costumes.”
“I did,” Frankie muttered, pushing past the dean to take her seat next to Elroy.
“While I appreciate that, Jeffrey, I am thoroughly stressed and could not deliver this news sans-costume.”
“News?” Britta asked cautiously.
“It seems that Neil and Garrett got their hands on a copy of the dean law handbook,” the dean said, tossing the book in front of Jeff. “Now, according to article 4, section 47, if the school shall host any type of game in which students compete for money or scholastic credit, the third game shall be the final installment in the quest for the Greendale diamonds.”
“What in the living hell?” Jeff sputtered.
“Greendale has diamonds?” asked Britta.
“What kind of school is this?” asked Elroy.
“Sweet! Blood diamonds, y’all,” said Chang.
“This can’t be real,” said Annie.
“I can’t believe I work here,” said Frankie.
“Cool. Cool, cool, cool,” said Abed.
Jeff grabbed the handbook and read over the paragraph. “So what if it says that? Who wrote this thing? What is dean law? You don’t have to let people compete for whatever these alleged diamonds are.”
“Well that’s the thing, I’m afraid I do, Jeffrey. Neil and Garrett have already brought this to the attention of the school board. If I don’t honor the handbook, they will open a case against the school for violating its contract and then we’ll be up for bid to another restaurant franchise.”
Annie was the first to wrap her head around this. “So what you’re saying is: people will be playing paintball to win $100, some brownies, movie tickets, a free class, and some diamonds valued at….”
“$2.8 million,” the dean finished.
“Where were those diamonds last year when Subway almost bought the school?” Jeff asked through gritted teeth.
“Under lock and key downstairs with the nutty professor. They are not to be touched or sold unless a student wins them fair and square in the final installment.”
“Oh, my God,” Britta said.
“So as you can see, we really need all hands on deck on this one. People are going to lose their minds and I'm just a little nervous things could get ugly,” the dean said, putting his hand on Jeff’s shoulder for old times’ sake. “So I’ve taken the liberty of enrolling Jeff and Elroy and Chang in a summer pottery class. Congrats! You’re students, and you’re playing.”
“What if we don’t want to? And what are you gonna do if one of us wins?” asked Elroy. “Because I could do a lot of things with $2.8 million.”
The dean placed a hand on his hip. “I would hope that you all tap into your inner morality and realize the implications of winning that much money through a game of paintball assassin at a community college and that those diamonds should never leave Greendale.”
“Or we could split it six ways and each end up with almost a cool half mil,” Chang said.
“Who said we’re teaming up?” Elroy countered.
“That’s what we always do,” said Annie. “Alliance until we’re the last six. Alliance? Alliance? Alliance?”
Jeff looked at Britta. Britta looked at Jeff. A silent exchange: here we go again.
Of course, everyone did immediately lose their shit as soon as Neil and Garrett announced that there was an insane lump of cash up for grabs. The dean sealed himself and Frankie inside his office with a week’s worth of food and made Jeff promise to call when it was over. Abed, in true fashion, managed to frame the whole thing in a motif, and had settled on a spy movie. Everyone was outfitted in head to toe black and had code names that he’d handpicked. The six of them had split up to take different quadrants of the campus: Annie and Abed on the south side, headquartered in the cafeteria, Chang and Elroy taking the north, camped out by the pool, and Jeff and Britta watching over central campus from the library.
The committee had already taken out the usual suspects: the chess club, the math club, the glee club, the cheerleaders, and Leonard. A handful of loners were the only ones left. Elroy had conveniently set up surveillance cameras for each quadrant, allowing the six of them to effectively pick off most of the competition. Jeff and Britta sat in the study room watching the monitor for passerby. Well, Britta was half-watching while eating a donut and Jeff wasn’t watching at all while he pretended to text but Britta could see he was playing Kwazy Cupcakes on mute (which she knew from experience meant he was stressing over something).
But their consensual silence was fine with her, because she didn’t know what to say to him. They’d hung out a handful of times over the summer but hadn’t talked much since their five-second engagement last year. They were amiable, but had drifted pretty far apart. And for once, Britta wasn’t actively trying to bridge that distance. She had enough going on, with trying to finish her degree and working and trying to pay her bills and trying to move off of Annie and Abed’s couch than to sort through the tangled mess of their relationship. So she mostly just tried to pretend he wasn’t even there, because that was easier than trying to erase everything else from memory. Still, she couldn’t resist messing with him. That part was also easy.
“Hey, can I ask you something serious?”
