fic: Teenage Dream (The Undercover Fed Remix) (rpf)
Teenage Dream (The Undercover Fed Remix)
rpf. he’s got the same sense of humor as a high school student so that’s gotta count for something, right? or, special agent andy samberg goes undercover -- and back to high school. andy samberg/rashida jones, et al. 6915 words.
notes: THIS GOT REALLY LONG. written for that ongoing ficathon for titi's prompt, which was supposed to be these two and a genderflipped Never Been Kissed AU, but somehow wound up being a hybrid of that and 21 Jump Street? he's a fed not a journalist? everything about this is cracky?
1.
For the record: Andy’s not very good at his job.
And for the record: Andy has the sort of job where he probably should be at least averagely good at it.
He went in to the Academy because he didn’t really know what else to do with himself. While at the Academy he met Bill, and Bill was actually pretty good at this shit. They both joined up in the super secret undercover unit of the FBI and that was that.
Only not really. Bill went on to do a lot of dangerous and cool shit while Andy was relegated to sting operations of frat houses and shit.
Until now.
2.
“Sit down, Agent Samberg,” Deputy Chief Bill Murray says. He has an unlit pipe hanging out of the corner of his mouth and a plaid pair of golfing pants on along with a t-shirt with a duck on it.
“We got an assignment for you I’m thinking you’ll like.”
“Son,” he says. He takes the pipe out of his mouth and points to Andy with it. “You’re going back to school.”
3.
“They’re sending me to high school. High. School,” he says. Bill scratches his neck and looks up at him, an expression a cross between a grimace and a smirk on his face.
“Yeah they sent me to the Russian mob last month and that totally sucked too.”
“Don’t try and one-up me. I am complaining. I am a man. I shave. I pay taxes. I do not belong in a high school unless I’m a pervert they’re arresting.”
Bill flops back on the couch. Bill’s been crashing at the FBI safe house since that last job with the Russians Just To Be Safe.
“You really don’t shave all that often.”
“I know, I usually don’t even have to, how awesome is that?”
“Dude,” Kristen calls from the kitchen, “You’re, like, allergic to peanuts in real life too, right? That wasn’t just for a cover?”
“No that wasn’t just a cover,” Bill shouts, immediately at attention. “Are you making something with peanuts? I swear to god, Kristen, all I have to do is smell nuts and I will asphyxiate and die.” Despite that, he heads back toward the kitchen, leaving Andy to laugh about smelling nuts.
Maybe high school is a good fit for him after all.
He can hear Wiig saying something about doctoring their medical records -- “doctoring our medical records, that’s funny, why aren’t you laughing, that’s funny” -- and would he chill out okay there are not now nor have there ever been peanuts on the premises.
Bill shuffles back in over the super 70s shag carpeting (pea soup green) with two beers and collapses back down in the threadbare armchair. He tosses the beer to Andy.
“High school though, that’s wild. When you in?”
“Next week,” Andy says after taking a sip. “They gotta get all the paperwork, and shit.”
Bill starts laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“You as a high school student, man.”
“Hey,” Kristen calls again from the kitchen table. “I know your blood type, but what’s mine?”
“O-neg,” Bill calls back without missing a beat.
“Really? Huh. Thanks.” She punctuates that with loud typing on her laptop. Wiig is the loudest, most aggressive typer Andy has ever seen or heard.
Andy frowns. “Whyyyyy do you know her blood type?”
Bill looks at Andy like why wouldn’t I know Kristen’s blood type. He shrugs then.
“She gets shot a lot,” he says, the same way most dudes would say, she forgets to pick up toilet paper a lot or she forgets the dry-cleaning a lot, like it’s totally mundane and normal that Kristen gets shot a lot.
“Whoa!” they hear Kristen in the kitchen. “I’m a universal red cell donor!”
4.
A half hour later drops a stack of papers in Bill’s lap and plops down on the couch beside Andy.
“By the way,” Kristen asks, “where are you planning on living for your whole Fast Times At Ridgemont High thing?”
He looks up at the both of them. “I thought I’d live . . . here?”
Bill raises his eyebrows. “And, what? We’d be your Benjamin Buttoning parents?”
“I was thinking aunt and uncle. My Aunt Kristen was an oops baby sister of my mom. And because my parents are the last of the Nazi hunters they’re gone a lot, looking for the last of the Nazis, so I stay with you guys while they’re gone, which is always.”
Bill looks at Kristen who looks at him.
“Have you been listening to us at all for the last three days?” he asks.
“Sort of. Why?”
“We’re going to Arizona,” Kristen says all slow and deliberate like she’s talking to the elderly senile version of Andy (instead of the hip about-to-reenter-high-school version of Andy).
“We got a job too, man,” Bill says.
“Wow, I thought you were just talking about Arizona because, like, Wiig likes handcrafted earthenware so much.”
“I do, I do love that. But Bill and I have to go join a cult.”
“For work,” Bill is quick to add.
“Then who’s going to be my mom and dad?” Andy says and Kristen and Bill stare at him.
“That whine was really convincing,” Wiig says.
“Go method, buddy. It’s working for you,” Bill says.
5.
In the end, he gets Tina and Jimmy as his “guardians,” and the three of them hole up in a modest split-level a street away from the FBI safe house Kristen and Bill had been crashing at before they took off.
Jimmy just got back from a sting in Vegas that he’s apparently not above rubbing in the face of a defeated Tina, who got made on her own previous assignment dealing with drug-peddling housewives in suburban southern California.
“This might be the dumbest assignment I have ever heard of,” Tina says.
“Come on, I can pull it off.”
“College? Maybe. High school? Absolutely not. You look old, my friend.”
“I do not! I look younger than Finn on Glee, okay.”
“Finn on Glee looks like he’s pushing forty, and I am pretty sure he is. Not a great baseline comparison there, nephew.”
“Yeah, speaking of, parent-teacher conferences are in a week and I’m gonna need you guys to go.”
“Nerds,” Tina grumbles.
“Don’t say anything weird, okay, dudes? I don’t want Social Services showing up and putting me in a foster home.”
“You are an adult!” Tina cries.
“Hey!” Jimmy interrupts. “Can I be called Uncle Ben? Like the rice? And like Spiderman’s awesome dead uncle?”
“This is punishment, isn’t it,” she says while she surveys the very small and very yellow kitchen.
“It’s vacation, man!” Jimmy says. “Now get in there and make me a sandwich!”
“I will use force against you. So help me, Fallon, I will subdue you if you make me.”
“Dirty talk! Not in front of the kids, woman!”
And unsurprising to no one, Tina’s really not all that keen on Andy’s original vision of a convincing back story.
“You gotta stop talking about Nazi hunters, man.”
6.
The only things Andy really remembers about high school are more or less useless to him right now.
He remembers doing donuts in the parking lot after it’d ice over, and he remembers getting sickeningly drunk at his prom and puking on his date’s pink taffeta dress.
He remembers that basketball had been the only sport his school cared about and that he played soccer and wasn’t very good and he won his high school’s talent show by doing a rap parody about Y2K (god, that dated him right there, didn’t it; none of these assholes he’s trying to fit in with now probably even know what Y2K stands for).
( . . . wait, what does Y2K stand for?)
7.
On his first day of school, Andy leaves Principal Johnson’s office with this Franco kid. (And of all the luck: he gets local ne’er do well James Franco’s younger bro as a tour guide. The guy that should be his number one suspect has already insinuated himself into Andy’s day. That’s luck, man).
“So where you headed now, buddy?” Ugh, this smug shit. Buddy? Really? They just met. For all this Franco kid knows Andy could be an axe murderer or the killer from Scream or a pedophile running a kiddy porn ring or an undercover FBI agent tasked to bring a teenage drug empire down.
“I, uh, got . . . Mrs. Jones next? For lit?”
“Ah, man, Miss Jones!” Franco says, clapping his hands together. “She is hot to a capital T, my man.”
“That doesn’t make any sense!” Andy says in the same cheerful upbeat manner Franco’s talking.
“No, it really does.” The kid’s serious now. “The word hot ends with a T and saying that she is hot to a capital T implies that the other two remaining letters in the word hot are also capitalized rendering Miss Jones a full-blown piece of the highest order, capital H, capital O, capital T.”
“Ohkay!”
If everyone at this school talks in rhymes and riddles, Andy’s cover might be blown faster than Tina’s out in Agrestic last month.
8.
