fic: introduction to civil disobedience and revolutionary tactics
Title: Introduction to Civil Disobedience and Revolutionary Tactics (3/?)
Author: ktcosmopolitan
Spoilers: Anything the show has already aired is fair game.
Rating/Warning: currently PG-13
Word Count: 5899
Disclaimer: I solemnly swear all of these characters belong to NBC (which, higher power willing, loves them as much as I do).
Summary: An AU story set in 1960s New York City, in which we meet the jaded lawyer, the fierce feminist, the tough civil rights activist, the lost athlete who never got his shot, the ambitious college student who wants to see the world, the entrepreneur who is simply trying to cater to the highest paying customer, and the photojournalist there to capture it all. (I bet you can guess who’s who.)
Author's Note: Hmm, my only note for this chapter is regarding where the story's focus will lie. Of course, while I love Jeff and Annie to pieces, I want to emphasize the presence of the rest of the study group in this story because they are important to me, too. Later chapters will be heavy, heavy, heavy with Jeff/Annie development; these chapters are more about setting up all seven group members' stories. xo Kate
…
NEW CIVIL RIGHTS LAW ALREADY IN EFFECT? CITIZENS TESTING OUT LEGISLATION LEFT AND RIGHT; POLICE OVERWHELMED
“Jeffrey Winger, this is my goddaughter, Annie Edison. She’s from Alabama and she’ll be staying with me while she attends school at New York University in September. Well, Annie? Don’t just stand there, shake the man’s hand.”
They spoke simultaneously.
“Well, well, well, what are the chances?”
“Oh my goodness gracious.”
Her eyes widened as her fingers curled up against her palm and Jeff suddenly sensed that, perhaps, the two of them were not supposed to have met before this moment.
To conceal his own confusion, Pierce laughed loudly and nudged Annie’s chin with the folded knuckle of his index finger. A stiff smile blossomed in place of her frown. “Oh, Annie, don’t tell me you’ve already run into the likes of men like Winger! Beware, that smile is more wicked than it is warmhearted.”
“Ah, your encouragement is always much appreciated, Pierce,” said Jeff, adopting an overworked smile, “but, no, no, I was merely mistaken. I thought she looked like someone I know-just a blunder on my part. Forgive me.”
“Well! That makes much more sense- I would sooner expect hell to freeze over than for little Annie to be anything like the women you know,” Pierce jested with a wink.
When it became clear that the joke was in want of validation, Jeff deadpanned, “Always the wisecracker, Pierce.”
Though this exchange satisfied the old billboard mogul, the young woman’s one-inch heels and modest dress could not fool the blind; Jeff knew she was the same girl who had trailed along with that nosey kid from The Five Boroughs Chronicle the day before. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, looking more at Pierce than he looked at her.
She shook hands like a politician-with a firm grip and a winning smile. “The pleasure is all mine,” she replied in an accent whose presence he now understood.
“Come this fall, Annie will be studying at the university to become a nurse,” said Pierce, proudly gripping the lapels of his jacket. “I thought some time at the firm might do her some good-a woman working in a hospital should know the whole office routine: how to type, how to fill, you know.” He spoke with an air of joyful arrogance, the kind that reminded Jeff of his father. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to catch a meeting uptown in forty minutes-look after her, won’t you, Jeffrey? Don’t let her go out alone. This neighborhood is much too dangerous for a girl to be by herself.”
Suppressing a snort, Jeff glanced at Annie, whose eyes flickered beneath her dark lashes, a challenge camouflaged in silence. He hesitated before calling out to Pierce, who was marching purposefully toward the office foyer, “Uh, right! Don’t you worry! She’ll keep busy here!”
“I wouldn’t doubt it for a second,” Pierce said grandly, waving a hand stepping into the elevator, the doors of which closed soundlessly.
Annie’s rigid posture wilted noticeably once the two of them were alone. She leaned against a desk and slipped one foot out of its shoe, wincing. “I think I’m gettin’ a blister,” she muttered absently, rubbing her heel. “I knew I shouldn’t have worn these terrible things. I’m fixin’ to write the manufacturers, give ’em a piece of my mind-it’s shameful how they prioritize looks over comfort.”
