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“Fifteen… fourteen… thirteen…”
Abed could hear Troy’s voice echoing from the living room. He needed to find a hiding place, quickly. Six-time champion in their ever-running, occasionally impromptu games of Hide-and-Seek, he was not about to lose his winning streak.
“Ten… nine…”
Abed looked around frantically. A pile of clothes? Too obvious, and considering his roommates, potentially problematic.
“Ready or not, here I come!” Troy called eagerly.
The dryer had seemed like a perfect hiding spot only a moment ago, when Abed had quietly tucked his gangly legs into the machine. He immediately regretted the choice when the cold metallic walls began to push against Abed’s limp body, his breathing increasing rapidly beyond his control. Everything was bright and warm, too warm, and there was a hysterical high pitched humming that he realized was coming from him.
“Abed? Abed, buddy, what’s going on?” Troy gasped, and he pulled the dryer open with his breath caught in his chest. His best friend was curled slack, eyes squeezed shut as he twitched in distress.
“Hey, hey, you’re okay,” Troy whispered soothingly, wrapping his arms around Abed and rocking him delicately. He was quiet for a minute, running his fingers gently through his friend’s hair. “What happened, buddy?”
Abed focused his attention towards stabilizing his breathing. “Troy, can you flashback with me?”
…
September 5, 2002
Henry David Thoreau High School
Abed was beginning to think he understood people a little bit better than they gave him credit for. People had always been unpredictable, but that didn’t mean he would stop trying to catalog their reactions. Recognizing emotions didn’t come naturally to him, but surely his quiet observation would amount to something.
Patterns were easy to chart. There were constants in any relationship, unwavering truths that remained steady throughout all situations. Abed’s studies could help him to gauge people’s reactions, making conversation a little bit easier to navigate.
Sometimes, though, interactions refused to follow a script. It was during times like these that he wished he had more control in the writer’s room.
This is what friends do, Abed reminded himself as he rummaged in his pockets for coins. “Three ice creams, please,” he said, glancing back at his new friends who looked back at him with encouraging grins.
High school was just as confusing in real life as it was in the movies, but if he’d learned anything from TV, it was that misfits always found refuge in a group of similarly flawed people. And if friendship meant buying your classmates ice cream with your movie ticket money, it was a sacrifice he was willing to make.
…
“It didn’t work,” Troy frowned. “We just flashbacked to your high school.”
“No, that’s where we were supposed to go,” Abed said. “We ended up where we were meant to be, we just didn’t flashback for long enough. Close your eyes and concentrate really hard.”
…
Abed didn’t like being shoved into a clothes dryer. It smelled like fabric softener, sickeningly lavender that made him choke on his own breath.
“Please let me out,” He tried, knowing his plea meant nothing to his tormentors.
It was like that part of The Neverending Story where the kid, Bastian, is being bullied by the kids at school and they throw him into a trash can. All the geeks and the outcasts in movies faced backlash for being themselves, but Abed reminded himself that it was always okay in the end because the villains eventually got what they deserved. So how were they able to do this to him now, to make him feel so powerless and humiliated? As he lay shaking and fell loosely to the wall of the machine, he was almost able to accept it. It didn’t matter if it was the inside of a locker or somebody else’s clothes dryer; this was where people like him always ended up.
“He’s so weird,” One of the voices said, and Abed felt the dryer rattle as his classmate’s foot hit the side of it.
They weren’t talking to him. No one was ever talking to him. They just talked around him, like he couldn’t understand them. Sure, he may not have understood their reasoning, or who they were as characters, but Abed could hear every word. Every “freak,” muttered under someone’s breath, every “loser” disguised as a cough when he was walking down the hallway. To them, he wasn’t even a human; unworthy of even being insulted as an equal. He would always be nothing short of worthless.
…
Troy’s eyes stung with tears. “Abed, I- I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
Abed sat up. “It’s okay, Troy. It happened a lot when I was younger.” The strain in his voice would probably not be noticeable to anybody else, but it made Troy’s heart ache. Nobody should be allowed to make his best friend hurt that way.
“Abed, you’re perfect the way you are. If a bunch of jerks don’t understand that, they don’t deserve to be your friends,” Troy insisted. He leaned against Abed, knowing his friend didn’t mind being touched when it was someone he was close to.
“You don’t hate me now that you know what I was like in high school?”
“No, I definitely don’t hate you,” Troy said honestly. “Maybe myself, for the way I used to be. I hate the idea that I might have been closer to being one of those people than I was to being your friend.”
Abed nodded, “You know, whenever I got shoved somewhere or locked inside something,” He added, “I would always hold out hope that somebody would come. I would wait and wait for someone to find me but no one ever did.”
Tears pricked Troy’s eyes again, and he was at a loss for words. “I- Abed,” He finally managed to get out.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t ever want you to feel like that again,” Troy said. “And I hope you know that you’ll never have to. Because I will always be there for you, and I will always find you.”
Yeah, Abed thought, peace filling his chest. Troy will find me.