fic: executive politics 101 (Community/The West Wing)
Britta fucks up.
This isn’t anything new. She fucks up on things all the time. But this fuckup doesn’t really count in the same category as say when she chose to eat the hot dog for lunch from the cafeteria instead of the chicken nuggets. That is something she should have known better. This is completely on a different level.
First thing: She told Jeff Winger she loved him in the middle of said cafeteria in front of the entire Greendale campus body.
Second thing: She then proceeded to call her sister and leave voicemail messages, several, that consisted of her heavy breathing and what could have been, she will never admit it, small, tiny sniffling like sounds and nothing else.
Okay, both of those things she should have known better on. The first because it’s Jeff Winger and she isn’t the type of girl who plays one-up games with other women out of spite and mistaken jealousy. And two because leaving messages with no words tends to freak her sister out and put her on a plane to come visit.
Or if in Britta’s case your sister worked for the President of the United States, caused said sister to convince the President to make a side stop at Greendale for a speech on education after being in the Colorado area.
This would be a good point to back up and rewind. Pause and explain. Abed would call this the backstory, filling in the missing pieces for the audience.
Britta hadn’t ever been lying when she said she dropped out of high school to impress a band and then messed around with spray paint cans until she went off to the Peace Corp and mixed some foot modeling in with a trip to Africa. That all was true. It’s the before all of that she hadn’t ever really talked about. They all had their secrets in the study group. Hers just happened to be family related.
The truth is that Perry isn’t her last name. It’s her middle name, and her full name happens to be Britta Perry Hayes. She’d dropped the ‘Hayes’ after leaving home, but if someone looked at her social security card, it would still have the ‘Hayes’ on the end. The truth is that Britta hadn’t, and still doesn’t, fit in being the child of a Republican family from North Carolina that prided itself on having been political royalty in the state for the last one hundred years. She also hates sweet tea.
Lucky for her, older sister Ainsley fits the role perfectly as if she’d been born for it. She is, Britta isn’t, and hadn’t liked the long shadow that had been casted despite the several years between them. Ainsley went to the Ivy League and got a job in the White House (twice now). And Britta ended up getting her G.E.D. and landing in Greendale and professing her love for Jeff Winger in a crowded cafeteria.
That explains everything.
Especially the sweet tea thing.
Press play.
Britta fucks up.
At the end of the summer she leaves several messages after a sudden bout of feelings. She handles them in the best possible way: a drinking binge that involves all the vodka in her freezer and talking to her cat. In her drink fest, she turns her phone on silent after finally having enough of the calls from Annie and Shirley asking if she wanted to talk about it or go shopping or anything else that she doesn’t want to do. And then her phone dies and she doesn’t really give a shit enough about it to care.
The problem is that she doesn’t listen to her voicemail until it’s too late:
“You have seven new messages. First new message,”
“Britta, It’s Ainsley. I think you maybe called me by accident.”
“Britta, I know it’s you. I don’t know any other Colorado numbers and the Colorado representation doesn’t really call me, their loss, they’re just upset over the fact that I orchestrated the environmental legislation getting cut from their state, but what’s going on?”
“Britta, this isn’t funny anymore. Call me back.”
“Okay, as your older sister, I’m ordering you to call me back. You sound like you’re crying and the heavy breathing is not helping me keep images of you dying from my mind. I will call the FBI. Do you want them breaking down your door? I will call Daddy.”
And so on and so on until,
“Britta, good news. It’s re-election time and we’re going to be in Colorado. I’ve gotten myself onto Air Force One, and I’ll be close to Greendale. I’m stopping by on Wednesday.”
Britta stands at her tiny kitchen counter having listened to all seven messages from her sister. “Shit,” she says to the empty apartment.
She spends all Monday divided between ignoring the looks from her fellow Greendale students and trying to get Ainsley on the phone. This proves to be easier said than done. Apparently working for the President means you’re actually busy or something. They play phone tag back and forth until Britta finally manages to nail her down in the afternoon. She ducks into a storage closet.
“Britta! Sorry, I didn’t pick up earlier, it’s been crazy this morning. The President just got done with his speech--”
Britta moves a box that’s on top of a bucket before sitting down. She fights to talk over her sister and the background noise. “Yeah, that’s great. But you know you really don’t--”
“... the part on foreign affairs was a bit weak, especially given the current situation in North Africa.”
