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After—after Annie confronts Jeff about his ridiculous jealousy and gets turned down by Rich, after all that—she goes home and tries to focus on studying for her Intro to Insurance Billing class. Except she can’t seem to turn her brain off because she finds herself digging into the box she keeps in her closet that holds her—mementos. Like her hospital bracelet from senior year of high school, and the empty prescription bottle from her last refill of Adderall, and a flyer from the Transfer Dance.
It’s where she put Caroline Decker’s license, after Troy’s 21st.
She makes the decision almost on autopilot: she takes her hair down, puts on one of her nicer dresses, and searches for nearby bars on her phone. The Ballroom is a little too far away to walk (not to mention that going back seems dangerous). The nearest bar is called Gutshot and has a two star rating. “Good beer but I kind of got stabbed there,” says the top review.
Annie decides to go to a bar closer to the Greendale side of her neighborhood that’s called the Vatican. It’s got 3 stars, but the 1 star reviews are all focused on the sour bartenders and the lack of tap options. Neither of those things involve bloodborne pathogens or law enforcement, so she thinks she can handle it.
They don’t have a bouncer at the Vatican; instead, the bartender asks for her ID when she orders a screwdriver and examines it deftly without saying anything. Annie doesn’t breathe until the drink’s in front of her, wondering if maybe this is a trap, if the moment she takes a drink cops will jump out at her from behind the bar.
But they don’t. The vodka is sharp through the orange juice, and she lets herself relax when she realizes that no one’s looking at the sad brunette at the counter.
She kind of hates herself for being sad, she realizes, pushing her straw around the rim of the glass. She shouldn’t be sad. Sad is for hurt feelings and she shouldn’t—she doesn’t—she—
Rich was almost too nice when he turned her down, which was infuriating, and Jeff—well. The less said about him the better. So. No hurt feelings here. None at all.
“You doing okay?” the bartender asks, and Annie tries to remember that she’s Caroline Decker, wanderer, and not Annie Edison, worrier. The split feels like an uncrossable divide in her head and she wonders what her group therapist would have to say about this particular facet of her recovery.
“Oh, um, yeah,” Annie manages, glancing back down at her nearly empty glass. She probably shouldn’t have another, but she thinks of Britta, about how strong she is, and how brave. Britta’s probably never let a man make her feel like—like this, and Annie wants that bravado more than anything in the world right now. “Actually, can I get a—a vodka soda? With, um, olives?”
“Rail okay?” The bartender asks, and Annie nods like she’s got it all figured out.
::
She doesn’t go back to the Vatican until the day when it’s revealed that Jeff and Britta have been sleeping together all year.
And it’s not—not because of that, necessarily; it’s because of Jeff’s stupid dismissal. I think you’ve been reading into some things, he’d said and Annie had felt a—a choking feeling, overwhelming and thick, like she was drowning. Like she might run out of air, or words, or space. She wanted to scream and keep screaming until all the oxygen in the room was gone.
He’s such a—a jerk.
A big, handsome jerk she wants to punch. Or kiss. But also definitely punch. Interspersed with kissing. Make out with and then destroy, in some detail.
That’s the night someone buys her a drink for the first time. She’s had a vodka soda and a whiskey sour when the bartender stops in front of her with a smile. “The guy at the end of the bar wants to cover your next drink,” she says, hiking a thumb over her shoulder at a guy further down. He lifts his beer bottle at her.
She can hear Jeff’s Don’t accept any drinks in her head, but it’s overlaid with I can’t give you an answer and I think you’ve been reading into some things and the urge to scream begins building in her chest again.
“Okay,” she says. “What about—how about an Appletini?”
The bartender nods and sets out a coaster. “Sure thing. It’ll just be a minute.”
Annie watches as she mixes the drink, shaker swift and limned with frost. When she pours it into a cocktail glass, it’s shockingly green and clear and garnished with a candy red cherry.
