Chapter Text
He’s finally gonna let me practice my psych skills on him-what’s the worst that could happen…Classic tee-up
I hereby offer my licensed services as a grief counselor…Grief causer
I’m gonna get a four-year psych degree, then a master’s, and become a real psychologist…Or you could find another major
The doubts of others led to self-deprecating thoughts and made her question her capability as a psychologist. These notions were further fortified by the most recent onslaught of judgemental queries regarding her dreams.
Shortly before the incident, Britta had strolled into the study room and taken her seat. She felt a swell of pride in her chest as she studied the paper in her hands. A draft of her senior thesis, complete with hard-earned research and flooded with the knowledge about psychology she had acquired over the years at Greendale.
Shirley moved past her to her seat, purse strung over her shoulder in its typical manner.
“Oh Britta, what do you have there?” Shirley asked her in a sweet voice.
Confidence emanating from her tone and posture, Britta replied, “My senior thesis”.
“Oh, that’s nice. Still into psychology, huh?”
Britta opened her mouth to argue back, but the opportunity faded when Abed and Troy burst into the room, the sound of angry voices evident from the direction they had come from.
“Apparently the sprinkler will go off and spray everyone if you try to use a bunsen burner to roast marshmallows,” Troy announced in a slightly squeaky voice.
“What!” Shirley and Britta exclaimed in unison.
“We needed them for smores,” Troy explained casually as he rounded the table and plunked into his seat, performing his special handshake with Abed.
“Some mores,” Britta mumbled under her breath.
“God, don’t tell me we’re still on that,” Jeff commented as he entered, Pierce and Annie not far behind.
How had he heard her! Britta thought.
“Still on what,” Pierce asked and added on “Jeff’s gayness?”. He gave Jeff a pat on the
back and a look that said I support you.
Jeff shrank away from his hand and pulled out his phone as he sat in the wooden chair.
Sensing a lull, Shirley shifted the direction of the conversation. “Britta and I were just talking about her thesis”.
“More like you were judging me for it,” Britta replied, starting to feel frustrated. Why
couldn’t they understand that she was adept in the field of psychology?
“Let me see,” Annie said, and Britta passed the paper into her waiting hands.
At that moment, two security guards rushed past in the hall, pausing to ask Garrett about a disturbance with a bunsen burner. Garrett shrugged his shoulders up and down in response. When the guards pressed the issue, Garrett began motioning with his hands, panicking as he asserted his innocence. His voice quickly rose up to a higher octave.
“And that’s what we call saved Garrett,” Jeff noted sarcastically as he observed the situation playing out in front of them. Annie glanced up from the paper to glare at him.
“Who the hell’s Garrett?” Pierce asked. Abed’s right eye widened and he tilted his head a little to the left to shoot Pierce a questioning look.
One of the guards briefly looked towards the study group. A soft shuffling noise resonated from across the room. Britta’s gaze shifted from the escalating scene with the guards back to the table as she heard two chairs inching along the floor. Troy and Abed were sunken lower in their seats, the strings of their hoodies pulled taut to conceal their faces.
The guards left Garrett and proceeded down the hall, where the Dean stood with wide eyes, wishing that Jeffrey was there to help him.
Hoodies pulled off, and smiles slowly gaining traction across their faces once more, Troy and Abed began to chat about their upcoming adventurous plans for the Dreamatorium. From their quiet conversation, Britta could glean but a few words. Silly string, inspector, ivory toupee.
Britta’s thesis now lay on the wooden table in front of Annie, flipped back to the cover page with each piece of paper perfectly aligned with the one above it. Jeff smirked and reached over to nudge the papers so that they were askew. Annie’s hands immediately rose from her lap to fix the pages.
“So what’s the verdict? Did she Britta it?” Jeff asked Annie.
Britta’s heart began beating faster and she clasped her hands together to keep them from shaking. She’d never show it to the group unless she had to, but there was this vulnerable side to her that stung from critiques, just like anybody else.
The papers meticulously aligned once more, Annie glanced up at the group. “Britta, this is really good”.
When she said that, Britta felt her muscles untense. Wait-did she seriously say it was good?
Troy gave her a thumbs up from across the table before returning to his conversation with Abed.