“Hey, why aren’t you guys doing more about that? There are people dying and,” she pauses and realizes that now isn’t the time to get distracted. Focus. “No, seriously you don’t need to come--”
“What?” There are muffling noises and something about a person named Sam and a sandwich that involves a debate between turkey or ham. She comes back on. “Sorry, what did you say?”
Britta unfolds her leg, boot heel catching on a mop and causing it to clatter to the floor. “I said, you don’t need to come here. I’m fine. Really, I’m good. No need for you to take time out of your busy schedule doing, um, Presidential things.” She says this all in a rush.
“Oh, it’s not a problem. I want to see you. And I don’t believe you at all, but see this is the best part. Wait for it. I convinced the President to make at stop and do a speech at Greendale!”
She is sure she didn’t hear her right. “What?”
“It’s perfect. I told him we shouldn’t exclude community colleges in the area, and he agreed, and now he’s talking on Thursday. I get to see you then too. It’ll be--”
Britta hangs up the phone, finger jabbing down on the red end call button. Her mouth twists together and outside of her hiding place in the closet she can hear the PA system go off. The Dean’s announcement of President Santos’ arrival has her grinding her teeth.
“Fuck,” she says to the mop on the floor.
Britta wants to kill herself in the library later. Normally, being that it’s the beginning of a new year, they would probably be talking about classes and how weird Anthropology is going to be. But of course the group only wants to talk about the upcoming Presidential arrival.
It’s on the tip of her tongue to tell them about her sister, because let’s face it, with this study group, it’s going to come out sooner than later. And she’d rather have it all out, say it and run, than have them find out and make a big deal about it. She can already see Annie and Shirley’s looks of pity about her family issues, Abed’s quip about the black sheep of the family stereotype, and Pierce’s comment that her sister’s a lesbian too after learning she went to Smith. Better to just say it and let that be that. It’s ready to come out, quick announcement, sandwich it between Troy’s joke, but it gets stuck in her throat when Annie speaks.
“This is going to be so great, guys.” Annie’s practically vibrating in her chair from excitement, and on any other day, any other thing, Britta would find her equal parts annoying and cute. Today, not so much. “The President is coming here. Of the United States.” She says the last part as if they’d missed that.
“You shouldn’t be so excited,” Jeff says this while tapping away at the keys of his BlackBerry. “The speech won’t be anything different from what any other politician says. Empty promises of hope and good feelings and blah blah blah.”
Britta doesn’t try and stop herself from snapping out, “And that’s different from any of your speeches how?”
Annie breaks in before they can go at each other, but Britta’s lips curl in satisfaction at pointing out Jeff’s bullshit. Take that, Pointy Face Loser.
“Jeff, you shouldn’t say things like that.” Annie gives him her most disapproving big eyed stare. “I for one am looking forward to hearing President Santos speak. And getting to ask him questions.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna ask him about zombies.”
The whole group turns together to look at Troy. Abed nods in understanding and the two do their ritual hand shake.
Annie crosses her arms and lays them on the table. “Okay,” she drags the word out slowly. “The Dean asked me to be on the planning committee! Isn’t that great?”
As if by calling his name summons him, Dean Pelton chooses that moment to grace them with his presence. The costume he has on is even worse than the red, white, and blue affair he had worn for the student body president elections. There’re sparkles and sequins and ribbons.
Britta uses this to sneak out.
“I have to go,” pause, “take care of my cat. His eyes are infected,” she says. The group doesn’t notice, and she leaves them with Pierce talking about liberal hippies and Shirley wondering if the President liked brownies.
Britta doesn’t go to campus on Tuesday. It’s the second day of classes, but fuck it, it’s Greendale community college, and it’s not like anything serious is ever going to be covered that she can’t get later.
She lies in bed and stares at the mess of clothes and books and random shit that covers her floor and every available surface. She contemplates cleaning the apartment and this is why she doesn’t go to campus. She’s going to clean, or so she tells herself. It’s not that she cares what Ainsley is going to think about her messy apartment. She can judge all she wants and Britta won’t care. It’s that she wants to avoid the worry that Ainsley will have after seeing her place.
It’s two entirely different things. Her sister will worry like she always has, like when she used to call her after she dropped out of high school, like when she used to send money that she didn’t have to spare while in law school but did it anyway, like always. Britta is a functioning adult and this is her life. She doesn’t want the worry, and she doesn’t want the help.