Miss Jones’s classroom is nice. Apparently she teaches AP Literature as well as junior Lit. Andy sort of wants to call Murray up and give him what-for (jesus, why is he talking like an angry farmer from the dust bowl) for putting him in AP fucking Lit. The last time he read a book for fun it was Lance Armstrong’s book and now he feels cheated because that man was a liar and a doper and that’s terrible. Miss Jones has decorated the walls of the classroom with posters of old book covers, sort of like how Barnes and Noble does it, and Andy makes a mental note to look all these books up on Wikipedia so he knows what the fuck happens in Of Mice and Men (even though he vaguely remembers writing a paper about that over a decade ago).
And, okay, Little Franco might have been on to something here: Miss Jones is hot to a capital T (Andy still doesn’t get what that means, but he also never understood what Sisqo was singing about when he said ‘she has dumps like a truck, truck, truck,’ like that was a good thing, so he’s just going to assume there’s a lot about popular youth culture he’s never going to make sense of).
He’s barely stepped into her classroom and he’s already trying to figure out how he can make this assignment into a Mary Kay Letourneau scenario.
(He’s also, like, insanely grateful that he is no longer 16 or even 17 and he no longer immediately pops wood at the slightest of breezes or, well, the hottest of women. He’s a man, goddamnit. He can control his dick.)
(Sort of.)
Her hair is neatly pulled back away from her face and she’s got these thick glasses on that brand her totally as a hipster but also look super good on her (hipsters aren’t supposed to look that good, Andy’s pretty sure of that), and she looks and is dressed like every kind of woman Andy usually doesn’t bother with because he assumes they are that far out of his league.
(If she was wearing, say, an old Pixies t-shirt or if her hair was more disheveled and if instead of teaching AP literature to college-bound seniors she was a bartender or a tattoo artist or “unemployed but exploring her options she might try her hand at teaching yoga,” they might be on to something, or, alternatively, he’d be on her.)
She smiles over at him then and waves him towards her.
“You lucky dog,” Franco hisses and then pounds him on the back, and that little fuck is strong, dude.
Andy shuffles over to her desk and tries to slouch and tries to remember how Teenage Him walked, if he even walked differently at all. He felt fine in front of the principal (namely because the principal, Jake Johnson, looked like he was either coming down off a vicious bender or was just starting one and was probably not scrutinizing new students to see if they were in fact undercover agents and roughly thirty years old) and he felt fine enough with Mini Franco (namely because when you’re in high school everyone looks older to you, even people your own age; it’s like overnight they earned the bodies and voices of adults while you were still an adolescent twerp -- not that Andy’s speaking from experience or anything). But in front of this Miss Jones he suddenly feels like a total and complete fraud.
“Hi,” she says, and shit, man, her voice is even hot, all raspy and shit. “I’m Ms. Jones, and you -- you must be,” she rummages around the papers on her desk until she snatches an official looking sheet of paper up. “You’re Billy Madison?” She scrunches her nose up. “Like the movie?”
He shrugs. “Like the movie.”
“Huh,” she says, and she drops the paper back down on her desk. She folds her arms and that does some awesome stuff for her chest (not that he’s . . . looking there, not obviously at least). “You know,” she says after a beat, “I always say you guys just get younger and younger looking each year, but wow, you look like you could legally rent a car.”
He shrugs again. “Growth spurt.”
“Alrighty, Mr. Madison,” she says. “Here,” and she hands him a thick packet, “is the semester’s syllabus. You’re a little behind, but based on the records your old school sent over I think you should be fine?”
Well fuck you too, Deputy Chief Bill Murray.
9.
Before Bill left with Kristen to pretend to be married and hippie-dippie members of some cult where they make pottery and cocaine shipments and human sacrifices (Andy’s not sure if he made that last bit up), Bill amassed what he called Andy’s High School Cheat Sheet, which was really more of a binder than a sheet.
Wiig said it was sad that he needed a cheat sheet for high school, and he told her to go fuck herself while doing the quadratic equation, but all she did was laugh.
He guesses that living in the internet age will be hugely advantageous, but he’s, like, thirty and writing book reports about The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. That’s tragic on a whole different level than he ever thought doing undercover work would be tragic. When he agreed to this unit, he imagined heavy shit. Shit like him infiltrating a gang led by Jack Nicholson and then getting shot in the head by Matt Damon’s friend or whatever happened at the end of The Departed. He imagined getting in too deep, getting addicted to the life of crime and becoming too close of friends with the marks and then having to make the Sophie’s Choice of turning them in (or worse still, killing them) or joining them in a life of crime.
Truth be told, undercover work was a fuck-ton more pedantic than that. It was a lot of sitting around. It was a lot of choosing your words and watching every fucking thing you said and who you said it to and wanting to barf a lot, especially when you’ve got a wire on you (although no one really uses wire wires anymore, it’s all tiny bugs and shit, science is awesome). There’s nothing really glamorous about the field at all. If anything, it’s just tiring. You don’t ever lose yourself in the job or forget who you are, if only because the fear of death is wrapped up in every move you make.
That’s not entirely true. It’s more often the fear of being found out than the fear of death. Very few of them have been embedded in situations where if discovered they’d be capped immediately.
Or at least Andy hasn’t been.
10.
Things he had forgotten: school is fucking boring, man.
From eight in the morning until three he’s stuck sitting in classrooms learning shit he definitely expunged from his brain somewhere around his freshman year of college and the third keg stand he did in a row.
The first couple weeks manage to somehow both crawl and fly by. He’s bored with learning and insulted he even has to do this again, and he likes to thing it’s the combination of his casual boredom, his ‘been there, done that’ demeanor, and his sophomoric humor that gets him in with Franco and his crew. The first couple weeks he watches those dumb smart kids pop Adderall in the student lounge, back by the fridge behind the potted (fake) plant, and one Friday night he winds up feeling like the accessory to a terrible crime when he watches Franco meet up with Elder Franco as well as this murderous-looking motherfucker everyone just calls Ezra. No one dies that night, but drugs definitely exchange hands, and Andy hands his report in the next day. Apparently those Francos and this Ezra kid are small potatoes and Murray wants the top brass, so back to school Andy goes.
He ignores the weird kid Cera who keeps trying to talk to him, and this hot leggy blonde Brie (like the cheese, that was his line and it made her laugh) appears to have a thing for him and thank fuck she’s eighteen (he did his research) so he doesn’t have to feel too sleazy about that, and despite all this, Miss Jones remains the highlight of his morning.
The third week enrolled Andy finds out they have to write a term paper about a play assigned to them arbitrarily by Miss Jones.
And okay, brief interruption, but Andy’s done his homework. He’s supposed to investigate this school since based on intel recovered by Suds, this school is fucking smack in the center of the biggest drug operation in the city. And considering both the principal -- Johnson, come on -- and his lit teacher -- Jones -- have the blandest names he’s ever heard, perfect as pseudonyms if you ask him, he did some digging.
All he found on Jake Johnson were some divorce papers, a lot of Chicago parking tickets, and a miserably low credit score.
As for Miss Jones (when she says it, it sounds like Ms., but when any of the dudes say it at school it’s always Miss, like they’re all trying to make her sound that much younger and blushing), born Rashida Leah, she went to fucking Harvard and had really rich parents out in California (and hey, that had that part in common -- the geography not the wealth). He couldn’t figure out based on the facts how Harvard-educated Rashida Jones (Ms. Jones if you’re nasty) wound up teaching a bunch of suburban horndogs about Vonnegut and Shakespeare, but that clearly was what she wound up doing.
When he was bored in class, namely in chemistry (try as he might to make this shit cool, Mr. Cranston was a snoozefest), he’d start inventing these elaborate backstories and covers for Rashida. She was undercover too only she worked for Homeland Security and the DEA and together they were going to bust these guys and then ride off into the sunset in a fancy convertible or something and then do it in a motel where they were hiding out with a bunch of money, because somewhere in the middle of these daydreams it always went sour and they became criminals instead of cops (come on, criminality is way hotter than law enforcement, especially in dreams), but it always ended with them doing it. Actually, the bulk of his day dreaming revolved around them doing it and how they’d do it and what she’d look like and sound like and feel like while they did it.
Or guns. He daydreamed about Ms. Jones (Rashida? Was it rude to think of her as Rashida? Like, he’d imagined her naked and invented what her tits probably looked like so calling her Rashida in his head really couldn’t be that much worse, right?) shooting guns a lot.
She looked like she’d be a good shot.
11.
So, these plays she assigns. Andy gets this thing from, like, the fucking 1600s called Volpone.