“Yawn!” Pierce loudly proclaimed. He facetiously lowered his head to the table as if the academic conversation was lulling him to sleep. As he did so he also moved forward slightly in his seat. The shift in body weight caused him to accidentally carry his head the rest of the way, and he hit his head roughly against the table. Startled, Pierce shot up and leaned back in his seat, lifting his hands to his injured head. Big mistake on his part. The chair began to tip back, slowly at first and then gaining speed. Pierce went down with the ship. Plonk.
Pierce lay on the ground tangled up with the chair. A groan escaped his lips and his arms struggled to push him to a sitting position. Abed leaned over in his seat to check on him.
“Pierce, are you alright?” Annie asked.
Troy observed as Pierce continued to struggle to stand. “He kind of looks like a human pretzel.”
“Oh,” Shirley groaned. She hurried over to help Pierce get up.
Annie tapped on the thesis on the table. “Aaanyway, Britta, this paper was really well-thought out”, she told her.
After hearing Annie's comment, Jeff’s head turned towards Britta, his arms crossed and eyebrows slightly raised.
“Well, don’t act so shocked, Jeff. You could actually learn a lot from me about what you can do when you don’t slack off 24/7”.
“Hey, if I’m slacking off, that means I haven’t sacrificed myself to this dump”.
Pierce opened his mouth to contribute, but Shirley gestured at Pierce to stay quiet. When he let out a quiet noise, a dismissive glare from Shirley shut him down for good.
“May I see it?” Shirley asked Britta, and at her consent slid the thesis towards herself on the table.
Britta’s heart once again picked up its hammering as the paper was passed around the table. An overwhelming dizziness plagued her. No one deigned to say anything else until everyone had read it.
Britta tensed as Shirley’s eyes scanned over the paper and her hands corrected a few errors. I didn’t know that we could edit it! Annie pointed out, vying for a second turn with the thesis. Britta panicked as the paper fluttered towards the floor and Pierce attempted to catch it mid-air, nearly crumpling it in the process. I’ve got it, Pierce reassured everyone. She relaxed as Troy grabbed the paper, mouthing a couple of words that confused him and nodding proudly as he read it. She chuckled as Abed abruptly paused halfway through to ask where the plot was. She froze as Jeff quickly skimmed the paper.
A silence descended upon the group as they absorbed her words. It was the kind of shell shocked silence she longed to greet her every time she broached the subject of human injustice.
Jeff, as usual, spoke first. Everyone appeared to have been waiting for their leader to jumpstart the discussion. “Wooow. Britta. I know we tease you a lot, and as much as I love doing that, no one seems to have a complaint about this”.
Britta felt like she was getting whiplash from the constant transition from a relaxed to tense to relaxed state again. Clinging to the positivity, she jumped up from her chair. Her legs carried her around the room as she bounced and danced to an invisible song.
“Dr. Britta for the win!” she shouted in a deep voice.
“Ms. Britta,” Jeff called to her, accentuating the Ms. He pointed from her to the table.
Britta’s dancing slowed and her smiling face shined at the group as she reapproached her seat. I didn’t Britta it! I didn’t Britta it!, was on repeat in her mind.
As she continued to get hyped, practically shaking with joy, her mind failed to account for the disappearance of pride from Troy, Abed, and Annie’s eyes. Their faces tensed and Troy’s leg tapped against the floor. Thump. Thump, thump. Thump.
Annie gave Troy a look. “I think it’s time we tell her”.
“About the letters?” Abed bluntly asked. Annie and Troy glared at him, but he shrugged. “You should have just told her already”.
Britta’s heart skipped a beat. “Told me about what?”
No one answered. Abed, Troy, and Annie remained tight-lipped, meanwhile the rest of the group kept glancing anticipatingly between each of the younger people. Leonard passed by the study room and paused with a curious look on his face. He stepped in from the hall to courteously break the silence with a Pbbt.
“Shut up, Leonard. I saw you after gym class. You smelled like a rotting tomato stuck in a garbage disposal,” Jeff informed his nemesis. The burn followed him and his small backpack out the door.
After Leonard disappeared from view, Britta turned to Abed angrily. “Tell me, Abed”.