She lies in bed and looks at the floor with narrowed eyes. She has every intention of cleaning, but in reality she just ends up pushing piles of clothes around until you can actually see spots of clear floor.
Britta deems that good enough and then makes a run to the liquor store to replace her vodka.
This is her Tuesday.
Nothing goes like how she wants it to on Wednesday.
She doesn’t have an exact plan of action, but she knows that what goes down was not what she wanted.
Abed would call this the big reveal.
Britta turns the corner into the library and stops. If her life had a soundtrack that followed her around, it would be screeching tires or breaking glass or the high sound of a violin at this moment. The worst possible thing is playing out in front of her.
There is no mistaking her sister who despite the time between last seeing her hasn’t changed all that much. And there is definitely no mistaking the sight of Jeff Winger talking to her sister about the White House, smug grin on his face as he leans over into her space.
The hangover Britta woke up with vanishes as anger replaces her mild irritation with the world. She doesn’t hesitate and she doesn’t think. She marches the short distance and slides between them. Pointing her finger at his chest, she says, “Get your pointy face and douchebag gelled hair away from my sister!”
“Sister?” Jeff asks and at the same time there’s a collective gasp from the rest of the group who’s been listening inside the room.
“Britta!”
Ainsley’s smiling and the group is staring at her and Jeff just tried to hit on her older sister.
Track 2 of the sound track is a low ‘dun dun dun’.
Not how she planned.
“I knew you were lying. Your cat only has one eye.”
Jeff says this, and they’re all sitting at the table now. It’s like an interrogation as the study group stares her down.
Annie peers at her with her wide blue eyes, awaiting her question when she asks, “You have a sister?”
“Yes,” Britta says because it’s all out now. And there is the pitying look from Annie.
Shirley is not far behind with a noise of sympathy, a coo from the back of her throat. “Britta,” and she says her name in the way that breaks it hard at the double consonants. “You didn’t have to hide her.”
She crosses her arms, fingers playing with the leather of her jacket, and lifts her eyebrows in disbelief. “I didn’t. You just found out.”
“But you wouldn’t have told us otherwise,” Annie says.
Pierce interjects from his spot. “Oh come on, it’s obvious. Britta’s insecure that she’s not as successful as her older and hotter sister.”
Britta grinds her teeth, her lips lifting in a snarl. She uncrosses her arms. “That is not true.”
“Uh, yeah, it is.” Jeff’s leaning back in his chair and it’s his turn for his eyebrows to lift.
Before she can say anything, Abed chooses to weigh in. “Actually, it’s only natural for Britta to feel this way. She dropped out of high school and now goes here,” he ticks his fingers like it’s a list. “Her sister works for the President of the United States. If they were on a TV show, Britta would be the black sheep who is the disgrace of the family. Her sister would be the opposite.”
“Her sister’s also sitting right here.”
They all turn as one; they’ve really gotten good at that, and Ainsley smiles at them, the corners of her mouth tight. It’s not a friendly smile. She gives them a half wave from the couch. “Hi. Yeah, I’m sitting right here. So is Britta.”
“You work for President Santos? What do you do?” Annie asks, grinning.
“I’m the White House Counsel, his lawyer.”
Britta can see Jeff about to comment and cuts him off. “She’s a real lawyer. Unlike you who faked your degree.”
He glares at her.
Troy sneaks his question in at this time. “Is there a plan for when the zombies invade? Because it’s going to happen and I just wanted to know, if like, you guys had taken steps to save us all.”
Ainsley gives Britta a look as if to say ‘are you for real’. “That’s not really my area of expertise,” she answers and stands from the couch. “And actually I really came here for Britta.”
She walks towards the door and Britta quickly follows.
Outside, the sun is bright as they walk aimlessly around the campus. The sidewalk is empty of most students and it’s just the two of them. They look odd: Britta in her leather and heeled boots, and Ainsley in tailored jeans and a blouse.
“Your friends are interesting,” Ainsley says. Her hair is pulled back and her eyes, the same blue, are hidden behind sunglasses.
Britta knows that this is her sister being polite. Their mother’s graces of hiding insults in thinly veiled politeness had been taught at an early age and Ainsley had learned it well. Her big sister had never stood for anyone dissing or putting them down. Family is important.