Nowhere in that binder Bill left him is there anything about some Italian comedy about some bro named Volpone.
It takes him the entire weekend and the better part of a fifth of Jack to weed his way through the actual text of the play. He doesn’t know why he does it; he totally finds Cliff Notes for it on the internet. But he reads the goddamn thing, and that play is fucked up. There’s a hermaphrodite named Andogyno and a eunuch named Castrone and a dwarf and some guy hides in a tortoise shell, like, what.
Though for a comedy, it kinda blows.
As part of the assignment, they have to meet one-on-one with Ms. Jones to discuss the direction their paper is going. Andy’s got to meet with her after school, and he’s beginning to get what the other big problem of going undercover is: you stop questioning certain aspects of your new lifestyle. Like, for a beat he is honestly concerned about this fucking paper, and are you kidding me. He’s supposed to be busting a drug ring, not worrying about Italian playwrights or whatever. He zones out the fifteen minute spiel Mini Franco enters into about Tennessee Williams (the little fuck got Streetcar, like come on, even Andy knows about fucking Streetcar), and Brie nods along all energetically while trying to simultaneously get Andy’s attention, which is weird. She’s hot, okay, but, like, he can’t even rationalize how fucked even pretend dating a high school student would be, dude.
He meets with Ms. Jones/Rashida (neither sound right in his head! everything is terrible!) at three that afternoon. Outside he can hear the whistle blowing and the football team practicing and the smokers everyone pretends don’t exist out by the back door just under Rashida’s classroom.
“Billy!” she says. She waves at the empty collection of desks. “Pick a seat.”
He flops down and opens his bag, and he wishes that fucking Murray could have just written him a note saying BY THE WAY, HE’S AN UNDERCOVER FED SO ALL THIS ACADEMIA IS SORT OF POINTLESS THANKS.
“Volpone,” she says all elegantly, scooting her desk over towards his. She misjudges a little and her knees bump against his.
“Alright, Mr. Madison,” she says, “Talk to me.”
“So,” he drawls. And why is he making this so hard? He can pretend to be smart, like, no problem. “Volpone means “sly fox.” So there’s that.”
“There is that. Why don’t you tell me what it’s about?”
“It’s . . . a satire.”
“It is a satire.”
“And it’s making fun of greed?”
“Greed how so?”
“Well, like, money, obviously, but also . . . all other sorts? Of desire?”
Saying the word desire out loud feels like a bad move. It’s like they’re acting out their own low-rent version of a gender-swapped Lolita or something. Rashida is a fidgeter, and he never noticed that about her before. She was always so calm and cool in front of the class, sometimes perched on the edge of her desk, or at the board, or leaning her whole body against the anachronistic shelf of encyclopedias at the back of the room. But one-on-one, she’s constantly in motion. She taps her feet and she clicks and clicks her pen, nibbles on it, jiggles her leg, her knee bumping against his again and again but she never bothers to move away from him. A part of him wants to imagine this all as some weird courtship ritual, like, this is her flirting with him. That makes her dirty in a way that makes his stomach kind of hollow out and his mouth go dry.
“‘What a rare punishment is avarice to itself,’” she quotes, and hey, he recognizes that quote.
“Yeah,” he says, “exactly.”
“So what are you planning on writing about?”
He can’t help but smirk. He was sort of proud of himself when he came up with the idea (slash read the Cliff Notes page about Thematic Elements Prevalent in Volpone).
“Disguise,” he says. “Disguise, deception, and the truth.”
12.
The drug stuff’s not really going anywhere.
They bring that Ezra kid in for questioning, but shocking no one, it’s a dead end. The kid won’t talk, and when he does, everyone wishes that he hadn’t.
Andy meets with Suds in a dark parking garage and he’s guessing that Suds just rewatched All The President’s Men or something because this Deep Throat Watergate shit is way overkill.
“Any movement?” Suds asks him. He bites down on a toothpick and Andy rolls his eyes at him.
“On what?”
“You know,” Suds gestures.
“They’re not bumping lines off their desks in the middle of class. No one comes sneaking in the cafeteria with a big duffle bag labeled DRUGS, man.”
“We have reason to believe this shit’s being made on the premises.”
“Where you think? The trailers out back? Where they have health class?”
Suds nods. “You enrolled in that?”
“Nah, they think only sophomores need to learn about their health.”
13.
“Hey, Billy,” Ms. Jones calls after the bell rings. “Stay for a second?”
He’s gotten good at reacting to his “name” now. Bill made him practice like a gazillion times before Bill set out for the high country or whatever.
“Dude, you think you’ll be fine, but you gotta -- you gotta have that name actually be your name. Like you believe it. From here on out you are Billy Madison.”
“Training montage?” Andy said.
“Training montage,” Bill said.
Training montage set to Biggie’s “Party and Bullshit”: Andy eating Froot Loops while pacing in the family room of the safe house while Bill says, “okay, tell me about your parents again”; Andy lounging on the couch watching The Daily Show and Bill shutting off the lights, saying, “Yo, Billy,” with no answer from Andy so he throws a shoe at his head; in the morning Kristen padding into the kitchen, hair everywhere while Andy is still on the couch, pages of notes surrounding him, and she says, “You’re still here?” to which he mumbles a reply of, “My name is Billy Madison and I was born May 17, 1994, and my parents are dead but it’s cool they died when I was, like, two, so my aunt and uncle, Aunt Tina, Uncle Jimmy, raised me and we just moved here from . . . ” - “Milwaukee!” Bill shouts from the kitchen; Bill and Andy at the shooting range; Andy moving in with Tina and Jimmy; Andy at the mall, frowning at the Gap; “It’s pretty narcissistic of you to name me after you,” Andy whines into a French-to-English dictionary, and Bill frowns, sort of incredulous: “It’s a fucking movie, dumbass. We’re being meta, ok?”; Andy watching a YouTube video of Taylor Swift and jams his finger down hard on the mute button; and Andy trying -- and failing -- to skateboard.
Anyway.
The bell rings that Friday and the lit class starts to scatter.
“Hey, Billy. Stay for second?”
And you know, a lot of those daydreams he’s enjoyed in chemistry and calculus and intermediate French (he’s tres fucked in that class, man) have started like this.
“Yeah, sure,” he mumbles while he packs up his backbag and then sort of ambles over to her desk. He was right that first day: high school boys totally walk differently than actual adult men.
“What’s up?” he asks at her desk, and she looks up at him.
“Why don’t you -- pull up a chair, Billy.”
The way she says it -- his name especially -- it’s all serious and I Mean Business. He’s thinking either a) she knows exactly who he is and she’s going to burn him right now, or b) he definitely plagiarized way too much of that Wikipedia article about King Lear.
Turns out it’s neither.
“Look,” she says. “Ms. Jacobs, the guidance counselor, she, uh, she stopped in here yesterday after school.”
“Okay . . . ” He didn’t hit on Ms. Jacobs, did he? She’s hot, totally, and he had to see her when he first started here to Ensure He Was Getting Acclimated And Assimilated Properly, and she had this great top on . . . whatever, that doesn’t matter.
“Well, as you know, it’s your senior year, and you’re going to graduate this spring, and the thing is, Ms. Jacobs says that you . . . haven’t applied to a single college. So, uh, what’s up with that, Billy?”
Well, fuck. The one thing Bill hadn’t quizzed him on: what to say or do when everyone starts will the whole college thing.
“You’re smart, Billy. Since you’ve started here, you’ve shown some great mental acuity, some really great literary analysis in here. And, look, you’re seventeen, eighteen, I’m sure the idea of studying literature and a bunch of old dead windbags sounds like the actual worst, but you could be good at it. Or good at something else. I just think it’s a real shame that a smart kid like you isn’t even looking at college though,” she says, and then she reaches her hand across the desk and places it on top of his, and, well, fuck again.
“I,” he starts, and his voice actually cracks, “was sort of thinking about the Army? Or the Marines?”
Ms. Jones/Rashida cocks her head to the side. “Huh,” she says. “Really? The military?”
“Yeah, man,” he says, trying to be serious, but she’s still looking at him like he just told her he wants to go to clown college and her hand is still on his hand, and her hand’s all cool and soft and he bets she has some really nice smelling lotion hidden away in one of her desk drawers.
She pulls her hand back and gestures with it. “I just never really thought . . . you and . . . the military. Guns. And stuff.”
“Dude, I totally shoot guns all the time. And I’m awesome.” Her eyebrows raise. “Under, you know, adult supervision. And stuff.”
“Right. Okay. Good talk!”