He made a noncommittal noise in response, briefly flicking his eyes up to look at her.
“Do you ever worry... that you might strain your thumbs playing Kwazy Cupcakes?”
Jeff looked up from his phone to roll his eyes at her. “Ha ha, hilarious. Do you ever worry that your knees might give out from the weight of being the worst?”
Britta smiled to herself because it had been six years and pretending to bother each other was a language they were both still fluent in. “I can’t wait for this to be over so I can go home and do nothing. I only have a week before summer classes start,” she told him.
“Oh yeah, I hear that. I’m teaching summer classes. No time off for me either. The kids must be having fun though,” he said, implying Annie and Abed. “I can’t believe they’re leaving tomorrow. I wish I had the energy to do this and then hop on a plane.”
“You are getting old,” Britta shot back, trying to avoid the topic. She wasn’t stupid. She knew that Jeff was freaking out about them leaving. Well, mostly about Annie leaving, and maybe a little bit about Abed leaving. But that was another thing in her do-not-touch pile.
“Shut up. So what else are you doing this summer?” he asked her.
“Let’s see… working, working, studying, working, maybe calling Shirley, maybe going on a couple dates with Sergio… and working.”
“Sounds riveting.”
But the thing was, it was riveting. Jeff was hung up on the words dates and Sergio (seriously, who the hell was Sergio and what kind of name was that and where did they meet and was he tall and what was his last name and did he have a Facebook and...) and he was annoyed with himself. The Jeff and Britta ship had long since sailed, run aground, and started turning into a historical wreck. It’d been six years. If it was going to happen, it would have happened. It almost did happen last year, in a for-the-rest-of-our-lives kind of way, before they remembered how much they just did not work together and added another mark to their almost-got-married tally. So he didn’t know why the thought of Britta on a meaningless date with someone whose legal first name was Sergio made him so irritated. On top of some other already present irritation he was actively trying to suppress.
Mercifully, static buzzed from their walkie-talkies, distracting him. “Spades, do you copy?”
“Hate these code names,” Jeff said through his teeth. “Yes, copy. What?”
“You’re gonna have company,” Abed said. “Four guys, lots of ammo, headed your way. They’ve got infrared.”
“We’re hiding in the walk-in freezer. Hurry up and get them,” Annie chimed in.
Jeff looked over to Britta who was already picking up two guns, tucking one in her holster.
“Ready to end this thing so we can get on with our boring summers?” he asked, looking over his own weapons.
“Yep. And so we can feel guilty about keeping the diamonds and die poor. Don’t forget that part,” Britta said, turning off the lights and killing the video feed.
“I won’t be poor. I’m gonna get that $100 check,” Jeff countered, pushing in their chairs and making sure the room looked untouched.
“Who said you’re gonna win?” she whispered as they left the study room, canvassing for threats.
“Um, because I won the first year. Second year was a fluke since it was all rigged.”
“You only won because I saved you. And I was in the top three the second year. I’m obviously much better than you at paintball.”
Jeff stole a glance at her out of the corner of his eye, in her all black and her hair plaited in a french braid on one side. His mind drifted back to that first year, them versus everybody and then, in the deserted study room, them versus themselves. So much had changed since then. But so much was still the same. Them, on a ridiculous mission, playing a ridiculous game they were way too old for, saving this ridiculous school. Something moved and caught his attention, breaking his thought.
“Over there,” he hissed, pulling them down behind a computer desk. A figure in a spy-costume that gave Abed a run for his money had his back turned to them and was fiddling with a gun. “I’ll get him, you keep watch,” Jeff said. He approached the player, drawing up his gun to take him out, only to find himself with a gun to his head. Obviously a trap, he should've known.
“Turn around, nice and slow,” the person behind him said. The voice sounded familiar.
“Carl? School board Carl? I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to play,” Jeff said, turning around to look at him.
“Normally, you’d be right pretty boy. But me and my buddies signed up for your summer class.”
“I look forward to growing and learning with you,” Jeff said sarcastically.
“Won’t be time for that. After we get our hands on those rocks this school is getting put out to pasture. TJ Maxx is very interested. Hands up, loser.”
Jeff held up his hands, only to see Britta approaching silently from behind. Saving his ass in a paintball battle again. She was always doing that. Saving him from something or someone or some unhealthy destructive thing he was doing to himself.