She picks her words carefully to answer. “They mean well.”
Ainsley stops and turns to say something, but Britta grabs her arm. “No really they do. They just,” Britta pauses, “Show it odd.”
Ainsley looks at her from behind the dark lenses. Seconds pass and Britta wants to squirm. Finally, she says, “If you say so.”
When Britta is sixteen, Ainsley comes home from law school for the summer. The house has been suffocating since she left, Britta the only child at home, and it’s been too much of her and her mother and father. All of it is too much.
But Ainsley comes home and things get better. Britta can breathe easier, there’s a buffer, deflection, attention taken away from her. Her sister spends the summer as an intern at the General Assembly, but at night she takes her out. The nights are theirs. They drive to the 7-11 down the street and buy the biggest slushy size and sit in the parking lot and laugh at the high school boys that come by and try so hard to pick them up. Or they go to the abandoned quarry that’s filled in with water now and swim till their arms get sore.
It’s the last summer that Britta is happy. She drops out of high school eight months later.
“Why are you here?”
This is later when Britta asks this. This is later when they are in her apartment, sitting on opposite ends of the couch and pretending not to notice the place that she lives in. Britta holds her drink in her hand, feet tucked underneath her, and asks, “Why are you here?”
Ainsley pets her one eyed cat and tilts her head to the side. “Why are you asking?”
Her fingers tighten on the glass. “Did Mom and Dad send you?”
The older blonde shakes her head. “No.”
Silence descends.
“I miss you,” Ainsley says and puts the glass to her lips.
‘I miss you too’ Britta says in her head.
Thursday comes and Greendale looks like someone vomited red, white, and blue all over it. The Dean has gone all out this time. There are streamers and banners, and he’s even painted the buildings. It’s a disgusting eyesore and only the Dean would think this would make Greendale look good to the President of the United States.
Britta stands in the parking lot, staring at the hot patriotic mess in front of her. She doesn’t speak at first when Jeff joins her, choosing to let him say whatever he wants.
“Your sister here?” He asks and they’re watching the workers moving things around for the stage that is hastily being constructed in the cafeteria.
“Yes.” She frowns. “Why? Want another chance at her?”
An odd look passes over his face, and it’s not one that she wants to think about putting a name to at the moment. He scrunches up his face, and says, “No. What’s her name anyway?”
The Dean’s running around with the recognizable figure of Annie following; she’s got a clipboard. Britta turns away to look at Jeff. “You didn’t even learn her name? You are a douche.”
“You interrupted us before we got there,” he points out.
“Whatever. Her name’s Ainsley.”
“How Southern. Speaking of, where’s your accent?
“I got rid of it when I ditched the cowboy boots and redneck cousins.” He gives her a funny look and she adds, “Isn’t that what you wanted? Some inbred joke?”
“Or you could tell me the truth.”
They don’t do that. Whatever they are or aren’t, whatever definition they assign to them, they don’t exchange life stories.
Britta walks away, intent on getting a seat in the back away from Starburns.
“She’s not hotter than you,” Jeff calls after her.
She can’t stop the smile that pulls at the corners of her mouth.
Britta sits in the back of the cafeteria, her feet propped up on the opposite side of the booth so no one joins her. From here she watches as Abed talks to a man that looks as harassed as the receding hair line on his forehead. She also can see from the corner of her eye Ainsley talking to a man who looks like he just walked off the cover of a GQ magazine; her sister looks happy as he makes her laugh.
There’s a crash from the front and the Dean has gotten himself, his costume, tangled in the cords. Annie’s frantically trying to untangle him while the Secret Service look on. They fix it and the Dean grabs the microphone to make his announcement and introduction. The packed cafeteria claps and Ainsley slides into the booth when the President walks on.
She’s holding a napkin and picking off a piece of a recognizable brownie. “Your friend made brownies.”
Britta steals a corner for herself. “Yeah, Shirley makes them all the time.”
Ainsley’s eyes widen as she asks, “All the time?”
“Yeah. She wants to start a business.”
“Maybe I should move out here, teach a class.”
“You’d hate it. There’s no one here worth arguing with. You’d be bored in three days.”
Ainsley makes a humming noise and shrugs her shoulders.
Britta changes the subject. “Is Abed bothering your colleague or whatever over there?”