Instinct nearly drove him to remark how she and his needlessly defiant roommate would get along famously, but Jeff bit the inside of his cheek and turned away to let the moment pass. “Yes, well, uh, I really do have some things for you to type up-if you could follow me-” He motioned toward his office at the back of the firm.
Annie crossed her arms as she stood up. “That’s it? We’re not- you’re not going to ask me about yesterday?”
“Do I need to?” he rejoined over his shoulder.
Electing to remain barefoot, she trotted to catch up with him. “Well, I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to know.”
“I have found that keeping my nose out of other people’s business as much as possible keeps things running much more smoothly than anything else.” He pointed to a small desk outside his office door; on its surface sat an antique lamp and a typewriter. “This is where my old secretary Luellen would normally sit, but Pierce and I agreed you would be better off working under me.”
She looked up so fast, it was a wonder her neck did not snap. “What?”
“Working-working for me,” he said quickly, straightening his tie. “Working near me. At this desk. As my secretary.” She was quiet, so he continued, “The rest of the men in the office are a little-oh, I don’t know, old, I guess-so we figured you would be happier here. Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll show you what you’ll be typing up.”
He returned with a stack of legal pads in his arms to find her staring glumly toward the office’s eastern windows. “Ah, come on now, it won’t be so bad here,” he said, dropping the stack on top of the garishly large memo calendar that Luellen had spread out over the desk’s surface. With no response, Jeff finally relented and said, “All right, all right, you want to tell me what you were doing with that journalist kid yesterday?”
Much to his chagrin, the innocently hesitant look she gave him at that moment was like a needle in his arm and, though he desperately tried to fight this, he pitied her. “I wasn’t doing anything illegal, mind you,” she said after a moment. After some time, she began to sound as though her once grand ideas now seemed foolish to her. “I was only looking to buy the new Beatles album… Hardly any shops in Alabama sell them, not even in the bigger cities, so I thought I could pick one up here and-and the record store was the closest thing I could find! Just my luck, the place was sort of a dump. I spent near half an hour there before Abed-um, you know, the young man from the newspaper-before he started talking to me. I guess he likes the Beatles, too.”
The needle pulled slightly and he speculated that it would leave a bruise. “I assume Pierce don’t know you went out.”
“Oh, he had a limousine driver take me to that big park near all the hotels,” Annie said dismissively, suddenly emboldened by her own rebelliousness, “but, to be honest, it was awfully boring, so I slipped away to find one of those public phones with the-oh, what are they called-the Yellow Pages beneath them. I found the record shop’s listing and got myself a taxicab, which made me short a few dollars for the album, so Abed bought it for me. I thought that was especially sweet of him.”
Puppy love never charmed Jeff the same way it delighted the majority of television audiences, but he forced a smile at this and she continued, “He escorted me back to the park a short while after we saw you. The limousine driver was scared to death that he had lost me, so we agreed to keep the afternoon a secret.”
“Well, uh, welcome to New York. As long as you’re willing to tell authority figures to fuck off, you’ll fit right in.” He frowned when the color drained from her face. “Oh-oh, crap, what’s wrong? What happened?”
“It’s nothing,” she said, the majesty in her voice diminishing. “I just-oh, gosh, well, back home, I never heard that kind of talk. It’s a little shocking, I suppose.”
“Oh. Sorry. Creature of habit,” he replied, gesturing to himself. “I’ll watch my language.”
Annie stared at her lap. “It wasn’t even so bad of me to do that, was it? I’m sure there are plenty of other ways I could really tell him to-um, you know-screw off. I just wanted the album. That’s all.”
Later, Jeff would realize that him did not mean Pierce, but the conversation had grown too personal for him to care at the time. He cleared his throat and began moving toward the door on which a temporary sign hung, bearing his name (the firm rarely had the funds for fanciful gold lettering and the like.) “I’ll-I’ll give you a better rundown of the office later, but a client is meeting me here in half an hour so I should get ready. And, uh, when all the other women come in, just ignore them, okay? They’re-well, you’ll see.”
…
It turned out to be the elderly owner of an upscale bakery in South Carolina who ultimately broke the news to little Shirley Edwards about her place in society according to history and to the bulk of American lawmakers. Shirley was five at the time.