He smiles kind of awkwardly and goes to stand when she grabs him by the wrist. He freezes instantly and looks down at her.
“If you ever . . . ” she trails off and clears her throat. “If you need to talk, I’m around.”
As he leaves her classroom he wonders a) if he’ll have to fake enlist in the military, b) if this assignment will be done before someone makes him retake the SATs, c) if there’s enough time before chemistry to jack off, and d) if jacking off as a grown man in a high school is an offense he’d probably get arrested for.
The last one’s the only question he has a solid answer for (d: yes).
14.
After that, he sees Rashida a lot. He goes in after school when he doesn’t have to and when Franco has tennis team practice (seriously) and Brie has ballet and Andy really has nothing else to do. He wonders if she thinks he’s some charity case, like some product of an irrevocably broken home and she’s doing the good thing by talking to him, like she’s Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds only without the race relations.
Here’s the super dumb thing: he likes her. He likes her a lot. She’s funny and she’s bright and even though she’s supposed to consider him a high school student she talks to him like he’s an adult.
Eventually they ran out of Volpone-related things to talk about and suddenly they were talking about movies and television and shit Andy actually knew or cared about. Though the strange thing was always having to check himself. He kept wanting to tell her everything, not even everything about the job or the assignment, but everything about him. He wanted her to know that he graduated in 2000 and where he went to undergrad and that he spent two years at Quantico doing FBI training and sort of hated it but loved being so near to DC and he wanted her to know all the different places he had lived and all the strange danger that had found him in this job, like the frat brother with the bowie knife that one time in Memphis or the alligator mascot that got loose at that school in Florida. He wanted to know about her, all about her, the things you would never tell a student -- like whether she always wanted to be a teacher and if she was seeing anyone and if she was did she love him and if she did or if she didn’t did she think there might be room in her life for an idiot like him.
It made him think about Bill way back before this assignment got going and before Bill left. It made him think about his face when he asked him why he knew Wiig’s blood type.
He thinks he kinda gets that now.
That Wednesday though he gets a call.
“We got a suspect,” Suds tells him over the phone.
“Is this a secure line?” Suds asks after a beat.
“Sudeikis. You need to stop watching television,” Andy shouts.
“Don’t use my name,” he hisses. There’s crackly static on Suds’s end.
“We might have you out by Friday. I repeat. We might have you out by Friday.”
“Copy,” Andy says, even though that’s the dumbest thing to say in a cell phone that isn’t a walkie talkie.
If he didn’t know himself any better, he might say he’s a little sad.
15.
Shit reaches a head at the school’s Halloween dance -- the Friday Suds had spoken of.
Andy goes dressed as a NASCAR driver (“What a great appropriation of Middle American redneck culture,” Franco says without a trace of irony).
Midway through the dance (and what his research tells him is a song by British boy band One Direction), he gets a call from Suds. He ducks out of the gym and wanders the dark empty hallways listening to Suds.
“Target acquired.”
“What? Are you gonna shoot somebody?” he whisper shouts.
“No. That’s just departmental lingo.”
“No it’s -- ” and Andy freezes.
He’s reached Rashida’s classroom, and she’s in there, sitting at her desk drinking from some old-school looking thermos.
“I’m gonna have to call you back,” he hisses. He totally regrets all those swigs of Jager he did from Franco’s flask (so much about that statement is a tragedy; who puts Jager in a flask? these kids have so much to learn in college -- if they ever get there or wind up in jail).
He knocks on her open door.
“Hey . . . Ms. Jones.”
She blinks at him like he just caught her doing something super bad, which just confirms his suspicion that whatever she had in that thermos had some sort of alcoholic proof to it.
“Billy. Hi.”
She stands up and she’s dressed all in black. Like, black leggings, black form-fitting top, black boots.
“What are you -- ” and he gestures at her.
“Oh! My costume? I was a cat. Yeah. I was a cat,” she says, and he steps into the classroom. She didn’t turn any of the lights on and the lights from the hall only halfway illuminate her and him and her desk. “But I left the ears in the car. And the tail. So now I’m just pretending I’m a cat burglar.”
“That works, I guess,” he says, and she smiles like it doesn’t.
He likes to think he hung up on Suds and came into her classroom for a reason. What he thinks is that everything is ending that night. They’ve got their guy (or so they say) and come Monday Andy will be debriefed and by the end of that week prepped for a new assignment. And maybe that’s the really hard part about undercover work that Bill and Wiig never mention: having to say goodbye to this pretend life you’ve built. Not everyone you encounter in a job is a criminal and not all of them are bad.
Which is why, he tells himself, that he crosses the room to her. It’s why, he reasons, that he kisses her.
Because that’s what he does. He kisses her, his mouth still thick with the anise taste from the Jager, and there must be a little bad in her somewhere because she doesn’t pull away at first: she kisses him back. It’s brief, but she kisses him back, her lips parting around his bottom lip and sucking, just for a moment. Her hands reach up to his shoulders and curl into that stupid jumpsuit he’s wearing and he’s not sure which one of them does it, closes the gap, but her body presses hot against his.
“Oh my god,” she says as she pulls back, “I’m gonna go to jail, I’m gonna be on the news.”
“No,” he says. “No, no, no, no. No. It was my fault.”
“You’re eighteen. You’re eighteen? Tell me you are eighteen years old, so help me.” She scrubs a hand over her face. “They’re gonna make a Lifetime movie about me,” she moans.
“No. No they’re really not. Hey. Hey,” he says and she reaches for her thermos and takes a long slug. She sighs nosily as she swallows. “Hi. Would you look at me.”
“I don’t want to look at you,” she says, miserable, and her shoulders slumped, and she really won’t look at him. She’s staring at her desk like she’s waiting for it to scuttle off and spread the news.
“Please.”
“I like you a lot,” she says to her desk, but she says it like it’s the worst thing in the world. “And that’s so wrong. I’m a cliche,” she all but wails.
“I like you a lot too which is why I need you to look at me because I have something important to say.” He likes that when he says it, he says it like not only does he have something important to say, but that he himself is important. Score one, Samberg!
“If it’s a murder-suicide pact you got up your sleeve, I’m really not game for that,” she says, but she lifts her head and turns to face him.
“No. Though it’s good to know that’s not your thing.” And then he sighs heavily, because he’s actually going to do this. Disguise, deception, and the truth -- all that jazz.
“I’m not a student,” he says, and she frowns. “I mean, I’ve been a student. But I’m not really a student.”
“What the fuck are you talking about.” The word fuck sounds good in her mouth he decides, but now’s really not the time to dwell on that.
“I’m with . . . I’m with a special unit of the FBI.” It sounds so incredibly stupid and improbably out loud a part of him wants to laugh. “I’m thirty years old yet apparently pass for eighteen and I’m here to . . . bust some giant drug ring thing.”
“What . . . the . . . fuck,” she says all long and slow. “Dude. What? Who else knows about this?”
“Uh, well, you. And my boss. And, like, my fake aunt and uncle. Yeah, they definitely know we’re not related and stuff.”
“But no one, I mean no one, knows here?”
“Nah, man. Everyone thinks I’m just . . . eighteen.”
Her eyes narrow. “And your name’s not Billy Madison.”
“Well, duh.”
“ . . . are you allowed to tell me your name?”
Andy considers it. “Well. I totally wasn’t supposed to tell you I’m . . . ”
“A cop?”
He braces his hands on his hips. “I told you. I’m not a cop. I’m FBI. That’s cooler. That’s so much cooler.”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re FBI,” she mocks, her voice dropped to a lower register and she waves her hands in the air, mimicking -- well, he’s not really sure what she’s supposed to be mimicking.
He shoots her what he thinks is a serious look and she giggles. She actually giggles, like she’s the schoolgirl and he’s the teacher (hey, that’s not that terrible of a potential roleplay scenario . . . ) and they weren’t just kissing a few minutes ago and he didn’t just cop to being an undercover officer of the law. She sobers quickly and stands up a little straighter, her shoulders held back and she nods.
“I’m Andy,” he finally says. She bites her bottom lip, more coy than nervous.
“Rashida,” she says, and she extends her hand out to him.
He takes it.
EPILOGUE.
Mr. Cranston’s taken into custody that Friday.
“The chemist,” Suds says, slipping his shades on. “Should have known.”
“Good work,” he says and pounds Andy on the back.
Andy’s not entirely sure he’s responsible for this achievement, but hey, whatever. A job well done.
Now, if you’ll excuse him, but there's a former educator of his to wreck*.