“Thank you,” she says when the bartender sets it in front of her. “I’ve never tried one before.”
When she lifts it to her lips, it’s sour and tart and makes her nose tickle. The guy down the bar smiles back at her and she feels—fine. Absolutely fine.
::
The first day of summer is hot and Annie spends it recklessly. She sleeps in and takes a long shower and lets her hair dry loose and curly. She paints her nails tangerine and then treats herself to lunch at the cafe near campus and adds two packets of sugar to her iced tea. She thinks about calling Troy or Abed but then remembers Han Solo and orange paint and decides she’ll wait.
It’s the heat that makes her head to the Vatican. Makes her order a beer, sit at the bar and pick at the label as she thinks about kisses. Somehow she’s managed to end both years of her college career so far by kissing men she otherwise has no romantic relationship with.
Abed’s kiss was thrilling and cinematic—the rush of adrenaline, the slick of paint—and Annie hadn’t quite wanted it to stop. But Abed is still just Abed; she loves him but she doesn’t feel like she’d want to make breakfast for him or anything.
Jeff’s kiss—that frantic, hot, wet kiss—feels hazy and distant, like those scenes in old movies where the camera goes soft. Abed told her once they rubbed the lens with Vaseline, to make it look like that. But the memory of it still holds heat and want, tangible in a way she'd tried to put out of her mind after the debate kiss. How big his hands had felt against her jaw; how his body had aligned with hers, how his mouth had felt on hers.
And Annie doesn’t know how to want that anymore. At one point it was blind and driven and she knew that part of the allure was the very fact that it would come to nothing. It made it safe. But then she punched Jeff Winger in the face and saw him with his old lawyer cronies and watched him admit to hooking up with Britta and realized that the safety was off because she knew all that and still wanted his stupid smile across her kitchen table over pancakes and his stupid hand on her knee and the stupid cowlick he can’t ever seem to hide against her pillows.
It’s bad. It’s really bad.
She orders another beer, asks the bartender about his summer plans. His name is Alex and he’s in a band, apparently. He plays the bass, and he knows they’re not going to make it big but he likes the creative energy. Annie laughs in all the right places and tries to figure out what flirting for fun feels like.
At the end of the night, she pays her tab and wishes Alex good luck with his music.
::
Annie doesn’t go back to the Vatican much that summer. Being Caroline Decker is about anonymity and getting to know bartenders and flirting with regulars feels dangerous in a way that has nothing to do with being underaged.
Instead, she goes to other bars in Greendale: she tries tequila slammers at B-52’s and has her first Manhattan at Oddball. She plays darts at Reds on Main and dances to old hair metal at Dave’s. She tries a white wine spritzer at The Cave and a daiquiri at Final Score. There are mojitos and margaritas and sidecars and a Tom Collins that makes her feel like doing something rash. She tries everything, asks bartenders to make her their speciality, and tries to learn it all like some kind of manual for adulthood.
It’s not even about the alcohol, it’s about the space. She doesn’t do it every week, of course. And sometimes she doesn’t even drink. She just—it’s just that Caroline Decker feels like a fresh start, kind of. A way to step outside the borders drawn around Annie Eddison and be something else.
So when she’s not working or taking summer classes or preparing for fall classes, she gets dressed and goes out. She sits at the bar and orders a new drink, watches the reruns or the sports playing on the televisions behind the bar, and listens to the murmur of conversation or the clatter of pool balls.
Sometimes on her way home when it’s late and the streets are faintly damp with early morning dew, she stands in the puddles of street lights and drafts text messages to Britta, and Abed and Troy, and Jeff. Things like You’ll never guess what I did tonight and I think peach schnapps is better than melon vodka and The top score on Ms PacMan at Hatter’s is now AWE and AWE is ME in case you were wondering.
She doesn’t send them.
Not yet, anyway.