“You were rejected from two grad schools”.
Britta lowered into her chair, tightly grabbing the armrests. “Wha-at? How did I not know about this?”
Pierce stood up, walked over and draped his arm over Britta’s shoulder. “Yeah, how come we two are always the last to know everything?”.
Annie rolled her eyes. “Pierce, Jeff and Shirley didn’t know either”.
“Oh, alright then”. Pierce removed his arm from Britta’s shoulder.
Britta cleared her throat to regrab Annie’s attention.
Annie hesitantly started to explain. “Well, some of your mail is still coming to our apartment even though you moved out last month. So the rejection letters were accidentally sent to our apartment”.
Britta let out an indignant gasp.
“We wanted to spare you the pain!” Annie hurried to defend herself and the boys.
“Yeah, we’d figure you’d get into another school. You’re pretty smart, you know”. Troy added on. He gave her a grin, but his mouth struggled to maintain the pitiful smile. The joy he attempted with the smile didn’t travel to his eyes, which were swarming with pity.
Abed’s eyes suddenly went bright. “Maybe you could be like in that movie Acceptance and create your own grad school”.
“Not helping, Abed,” Annie ground out.
Britta lowered her head onto her arms on the table. Her head was pounding as she absorbed all of this new information. There was no energy left in her to argue about the radical invasion of privacy by the trio.
“Aww, sweetie,” Shirley sympathetically said as she hurried over to hug her. Britta sat up and allowed Shirley to pull her into a warm embrace.
Her thoughts turned inward as the group struggled for something to say. Britta’s chest and brain felt hollow. How could this have happened? She thought she had turned it all around. Greendale was supposed to mean the start of a new, better life for her. Why else would she have suffered through Chang’s stunted and crazed Spanish and allowed herself to be declared insane at a judge’s table in front of a pool? If she knew she was headed to failure she wouldn’t’ve spent so many nights in the library studying, and fought over the best biology partner. And-
“I hate to ruin this dramatic scene, but didn’t Troy say she applied to other colleges? She hasn’t been rejected by all of them,” Jeff pointed out, interrupting her train of thoughts.
“She has a right to be upset,” Shirley told him. “This is tough for her.”
“And if she already got rejected from two, she’ll probably get a lot more rejections”, Pierce contributed.
The entire group glared at him except for Britta, who once more had her head in her hands. She breathed slowly in and out, attempting not to focus too much on the situation. The conversations of students out in the hall subsided to a quiet buzz in her ears. Her brain barely registered as the Dean implored over the loudspeaker for information regarding the recent endeavors of the “Marshmallow Malefactor”(his exact words).
After the announcement, Troy and Abed announced they needed to evacuate some damning evidence from their lockers. They constantly glanced back at Britta as they slowly walked out of the room. Their footsteps remained stuttered until the Dean’s voice drifted down the hall, and then the bromantic couple was full-out sprinting.
Shirley’s hand soothingly rubbed Britta’s back. “Maybe…” Shirley began. Britta’s body tensed as she prepared for some not-so-helpful reassurances. “Maybe it’s for the best,” Shirley finished. Her hand stopped its consoling motion and lifted from Britta’s back.
Britta slowly picked up her head. Either her ears had deceived her, or Shirley was not sympathizing with her anymore. “What did you say?”
Jeff’s phone now lay on the table rather than remaining an occupation for his hands. Shit, that meant this was dire. “Shirley, maybe we should all take a step back for a minute and give her some space”. Annie’s shoulders shifted as she leaned over to pick up her bag. Slightly delayed in his realization of Jeff’s insinuation, a moment later Pierce braced his hands on the table to stand.
A well of anger began bubbling up inside Britta. She turned fierce eyes on Jeff. “No, I want to hear Queen Shirley’s decree.” Britta’s heart felt like it was breaking. Of course from the rejection letters, but also from Shirley’s comment. Britta loved Shirley, but who was she to know what was best for her?
“It’s great you’ve found something you’re passionate about, but have you ever considered another major? One that you are certain you could excel in?” Shirley asked her in as polite a tone as she could muster.