(*that’s hip slang, right?)
fin.
rpf. he’s got the same sense of humor as a high school student so that’s gotta count for something, right? or, special agent andy samberg goes undercover -- and back to high school. andy samberg/rashida jones, et al. 6915 words.
notes: THIS GOT REALLY LONG. written for that ongoing ficathon for titi's prompt, which was supposed to be these two and a genderflipped Never Been Kissed AU, but somehow wound up being a hybrid of that and 21 Jump Street? he's a fed not a journalist? everything about this is cracky?
1.
For the record: Andy’s not very good at his job.
And for the record: Andy has the sort of job where he probably should be at least averagely good at it.
He went in to the Academy because he didn’t really know what else to do with himself. While at the Academy he met Bill, and Bill was actually pretty good at this shit. They both joined up in the super secret undercover unit of the FBI and that was that.
Only not really. Bill went on to do a lot of dangerous and cool shit while Andy was relegated to sting operations of frat houses and shit.
Until now.
2.
“Sit down, Agent Samberg,” Deputy Chief Bill Murray says. He has an unlit pipe hanging out of the corner of his mouth and a plaid pair of golfing pants on along with a t-shirt with a duck on it.
“We got an assignment for you I’m thinking you’ll like.”
“Son,” he says. He takes the pipe out of his mouth and points to Andy with it. “You’re going back to school.”
3.
“They’re sending me to high school. High. School,” he says. Bill scratches his neck and looks up at him, an expression a cross between a grimace and a smirk on his face.
“Yeah they sent me to the Russian mob last month and that totally sucked too.”
“Don’t try and one-up me. I am complaining. I am a man. I shave. I pay taxes. I do not belong in a high school unless I’m a pervert they’re arresting.”
Bill flops back on the couch. Bill’s been crashing at the FBI safe house since that last job with the Russians Just To Be Safe.
“You really don’t shave all that often.”
“I know, I usually don’t even have to, how awesome is that?”
“Dude,” Kristen calls from the kitchen, “You’re, like, allergic to peanuts in real life too, right? That wasn’t just for a cover?”
“No that wasn’t just a cover,” Bill shouts, immediately at attention. “Are you making something with peanuts? I swear to god, Kristen, all I have to do is smell nuts and I will asphyxiate and die.” Despite that, he heads back toward the kitchen, leaving Andy to laugh about smelling nuts.
Maybe high school is a good fit for him after all.
He can hear Wiig saying something about doctoring their medical records -- “doctoring our medical records, that’s funny, why aren’t you laughing, that’s funny” -- and would he chill out okay there are not now nor have there ever been peanuts on the premises.
Bill shuffles back in over the super 70s shag carpeting (pea soup green) with two beers and collapses back down in the threadbare armchair. He tosses the beer to Andy.
“High school though, that’s wild. When you in?”
“Next week,” Andy says after taking a sip. “They gotta get all the paperwork, and shit.”
Bill starts laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“You as a high school student, man.”
“Hey,” Kristen calls again from the kitchen table. “I know your blood type, but what’s mine?”
“O-neg,” Bill calls back without missing a beat.
“Really? Huh. Thanks.” She punctuates that with loud typing on her laptop. Wiig is the loudest, most aggressive typer Andy has ever seen or heard.
Andy frowns. “Whyyyyy do you know her blood type?”
Bill looks at Andy like why wouldn’t I know Kristen’s blood type. He shrugs then.
“She gets shot a lot,” he says, the same way most dudes would say, she forgets to pick up toilet paper a lot or she forgets the dry-cleaning a lot, like it’s totally mundane and normal that Kristen gets shot a lot.
“Whoa!” they hear Kristen in the kitchen. “I’m a universal red cell donor!”
4.
A half hour later drops a stack of papers in Bill’s lap and plops down on the couch beside Andy.
“By the way,” Kristen asks, “where are you planning on living for your whole Fast Times At Ridgemont High thing?”
He looks up at the both of them. “I thought I’d live . . . here?”
Bill raises his eyebrows. “And, what? We’d be your Benjamin Buttoning parents?”
“I was thinking aunt and uncle. My Aunt Kristen was an oops baby sister of my mom. And because my parents are the last of the Nazi hunters they’re gone a lot, looking for the last of the Nazis, so I stay with you guys while they’re gone, which is always.”
Bill looks at Kristen who looks at him.
“Have you been listening to us at all for the last three days?” he asks.
“Sort of. Why?”
“We’re going to Arizona,” Kristen says all slow and deliberate like she’s talking to the elderly senile version of Andy (instead of the hip about-to-reenter-high-school version of Andy).
“We got a job too, man,” Bill says.
“Wow, I thought you were just talking about Arizona because, like, Wiig likes handcrafted earthenware so much.”
“I do, I do love that. But Bill and I have to go join a cult.”
“For work,” Bill is quick to add.
“Then who’s going to be my mom and dad?” Andy says and Kristen and Bill stare at him.
“That whine was really convincing,” Wiig says.
“Go method, buddy. It’s working for you,” Bill says.
5.
In the end, he gets Tina and Jimmy as his “guardians,” and the three of them hole up in a modest split-level a street away from the FBI safe house Kristen and Bill had been crashing at before they took off.
Jimmy just got back from a sting in Vegas that he’s apparently not above rubbing in the face of a defeated Tina, who got made on her own previous assignment dealing with drug-peddling housewives in suburban southern California.
“This might be the dumbest assignment I have ever heard of,” Tina says.
“Come on, I can pull it off.”
“College? Maybe. High school? Absolutely not. You look old, my friend.”
“I do not! I look younger than Finn on Glee, okay.”
“Finn on Glee looks like he’s pushing forty, and I am pretty sure he is. Not a great baseline comparison there, nephew.”
“Yeah, speaking of, parent-teacher conferences are in a week and I’m gonna need you guys to go.”
“Nerds,” Tina grumbles.
“Don’t say anything weird, okay, dudes? I don’t want Social Services showing up and putting me in a foster home.”
“You are an adult!” Tina cries.
“Hey!” Jimmy interrupts. “Can I be called Uncle Ben? Like the rice? And like Spiderman’s awesome dead uncle?”
“This is punishment, isn’t it,” she says while she surveys the very small and very yellow kitchen.
“It’s vacation, man!” Jimmy says. “Now get in there and make me a sandwich!”
“I will use force against you. So help me, Fallon, I will subdue you if you make me.”
“Dirty talk! Not in front of the kids, woman!”
And unsurprising to no one, Tina’s really not all that keen on Andy’s original vision of a convincing back story.
“You gotta stop talking about Nazi hunters, man.”
6.
The only things Andy really remembers about high school are more or less useless to him right now.
He remembers doing donuts in the parking lot after it’d ice over, and he remembers getting sickeningly drunk at his prom and puking on his date’s pink taffeta dress.
He remembers that basketball had been the only sport his school cared about and that he played soccer and wasn’t very good and he won his high school’s talent show by doing a rap parody about Y2K (god, that dated him right there, didn’t it; none of these assholes he’s trying to fit in with now probably even know what Y2K stands for).
( . . . wait, what does Y2K stand for?)
7.
On his first day of school, Andy leaves Principal Johnson’s office with this Franco kid. (And of all the luck: he gets local ne’er do well James Franco’s younger bro as a tour guide. The guy that should be his number one suspect has already insinuated himself into Andy’s day. That’s luck, man).
“So where you headed now, buddy?” Ugh, this smug shit. Buddy? Really? They just met. For all this Franco kid knows Andy could be an axe murderer or the killer from Scream or a pedophile running a kiddy porn ring or an undercover FBI agent tasked to bring a teenage drug empire down.
“I, uh, got . . . Mrs. Jones next? For lit?”
“Ah, man, Miss Jones!” Franco says, clapping his hands together. “She is hot to a capital T, my man.”
“That doesn’t make any sense!” Andy says in the same cheerful upbeat manner Franco’s talking.
“No, it really does.” The kid’s serious now. “The word hot ends with a T and saying that she is hot to a capital T implies that the other two remaining letters in the word hot are also capitalized rendering Miss Jones a full-blown piece of the highest order, capital H, capital O, capital T.”
“Ohkay!”
If everyone at this school talks in rhymes and riddles, Andy’s cover might be blown faster than Tina’s out in Agrestic last month.
8.