On one especially icy day in January, a small group of kindergarten students bound for home passed Lulubelle’s Pastry Parlor, one of the few establishments in the neighborhood that had year-round air conditioning and heating. Rosemary Wilkinson proposed that they pool their money and go inside to share a few cups of cocoa, an idea met with rousing applause. “We’ll be kings!” exclaimed a boy as the six children ascended the parlor stoop. Only four made it through the door.
A thin, silver-haired woman with angular features stood over the threshold, staring down at Shirley and another dark-skinned boy from behind her half-moon spectacles. “Your kind is not welcome here,” she said coldly before slamming the door shut.
The other boy cried into Shirley’s sleeve behind the dumpster out back for twenty minutes as they listened to the blare of the president’s voice coming from the barber shop’s radio down the block. Her grandmother talked about it nonstop at dinner later that night, reciting various parts. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself…
Business at the diner had grown rapidly in the twenty-four hours following President Johnson’s signing of H.R. 7152. People dropped by for a cup of coffee or a quick breakfast and, upon seeing Shirley, would exclaim something of the congratulatory essence. “We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?” gushed a middle-aged woman at one point. When Shirley said nothing, Troy forced a smile and told the woman her pancakes were on the house.
“Why does everyone think this is the finish line? They’re all acting like we’ve completed a goddamned marathon!” Shirley cried as she burst into the diner’s kitchen. Upon seeing her, the cook ducked his head; a few years earlier, she had asked if the diner could close early so the community leaders could meet there. The cook spat that hell would freeze over the day he took directives from a woman. Her eyes became slits and she growled in his face, “Then the devil must be ice cold right about now.” He avoided her like the plague ever since.
Troy followed her through the swinging silver doors. “Well, this is a big deal-”
“Yes, yes, I know! Just like the Thirteenth Amendment! And the fourteenth, and the fifteenth!” Shirley yanked open the icebox door. “As was the Court’s decision on Brown and headlines from Rosa Parks and James Meredith! Everything is a big deal for people who have nothing! But I suppose no one can get it through their fat heads that we haven’t done enough!”
“Well, you have to let people celebrate once in a while. They just want to feel good about something for-”
“Feeling good will give them a false sense of security!” she snapped, shutting the icebox door noisily when she could not find what she wanted. “Sure, Johnson’s on our side, but what about the members of Congress who voted against the act? What about the rest of America?”
“Things take time, Shirley-”
“And I’m tired of waiting!” she bellowed, turning around so quickly that the skirt of her dress caught on a tray of silverware. Forks, spoons, and knives went flying; the sound rekindled her anger. “Everyone thinks it’s been a long time coming, and of course it has, but no one seems to remember the fact that most of us-maybe all of us-will be long gone by the time all is truly well!”
“I do,” he said quietly.
At this, she stopped and looked at him for an ostensible eternity. Finally, her face softened. “Oh. Oh, Troy, sweetheart,” she sighed, bending down to pick up a spoon that had skidded beneath a table. She stared at her inverted reflection in its surface. “Oh, honey, I know you do. You know better than anyone what all of this takes. I-I just forgot that for a moment. I’m sorry you had to see me fly off the handle like that.”
Troy shrugged as the cook gently dropped a few plates of burgers on the pick-up counter. “I don’t mind that much-you’ve seen me lose my cool, too, so let’s call it even,” he said. At that moment, he noticed the man with the camera walk inside, taking the first available booth for himself. Troy quickly kissed Shirley’s cheek and moved toward the swinging silver doors again, before turning back to her once more. “I always… I always want you to be happy, Shirley. So let me help you, okay?”
…
The other secretarial women at the firm initially ignored Annie (perhaps out of loyalty to Luellen, Jeff’s former secretary, who felt she had been wrongly exiled to the far corner of the office), but when Jeff signaled they would leave for lunch soon, the other secretaries quickly turned on their sneering smiles and began their rounds of questions.
“Ooh, lunch? On your first day here?” cooed one woman with tight brown curls stuck close to her head. “Dear, dear, I wonder what one would have to do to warrant such a luxury as that!”
“I can think of a few things,” said a raspy-voiced woman near Annie’s desk. She held a lit cigarette in her hand. “Nothing any of us old broads would be caught doing these days.”
Jeff emerged from his office, tugging on the jacket of his suit. “Ready?”