“Yeah, right. I’d probably just screw up that too, apparently. You guys just think I’m going to Britta everything”. The coined term tasted sour in mouth, even more so than it usually did.
Annie stood up and walked over to her. “No, Britta. We believe in you. It’s just that sometimes, well, your take on psychology is…” Annie shut her mouth and Britta could imagine the gears turning in her head.
Pierce threw his hands up in the air. “It’s confusing, that’s what it is. Her psychology mumbo jumbo doesn’t make sense.You guys don’t know how to get to the point of things”. He crossed his arms over his chest and he began to casually lean back in the chair, but then thought better of it and recorrected his posture.
She turned pleading eyes on the one person of the group yet to provide their insight on the issue. “Jeff? Britta said.
“Britta…” he replied with a sigh. Would you look at that!, she pondered. Mr. Fake Lawyer doesn’t want to speak for once.
“Fine screw you guys. I am not switching my major.” Her voice wavered on the “not” and her sentence faded away at the end. The group stared down at the table glumly as she hesitantly spoke. A tiny part of her whispered that maybe there was some truth in her words. She did once incorrectly call the Oedipal Complex the Edible Complex. Oh, damn. How could she get through to the group if she wasn’t even confident enough in her own decision about her major? What could she do if she struggled to defend her choices to even herself? Her brain felt as if a fog had floated into it and suffocated every thought. Each time a suggestion about how to react to the painful situation popped up, it shortly thereafter disappeared into the misty confines of her mind. In her current state of disrepair, only one clear suggestion broke through. If only she had some mustard on her face they would listen to her! She thought to herself. Britta stood up to go grab some when her pride returned.
She’d show them. She would be the best damn therapist she could be. She’d scoured newspapers for information about the journalists being killed in Burma, risked her life to witness the second Congo War safely from a hotel, seen the suffering caused by a tsunami in Asia, survived a transient dinosaur encounter and endured the Jimmy Fallon syndrome with her parents. She knew what trauma was, so she sure as hell could treat it.
And had they forgotten how she helped Jeff resolve his issues with his father? What about how she pulled Abed out of the destructive void he called the Darkest Timeline?
Britta would be a therapist. Even without her degree, she would assist as many people as possible struggling to thrive in a world that made no sense.
So, yeah, she wasn't going to waste a breath explaining any of this to the group. She decided not to degrade herself with a condiment. They weren't going to listen, that was certain.
Back from their successful mission, Troy and Abed appeared at the entry to the room and proceeded into the room with an extra pep in their step. Britta’s purse was now in her hands and Shirley and Annie had backed off to allow her to get up from her seat. With muscles tense and a headache beginning to pound against her skull, Britta began her escape from the toxic room. Her shoulder slammed into Abed’s as she sped away. A mumbled sorry escaped her lips. Pleas for her to return overlapped and grew more desperate the farther she got from the study room. Screw them was Britta’s final thought in the building before fresh air hit her face and the library doors slammed shut behind her now-shaking figure.
- - -
Now here she was, an hour after the debacle in the library. She could not even face the study room. Seeing the large table that took up half the space, the metal vent with its door half open to allow Annie's Boobs to come and go as he pleases, and the fluorescent lights casting a sickly glow over the table and carpet-her stomach dropped just at the thought.
The beige facade of the library was only visible in the corner of her eye as she sped away. Students’ eyes tracked her hurried and haphazard progress across the campus as her speed increased.
Another building appeared before her and she pushed through the heavy glass doors. She flew past a wall decked with flyers of every bright and positive color, contrasting her dark despondency.
Britta was not one to cry, but heat began building up behind her eyes and her cheeks were flushing red. Spinning through her head in a hurricane of self-doubt were all her previous failures. First to her stormy mind came breaking a glass and avoiding her boss’s odious gaze as the broken glass skittered across the bartop. The winds of her mind pushed to the forefront of her brain how her fellow anarchists ditched her despite her pleas to stick to their rebellious ways. I ate a hamburger the other day and suddenly I’m not cold all the time. Yeah, so what? Life was never easy so don’t crap your way out of it. A torrential downpour swiftly carried to her a reminder of her inserting psych test results upside down into the machine. You Britta’d it. No, she didn’t, it was an honest mistake. Everything else about the tests was accurate. Lightning flashed behind her eyes as she thought of her mispronunciation of bagel. Hell, who’s to say the study group wasn’t the one saying it incorrectly! Why was it always her that was in the wrong? And with one last crack of thunder came the memory of soiled pants on a drunken night. She had not been in the right mindset to assist the study group with their most recent escapade at the time.
