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It’s March 20, 2019. The year of the pig. Disney has acquired Fox for $71 billion and Randy Jackson has died of pneumonia at 93. And for the past three hours, Frankie Dart has been in her apartment’s living room, sitting on her long, red couch, crying—her head in her hands. Only the living room light is on; the rest coated in darkness. The clock on the wall reads 10:21P.M. In very un-Frankie fashion, she’s wearing only a grey t-shirt—no jacket—and black jeans. Her hair is slightly greasy and frazzled from a moderate case of bedhead. She hasn’t had a shower in a day.
What has caused all of this, you may ask? Well, it’s a mid-length story. In the past few years, ever since February 17, 2015, when Frankie became administrative consultant at Greendale Community College, there has been tension between the students and the Nippledippers (previously known as the Save Greendale Committee). The students say they’re killing the identity of the school, stripping away all that makes it what it is (paintball; Ladders; mysterious disappearances; etc.). But the Nippledippers (or, more accurately, Frankie) say that while that’s all been nice and fun, the school needs to grow up. It’s lived too long in squalor—technology severely out of date and safety severely compromised—and become a degree mill, rather than the slightly credible—if a bit wacky—school with a moderate pass rate that it should be.
Frankie’s chaotic, therapist-in-training girlfriend—also former student and Nippledipper at Greendale—Britta Perry, partially agrees with the rebellion, thinking Greendale ought to be reformed into an anarcho-collectivist utopia, but, she tries (and often fails) to keep her mouth shut, knowing how much it all stresses out the much more hierarchically-inclined Frankie. It’s a wonder how they ever put up with each other’s differing political views, but NPR speaks all languages (that are English or Spanish).
Frankie raises her head back up—revealing her red, tear-streaked face—whimpering. At that moment, Britta, who’s wearing a black sweater, blue jeans, and what she likes to call her “therapist glasses”—her hair tied up in a bun—sets her lips on a tear at the bottom of Frankie’s right cheek and starts systematically kissing the rest away, one by one.
Frankie places her hand between her face and Britta’s lips, causing her to stop. “Britta, I appreciate the attempt at support, but I’m really not in the mood for this right now.”
Britta puts her hand on Frankie’s thigh and frowns. “Come on, Franks; you won’t let me help organize Leonard’s funeral, you won’t let me give you my special brownies, and you won’t let me therapize you. What can I do? I want to help.” She gives Frankie sad googly eyes and starts stroking her thigh. “Administration is hard. You’re swamped in paperwork. And I...I know how much the...revolution”—she almost whispers that part—“has been stressing you out. Let me help you.”
As much as Frankie’s trying to stay cognizant, she’s barely hearing Britta’s words, too focused on the logistics of removing the 100 pizza slices stuck to the ceiling of Study Room F. She sucks in some snot that’s dripped down her nose.
Britta’s face scrunches up and she takes her hand off of Frankie’s thigh. “Ew.”
Frankie gives her a tired glare.
“I mean, um, your bodily functions are completely normal and are nothing to be ashamed of and I love you?” Britta nervously smiles, looking like a cat that was just scolded for sinking her claws into her human’s legs.
Frankie briefly looks at Britta, back down and sighs. “A hot chocolate would be nice.”
Hurrah! Britta claps, stands up off the couch and clasps her palms together. “Great! How do I do that?”
“Britta...”
She scrunches her mega fist against her chest awkwardly. “Right. I’ll- I’ll learn. Uh, mind if I use your phone?” She points to Frankie’s blue smartphone sitting on the short—but wide—coffee table in front of the couch.
“Sure.”
She smiles again and grabs it off the table. She then turns the phone on, mumbles the passcode and presses a button. “There.”
Frankie looks at Britta suspiciously. “Britta, how do you know my passcode?”
“Um, good guess?” Britta nervously chuckles.
Frankie sighs again. “I don’t have enough energy to be mad at you over this.”
“Okay.” Britta clicks onto an app for vegan recipes called “Omnivore’s Witness” she installed onto Frankie’s phone and sits back down next to her. “H-o-t space c-h-o-c-o-l-a-t-e. Enter.”
“You don’t have to say all of the keys you press.”
“It helps!” She starts scrolling through hot chocolate recipes. “Oh, this looks nice. No, that has palm oil in it. Isn’t this a vegan app? Oh, how about this? No...”