::
For her 21st birthday, the study group goes out to Fuddruckers. Shirley suggests it, and Annie doesn’t get a chance to offer an alternative before everyone has piled into cars and started on their next argument.
Someone—probably Britta—orders a Cosmopolitan for Annie and the waitress presents it with a flourish. Then they all have to make comments about it, how it’s a rite of passage, how she can try all the drinks she’s seen in movies and on television now that she’s the big 21.
Annie doesn’t say I already have. She doesn’t say I can order my own drinks. She doesn’t say You’re treating me like I’m some kind of kid. She wants to, but she doesn’t.
She sips her Cosmo, and lets the sound of her friends wash over her. And she thinks; she thinks about Caroline Decker. She thinks about the strange power of a new name, about the power of no one knowing what she’s thinking or what she wants. She thinks about the last year, about how much her friends don’t even know about her.
Two nights later, she goes back to the Vatican and hands over her ID. Her actual ID. Annie Edison in black and white. The pang of grief is new, but the taste of rum covers it nicely.
::
“Annie?”
When she hears his voice cutting through the chatter at the bar, she can feel herself tensing up.
She turns to find the bartender watching her with steady eyes. “He okay?” he asks, tilting his head in Jeff’s direction.
Annie nods and then opens her mouth to explain, but before she can, Sam is leaning close. “If you need anything, just ask for a shot and I’ll get you out of here.”
Annie nods and tries to smile at Sam and find her courage. When she turns, it’s to find Jeff glowering down at her.
“What are you doing here, Annie?” he says. His eyes keep jumping from the glass in her hand to her hair, to her legs, to her face like he doesn’t know where to look. Which is—good. She doesn’t want to look like anyone he knows here: she wants to look like something new.
“Have a drink with me, Jeff,” Annie says instead, turning back to the bar. She watches Jeff in the barback mirror, watches him dither before he makes up his mind and slides onto the stool next to her.
Sam wanders back over, winking at Annie when she makes eye contact. “How’re you doing, dear? Need another?” Annie nods. “What about you?” he asks Jeff. “What’ll you have?”
Jeff looks completely lost, looking between Sam and Annie like they’re performing some kind of show. It’s almost funny. “Um, Scotch. Neat, please.”
Sam nods and moves down the bar.
“You know the bartender,” Jeff says in a low voice. “Take a class with him?”
“Nope,” Annie says, turning slightly to watch Sam prepare an amaretto sour for her. “No classes.”
Jeff opens his mouth and then closes it again. “So how do you know him?” he manages, finally.
“I come here sometimes,” Annie says with a shrug. Sam’s back with the drinks, and he winks as he sets a fresh coaster in front of her.
“On the house. And for you, it’ll be five even.”
Jeff digs out his wallet and tosses down a card. “I’ll open a tab. Thank you.” Sam nods and shoots Annie one more curious look before he heads down the bar.
“They like you here,” Jeff says, swirling his glass like it might hold an answer to the questions he won’t ask. Annie hides her smile behind her straw.
“Only here?” she says, and drags a finger through condensation on the bar. “That hurts, Jeff.”
He doesn’t answer, just busies himself taking a drink of his Scotch.
Annie doesn’t not stare at the line of his throat. She’s only human, after all.
They talk about classes, and how finals went. Jeff launches into an impassioned speech about potential blow-off classes in the spring semester and Annie ends up giggling her way through her rebuttals, amused and annoyed in turns at just how charming Jeff can be when he’s not trying so hard.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he asks a while later when her glass is empty, and Annie lets herself revel for just a moment. She can feel the urge to give in, to let him perform as Jeff Winger, mancake lawyer, to try and impress her. She wants to linger, to draw this night out into some kind of epoch, some decisive “this was the night” type of thing, but she knows better. She knows Jeff, and she knows herself, and she knows that they have had this night before and will likely have this night again.
So she shakes her head and flags down Sam to pay her tab. “No, but thank you. This friend of mine recommended I don’t accept drinks from strange men. But maybe if I see you around here again?”