Miss Jones’s classroom is nice. Apparently she teaches AP Literature as well as junior Lit. Andy sort of wants to call Murray up and give him what-for (jesus, why is he talking like an angry farmer from the dust bowl) for putting him in AP fucking Lit. The last time he read a book for fun it was Lance Armstrong’s book and now he feels cheated because that man was a liar and a doper and that’s terrible. Miss Jones has decorated the walls of the classroom with posters of old book covers, sort of like how Barnes and Noble does it, and Andy makes a mental note to look all these books up on Wikipedia so he knows what the fuck happens in Of Mice and Men (even though he vaguely remembers writing a paper about that over a decade ago).
And, okay, Little Franco might have been on to something here: Miss Jones is hot to a capital T (Andy still doesn’t get what that means, but he also never understood what Sisqo was singing about when he said ‘she has dumps like a truck, truck, truck,’ like that was a good thing, so he’s just going to assume there’s a lot about popular youth culture he’s never going to make sense of).
He’s barely stepped into her classroom and he’s already trying to figure out how he can make this assignment into a Mary Kay Letourneau scenario.
(He’s also, like, insanely grateful that he is no longer 16 or even 17 and he no longer immediately pops wood at the slightest of breezes or, well, the hottest of women. He’s a man, goddamnit. He can control his dick.)
(Sort of.)
Her hair is neatly pulled back away from her face and she’s got these thick glasses on that brand her totally as a hipster but also look super good on her (hipsters aren’t supposed to look that good, Andy’s pretty sure of that), and she looks and is dressed like every kind of woman Andy usually doesn’t bother with because he assumes they are that far out of his league.
(If she was wearing, say, an old Pixies t-shirt or if her hair was more disheveled and if instead of teaching AP literature to college-bound seniors she was a bartender or a tattoo artist or “unemployed but exploring her options she might try her hand at teaching yoga,” they might be on to something, or, alternatively, he’d be on her.)
She smiles over at him then and waves him towards her.
“You lucky dog,” Franco hisses and then pounds him on the back, and that little fuck is strong, dude.
Andy shuffles over to her desk and tries to slouch and tries to remember how Teenage Him walked, if he even walked differently at all. He felt fine in front of the principal (namely because the principal, Jake Johnson, looked like he was either coming down off a vicious bender or was just starting one and was probably not scrutinizing new students to see if they were in fact undercover agents and roughly thirty years old) and he felt fine enough with Mini Franco (namely because when you’re in high school everyone looks older to you, even people your own age; it’s like overnight they earned the bodies and voices of adults while you were still an adolescent twerp -- not that Andy’s speaking from experience or anything). But in front of this Miss Jones he suddenly feels like a total and complete fraud.
“Hi,” she says, and shit, man, her voice is even hot, all raspy and shit. “I’m Ms. Jones, and you -- you must be,” she rummages around the papers on her desk until she snatches an official looking sheet of paper up. “You’re Billy Madison?” She scrunches her nose up. “Like the movie?”
He shrugs. “Like the movie.”
“Huh,” she says, and she drops the paper back down on her desk. She folds her arms and that does some awesome stuff for her chest (not that he’s . . . looking there, not obviously at least). “You know,” she says after a beat, “I always say you guys just get younger and younger looking each year, but wow, you look like you could legally rent a car.”
He shrugs again. “Growth spurt.”
“Alrighty, Mr. Madison,” she says. “Here,” and she hands him a thick packet, “is the semester’s syllabus. You’re a little behind, but based on the records your old school sent over I think you should be fine?”
Well fuck you too, Deputy Chief Bill Murray.
9.
Before Bill left with Kristen to pretend to be married and hippie-dippie members of some cult where they make pottery and cocaine shipments and human sacrifices (Andy’s not sure if he made that last bit up), Bill amassed what he called Andy’s High School Cheat Sheet, which was really more of a binder than a sheet.
Wiig said it was sad that he needed a cheat sheet for high school, and he told her to go fuck herself while doing the quadratic equation, but all she did was laugh.
He guesses that living in the internet age will be hugely advantageous, but he’s, like, thirty and writing book reports about The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. That’s tragic on a whole different level than he ever thought doing undercover work would be tragic. When he agreed to this unit, he imagined heavy shit. Shit like him infiltrating a gang led by Jack Nicholson and then getting shot in the head by Matt Damon’s friend or whatever happened at the end of The Departed. He imagined getting in too deep, getting addicted to the life of crime and becoming too close of friends with the marks and then having to make the Sophie’s Choice of turning them in (or worse still, killing them) or joining them in a life of crime.
Truth be told, undercover work was a fuck-ton more pedantic than that. It was a lot of sitting around. It was a lot of choosing your words and watching every fucking thing you said and who you said it to and wanting to barf a lot, especially when you’ve got a wire on you (although no one really uses wire wires anymore, it’s all tiny bugs and shit, science is awesome). There’s nothing really glamorous about the field at all. If anything, it’s just tiring. You don’t ever lose yourself in the job or forget who you are, if only because the fear of death is wrapped up in every move you make.
That’s not entirely true. It’s more often the fear of being found out than the fear of death. Very few of them have been embedded in situations where if discovered they’d be capped immediately.
Or at least Andy hasn’t been.
10.
Things he had forgotten: school is fucking boring, man.
From eight in the morning until three he’s stuck sitting in classrooms learning shit he definitely expunged from his brain somewhere around his freshman year of college and the third keg stand he did in a row.
The first couple weeks manage to somehow both crawl and fly by. He’s bored with learning and insulted he even has to do this again, and he likes to thing it’s the combination of his casual boredom, his ‘been there, done that’ demeanor, and his sophomoric humor that gets him in with Franco and his crew. The first couple weeks he watches those dumb smart kids pop Adderall in the student lounge, back by the fridge behind the potted (fake) plant, and one Friday night he winds up feeling like the accessory to a terrible crime when he watches Franco meet up with Elder Franco as well as this murderous-looking motherfucker everyone just calls Ezra. No one dies that night, but drugs definitely exchange hands, and Andy hands his report in the next day. Apparently those Francos and this Ezra kid are small potatoes and Murray wants the top brass, so back to school Andy goes.
He ignores the weird kid Cera who keeps trying to talk to him, and this hot leggy blonde Brie (like the cheese, that was his line and it made her laugh) appears to have a thing for him and thank fuck she’s eighteen (he did his research) so he doesn’t have to feel too sleazy about that, and despite all this, Miss Jones remains the highlight of his morning.
The third week enrolled Andy finds out they have to write a term paper about a play assigned to them arbitrarily by Miss Jones.
And okay, brief interruption, but Andy’s done his homework. He’s supposed to investigate this school since based on intel recovered by Suds, this school is fucking smack in the center of the biggest drug operation in the city. And considering both the principal -- Johnson, come on -- and his lit teacher -- Jones -- have the blandest names he’s ever heard, perfect as pseudonyms if you ask him, he did some digging.
All he found on Jake Johnson were some divorce papers, a lot of Chicago parking tickets, and a miserably low credit score.
As for Miss Jones (when she says it, it sounds like Ms., but when any of the dudes say it at school it’s always Miss, like they’re all trying to make her sound that much younger and blushing), born Rashida Leah, she went to fucking Harvard and had really rich parents out in California (and hey, that had that part in common -- the geography not the wealth). He couldn’t figure out based on the facts how Harvard-educated Rashida Jones (Ms. Jones if you’re nasty) wound up teaching a bunch of suburban horndogs about Vonnegut and Shakespeare, but that clearly was what she wound up doing.
When he was bored in class, namely in chemistry (try as he might to make this shit cool, Mr. Cranston was a snoozefest), he’d start inventing these elaborate backstories and covers for Rashida. She was undercover too only she worked for Homeland Security and the DEA and together they were going to bust these guys and then ride off into the sunset in a fancy convertible or something and then do it in a motel where they were hiding out with a bunch of money, because somewhere in the middle of these daydreams it always went sour and they became criminals instead of cops (come on, criminality is way hotter than law enforcement, especially in dreams), but it always ended with them doing it. Actually, the bulk of his day dreaming revolved around them doing it and how they’d do it and what she’d look like and sound like and feel like while they did it.
Or guns. He daydreamed about Ms. Jones (Rashida? Was it rude to think of her as Rashida? Like, he’d imagined her naked and invented what her tits probably looked like so calling her Rashida in his head really couldn’t be that much worse, right?) shooting guns a lot.
She looked like she’d be a good shot.
11.
So, these plays she assigns. Andy gets this thing from, like, the fucking 1600s called Volpone.
Nowhere in that binder Bill left him is there anything about some Italian comedy about some bro named Volpone.