Frankie sucks in another dribble of snot (“Ew.”)—her morose expression holding—and turns her head to look at Britta. A small smile creeps onto her still red, tear-streaked face as she watches her annoying but adorable girlfriend excitedly scroll through vegan hot chocolate recipes. Maybe everything’s going to be-
“Okay, found something!” Britta announces. She gets up off the couch, awkwardly scooches around the coffee table and recently bought TV and walks to the small kitchen across from the living room—turning the light on, on the way.
Frankie sighs and looks down at the carpet. God, I hate this school. Why couldn’t I get hired at a normal job run by sane people that don’t organize dances called “Too Many Feet”? Somewhere where they have fire insurance that doesn’t require you to run your building lights on Energizer batteries (It keeps going, and going, and going...). Maybe somewhere away from Nia-...No, you would’ve hated that, and you know it.
She takes a long breath out.
Okay, this has been simmering for years. Ever since you nixed Ladders, people have been talking. The Summer of 2015, anonymous students started sticking vague, political-sounding posters around the school. Eventually, they started attacking your emails, complaining about a lack of “fun snacks” in the vending machines and how they hate the new toilet bowl system, mixed in with a bunch of death threats from some other spam accounts. Of course, there was also the whole price hike on tuition, library fees, cafeteria food, study rooms, water, toilets, and special air—but, that’s beside the point. 2017: the overthrowing of Borchert Hall. And then you shut that down after threatening to expel everyone and go work somewhere else. They called you a “dictator”, a “she-devil”, and a “demagogue”, like some hell demon that was raised in Florida...Ugh, maybe they have a point. The enrollment rate has recently started dropping and Bubbah has mentioned underprivileged students feeling less welcome. They obviously feel their voices aren’t being heard. Maybe I should try installing a rotating council; everyone could get a say and- Oh my God, she’s gotten to me.
What am I becoming? Where’s the no-nonsense, professional and extremely efficient powerhouse who would knock out problems in an instant? Who am I? Have I spent too much time around Britta? Oh, shut up; if it weren’t for her, you’d have left this travesty of a school by now and you know it...
Frankie puts her head in her hands, rubs her face and starts crying again, but quickly stops herself and starts methodically and rhythmically breathing in and out, a new resolve washing over her.
Okay, toughen up. You’re an administrative consultant, not a coked-up drummer struggling to rise above the first level of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Don’t let your personal issues get in the way of your work. If you do, everything will fall apart, order will let way for chaos and 24/7 ONJ, and you might even lose your job. God, you haven’t had a shower in a day...Okay, remember what your therapist said. “Could you lend me 30 bucks?” Honestly, she was a terrible therapist.
Suddenly, the loud sound of rummaging pulls Frankie out of the grasp of her ever-evolving trains of thought and she looks over to the kitchen. “What are you doing?”
“Just getting some ingredients,” Britta shouts way too loudly, almost certainly waking up Niamh. God, she’s beauti- “Um, do we have almond milk?”
“No, we just ran out.”
“Crap. Okay, that’s...that’s fine. I can improvise.”
Frankie looks back. Okay, team plan. First, I’ll cover the democratic side of things. I'll get Kasra to hand out surveys on what the students want out of the school, announce a vote for the members of the council, and make it mandatory to vote, or they’ll fail all their classes. Maybe I could even bring back more of those stupid games they liked. If I can get the Dean to agree to it all, then everything will work out great. Oh, who am I kidding, he’ll agree to anything as long as he gets to keep buying his costumes on the school’s dime.
Right now, Britta’s struggling to find cocoa mix. A bunch of bags, cans, and condiments have made their way all around the kitchen and back into their respective compartments multiple times, as neatly organized as is possible (for Britta). She’s looked in all the top rows of the cupboards; she’s looked in the fridge; she’s even looked in the oven. She’s looked everywhere. The kitchen knows. Where do these boxes go? Ugh.
That’s when Niamh—wearing a long robe...just a long robe—walks into the kitchen, her body in a sleepy slump, after a short night of [redacted]. “It’s in the back of the cupboard at the bottom-right.”
Britta turns her head that way, whipping it around cartoonishly. “Oh. Thanks, Niamh.”
“Don’t mention it.”
She raises her head to face Niamh and puts her hand on the back of her shoulder. “Women should uplift each other! We get enough crap from men, and the misogynistic stereotype of the catty female has strongly infected the population, despite the complete lack of truthfulness to it. I’m very thankful and I think that you should know-”
Niamh opens the cupboard to her right and stares down at Britta with a great intensity. “No, seriously; don’t mention it. It’s annoying.”
Britta freezes for a second before taking her hand away. “O...kay.”