Jeff seems to be stuck, so Annie counts out her tip and collects her bag and coat and stands, waiting until he actually clues onto the fact that she’s leaving.
“Have a good night, Jeff,” she says, and turns and walks away.
She doesn’t look back; she doesn’t need to.
::
She expects things to be strange the next day when she sees him at study group. She almost expects him to bring it up in front of everyone, mention it like some silly fact he just recently discovered and wants to share with the rest of them, but he...doesn’t.
Maybe he doesn’t believe it happened. Maybe he thinks she’ll break and bring it up first. Maybe he just doesn’t care.
So it stays a secret, and Annie finds that this secret sits easy in her chest. There’s no strange confusion around it, no fluttering butterflies. It’s just a solid knowing she keeps locked away with her other secrets.
At lunch, when she’s watching Jeff eat around the croutons in his salad, she realizes that she really doesn’t care what he decides to do, or not do, about their meeting at the bar. Sure, she cares about Jeff, about the way he thinks he doesn’t care; how he pushes away anybody who might look too closely and not like what they’ll find; how he can’t stop himself from being a good person, even under all the hair product and cynicism.
But she doesn’t need him to care back.
The fizz she used to feel in her blood, that serious, overwhelming craving like he was an itch she needed to scratch, like she was waiting only for him to wake up and realize she was under his nose the entire time—it’s gone.
Instead, she realizes that she will care about him like this without end. And maybe the boundaries of that feeling are fuzzy and undefined, but this Jeff—this real, foolish man—he’s important to her, and she cares.
And that is enough to carry her through the rest of the day and into her evening.
::
It’s almost two weeks later that she makes it back to the Vatican. Sam nods at her when she walks through the door and then tilts his head toward the back of the bar where Jeff Winger is perched on a barstool, nursing a Scotch and glaring at his phone.
Well, well, well, she lets herself think before she lifts her chin and crosses to the empty stool next to him.
His head snaps up when she takes the seat, and there’s a split second where he doesn’t quite shield his relief at seeing her, where his eyes go soft and excited.
“Didn’t think I’d see you here again,” he says in lieu of an actual greeting.
“Well. I am liked here,” she murmurs, and smiles at Sam as he approaches. “Hey. I’ll have a glass of the house red, please.”
“Coming right up. Do you need a refill?”
Jeff nods and watches him head back to the bar before turning to Annie. His knee nudges hers, settles, firm and warm against her thigh. She wants to drop a hand to it, measure the width of it with her palm.
She hasn’t even had a drink and already she feels giddy and heated.
Sam sweeps back through, delivering their drinks with a smile, and Annie lifts her glass towards Jeff. “Cheers,” she says, and Jeff raises an eyebrow.
“Cheers. Here’s to—good times,” he says. “May we recognize them when they’re upon us.”
The wine is warm, sharp on her tongue and she lets the flavor of it slide through her. “So what brings you back to the Vatican?” she asks. “If I remember correctly, you prefer your bars to be ‘cool’.”
Jeff does the thing he does where he studies his drink for a long moment, then glances up with a look that could melt butter. “The clientele here seem interesting,” he offers.
“Is that so?” Annie responds. She takes another sip of wine and sets the glass down precisely on the coaster. “I wonder what gave you that impression.”
Jeff huffs out a laugh, thumb tapping out a rhythm against the rim of his Scotch. “How often do you come here, anyway?” he asks.
She shrugs. “Now and then. I’ve been meaning to invite everyone, but—well.”
He nods, looks down at his hands. “Sometimes it’s nice.”
“Mmm,” she answers. Under the bar, his knee slides against hers as he adjusts in his seat, but he doesn’t pull it away. She wonders what it means, if it means anything. If she’s reading too much into things again. “I like having a space where I’m not—where I’m just Annie, you know?”