As the storm in her mind started to slow with each step through the building, Britta’s surroundings came back into focus. A row of doors stretched out before her. The wall beside each door bore a plaque with a professor’s name printed onto it. Britta’s feet slowed so that she walked at a socially acceptable pace once more.
The hall was quiet, all of the professors either in class, or silently grading papers in their offices. Eh, who was she kidding, it was Greendale. They either were taking a nap or getting drunk.
She felt out of place in a location that represented accomplishment. Each room held a person with a degree and a stable profession. Yet Britta forced herself to remain there, reminding herself that she was deserving of the same stability. She was so close to her degree, and would go to grad school and become a psychologist.
Breaking the quiet atmosphere, a yell of frustration from a male voice echoed down the hall. Britta followed the sound a few doors down to a sign that read Professor Duncan. What the hell was he doing that would predicate shouting?
She knocked on the door and peeked into the room. Duncan was half-bent behind his desk and surrounded by a myriad of random papers both on the desk and on the floor.
“Professor Duncan?”
“Ye-es. Ah, Britta.” His head popped up over the lip of the desk. Duncan’s hair was as messy as the chaotic environment surrounding him. In addition to the scattered papers, file doors were flung open, a lamp lay sideways on the desk, and a coffee cup was propped up against the door frame. Every few seconds a drop of coffee plunked onto the floor from the tilted coffee cup.
Duncan’s left hand now rested atop the desk with a crumpled piece of paper in his grip. With the other hand he readjusted the glasses on his face that had slipped down his nose.
To his right was the couch Britta had spent many painful(and as much as she hated to admit it, secretly helpful) hours talking and venting to Duncan. She reluctantly opened up about issues with her family and the study group, and any other frustrations that plagued her. Britta had laid down on the ragged sofa and stared up at the ceiling like Abed had taught her to do. That is, of course, until Duncan finally informed in their last required session she didn’t have to do that. Could’ve told me that sooner, genius.
In the present, Duncan now stood next to the battered old filing cabinet and was digging through its contents. A paper was pulled up, then roughly tucked back in. A moment later a folder bent as he pushed past it to check other papers in the cabinet. Britta crossed her arms and sat down on the couch. Her body itched to lay down out of an old habit. For weeks she had had to go to these sessions after Jeff not-so-considerately ran with the insanity plea after she cheated on a Spanish exam. That was five years ago now. Save for one night when he drove her home, she hadn’t really spent any one-on-one time with Duncan since then. Not that she wanted to. Even in the sessions, there was an awkward atmosphere that barred them from becoming close friends. Duncan constantly hit on her, and Britta would often shut up or yell at him when she realized how much personal information she was sharing.
Britta’s hand brushed against something in the space between the back and seat cushions of the couch. Instinctively, she pulled it up. In her grip, crumpled but otherwise fine, was a thin stack of papers with the staple holding them together coming loose.
Duncan slammed the file door shut when his eyes locked on the paper she had found. “I’ll take that,” he said as his arm quickly reached out towards her.
Britta pulled the paper just out of reach and narrowed her eyes at him. “What is it?” She asked suspiciously. Duncan’s eyes were darting around the room without settling on anything and his now idle hands were shoved into his pants pockets. One hand darted out to scratch the back of his head as he shifted on his feet. “I doubt you’d be so worried about some random paper for work”.
Duncan took another step forward as Britta skimmed the first page. “Really, Duncan? I didn’t think you cared so much about Greendale’s septic system issues”. The printed email from the Dean displayed a horrendous image of a leaking, rusted septic tank below a short apologetic block of text.
A quiet Oh escaped her lips as she flipped to the subsequent page. Correlation of Escalation of Ebullition With Incognizant Increase in Loss of Control read the page, above a byline stating the name Ian Duncan. No wonder he had been acting nervously when she found the paper-it was his research. “You’re still considering publishing the Duncan Principle? I thought that went to shit when Abed disproved it,” she said with a slight smirk.