But that’s what Britta did, she saved people. She helped, whether you wanted it or not. That was her thing. He thought about that Thanksgiving two years ago. But somehow, she was always annoyingly right about those kind of things. Once she knew you, she knew you. Everything. But she wasn’t really annoying about it. She would be your sounding board and actually give you good advice. She was actually probably the coolest person he’d ever met, though he would never phrase it like that out loud. Plus, she was funny, even though she thought a frog in a tiny sombrero was a good prank. But her sarcasm was unparalleled and she was probably the only person who could go head to head with him in that race. She was smart, even though the group gave her so much crap for being the worst. True, maybe she did try too hard sometimes and true, she did mix up a lot of common phrases and would it kill her to just Google something on that decrepit phone of hers once in awhile, but with the things that mattered, the stuff that the rest of them seemed to be so horrible at: honesty, empathy, loyalty, authenticity, sticking by your morals while everyone laughed in your face, she was streets ahead, as Pierce would’ve said. Plus, there was also the fact that she did all of that stuff while also looking like she belonged on the page of some kind of hipster magazine. Jeff had met a lot of girls, but Britta was the prettiest. And she didn’t even try. And when she was trying, when she was channeling all of that your way...
A blast of green paint splattered off Carl's back as Britta shot him and the other crony and ran up to Jeff. “C’mon, let’s go. The other two probably already know where we are.”
Jeff was just staring at her. “What’s with you? You look like you just saw a ghost or something,” she remarked.
“Uh, nothing. Right, we've gotta go. My office?”
She nodded and they carefully made their way to Borchert hall, sealing themselves inside Jeff’s office. They both sat behind the desk. Britta couldn’t help but be aware of how close they were sitting together. She mostly didn’t think about that year anymore, the year of Jeff and Britta (well, at least not all the time anymore), that was all part of her pretend-Jeff-isn’t-here thing, but it was hard to forget about spending weekends tangled up in bed in a pile of limbs when their arms were touching like this. Everything was quiet and she could hear her own breathing and even that seemed too loud for this space.
“We’re out,” Elroy announced over the walkie-talkie. “See ya at Denny’s.”
“Just us and the kids,” Britta sputtered, thankful for the noise. “Remember when we were the Greendale parents?”
“Yeah. Look how great they all turned out. Shirley’s gone...”
“And Pierce is dead,” she finished.
“Troy is some crazy sea captain.”
“Abed’s going to L.A. with a dime and a dream.”
“Annie is going to FBI camp. At least she turned out good.”
Britta shifted away ever so slightly at the mention of Annie’s name. Things had been kind of strained between them this year, ever since she’d moved in. Britta always seemed to be looking for a way to piss her off and Annie always seemed to be looking for a way to correct her. They did have fun; Garrett’s wedding had been pretty decent. But she thought that some space would be good. Britta still felt like she should have been more sad about Annie taking off for the summer. Instead she mostly felt… relieved. Like she’d be able to breathe a little easier, move a little more freely. And she felt really bad for not feeling bad.
“What about you?” Jeff asked, breaking her train of thought.
“What about me, what?”
“When do you leave? What’s your finale?”
“Wow, Abed much? I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Finish my degree. Get a bed that’s not a couch. Keep bartending and save up. Then move, probably.”
Jeff stared at her. Okay, no. Britta couldn’t move. Shirley, okay, understandable. Sick dad. Troy? A shot at $14 million and he’d face his fear of pirates too. Pierce? Well, everyone knew it was coming. Abed? Tough, but he’d recover. Annie? That one stung. Annie was a moral compass, the first blade of green grass poking up in the spring. Hope, optimism. Validation. And there was always that thought in the back of his mind, that Annie was his safety. If it all went to hell, Annie would be there as an option. He'd give in, let her fix him up into whatever it was she thought he should be and they'd play house and that would be that, he'd never have to think about anything ever again. But also, she was probably one of his closest friends and he was going to miss her. A lot. And he should probably tell her that as soon as this was over. Maybe that was it, Annie (and okay, Abed) starting the next chapter of their still young lives and him, staying here, living his increasingly old life, that was why he was feeling… so weird, so jumpy. But Britta moving, however far in the future? That one was unacceptable. It all started with Britta.
“Move where?” he finally forced out.
“What is this, 20 questions? I don’t know. I don’t have a plan yet. But what’s left here? My parents? I definitely need some space from them. It’s all, ‘Britta, come over for lasagna.’ ‘Britta, are you late on rent?’ ‘Britta, Dad made you a shoe rack.’ Who has time for that? I mean, I do have a lot of boots, but that’s not the point.” Britta could feel herself rambling but it actually felt good to say these things out loud. She stared at the leaves on the plant on Jeff’s desk and kept going. “But I’m thinking the Bay Area, maybe Oakland? I was there once. Lots of cool people, really good vegetarian food. I think I’d-”
Jeff cut her off with mouth. She startled, almost pulling back. Then he felt her relax into him, kissing back softly, tentatively, a question. It’d been like a year since he’d kissed her and it suddenly felt like that was way too long.