It takes him the entire weekend and the better part of a fifth of Jack to weed his way through the actual text of the play. He doesn’t know why he does it; he totally finds Cliff Notes for it on the internet. But he reads the goddamn thing, and that play is fucked up. There’s a hermaphrodite named Andogyno and a eunuch named Castrone and a dwarf and some guy hides in a tortoise shell, like, what.
Though for a comedy, it kinda blows.
As part of the assignment, they have to meet one-on-one with Ms. Jones to discuss the direction their paper is going. Andy’s got to meet with her after school, and he’s beginning to get what the other big problem of going undercover is: you stop questioning certain aspects of your new lifestyle. Like, for a beat he is honestly concerned about this fucking paper, and are you kidding me. He’s supposed to be busting a drug ring, not worrying about Italian playwrights or whatever. He zones out the fifteen minute spiel Mini Franco enters into about Tennessee Williams (the little fuck got Streetcar, like come on, even Andy knows about fucking Streetcar), and Brie nods along all energetically while trying to simultaneously get Andy’s attention, which is weird. She’s hot, okay, but, like, he can’t even rationalize how fucked even pretend dating a high school student would be, dude.
He meets with Ms. Jones/Rashida (neither sound right in his head! everything is terrible!) at three that afternoon. Outside he can hear the whistle blowing and the football team practicing and the smokers everyone pretends don’t exist out by the back door just under Rashida’s classroom.
“Billy!” she says. She waves at the empty collection of desks. “Pick a seat.”
He flops down and opens his bag, and he wishes that fucking Murray could have just written him a note saying BY THE WAY, HE’S AN UNDERCOVER FED SO ALL THIS ACADEMIA IS SORT OF POINTLESS THANKS.
“Volpone,” she says all elegantly, scooting her desk over towards his. She misjudges a little and her knees bump against his.
“Alright, Mr. Madison,” she says, “Talk to me.”
“So,” he drawls. And why is he making this so hard? He can pretend to be smart, like, no problem. “Volpone means “sly fox.” So there’s that.”
“There is that. Why don’t you tell me what it’s about?”
“It’s . . . a satire.”
“It is a satire.”
“And it’s making fun of greed?”
“Greed how so?”
“Well, like, money, obviously, but also . . . all other sorts? Of desire?”
Saying the word desire out loud feels like a bad move. It’s like they’re acting out their own low-rent version of a gender-swapped Lolita or something. Rashida is a fidgeter, and he never noticed that about her before. She was always so calm and cool in front of the class, sometimes perched on the edge of her desk, or at the board, or leaning her whole body against the anachronistic shelf of encyclopedias at the back of the room. But one-on-one, she’s constantly in motion. She taps her feet and she clicks and clicks her pen, nibbles on it, jiggles her leg, her knee bumping against his again and again but she never bothers to move away from him. A part of him wants to imagine this all as some weird courtship ritual, like, this is her flirting with him. That makes her dirty in a way that makes his stomach kind of hollow out and his mouth go dry.
“‘What a rare punishment is avarice to itself,’” she quotes, and hey, he recognizes that quote.
“Yeah,” he says, “exactly.”
“So what are you planning on writing about?”
He can’t help but smirk. He was sort of proud of himself when he came up with the idea (slash read the Cliff Notes page about Thematic Elements Prevalent in Volpone).
“Disguise,” he says. “Disguise, deception, and the truth.”
12.
The drug stuff’s not really going anywhere.
They bring that Ezra kid in for questioning, but shocking no one, it’s a dead end. The kid won’t talk, and when he does, everyone wishes that he hadn’t.
Andy meets with Suds in a dark parking garage and he’s guessing that Suds just rewatched All The President’s Men or something because this Deep Throat Watergate shit is way overkill.
“Any movement?” Suds asks him. He bites down on a toothpick and Andy rolls his eyes at him.
“On what?”
“You know,” Suds gestures.
“They’re not bumping lines off their desks in the middle of class. No one comes sneaking in the cafeteria with a big duffle bag labeled DRUGS, man.”
“We have reason to believe this shit’s being made on the premises.”
“Where you think? The trailers out back? Where they have health class?”
Suds nods. “You enrolled in that?”
“Nah, they think only sophomores need to learn about their health.”
13.
“Hey, Billy,” Ms. Jones calls after the bell rings. “Stay for a second?”
He’s gotten good at reacting to his “name” now. Bill made him practice like a gazillion times before Bill set out for the high country or whatever.
“Dude, you think you’ll be fine, but you gotta -- you gotta have that name actually be your name. Like you believe it. From here on out you are Billy Madison.”
“Training montage?” Andy said.
“Training montage,” Bill said.
Training montage set to Biggie’s “Party and Bullshit”: Andy eating Froot Loops while pacing in the family room of the safe house while Bill says, “okay, tell me about your parents again”; Andy lounging on the couch watching The Daily Show and Bill shutting off the lights, saying, “Yo, Billy,” with no answer from Andy so he throws a shoe at his head; in the morning Kristen padding into the kitchen, hair everywhere while Andy is still on the couch, pages of notes surrounding him, and she says, “You’re still here?” to which he mumbles a reply of, “My name is Billy Madison and I was born May 17, 1994, and my parents are dead but it’s cool they died when I was, like, two, so my aunt and uncle, Aunt Tina, Uncle Jimmy, raised me and we just moved here from . . . ” - “Milwaukee!” Bill shouts from the kitchen; Bill and Andy at the shooting range; Andy moving in with Tina and Jimmy; Andy at the mall, frowning at the Gap; “It’s pretty narcissistic of you to name me after you,” Andy whines into a French-to-English dictionary, and Bill frowns, sort of incredulous: “It’s a fucking movie, dumbass. We’re being meta, ok?”; Andy watching a YouTube video of Taylor Swift and jams his finger down hard on the mute button; and Andy trying -- and failing -- to skateboard.
Anyway.
The bell rings that Friday and the lit class starts to scatter.
“Hey, Billy. Stay for second?”
And you know, a lot of those daydreams he’s enjoyed in chemistry and calculus and intermediate French (he’s tres fucked in that class, man) have started like this.
“Yeah, sure,” he mumbles while he packs up his backbag and then sort of ambles over to her desk. He was right that first day: high school boys totally walk differently than actual adult men.
“What’s up?” he asks at her desk, and she looks up at him.
“Why don’t you -- pull up a chair, Billy.”
The way she says it -- his name especially -- it’s all serious and I Mean Business. He’s thinking either a) she knows exactly who he is and she’s going to burn him right now, or b) he definitely plagiarized way too much of that Wikipedia article about King Lear.
Turns out it’s neither.
“Look,” she says. “Ms. Jacobs, the guidance counselor, she, uh, she stopped in here yesterday after school.”
“Okay . . . ” He didn’t hit on Ms. Jacobs, did he? She’s hot, totally, and he had to see her when he first started here to Ensure He Was Getting Acclimated And Assimilated Properly, and she had this great top on . . . whatever, that doesn’t matter.
“Well, as you know, it’s your senior year, and you’re going to graduate this spring, and the thing is, Ms. Jacobs says that you . . . haven’t applied to a single college. So, uh, what’s up with that, Billy?”
Well, fuck. The one thing Bill hadn’t quizzed him on: what to say or do when everyone starts will the whole college thing.
“You’re smart, Billy. Since you’ve started here, you’ve shown some great mental acuity, some really great literary analysis in here. And, look, you’re seventeen, eighteen, I’m sure the idea of studying literature and a bunch of old dead windbags sounds like the actual worst, but you could be good at it. Or good at something else. I just think it’s a real shame that a smart kid like you isn’t even looking at college though,” she says, and then she reaches her hand across the desk and places it on top of his, and, well, fuck again.
“I,” he starts, and his voice actually cracks, “was sort of thinking about the Army? Or the Marines?”
Ms. Jones/Rashida cocks her head to the side. “Huh,” she says. “Really? The military?”
“Yeah, man,” he says, trying to be serious, but she’s still looking at him like he just told her he wants to go to clown college and her hand is still on his hand, and her hand’s all cool and soft and he bets she has some really nice smelling lotion hidden away in one of her desk drawers.
She pulls her hand back and gestures with it. “I just never really thought . . . you and . . . the military. Guns. And stuff.”
“Dude, I totally shoot guns all the time. And I’m awesome.” Her eyebrows raise. “Under, you know, adult supervision. And stuff.”
“Right. Okay. Good talk!”
