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Three am. Everyone stared, bleary eyed, at their textbooks. Abed’s vision kept swimming in and out of focus. He blinked hard.
“We’re never gonna pass this exam,” sobbed Troy. He slumped over and put his head down. Abed patted his arm.
“I hate anthropology,” Britta groaned.
“We’re gonna faillll,” Troy cried. “We’re all gonna failllllll…”
“Why do we always have to study last minute?” Jeff complained, leaning his head on his fist. “This is the fucking final. Why did we wait until now?”
“You say that every time, and yet we still end up doing it,” Shirley said.
“I wanna go to sleeeeeeep,” Troy continued. “Why, why, why, why, why??” He thumped the table with his fist, waking up Pierce, who had been snoring quietly with his head hanging back.
He snapped his head back upright. “Who-wha?”
“We should just give up,” said Troy into the textbook.
“No!” said Annie, in her Determined to Succeed voice. “We are not giving up! We still have--” she glanced at the clock-- “seven hours to study! We’ve got this!”
Everyone groaned, so Abed joined in. Annie gasped in her Annie way.
“Guys!” she said.
“Annie, it’s three am. We’re tired,” Jeff said. “Duncan probably won’t give us a real final anyway. We don’t need to keep studying.”
“Can’t we at least take a nap?” Troy agreed.
“No,” said Annie.
Troy opened his eyes wide in indignation. “But Pierce got to take one!”
Shirley nodded vigorously. “I’m pregnant, I need my rest!”
Annie humphed. “Okay, how about this? I go get us some coffee, and we keep studying!”
There was a general chorus of affirmatives around the table. Everyone gave their coffee orders, and Annie stood to leave. Abed noticed she took her backpack, which was strange.
“Why are you bringing all your stuff?” he said. “There’s coffee right in the cafeteria.”
“Oh, I’m going to the nice coffee place a few minutes away,” she said, swaying back and forth and looking around the room. “Bye!” She ran out of the room.
The study room was mostly silent while Annie was gone, which almost never happened because everyone tended to be very loud. But it was three am, so everyone kind of zoned out and waited for her to come back. Pierce fell back asleep, and no one bothered to wake him.
It took Annie twenty minutes to return with their coffee. She slid everyone their cups to a hum of thank yous.
Abed looked at the label. “These are from Hot and Brown. You said you weren’t going to the cafeteria?”
“I changed my mind,” said Annie, sitting down and drumming her fingers on the table. “Everyone drink up!”
“Then why did it take you so long to get here?” Abed said, confused.
“They took a while with your orders!” said Annie tensely. “Go on now, drink!”
Everyone took a sip of their coffee, and Annie clapped her hands. “Alright, now let’s study!”
-----
Within the hour of drinking the coffee, Abed felt different. His brain was faster, which was really weird, and he felt almost jittery. He was bursting with energy. It was freaking him out.
Everyone else around the table seemed weird too; Jeff and Britta were both bantering at much higher speeds than usual and Pierce was pacing in the corner. Shirley was zoned into her textbook with an unparalleled amount of intensity. Only Annie seemed mostly normal, and Troy was somehow also being calm and quiet like her.
Abed was having trouble keeping his breathing at a normal speed. His heart was racing. He looked back down at his textbook, trying to focus on it but finding himself unable to keep his brain still enough to absorb any of the words. He keened, rocking back and forth and flapping his hands in distress.
“What’s wrong, Abed?” Annie asked.
“I don’t know,” he said frantically between whines. “Not cool, not cool, not cool!”
“Deep breaths, buddy,” said Troy, putting his hand on Abed’s shoulder. “What’s going on?”
“I feel weird,” he said, still making noises and rocking.
“Uh--It’s probably just, um, nerves! About the test!” Annie provided. “Don’t worry, you’ll do fine!”
Abed shook his head. He wasn’t worried about the test, this was something else. His brain felt weird. Troy grabbed his hand. “Think about Pulp Fiction, Abed,” he said. Troy was usually right when Abed got upset, so he did.
“Trying to forget anything as intriguing as this would be an exercise in futility,” Abed breathed, quoting the movie.
“Good, Abed, good,” Troy said.
“Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.” He stopped rocking. “I love that movie.”
“It’s a great movie,” Troy agreed. “Let’s just study, buddy. Ooh, that rhymed!”
Abed smiled. His brain was still going fast, but it was probably fine.
-----
Three am. Again. Abed stared at the ceiling, eyes wide. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
He felt tired and not tired at the same time. He’d switched bunks like ten times, but it hadn’t helped. He’d watched an entire movie, one of the non-actiony ones, My Dinner with Andre. He’d changed pajamas, closed his eyes and counted sheep, paced around the room; at one point he’d made Special Drink and stared at it for thirty minutes straight before just leaving it on the table, not having taken a single sip.
He turned on his side, hugging his pillow. It didn’t make sense. He hadn’t slept in almost forty-eight hours, why couldn’t he fall asleep?
His brain was still going too fast. It hadn’t stopped since they were studying. It was making him anxious.
He got up to pace around the room some more. He couldn’t stand to be still any longer. He flapped his hands, making increasingly loud whining noises, until he clapped his hands over his mouth to muffle them because people were sleeping!
He sunk into a ball on the ground, not knowing what else to do.
He didn’t know how long he stayed in a ball, because time is weird at night, but when he stood up, it was because being all hunched up was making his back start to hurt.
Abed wasn’t usually one to stay up all night. He’d done it somewhat often as a teenager, but normally he got at least a few hours, even if he’d spent most of the night watching movies and whatnot. Those nights always felt short, as if the time were passing more quickly than usual, but when he wasn’t doing anything, the time felt agonizingly slow.