“What was that for?” she asked when he pulled away, the tiniest hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
“Because. Oakland is full of hipsters.”
Abed and Annie sat back to back in front of the Shirley’s Sandwiches counter, watching over the cafeteria. Annie was getting tired. The sun was starting to shift downward in the sky and the fact that she was leaving home for three months and only packed a few things was becoming harder and harder to ignore. This game had been a great distraction, but that’s all it was, a distraction. Tomorrow, she was still getting on that plane. She was still saying goodbye to everything.
“Abed?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Are you sad about leaving Greendale?”
He was quiet for a few minutes. “No,” he finally said. “It’s time. The show’s over. It had a good run.”
“Abed, this is real life. It isn’t a TV show. These are our friends we’re talking about.”
“You mean Jeff,” Abed correctly pinpointed.
“Did I say Jeff? I’m talking about everyone.”
“Who, then? The only members of the original cast that are left here are Jeff and Britta. And you don’t care about Britta.”
“Of course I care about Britta. Don’t say that.”
Abed shrugged, Annie felt it against her own shoulders. “It just seemed like you were looking for reasons to dislike her all year. You guys stopped having secondary plots.”
“We’ve both just had a lot going on,” she said lamely, glad Abed couldn’t see her face.
“You don’t like her because she doesn’t care about being the best," he mused. “And things still work out for her. You try really hard and you care a lot, and sometimes things still don’t work out for you. You don’t think it’s fair.”
There was a comfortable silence for a few minutes, while Annie thought about his words. “Well, yeah. I just wonder what it would be like if I was more like her? Why bother trying if it ends the same way anyway?”
“Annie, I’m going to describe two shows to you and you tell me which one you would rather watch. One show has definitely reached its final season. All of the characters have completed their story arcs. The next season promises nothing new. The other show has two spinoff characters, breaking off from that group. Their story arcs are only half complete but will only continue to evolve in a different setting. The next season is full of new experiences.”
“So, we’re spinning off, got it. But what do you mean, everyone else has completed their story arc?”
“Jeff, perpetually flawed and morally skewed, redeemed himself. Britta, chaotic, flawed, and searching for purpose, has found some kind of peace with herself. Pierce, longing for connection and inclusion, found it and died having created something worthwhile to leave behind. Troy, kind and unsure of himself, is seeking valor and truth. And Shirley kind of fizzled out, but her arc was pretty complete to begin with.”
“So what’re ours?”
“I learn to connect. You learn to accept.”
“Accept what?”
“That, I don’t know. Only you know.”
Annie thought about that. Thought about it for a good five minutes. She thought about Greendale, and how much she’d changed in six years. She didn’t know what she would be like in another six years. Then she would be 30. She would be more like Shirley and Britta and maybe she would finally understand them a little better, understand how things could get messed up so badly and still finding the will to pick yourself up and brush the dust off your knees. She thought about Troy. And Pierce. And Britta again, and how maybe she’d been a little rude to her this year, and yeah, Britta was trying, she actually probably tried harder than all of them, despite it all. And Jeff. She thought about Jeff. She thought about how he made her feel so important. She thought about the way he looked at her sometimes, how he’d looked at her when she told him she was leaving. That was the kind of look people wrote sad songs about, the kind of look people put their lives on pause for to chase after, to investigate the question: what if? She thought about how her life was really just starting and his was probably not going to change much more than it already had; there would be no chasing. Could she she stay here for another six years, another ten, investigating, while all the other what ifs dissolved? Then she thought about tomorrow, and thought about that what she really wanted to do was go home and organize the new skirts Shirley had sent her and pack up her suitcase. And then watch Inspector Spacetime with Abed while they Skyped with Troy and ate buttered noodles and pretended that everything wasn’t changing, just for a little bit.
Annie turned around to look at Abed. “Do you think Jeff and Britta can finish this without us?”
“Have they ever responded well to losing?”
“Do you want to go home?”
“I do, actually. This has not lived up to my expectations.”
Annie knew he was lying, bailing on Troy’s sendoff game for her sake. And she was grateful for it and maybe she was being a little selfish today, but she wasn’t going to try to change his mind. “Let’s do it. Shoot me.”