Annie looked up at him, scowling. “Almost.”
The rest of the secretaries twittered with curiosity. Luellen stalked by, carrying a few manila folders, and huffed, “Jeffrey, I worked for you for five years and not once did you ever take me out!” The woman all chirruped in agreement and Jeff, visibly irritated, shook this off with a wave of his hand.
“Look, she’s new in town, I’m just showing her around. Let’s keep it professional, shall we?” He turned to Annie, who looked like a child caught between two adults fighting. “Let’s go-it’s nearly noon and we can’t be late.”
She followed him to the elevator, feeling scathing glares burn holes in her back. “Late? It’s just lunch. There’s a starting time for lunch?”
Jeff checked his watch as they stepped into the lift and the doors closed behind them. “There is on Fridays,” he said vaguely. They were quiet for the rest of the way down.
The following nine minutes passed in a strange fashion, with Jeff striding quickly down the block and turning corners sharply, silently, all the while Annie struggled to keep up, panting every time she drew close to him, “People in… Alabama… Walked… At most… Half the speed you’re goin’…”
“We can’t be late!” he yelled each time over his shoulder. “She hates it when I’m late!”
“Who’s-this-she-you’re talkin’ about?” Annie huffed as they approached a brick building on the corner of a deadened intersection. “What? We ran all the way here for a-a warehouse?”
The building’s interior hardly differed from its unmarked outside. The walls were painted with earthen tones and a few antique lights hung from the ceiling. A blond woman sitting at a table in the corner waved immediately once they came inside. “Go ahead, just that way,” Jeff said softly, pointing.
Once they reached the table, the blond woman stood up. People in the South would have balked at her outfit: high-waist jeans that flared at the bottom and thick-soled boots. What looked like handmade necklace of bottle caps was draped over her chest. “Hey there. I’m Britta, and you must be-”
“Annie. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Oh! What an accent! Where are you from?”
“Alabama.” Annie reddened briefly, still plagued by the notion that Southerners were not well-liked in New York. “Huntsville, to be exact. It’s where NASA built the Marshall Space Flight Center, so we get some attention for that, but nothin’ real big. Not these days, at least. I lived out in the suburbs, anyway, so I never saw much of it-the city here’s a change for me.”
“Totally,” Britta said, nodding her head rapidly. She seemed a little too high-strung for someone to be associated to Jeff. “Well, why don’t we sit down? Marla? Marla!”
A tired-looking woman trotted over to their table, pulling a pencil out from behind her ear. “All right, can I get you folks something to drink? I’m guessing the usual for you two-what about you?”
It took Annie a moment to realize the waitress was referring to her. “Oh, sorry. Um, I’ll have a Coca-Cola. Thank you.” When Marla walked away, she turned to Jeff and Britta. “Y’all have a usual here?”
“We come here every week,” Jeff explained. “It’s a tradition, I suppose. The prices are pretty low and the place is never crowded, so it always worked for us.”
“And they pay their workers fairly,” Britta added after a moment.
“Right. And they pay their workers fairly.” The way Jeff rolled his eyes seemed mostly affectionate.
The conversation remained pleasant for the remainder of the lunch, though Annie never got over the sense that she was playing third wheel to two people honoring a ritual. She smiled at the inside jokes she did not understand and decided to speak fondly of her parents when they asked about home, since she was yet unaware of their own sour relationships with their families. Things brightened a bit, however, when Britta asked why she came to the city.
“Well,” Annie said carefully, “I’ve enrolled at New York University for the fall. Their nursing program is supposed to be topnotch-”
Jeff yelped when Britta reached across the table to smack his arm. “Damn it, Jeff, you didn’t tell me she was going to college! What have we said about withholding important information from each other-shit, Annie, congratulations! That’s huge!”
“I don’t know about that,” Annie said, her face flushing as she smiled at her lap. “I guess it is pretty exciting. I’m transferring from the community college down in Huntsville.” The unadulterated joy on Britta’s face would later solidify her and Annie’s friendship-in that moment, it was clear her happiness was one hundred percent devoted to Annie, who was new to such an experience.
Excitedly, Britta began to list all the radical practices of the university from the late 19th century through the present. “Ooh, don’t forget!” Annie cried at one point. “The 1928 Olympic games were the first to include women, and the American women’s swim team had a few NYU students!”