“The exception that proves the rule. Every compilation of data for an experiment has its outliers.” Pain flashed across his features as he likely thought back to his own outburst.
Britta nodded understandingly at his explanation. Fair enough. “Why did you staple a random email to the front though?”
“I may have had enough drinks to think that a boggart in a mischievous mood would come and steal the paper. Even drunk I’m well aware that I can easily annoy people and goblins alike, so I made sure to conceal the actual research”. He sure wasn’t afraid to admit his shortcomings, that was for sure.
“Harry Potter fan, huh?” Imagining Duncan dressed as a wizard from Harry Potter wasn’t difficult. Already she held a mental image of claymation Duncan decked out in a bright blue cap and glittery cloak. Just transfer that to a human Duncan and dial down the extravagance a tad, and there you have it. Wizard Duncan.
“No, Britta. The boggart of Yorkshire. Uncivilized Americans”, Duncan scoffed. Britta’s mind attempted to pull together a reasonable response to his criticism. She figured that mentioning J.K. Rowling being British may frustrate him too much and cause him to clam up about the research. Her hand fiddled with the stack of paper and her eyes kept derailing from Duncan’s face to the research. Britta’s face contorted into a tight-lipped grimace. Despite herself, curiosity about the research overwhelmed her need to take him down a peg. Duncan smiled smugly at her lack of a retort and her stomach twisted. Damn it.
“Ok, so if this paper matters so much to you then why haven’t you published it yet?”. Getting right down to the nitty gritty was often Britta’s primary tactic.
Duncan relaxed and sat down in his chair. “Well, after your wildly imaginative friend tore apart the Duncan Principle, it took me quite a while to revisit the research. And by that, I mean three years”. She laughed quietly at that and settled back into the cushions of the couch. Soon enough, she was lying down on the couch and staring up at the cracks streaking across the ceiling of the office.
“Still, two years is a long time to hold onto something. I would’ve published that decades ago if it was mine”. She grew quiet for a moment before continuing to speak. “I’m surprised that you’ve been dedicated enough to stick with it this long”.
Duncan got up and snatched the paper from her hands. “Contrary to what you may think, I do care about my work”.
“And the fact that it could boost your ego if you get published in a journal,” Britta scoffed. With a jolt, she realized she had given into her instincts and laid down on the couch. She readjusted herself to sit upright against the pillows.
“I’m not ashamed of that.” Of course he wasn’t ashamed of that. Unlike her, he had a strong opening for success in the form of his research. Britta wasn’t about to reveal those thoughts to him, though. Well, not exactly at least.
“Of course you aren’t. I’ve known that since you exploited Abed for research when he thought everything was claymation,” Britta informed him with a tinge of disgust in her voice.
“And I don’t think you’re completely this-”, he waves his hands in her general direction, “-altruistic and modest humanitarian you shape yourself up to be,” he retorted.
Tears welled up in her eyes and threatened to spill over. His critique hardly scraped the surface of her self-esteem, but it reminded her of how earlier the study group had judged her shortcomings as a psychology major.
She apologized quietly as she turned away to hide the tears now streaming down her face. Don’t cry in front of this jackass, Britta, she told herself firmly.
“Not the first time I’ve made a blonde girl cry”, he jokingly responded to her. A smile briefly flickered across her face at his poor self-degrading humor despite her current dilemma.
Duncan didn’t say another word after that and rather chose to wait for her lead in the continuation of the conversation. Damn psychological techniques.
Psychologist. Duh! The thought hit her like a baseball to the head. She could rant to Duncan about the studygroup, and as a psychologist he’d be forced to listen to her. Part of her longed to just rush out the door and smother her feelings. And yet…maybe it’d be helpful. Who else would she be willing to talk to about this? Jeff? Yeah, didn’t think so. No, Duncan would just listen and provide some either intellectual or obnoxious response(could go either way). She’d spilled the beans about her issues plenty of times before in previous therapy sessions. What was the harm in doing it one more time?