“You’re just Annie with us,” he objects.
“No. No, I’m not. You guys see me as the—the kid of the group. Little Annie—I mean, you didn’t even ask what I wanted to drink for my birthday. Which wouldn’t have been a Cosmo.”
“What would it have been, then?”
“You’re going to think it’s silly,” she hedges.
“Try me, Annie.” He’s laughing, but in the way where it’s clear she’s in on it with him. The sound goes right to her head and she finishes her wine, flagging down Sam for another. “Can’t be that bad.”
“I wanted a martini, on my birthday. A dirty martini. I’d been—I’d waited. To try one.” The moment she says it, she wants to take it back because it feels like she’s shared something sacred, something close and secret.
Jeff stills. “Annie, how long have you been coming here?”
“Now and then,” she repeats. “Not that long.”
“Annie. What were you—?”
She watches him in the barback mirror again; watches him try to process this new information. He’s wearing a nice sweater, something black and soft looking and tight in all the right places, and she kind of wants to see if it feels like it looks. But that’s maybe the wine and maybe her caring and so she doesn’t.
“Thanks, Sam,” she says when he delivers her next drink. “So, Jeff. You never did tell me what brought you back here.”
He slits her a look from the corner of his eye that she’s never seen before. “I guess I don’t know. I mean, I came here a few weeks ago and met this—this woman, and I wanted to buy her a drink.”
“Is that all?” Annie hears herself say as if from far away.
“Annie,” Jeff murmurs.
“Jeff,” she returns.
“Let me buy you a drink,” he says. She thinks she can hear Who are you? and Where did you come from? buried in his words. But she won’t do that again with Jeff. If he wants to ask, if he wants to—well, he can ask.
“Is that all?” she repeats, voice low.
When he doesn’t answer, she picks up her wine glass and takes a drink, licks a stray drop from her lips, watches Jeff watch her. “I don’t want another drink,” she says finally. “Maybe another time.”
She finishes her wine; she goes home alone. The world keeps turning.
::
Annie buys a bottle of gin, a bottle of vodka, and a bottle of vermouth. She buys olives. She looks up a dozen recipes for martinis and prints them out and organizes them by complexity in a folder she keeps in the liquor cabinet.
When she’s done with her homework, when Troy and Abed are doing their own thing, when she feels the urge to call Jeff or to demand answers, she goes to the kitchen and she makes herself a drink.
She makes dirty martinis; she makes wet martinis and dry martinis; she makes vodka martinis and gin martinis. She makes them shaken, and stirred, and on the rocks, and neat.
Each one she lifts in a toast. “To me,” she says. “To Annie Edison.”
Each one feels like it means something slightly different.
::
It’s several weeks later when Jeff sidels into the study room ten minutes early for study group. He looks slightly hunted, wary in a way she remembers from sophomore year.
He hasn’t said anything about their conversation at the bar. Everything has been so strangely normal that sometimes Annie wonders if she had dreamt it all. But there was a stain—a round, ruby drip—on the hem of the pink dress she’d been wearing so it hadn’t been a dream.
Jeff was just being…Jeff about the whole thing.
“Annie, hey,” he says, faux casual. “How, uh, how’re you doing? That’s good.”
She glances up when he doesn’t wait for her to answer and catches him nervously pushing his sleeves down to cover his wrists.
“I was just. That is. I was just wondering if you were. Going. If you were going to the Vatican. Anytime soon.”
Annie shrugs and ignores the thrill in her stomach. “Probably. I hear they have an interesting clientele.”
At that, Jeff smiles and it feels like the sun bursting over the horizon. She’s got it so bad, and she can’t stop herself from smiling back at him for a brief, blinding moment. “I hear the real interesting ones are there around seven.”
There’s a part of her that wants to reach over and shake his broad, dumb shoulders until his eyes roll back in his head. There’s a part of her that wants to slam her palms on the table and yell What does this mean? and Why are you doing this to me? and Where does all this lead?