At this, Britta practically glowed. She looked over at Jeff and gave one short, sure nod, much different from her previously jittery disposition. “Oh, I like her. She’s definitely a keeper.”
…
Troy Barnes and Abed Nadir came from quite similar backgrounds. Both were separated from their parents as teenagers and neither remembers much pleasantness in their childhoods prior to that. Both grew up as only children and as the products of unhappy marriages. Both envied, in separate ways, the richer families of their hometowns who could afford things like television sets. And, most importantly, both would foster an eager and unique desire for change within them during the darker parts of their life.
None of this, however, was revealed in their first real conversation, which struggled to accommodate Abed’s frank personality and Troy’s lack in a sense of self.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in here past noon. You want the usual?”
“I do like the hotcakes, but I’m not here to eat. Actually, I wanted to talk to you for a moment.”
“Oh. Well, um, sure, what can I do for you?”
“Abed Nadir, second-in-command journalist for The Five Boroughs Chronicle.”
They shook hands. “Troy Barnes. Uh, wait staff at this diner.”
“As you probably remember, I was present for the community meeting here a few days ago. Since the bill has passed, I’ve developed an interest in writing about the Civil Rights Movement-where it’s been, where it is now, where it’s headed. I want to recruit you to help me cover this story.”
Troy dropped into his side of the booth, evidently winded at this revelation. “What? Why me?”
“You know people. You understand them. I’ve watched you interact with the customers here-you know how to gauge the public’s feelings on any given topic. And you also know Shirley Bennett.”
“Shirley? Um, yeah, we’re close-what about her?”
“I want her to be the face of my story.”
…
That evening, after the firm’s lights were off and its doors were locked, Jeff walked Annie down to the street, where he hailed a taxi for her. The cab pulled up and she turned to face him, eyebrow arched. “I could have done that.”
“Done what?” he asked as he opened the door.
“Flagged down the taxi. And I could have gotten the door for myself, too,” she said.
“Well, excuse me. I thought manners were a big deal in the South?”
She moved between the car and the door, keeping her glare fixed on him. “They are, but this isn’t the South, and I’m not going to be silly little Annie Addic-um, Edison. I’m not going to be silly little Annie Edison anymore. Grown-up Annie can do things for herself, thank you very much.”
“Fine by me,” Jeff said, flashing his palms. “So, did you enjoy yourself today, Grown-up Annie Edison?”
“Oh, what do y’all say up here when you like something? It was a hoot?”
“Maybe when you’re eighty-five and you’re still reminiscing on the so-called good ol’ days.” He smiled again and, still, she could not help but notice that this smile was still much more formal than anything he flashed Britta’s way. This sprung an abrupt question into her head that traveled out of her mouth long before she knew she should not ask it.
“Are you and Britta-um, together? You know, going steady?”
At first, he looked confused, and then the inquiry inspired something of a laugh, something of a bark from him. “Oh, no, not in the slightest. We’re just good friends,” he explained, though a topic like this still made him fidget more than he liked. He held back the details of their childhoods and adolescences, their current personal Cold Wars with their own parents. The story rarely served as more than a vehicle for pity, which Jeff could not stand.
“Oh.” Annie waved politely as the cab driver forced a cough to suggest that she should hurry up. “Well, thanks for lunch today. And thanks for trying to make me feel comfortable at the firm. I know my uncle only just surprised you with the idea of me working there on you yesterday, so I appreciate the effort.”
The world uncle briefly threw him off, before Jeff realized she was talking about Pierce. This baffled him slightly; he could not imagine ever being so close to someone that he would give them a title that did not truly belong to them-that is, to call a godfather an uncle and so forth. Then he wondered if he was unfair to label Britta as only a good friend, when she had been the one to help him through some really terrible shit in his life. By this time, Annie had buckled herself in and gently closed the door, waving at him through the window as the taxi drove away.
He felt guilty as he watched the tail lights fade in the distance, knowing his actions today were nothing close to the valiant effort that she mentioned. The omnipresent naïveté in youth and the equally boundless cynicism of the older generations, including his own, were a mix toxic enough to send him to the nearest bar most nights. Briefly, the concept enticed him, until he turned in the direction of home and began to walk quickly, suddenly desperate to spend an evening sober, even if it meant spending it in pain, for that would confirm he was yet alive.