He smiles kind of awkwardly and goes to stand when she grabs him by the wrist. He freezes instantly and looks down at her.
“If you ever . . . ” she trails off and clears her throat. “If you need to talk, I’m around.”
As he leaves her classroom he wonders a) if he’ll have to fake enlist in the military, b) if this assignment will be done before someone makes him retake the SATs, c) if there’s enough time before chemistry to jack off, and d) if jacking off as a grown man in a high school is an offense he’d probably get arrested for.
The last one’s the only question he has a solid answer for (d: yes).
14.
After that, he sees Rashida a lot. He goes in after school when he doesn’t have to and when Franco has tennis team practice (seriously) and Brie has ballet and Andy really has nothing else to do. He wonders if she thinks he’s some charity case, like some product of an irrevocably broken home and she’s doing the good thing by talking to him, like she’s Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds only without the race relations.
Here’s the super dumb thing: he likes her. He likes her a lot. She’s funny and she’s bright and even though she’s supposed to consider him a high school student she talks to him like he’s an adult.
Eventually they ran out of Volpone-related things to talk about and suddenly they were talking about movies and television and shit Andy actually knew or cared about. Though the strange thing was always having to check himself. He kept wanting to tell her everything, not even everything about the job or the assignment, but everything about him. He wanted her to know that he graduated in 2000 and where he went to undergrad and that he spent two years at Quantico doing FBI training and sort of hated it but loved being so near to DC and he wanted her to know all the different places he had lived and all the strange danger that had found him in this job, like the frat brother with the bowie knife that one time in Memphis or the alligator mascot that got loose at that school in Florida. He wanted to know about her, all about her, the things you would never tell a student -- like whether she always wanted to be a teacher and if she was seeing anyone and if she was did she love him and if she did or if she didn’t did she think there might be room in her life for an idiot like him.
It made him think about Bill way back before this assignment got going and before Bill left. It made him think about his face when he asked him why he knew Wiig’s blood type.
He thinks he kinda gets that now.
That Wednesday though he gets a call.
“We got a suspect,” Suds tells him over the phone.
“Is this a secure line?” Suds asks after a beat.
“Sudeikis. You need to stop watching television,” Andy shouts.
“Don’t use my name,” he hisses. There’s crackly static on Suds’s end.
“We might have you out by Friday. I repeat. We might have you out by Friday.”
“Copy,” Andy says, even though that’s the dumbest thing to say in a cell phone that isn’t a walkie talkie.
If he didn’t know himself any better, he might say he’s a little sad.
15.
Shit reaches a head at the school’s Halloween dance -- the Friday Suds had spoken of.
Andy goes dressed as a NASCAR driver (“What a great appropriation of Middle American redneck culture,” Franco says without a trace of irony).
Midway through the dance (and what his research tells him is a song by British boy band One Direction), he gets a call from Suds. He ducks out of the gym and wanders the dark empty hallways listening to Suds.
“Target acquired.”
“What? Are you gonna shoot somebody?” he whisper shouts.
“No. That’s just departmental lingo.”
“No it’s -- ” and Andy freezes.
He’s reached Rashida’s classroom, and she’s in there, sitting at her desk drinking from some old-school looking thermos.
“I’m gonna have to call you back,” he hisses. He totally regrets all those swigs of Jager he did from Franco’s flask (so much about that statement is a tragedy; who puts Jager in a flask? these kids have so much to learn in college -- if they ever get there or wind up in jail).
He knocks on her open door.
“Hey . . . Ms. Jones.”
She blinks at him like he just caught her doing something super bad, which just confirms his suspicion that whatever she had in that thermos had some sort of alcoholic proof to it.
“Billy. Hi.”
She stands up and she’s dressed all in black. Like, black leggings, black form-fitting top, black boots.
“What are you -- ” and he gestures at her.
“Oh! My costume? I was a cat. Yeah. I was a cat,” she says, and he steps into the classroom. She didn’t turn any of the lights on and the lights from the hall only halfway illuminate her and him and her desk. “But I left the ears in the car. And the tail. So now I’m just pretending I’m a cat burglar.”
“That works, I guess,” he says, and she smiles like it doesn’t.
He likes to think he hung up on Suds and came into her classroom for a reason. What he thinks is that everything is ending that night. They’ve got their guy (or so they say) and come Monday Andy will be debriefed and by the end of that week prepped for a new assignment. And maybe that’s the really hard part about undercover work that Bill and Wiig never mention: having to say goodbye to this pretend life you’ve built. Not everyone you encounter in a job is a criminal and not all of them are bad.
Which is why, he tells himself, that he crosses the room to her. It’s why, he reasons, that he kisses her.
Because that’s what he does. He kisses her, his mouth still thick with the anise taste from the Jager, and there must be a little bad in her somewhere because she doesn’t pull away at first: she kisses him back. It’s brief, but she kisses him back, her lips parting around his bottom lip and sucking, just for a moment. Her hands reach up to his shoulders and curl into that stupid jumpsuit he’s wearing and he’s not sure which one of them does it, closes the gap, but her body presses hot against his.
“Oh my god,” she says as she pulls back, “I’m gonna go to jail, I’m gonna be on the news.”
“No,” he says. “No, no, no, no. No. It was my fault.”
“You’re eighteen. You’re eighteen? Tell me you are eighteen years old, so help me.” She scrubs a hand over her face. “They’re gonna make a Lifetime movie about me,” she moans.
“No. No they’re really not. Hey. Hey,” he says and she reaches for her thermos and takes a long slug. She sighs nosily as she swallows. “Hi. Would you look at me.”
“I don’t want to look at you,” she says, miserable, and her shoulders slumped, and she really won’t look at him. She’s staring at her desk like she’s waiting for it to scuttle off and spread the news.
“Please.”
“I like you a lot,” she says to her desk, but she says it like it’s the worst thing in the world. “And that’s so wrong. I’m a cliche,” she all but wails.
“I like you a lot too which is why I need you to look at me because I have something important to say.” He likes that when he says it, he says it like not only does he have something important to say, but that he himself is important. Score one, Samberg!
“If it’s a murder-suicide pact you got up your sleeve, I’m really not game for that,” she says, but she lifts her head and turns to face him.
“No. Though it’s good to know that’s not your thing.” And then he sighs heavily, because he’s actually going to do this. Disguise, deception, and the truth -- all that jazz.
“I’m not a student,” he says, and she frowns. “I mean, I’ve been a student. But I’m not really a student.”
“What the fuck are you talking about.” The word fuck sounds good in her mouth he decides, but now’s really not the time to dwell on that.
“I’m with . . . I’m with a special unit of the FBI.” It sounds so incredibly stupid and improbably out loud a part of him wants to laugh. “I’m thirty years old yet apparently pass for eighteen and I’m here to . . . bust some giant drug ring thing.”
“What . . . the . . . fuck,” she says all long and slow. “Dude. What? Who else knows about this?”
“Uh, well, you. And my boss. And, like, my fake aunt and uncle. Yeah, they definitely know we’re not related and stuff.”
“But no one, I mean no one, knows here?”
“Nah, man. Everyone thinks I’m just . . . eighteen.”
Her eyes narrow. “And your name’s not Billy Madison.”
“Well, duh.”
“ . . . are you allowed to tell me your name?”
Andy considers it. “Well. I totally wasn’t supposed to tell you I’m . . . ”
“A cop?”
He braces his hands on his hips. “I told you. I’m not a cop. I’m FBI. That’s cooler. That’s so much cooler.”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re FBI,” she mocks, her voice dropped to a lower register and she waves her hands in the air, mimicking -- well, he’s not really sure what she’s supposed to be mimicking.
He shoots her what he thinks is a serious look and she giggles. She actually giggles, like she’s the schoolgirl and he’s the teacher (hey, that’s not that terrible of a potential roleplay scenario . . . ) and they weren’t just kissing a few minutes ago and he didn’t just cop to being an undercover officer of the law. She sobers quickly and stands up a little straighter, her shoulders held back and she nods.
“I’m Andy,” he finally says. She bites her bottom lip, more coy than nervous.
“Rashida,” she says, and she extends her hand out to him.
He takes it.
EPILOGUE.
Mr. Cranston’s taken into custody that Friday.
“The chemist,” Suds says, slipping his shades on. “Should have known.”
“Good work,” he says and pounds Andy on the back.
Andy’s not entirely sure he’s responsible for this achievement, but hey, whatever. A job well done.
Now, if you’ll excuse him, but there's a former educator of his to wreck*.
(*that’s hip slang, right?)
fin.