They’re talking softly so as not to be heard over the speech being given. From the back, no one really is paying them that much attention. Looking up, Ainsley laughs. “Who, Josh? No, I think he was telling him something about how we should film our daily lives because it would be a realistic portrayal of West Wing staffers for the general public to see. Josh could use the distraction for a few minutes anyway.”
“It’s not a bad speech,” Britta says, lifting her chin towards the stage.
“No, he’s a good guy,” pause, “For a Democrat.”
They trade smiles because this will never change.
Ainsley finishes the brownie and wipes her fingers on the napkin before turning to fully face her in the seat. “So you going to tell me why you called me crying?”
“I wasn’t crying.” It’s her instant response. She knew this was eventually going to come up, but it doesn’t stop her from denying it one last time.
“Right,” the sarcasm drips like the accent she doesn’t have any more. “You weren’t crying. Want to tell me what happened?”
‘Not really’ is what she wants to answer with. And Britta knows that her sister won’t force it out of her, but she also knows that Ainsley wants her to want to tell her. That she wants her to know that she can tell her anything. It’s just hard. “I did something stupid.”
“How stupid?”
“Pretty stupid.” She sighs and says the next part while looking sideways, her body still turned frontwards. “I slept with Jeff, and then I told him I loved him in front of an entire room full of people at a stupid dance, and then he didn’t say anything back, so I humiliated myself in front of everyone. And I didn’t really love him, I was just being jealous and petty because he was dating someone else.”
It feels good to get it all out, but it makes her throat crawl and tongue curl in annoyance at herself.
Ainsley taps her fingers on the table. “That’s not so stupid. I once danced in just a bathrobe, drunk, in front of the President.”
“This President?”
“No, the one before.”
“The old one?”
“Yeah.”
Okay, so they’re sort of tied. Hayes sisters united by embarrassment.
“You know,” Ainsley starts, “I don’t care what you do. I don’t care if you go to community college, even though this place is a little weird--”
“A little?”
She gives Britta a look. “A little weird. I don’t care what you do or what you will do. Or what you want to do. Stay here, go back to Africa, help people, whatever. I just want you to be happy.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Britta thinks about this for a moment. Finally, she settles on, “I’m getting there.”
Surprisingly, the speech ends well. At least by Greendale standards it ends well. Which means that the speakers somehow mess up, probably because the Dean didn’t spend any real amount of money on them, and then catch on fire while the President continues to speak with only the first three rows actually able to hear him.
Britta and Ainsley stand side by side in the parking lot and watch as the fire trucks pull in, the Secret Service bundle the leader of the Free World away, and the Dean hold back tears because he won’t be able to set off the fireworks like originally planned.
“We should do this again,” Britta says.
“Oh definitely.”
Epilogue:
Ainsley shuts the door to her condo and notices the red blinking light of her answering machine. She dumps the coat and bag in her arms onto the couch before going into the kitchen. There’s a muffin from the bakery down the street she grabs before pressing play.
“You have one new message,”
“Hey, it’s me. I’m not crying this time, ha ha, but you’ll never guess what happened today. Get your ears ready for this tale. Our crazy anthropology professor totally nearly killed Jeff today. It was awesome. Also, I so found the money you left, hiding it in the freezer wasn’t the best place. But anyway…. thanks.”
This isn’t anything new. She fucks up on things all the time. But this fuckup doesn’t really count in the same category as say when she chose to eat the hot dog for lunch from the cafeteria instead of the chicken nuggets. That is something she should have known better. This is completely on a different level.
First thing: She told Jeff Winger she loved him in the middle of said cafeteria in front of the entire Greendale campus body.
Second thing: She then proceeded to call her sister and leave voicemail messages, several, that consisted of her heavy breathing and what could have been, she will never admit it, small, tiny sniffling like sounds and nothing else.
Okay, both of those things she should have known better on. The first because it’s Jeff Winger and she isn’t the type of girl who plays one-up games with other women out of spite and mistaken jealousy. And two because leaving messages with no words tends to freak her sister out and put her on a plane to come visit.
Or if in Britta’s case your sister worked for the President of the United States, caused said sister to convince the President to make a side stop at Greendale for a speech on education after being in the Colorado area.
This would be a good point to back up and rewind. Pause and explain. Abed would call this the backstory, filling in the missing pieces for the audience.