With that, Britta’s mind was resolved. She shared everything about earlier that day with him as she choked back tears. It all replayed out in her mind. Once more she was proudly walking into the study room, and then an hour later fled with a mood entirely contrary to her joy from earlier. She gritted her teeth as she attempted to awkwardly recreate the dialogue. This reenactment was made worse by her deepening her voice to be Jeff and trying to change her posture for each member of the study group.
The rant finished with Britta completely out of breath. Her breathing grew heavier as her body struggled to increase oxygen intake after that rapidly spoken story. During the story, she had hardly stopped to take a breath. It needed to all be put out there before she lost her nerve to share it with Duncan.
A patiently waiting Duncan studied her and ensured that she was finished talking. “Britta, you do realize that you are not simply an extension of the study group? I had the same issue with Jeff. It’s so hard to separate ourselves from those closest to us. Sometimes, we need to take a step back and become more introspective. Who exactly are you without the study group? Who were you before them?”
“I-” Britta started and then stopped. Who was she? Not an anarchist anymore, that’s for sure. Bringer of justice? No, gone with her anarchist days. A member of the study group? Whoops, Duncan just told her not to think like that. A Greendale student? Getting warmer. “I’m an aspiring psychologist,” she said with conviction. “I want to help people like me. I mean-not like me, I’m totally fine. It’s just that I have this desire to become someone who can help people realize their worth and get them through the hardest parts of their lives. I already have this innate attraction to those who are broken. Why not use that to my advantage?”
Duncan smiled triumphantly. “And there it is. The real Britta Perry”. Britta huffed. Not exactly appealing to her that Duncan had actually assisted her.
“But what does that matter? Even if I go on some crappy journey of self-discovery, I’ll still have been rejected from two psychology programs”. In retrospect, she was relieved she hadn’t seen the actual letters. She did not have to feel the hope fade into despair as tiny letters in a generic font tore apart her world.
“Try to think of something that makes your goal seem more attainable”. His now-observant eyes were fully trained on her as she considered his suggestion.
“Hmm. I guess it can't be that hard to be a psychologist if you do it”. At last she had gotten back at him for his earlier comment about uncivilized Americans. She pulled her shoulders up and back and smirked.
“Ouch,” Duncan said with feigned pain, “but true. Don't let them deter you, because if a drunken blimey like me can become a therapist, granted one at this toilet, so can you”.
“Thanks, Duncan. That was..actually helpful.” When he was a lawyer Jeff made allies with people he could get something out of, and she was starting to see Duncan’s value to him.
Duncan chuckled and suddenly got a gleam in his eye. “So, how about a date?” Preparing for her inevitable rejection, he joked, “I’m sure you recall that I’ve got a real big penis and drink lots of tea”.
“Geez, does that story garner pity and make women want to sleep with you?”
Duncan shrugged as he awaited her response. A clock ticked on the wall, keeping in time with the pounding of Duncan’s heart. Students passed by in the hall, laughing and shouting.
Realizing he was waiting on her answer, Britta replied with a hearty NO. She stared straight into his brown eyes as she leaned forward to place her hands on his desk. Looking at him, the part of her mind longing for a broken human to fix struggled for dominance. She shook off the feeling and firmly told him, “I’ll take my chances looking for a man elsewhere”.
“Cheers. And when that doesn’t work…I'll still be waiting here, perhaps just a little drunk”.
Britta gave him a knowing look.
Duncan nodded at her and wagged his finger, “Ah-ah but hardly any more than usual”. He leaned forward in his seat. “Lower your standards. Certainly can’t get any worse than doing the yankee doodle with a sandwich corporation-tell me, how does one go about doing that again?”
“That’s none of your business, Duncan”, she replied, turning to leave.
“Think about it, Britta Fil-Perry”. Britta rolled her eyes, continuing on her way out of the Englishman’s office.
Britta’s steps were a little lighter as she headed for the exit, and a weight had lifted off her chest. Perhaps she had finally found someone that was truly on her side, regardless of how inebriated he was when offering her emotional support. In fact, having someone willing to respect you even at their worst proved the succor was genuine. With Duncan’s reassurances still fresh in her mind, some of the tension from earlier was alleviated. Smiling again so soon after her immense rejection didn’t appear implausible anymore.