Niamh grabs a cylindrical glass cookie jar, closes the cupboard, and fucks off back to her room.
Frankie looks over at her, annoyed. “It’s after 10!”
“It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.”
Frankie quietly whines and slouches deeper into her seat. “Lord, why must I always be the caretaker?”
Britta pours some cocoa mix into an already busy, metal saucepan on the stove and starts whisking it. After she’s satisfied with said whisking, she then grabs a big jug and pours in, let’s say, um, a load of water. Hot cocoa is splashing everywhere. This is definitely going to need a good wipe down afterwards.
After all that’s done, Britta pours the mix into the blender in between the dishwasher and the fridge and pushes the makeshift rubber lid sitting to its left in as far as she can. For approximately 10 seconds—the blender speed set to 5—it shakily whirs—the hodgepodge, lumpy mix of brown and a worrying dark purple becoming slightly smoother. Britta turns the speed back to 0 and takes the lid back off, readying the mug to pour into. And thus, she pours the hot chocolate in.
You’re not a failure. You’re just having a hard time. If Anique Elzinga had decided to give up music when she was struggling to live on food stamps, she wouldn’t have won 5 Amadeus Austrian Music Awards in 2 years and become the 4th most iconic folk artist in Cyprus. You can do this. Britta is here. She can help you. She may be an adorkable doofus who is also kind of a liability, but she is also-also a beautiful, scrappy, and sometimes emotionally intelligent idea-fueled machine who knows Greendale inside out because she is it. She’s weird, wonderful, gross, whimsical, passionate, and also somehow grounding...Did I just seriously think the word “adorkable”? God, I’ve become a sentimental pile of mush.
Suddenly Britta appears in front of Frankie. “Hi!”
Frankie jumps. “Jesus Christ of Nazareth!”
Britta slightly jumps, too, almost spilling the hot chocolate. “Oh, yoikey menny!” She stands still, her hand beside the brimming mug. “That was close.” She grins and extends her arm to Frankie, offering the hot mug of hot chocolate. “Here you go.”
Frankie weakly smiles and carefully takes the mug by the handle. “Thanks, Britta.” She blows on the drink.
Britta walks around the coffee table and sits down to Frankie’s right as she takes a sip.
Suddenly, a cough comes over Frankie and she accidentally coughs a little bit of the drink out onto the coffee table.
Britta stares at her. “What do you think?”
“It’s...” Frankie tries to breathe through the coughs. A cacophony of clashing flavors are attacking her senses, lighting up her face. Is this how she dies? Frankie forces a smile and gives an awkward thumbs up. “It’s great.”
Britta’s grin and shoulders fall and she furrows her eyebrows. “It’s terrible, isn’t it?”
“Okay, yeah, it’s pretty bad.”
Britta squints. “How bad?”
“Worse than that one time I thought my roommate’s burger smoothie was chocolate.”
She looks down at the ground, sad that her attempt at cheering up Frankie failed.
Frankie puts the mug down on a round coaster on the coffee table and her hand on Britta’s. “But, thank you, Britta. Watching and listening to you bumble through something you have absolutely zero experience doing just to cheer me up was moderately amusing. And the support you’ve given me over the years—helping support Niamh, sift through my work, loosen up a bit and be, maybe, I guess, not so much of a stick in the mud—has been invaluable. You care.” Her face is still red, but less so. “I love you.”
A small smile creeps onto Britta’s face and she laughs.
Frankie looks confused. “What?”
“I can’t believe I used flour,” Britta giggles.
Frankie smiles, too, and also laughs. “And blended it?” Both of them laugh again. “What was that about?”
“I seriously think there’s something wrong with me.”
“We need to get you checked.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll see if I can set up an appointment with a psychologist by the end of next month.”
“Okay, thanks.”
After about a full minute, when Frankie and Britta’s long fits of laughter calm down, Frankie lays back, looks at Britta and gives her a small smile. “Want to listen to Night Vale?”
Britta lights up in excitement. “Oh! The wedding episode? They were just about to [I’m not that much of a dick]!”
Frankie’s smile widens, the red in her face almost completely gone now. She leans forward and grabs the TV remote organized neatly next to the stack of 20-year-old National Geographic magazines on the coffee table, and clicks the on button. The TV lights up and Frankie opens the Stitcher app. She works through the menu, clicks onto ‘Welcome to Night Vale’ and Britta kisses her on the cheek. As Cecil Palmer’s voice fills Frankie and Britta’s ears, they both settle into the couch and lay their heads on each other.
“Do you think I have ADHD?”
“Shh.”