Britta hadn’t ever been lying when she said she dropped out of high school to impress a band and then messed around with spray paint cans until she went off to the Peace Corp and mixed some foot modeling in with a trip to Africa. That all was true. It’s the before all of that she hadn’t ever really talked about. They all had their secrets in the study group. Hers just happened to be family related.
The truth is that Perry isn’t her last name. It’s her middle name, and her full name happens to be Britta Perry Hayes. She’d dropped the ‘Hayes’ after leaving home, but if someone looked at her social security card, it would still have the ‘Hayes’ on the end. The truth is that Britta hadn’t, and still doesn’t, fit in being the child of a Republican family from North Carolina that prided itself on having been political royalty in the state for the last one hundred years. She also hates sweet tea.
Lucky for her, older sister Ainsley fits the role perfectly as if she’d been born for it. She is, Britta isn’t, and hadn’t liked the long shadow that had been casted despite the several years between them. Ainsley went to the Ivy League and got a job in the White House (twice now). And Britta ended up getting her G.E.D. and landing in Greendale and professing her love for Jeff Winger in a crowded cafeteria.
That explains everything.
Especially the sweet tea thing.
Press play.
Britta fucks up.
At the end of the summer she leaves several messages after a sudden bout of feelings. She handles them in the best possible way: a drinking binge that involves all the vodka in her freezer and talking to her cat. In her drink fest, she turns her phone on silent after finally having enough of the calls from Annie and Shirley asking if she wanted to talk about it or go shopping or anything else that she doesn’t want to do. And then her phone dies and she doesn’t really give a shit enough about it to care.
The problem is that she doesn’t listen to her voicemail until it’s too late:
“You have seven new messages. First new message,”
“Britta, It’s Ainsley. I think you maybe called me by accident.”
“Britta, I know it’s you. I don’t know any other Colorado numbers and the Colorado representation doesn’t really call me, their loss, they’re just upset over the fact that I orchestrated the environmental legislation getting cut from their state, but what’s going on?”
“Britta, this isn’t funny anymore. Call me back.”
“Okay, as your older sister, I’m ordering you to call me back. You sound like you’re crying and the heavy breathing is not helping me keep images of you dying from my mind. I will call the FBI. Do you want them breaking down your door? I will call Daddy.”
And so on and so on until,
“Britta, good news. It’s re-election time and we’re going to be in Colorado. I’ve gotten myself onto Air Force One, and I’ll be close to Greendale. I’m stopping by on Wednesday.”
Britta stands at her tiny kitchen counter having listened to all seven messages from her sister. “Shit,” she says to the empty apartment.
She spends all Monday divided between ignoring the looks from her fellow Greendale students and trying to get Ainsley on the phone. This proves to be easier said than done. Apparently working for the President means you’re actually busy or something. They play phone tag back and forth until Britta finally manages to nail her down in the afternoon. She ducks into a storage closet.
“Britta! Sorry, I didn’t pick up earlier, it’s been crazy this morning. The President just got done with his speech--”
Britta moves a box that’s on top of a bucket before sitting down. She fights to talk over her sister and the background noise. “Yeah, that’s great. But you know you really don’t--”
“... the part on foreign affairs was a bit weak, especially given the current situation in North Africa.”
“Hey, why aren’t you guys doing more about that? There are people dying and,” she pauses and realizes that now isn’t the time to get distracted. Focus. “No, seriously you don’t need to come--”
“What?” There are muffling noises and something about a person named Sam and a sandwich that involves a debate between turkey or ham. She comes back on. “Sorry, what did you say?”
Britta unfolds her leg, boot heel catching on a mop and causing it to clatter to the floor. “I said, you don’t need to come here. I’m fine. Really, I’m good. No need for you to take time out of your busy schedule doing, um, Presidential things.” She says this all in a rush.
“Oh, it’s not a problem. I want to see you. And I don’t believe you at all, but see this is the best part. Wait for it. I convinced the President to make at stop and do a speech at Greendale!”
She is sure she didn’t hear her right. “What?”
“It’s perfect. I told him we shouldn’t exclude community colleges in the area, and he agreed, and now he’s talking on Thursday. I get to see you then too. It’ll be--”
Britta hangs up the phone, finger jabbing down on the red end call button. Her mouth twists together and outside of her hiding place in the closet she can hear the PA system go off. The Dean’s announcement of President Santos’ arrival has her grinding her teeth.