Instead she uncaps her highlighter and returns to her notes. “Hopefully they’re there tomorrow since tonight’s not going to work.”
He dims, slightly. “What’s tonight?”
She taps her notebooks. “Prep. Some of us are taking classes that require actual studying. For actual tests. So we can actually pass.”
“Sounds...interesting,” Jeff says. There’s something in his voice, something slightly awed and something slightly dangerous and she feels almost drunk on it. She feels like she would do just about anything in the world to hear him say—
“Oh. Jeff is here? Jeff is here,” Abed announces as he and Troy enter the study room from the far door. “Why is Jeff here?”
Jeff makes a grab for his chair and attempts to casually kick up his feet. Troy looks slightly baffled, but it’s nothing to the serious concern on Abed’s face. “I don’t know if you know this, Abed,” Jeff says, now using his bullshitting-the-group voice, “but I’m a member of a super cool study group that meets here. Right here! RIght about this time, too!”
Abed’s expression is still twisted up. “Yes. But you’re early. You’re never early. Today’s Cobb salad day, and you have Intro to Ingresses at noon. And you always have to swing by the men’s room in South Hall to fix your hair. So you’re never early.”
“Um,” Jeff starts, but is interrupted by Britta storming into the room and slamming her bag on the table in a huff. Shirley’s right behind her and the conversation devolves into an argument about Starburns and whether or not he was hitting on Britta in the quad. But Jeff keeps looking at her, and there’s an answer in his eyes.
Annie doesn’t pencil 7PM - Vatican into her day planner. She doesn’t.
::
The next day, Annie goes to the Vatican.
The next day, Annie manages to wake up at a decent hour, get to campus, ace her test, go to lunch with Shirley and Britta and talk about normal things (not Starburns, thank god), spend two hours studying with Abed, and get coffee with Pierce.
The next day, Annie does all that and then goes home and stands in front of her closet and wonders what she should or should not wear to what may or may not be a date. Or something like a date. Something new, in the least.
With an hour to go, she goes out to the kitchen and mixes herself a martini. She takes it back to her bedroom and sips it as she considers her dresses, her skirts, her blouses, her cardigans.
With the taste of gin on her tongue, she imagines she is one of those girls from the movies that gets a makeover. A really over-the-top makeover where the girl takes off her glasses and flips her hair and everyone in a ten block radius swoons. She imagines herself slinking down a set of stairs in a tight, satin dress with her hair all twisted up and smokey eye makeup and, sure, Jeff’s at the bottom sipping a cocktail and he does the suave version of a spit take when he sees her before crossing to meet her and—
(And for the record, Britta: she knows it’s a misogynistic fantasy powered by the patriarchy to enforce value based on sexual desirability, okay. She’s not a complete idiot.)
Once her drink is gone, she plucks down the blue dress she wore last week and dabs on a bit of gloss. When she looks in the mirror, she sees Annie Edison and it feels good.
::
Jeff’s waiting for her. He’s got a glass of water in front of him, and he’s fumbling with his phone. He looks handsome and scared and nervous and Annie has to pause in the doorway to catch her breath.
He glances up at that moment and catches her eye; his expression is intense as he climbs to his feet and meets her midway through the bar. “Hey, Annie,” he says.
“Hey, Jeff.”
He reaches out a hand. “Can I buy you a drink?” he asks. There’s a question there, waiting for her, held in his outstretched palm. She wonders if he can feel it, too.
“I’m surprised you didn’t order for me already,” she says.
He looks over his shoulder at the bar. “I thought about it. But then I realized that I really don’t—that maybe you should get a say. About this. And—other things.”
Her heart is thundering in her ears, but Jeff is still standing there with his hand waiting for hers so it’s easy to reach out and take it, to slide her fingers into his and feel his own racing pulse against her own.
This is the night, she thinks.
“I’d love a drink,” she says.