Abed nodded and shot her in the foot. He held out his own foot and waited. Annie smiled and pulled the trigger.
“That’s two you owe me, junior.”
Abed was right, he was usually right, but Jeff and Britta did not take well to losing. So they didn’t. They packed up all their feelings and hunted down the rest of the school board as if shooting a paintball gun well enough would magically give them the answers and the words they were looking for. Britta was technically the last one standing, so she collected her winnings from a crying and overemotional dean who reluctantly showed them the dusty diamonds and cried even more when Britta said she wasn’t much of a diamond girl anyway and then she asked Jeff to go out to dinner, because that seemed like the kind of thing they should do.
So they did, but a real dinner felt too weird, too much like a first date, which technically they’d never actually gone on but it was a little late for such technicalities. They ended up at the Ballroom, hovered over fries and burgers (both regular and meatless) in a dim booth, which felt more par for the course.
“So today, was that you being weird again?” Britta finally asked, because after all this, she was not leaving without some answers, even if looking for those answers was like crawling through a thicket of briars, getting poked and pricked the whole way through, but pushing ahead was still a better option than turning around.
“Weird again how?” Jeff bluffed.
Britta took a breath and blurted out what she’d been holding onto all year. “Weird again like last year when you thought we should get married because you were freaking out about everything changing.”
“No. I mean, yes.” She gave him a look. “But no. I wasn’t thinking when I said that. I did think it through this time.”
“So what are you saying?”
He shifted in his seat and looked at her, almost pleading, like he was hoping she could figure it out without him having to say it. But she wasn't letting him off the hook, as easy as that would've been. They’d go to his place, she’d spend the night, they wouldn’t talk about it and that would be that, they’d start their seventh year of toeing the line.
“What do you want to be?” she forced herself to say, remembering when she’d asked him that same question all those years ago.
“I don’t know. Just… let’s be whatever it is you call people like us.”
“Shirley would call us idiots. And sinners.”
“Okay, fine. Let’s be idiotic sinners together. I don’t care what we call us. As long as there’s an us. Is there?”
Britta didn’t know what to say, because Jeff just, putting it out there like that was very weird. It wasn’t them. They incessantly danced around each other, that’s what they did. But now, there was nothing for her to win, no witty comeback to concoct. It was weird. It would be weird, if she said yes, of course there’s an us. But really, would it? Would it be as weird as telling someone you loved them in front of a crowd of people rather than just asking them out? As weird as pretending to be in love with that same person as part of some weird competition so you didn’t have to talk about it? As weird as deluding yourselves into calling your relationship a series of hookups so still you didn’t have to talk about it, even after you had a toothbrush at the other person’s place? Would it be as weird and messed up as dating someone else and thinking about that other person the whole entire time and hating yourself for it because by that point you maybe did kind of love that person but it was messed up how you’d let it get so messed up? Or as weird as getting engaged to that very same person and then deciding “nah, not today” and then, surprise, just never talking about it? Would it really be weird, them being an us?
It wasn’t. It wasn’t when he leaned over to kiss her and threw some bills on the table as they made their way to the car, and it wasn’t when he unlocked the door with Britta’s hands all over him. And it wasn’t when they peeled those spy costumes off each other and everything from four years ago was resuscitated instantly, in breathless whispers and touches and something unequivocal and effortless. It definitely wasn’t when Jeff’s hands splayed across her back and tangled in her hair and the way she looked up at him and snaked her legs around him and pulled him closer and he wondered why, or even how he had wasted four years of not having this, and it sure wasn’t when her hands were in his hair and his stubble brushed against her cheek and his mouth was whispering things into her ear that made her tilt her head back and wonder if there was anyone else on earth who could fit into her so perfectly, so completely. So, no. It wasn’t weird that they were an us, because they’d never stopped being an us.
And later, when Jeff was tracing patterns on the bare skin of her back, he was thinking that he should be scared, and it true, it was scary, actually doing this, actually looking at her in the eye and knowing she was feeling the same way, but it was also amazingly not scary at all, it was like picking up a book you hadn’t read for a while, nearing the end and remembering how it all unfolds so clearly after all those chapters.
And the next morning, when they drove Abed and Annie to the airport, Britta was thinking about those same things. And after they’d hugged Annie and Abed goodbye, and Annie hugged her for real and Abed smiled in a way that made her feel lighter and Jeff reached over to hold her hand on the drive home, she was thinking about it again, that sense of knowing how it unfolds, and sometimes all it took was a game of paintball to figure it all out.