He opened his laptop and typed ‘why cant i sleep’ into the search bar. The first thing at the top: ‘Did you mean: why can’t i sleep’. Abed blinked at it and wondered why it had corrected the contraction but not the lowercase i.
Second thing from the top: An article from WebMD listing insomnia as a symptom of cancer.
Abed scrolled. The rest of the results all said stuff like stress (Why would Abed be stressed? His final was over and it wasn’t even a real final. Shirley’s baby was fine. Not being able to sleep was making him stressed, not the other way around), eating dinner too late in the evening (Abed hadn’t eaten dinner at all. Come to think of it, he hadn’t eaten all day. Maybe he should get on that, but he was as not hungry as he was not tired), and screen time before bed (Abed was guilty of this one, but he did that every night. Why was this specific night different?). It was all stupid, stupid, stupid, not cool not cool not cool. He jiggled his leg up and down, making his computer bounce.
He was restless, in every sense of the word.
That was a thought. Words. Staring at the wall at almost four am in the morning having been awake for forty-five hours straight, Abed figured that words were entirely arbitrary. If he said that ‘shropple’ meant hello, then it meant hello. Who said that ‘hello’ meant hello in the first place? It was all just a random string of sounds. All words were just a random string of sounds.
Abed opened up a new document on his computer and wrote down the first word of his new language: Shropple.
-----
By the time the study group met the next night, Abed had created an entire language. He hadn’t stopped working until it was time to leave for their study session. Not that they had anything to study.
His brain was still at superspeed.
“Shropple,” he said as he entered the study room. Everyone looked at him weirdly before Abed realized he had to switch back into english mode. “I mean, hello,” he corrected.
Jeff turned to the study group, ignoring Abed. “Moving on--”
“Where’s Shirley?” interrupted Troy.
“She just had a baby, Troy, she’s taking a day off,” Jeff said.
“Yeah Troy,” said Britta aggressively, “do women have to work constantly to be worthy of your presence?”
Annie made a face. “What does that even mean?”
“It means that women can take breaks without being worth less!” Britta exclaimed with just as much enthusiasm as before, putting her fist in the air.
“No one said otherwise,” Annie said, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah, dude, I agree with you,” said Troy.
Britta’s fist drooped a little. “Well, yeah but--”
“Abed will you PLEASE stop bouncing your leg?!” Jeff yelled suddenly, slamming his fist on the table. Abed jumped. He hadn’t realized he’d even been doing that. He crossed his legs under the table, glad everyone was looking at Jeff and not at him.
“Jeff!” Annie chastised. “You didn’t have to yell!”
Jeff blinked. “Sorry, it’s just, he was vibrating the whole table.”
“Sorry,” Abed said.
“Thank you,” said Jeff. “Sorry I yelled.”
Abed didn’t respond, instead staring absently at his fingers on the table. They were so weird and spindly. He counted the wrinkles in between the joints. The middle ones had the most. He’d never noticed that about his hands before. How was it possible that there were still things to notice about his hands? He shook them out, distressed by this.
Troy leaned over into Abed’s vision. “Abed, are you alright?”
“I noticed something new about my hands and now I’m thinking about the phrase ‘I know it like the back of my hand’ and if there are still things to notice about my hands then knowing things like the back of my hand isn’t even knowing them all that well but it’s supposed to mean you know something super well so do I even know anything and what do I know and what’s real??”
He looked up to see Troy with his ‘concerned for Abed’ face. Abed tried to breathe normally. Something was wrong.
-----
Three am. Abed wanted to scream.
So he did. He did scream, and this time he didn’t cover his mouth because fuck his neighbors, he’d been awake for seventy fucking hours.
He worked on his language for a while. It was not just a simple word-to-word translation of english; it had different sentence structure and different verb endings and excluded the subjunctive because screw subjunctive Abed hated subjunctive. He’d spent all of last night coming up with grammar rules and then making up words. It was pretty complete already, but there were always more words to be added.
Abed decided to add some expletives.
-----
Three am.
Abed was near tears at this point. He couldn’t even lie down in bed for longer than thirty seconds because he was so wound up. Restless.
In every sense of the word.
In his language, the word restless translated to shoobida. It came from ‘shoob’, the prefix of his word for suffering which meant ‘very unpleasant’, and ‘ida’, his word for ‘awake’ which was also a prefix in his word for ‘energized’.
He had been ida for ninety-three hours.
“Shoobida shoobida shoobida,” he whispered to himself. It was fun to say, at least.
Everything was awful.
He called Troy.
One ring. Two rings. Three rings, and Abed hung up. He didn’t know why he’d even called in the first place. Troy should be sleeping.
Troy called him back.
Abed picked up before the first ring even finished. “Abed?” said Troy’s groggy voice over the phone. “Why did you call me?”
“I can’t sleep,” he said quietly.
“Why can’t you sleep, Abed?” Troy said.
“I don’t know.”
“Oh,” said Troy. “That sucks.”
Abed didn’t respond.
“You wanna stay on the call until we both fall asleep?” Troy said.
Abed nodded even though Troy couldn’t see him. “Yeah,” he whispered.
“Okay,” said Troy. “Let’s do that.”
Abed took a deep breath and slid under the covers of the top bunk. “Cool cool cool.”
There was silence for a while.
“Sorry I woke you up,” said Abed.
“It’s okay.”
Abed closed his eyes. It was warm under his covers, and he was tired.
“Goodnight Troy.”
“Goodnight, Abed.”