…
Annie’s first week in the city had become a precarious time for Pierce, who could not understand why time spent with her was so excruciatingly painful; why breakfasts were so unbearably silent, why dinners consisted of few words beyond good night. To him, rows of candelabra and gold dishware and fake fruit arrangements constituted a perfectly normal meal. Annie felt that all of it was simply more evidence that things like her secret trip to the record shop would never be allowed by him, and therefore it she would be better off if she kept quiet.
He downed a glass of seltzer before speaking. “How was your first day at the firm?”
“Oh, fine, fine.” The tips of her fork clinked against the china as she aimlessly stabbed a few thin slices of meat.
“Did Jeffrey treat you well?”
“Yes, he was nothing but a gentleman.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it. You know, tomorrow is the Fourth of July and every year a colleague of mine throws the best garden party on the roof of her building. I think it would be a great opportunity to introduce yourself to some really important, powerful people, people who might do you favors in the future. What do you say?”
She shrugged. “Sure. That sounds nice.”
Once the conversation faded again, Pierce sighed. “Annie, I know things are different-maybe even difficult-up here with me, but I’m trying my best and I think-”
Annie excused herself from the table with a less-than-gracious curtsy. He cringed at the image of her doing this for her parents at home, round-the-clock, and once her bedroom door closed loudly behind her, he swore loudly.
…
The middle-aged woman who lived in the apartment directly above Jeff and Britta was something of a guardian angel to them. When their lowlife landlord came knocking for some form of rent-always so conveniently while Jeff was gone-the woman made sure to stay near Britta and was quick to defend her in any rental disputes. In the earlier years, she often wordlessly spared extra groceries when it was obvious that Jeff’s paycheck was not enough. She performed more menial tasks, too-little things to get them through the day, like giving Britta a cigarette when the latter unexpectedly ran out or gifting Jeff with a beer after a particularly strenuous night at work. They eventually came to feel she was some sort of twisted divine being in their lives, and, considering their pasts, they were comforted by her presence.
Of course, they never told her any of this. She was a more reserved person than most and sentimentality did not seem like something she appreciated, so they expressed their thanks by donating to what she called the California Fund whenever they could. Her eldest son had gone out there for work a few years earlier, perhaps right around the time Britta returned to New York City. Since then, the woman-in secret they called her 4C for her apartment number, which was only labeled as M. Grenfell at the front door downstairs-had begun saving up so she could afford to move her family to the West. This task was easier said than done, since most of her salary went to paying the tuition checks of her children’s parochial education when it was not spent on essentials like food and rent. A donation to the fund seldom got more than a grateful nod out of her, but Britta swore on Christmas one year that the woman grew teary-eyed upon receiving the gift of twenty dollars from her neighbors downstairs. Jeff speculated this was highly exaggerated but never questioned the account.
About once a week, sometimes more, the woman would come to check on them. Their age did not matter-to her, they were still little fledglings who now and then lost their way. Neither could tell how much she knew of their family lives; the subject would pass through conversation casually, but the woman never reacted to any information, new or old. One year, Britta called her mother to tell her happy birthday and Mrs. Perry made some cold remark about revoked privileges of access to so-called family affairs; in response, Britta screamed at the top of her lungs and flung a glass bottle against the fire escape at the end of the hallway. 4C came and sat with Britta on the stairs, stroking her hair as the younger woman sobbed into her chest. Whatever she learned of the Perrys then or any other time, she never repeated.
The evening after her lunch with Jeff and Annie, Britta came home from a committee meeting with a few other Sisters of the Revolution-an activist group she and a friend founded some years earlier-to find the woman from 4C waiting for her, a piece of paper in hand. “You never told me you had a boyfriend,” she said plainly as she handed Britta the note.
“What? Oh. I guess it never came up. Thank you-” Britta came up short for words but 4C had already disappeared up the stairs.
Their apartment building had a single payphone, located on the first floor, beside the rusty P.O. boxes. An unwritten agreement had formed to state that a tenant, upon hearing the phone ring, would answer and either locate the proper person to take the call or write a message down. The neighborly feeling this created among the residents of the building touched Britta, but rarely expected calls for herself. This message made sense, though. On the paper, in long handwriting, was Troy’s name, a callback number to the diner, and the words Fourth of July party?
He answered almost immediately. She laughed into the receiver and said, “Eager beaver.”
“I was waiting to hear from you,” he replied sheepishly.
She glanced at her watch. “It’s a bit late for you to still be working, isn’t it?”
“I covered a shift; I’m trying to earn some extra cash for…” He drifted off for a moment and promptly forgot about this thought. “Hey, so, tomorrow, Shirley’s family is hosting a barbeque at her house-you know, for the holiday-and she thought it would be a good idea for me to bring you. You wanna come?”
Two years together certainly indicated a serious nature of Britta’s relationship with Troy, but she still hesitated at the idea of becoming familiar with one another’s excuse for a family. Neither had parents for the other to meet, but Britta had Jeff and Troy had Shirley, so long lingered the prospect of finally introducing one to the other; the idea was commonly met with a flimsy defense from Britta and would die shortly thereafter. She knew how much this hurt Troy, whose perceptions of family were slightly more positive than her own, but the pain from the yet-healed wounds inflicted by her parents often eclipsed her love for him. To say she was desperate to avoid ever confronting this reality was an understatement.
After a long pause, Troy ventured, “Britta?”
She sighed. “Oh-all right, yeah. What the hell. When and where do you want to meet?”
He volunteered to walk over to get her in the afternoon so that they could take the train to Shirley’s together. His voice grew giddier the more he spoke. “Oh, this is great, she’s been dying to meet you-”
A robotic female voice interrupted in a clear, cold voice, “Please deposit additional money if you would like to continue the call, which will be disconnected without further monetary payment.”
“Fuck,” Britta said under her breath as she rummaged around her pockets for extra coins. The lock of the front door behind her clicked before the door swung open and Jeff appeared. “Shit, do you have any change on you?”
He fished a nickel out of his pocket and handed it to her. She pressed it into the slot and said into the phone receiver, “Troy? Troy?” After a beat, she hung up. “Damn it.”
“How’s Lover Boy?” he asked as he treaded upstairs; she followed quickly. They rarely said formal hellos to each other these days.
Britta scowled. “He’s fine. “Why can’t you just call him by his name?”
“Where’s the fun in that?” he said with a smile as he turned the lone brass key in the lock of their apartment door.
“Of course. Nothing is fun when it’s not at the expense of someone else,” she sighed, pushing past him and making a beeline for the couch. “I’d ask about your love life, but if we’re being perfectly honest, I don’t really care about whatever flight attendant or groupie you fucked in the bathroom at Grand Central before dinner.”
“Ouch,” he said flatly, watching his reflection in the mirror on the wall as he loosened his tie. “Your confidence in me is insulting. We just saw each other this afternoon.”
“And you seducing someone at the start of a weekend is as much of a ritual as our lunches are,” she said matter-of-factly, pulling off her boots. “Speaking of our lunches, that Annie girl-I like her.”
He chose to say nothing, which was a mistake. Britta furrowed her brow and blurted out, “You’re not going to corrupt her, are you?”
“Corrupt her?” Jeff repeated resentfully, wheeling around to face his roommate. “What does that mean?”
“Don’t play dumb! She’s the first person younger than thirty-five to walk through the doors at Pearson-Harrow in a year and I don’t trust you.”
“Jesus, Britta.”
“Oh, you know what I’m talking about! From the looks of it, Annie is very wholesome compared to the rest of this city and if she’s working with you in close proximity, then you’re going to be very influential on her development! And, let’s face it, your track record with female friends is pretty lousy!“
“I’m friends with you,” he said, turning back to the mirror, clearly having lost major interest in her spiel.
“I don’t count,” she scoffed. “We’ve known each other since we were kids, back before you became such an fast-talking jackass.”
He bit back a laugh. “Well, we’re not even talking about the same thing with Annie. She’s just a kid, Britta. Working for me as a favor to Pierce.”
“Whatever. Talk to me in a year and we’ll see if you still feel that way.” She resigned to the bedroom at an unusually early hour, leaving him to replay the words in his head a few thousand times for the remainder of the night, agonizing over the possibility that he truly was too damaged to ever let innocence be innocence, to let goodness remain good.