“Fuck,” she says to the mop on the floor.
Britta wants to kill herself in the library later. Normally, being that it’s the beginning of a new year, they would probably be talking about classes and how weird Anthropology is going to be. But of course the group only wants to talk about the upcoming Presidential arrival.
It’s on the tip of her tongue to tell them about her sister, because let’s face it, with this study group, it’s going to come out sooner than later. And she’d rather have it all out, say it and run, than have them find out and make a big deal about it. She can already see Annie and Shirley’s looks of pity about her family issues, Abed’s quip about the black sheep of the family stereotype, and Pierce’s comment that her sister’s a lesbian too after learning she went to Smith. Better to just say it and let that be that. It’s ready to come out, quick announcement, sandwich it between Troy’s joke, but it gets stuck in her throat when Annie speaks.
“This is going to be so great, guys.” Annie’s practically vibrating in her chair from excitement, and on any other day, any other thing, Britta would find her equal parts annoying and cute. Today, not so much. “The President is coming here. Of the United States.” She says the last part as if they’d missed that.
“You shouldn’t be so excited,” Jeff says this while tapping away at the keys of his BlackBerry. “The speech won’t be anything different from what any other politician says. Empty promises of hope and good feelings and blah blah blah.”
Britta doesn’t try and stop herself from snapping out, “And that’s different from any of your speeches how?”
Annie breaks in before they can go at each other, but Britta’s lips curl in satisfaction at pointing out Jeff’s bullshit. Take that, Pointy Face Loser.
“Jeff, you shouldn’t say things like that.” Annie gives him her most disapproving big eyed stare. “I for one am looking forward to hearing President Santos speak. And getting to ask him questions.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna ask him about zombies.”
The whole group turns together to look at Troy. Abed nods in understanding and the two do their ritual hand shake.
Annie crosses her arms and lays them on the table. “Okay,” she drags the word out slowly. “The Dean asked me to be on the planning committee! Isn’t that great?”
As if by calling his name summons him, Dean Pelton chooses that moment to grace them with his presence. The costume he has on is even worse than the red, white, and blue affair he had worn for the student body president elections. There’re sparkles and sequins and ribbons.
Britta uses this to sneak out.
“I have to go,” pause, “take care of my cat. His eyes are infected,” she says. The group doesn’t notice, and she leaves them with Pierce talking about liberal hippies and Shirley wondering if the President liked brownies.
Britta doesn’t go to campus on Tuesday. It’s the second day of classes, but fuck it, it’s Greendale community college, and it’s not like anything serious is ever going to be covered that she can’t get later.
She lies in bed and stares at the mess of clothes and books and random shit that covers her floor and every available surface. She contemplates cleaning the apartment and this is why she doesn’t go to campus. She’s going to clean, or so she tells herself. It’s not that she cares what Ainsley is going to think about her messy apartment. She can judge all she wants and Britta won’t care. It’s that she wants to avoid the worry that Ainsley will have after seeing her place.
It’s two entirely different things. Her sister will worry like she always has, like when she used to call her after she dropped out of high school, like when she used to send money that she didn’t have to spare while in law school but did it anyway, like always. Britta is a functioning adult and this is her life. She doesn’t want the worry, and she doesn’t want the help.
She lies in bed and looks at the floor with narrowed eyes. She has every intention of cleaning, but in reality she just ends up pushing piles of clothes around until you can actually see spots of clear floor.
Britta deems that good enough and then makes a run to the liquor store to replace her vodka.
This is her Tuesday.
Nothing goes like how she wants it to on Wednesday.
She doesn’t have an exact plan of action, but she knows that what goes down was not what she wanted.
Abed would call this the big reveal.
Britta turns the corner into the library and stops. If her life had a soundtrack that followed her around, it would be screeching tires or breaking glass or the high sound of a violin at this moment. The worst possible thing is playing out in front of her.
There is no mistaking her sister who despite the time between last seeing her hasn’t changed all that much. And there is definitely no mistaking the sight of Jeff Winger talking to her sister about the White House, smug grin on his face as he leans over into her space.
The hangover Britta woke up with vanishes as anger replaces her mild irritation with the world. She doesn’t hesitate and she doesn’t think. She marches the short distance and slides between them. Pointing her finger at his chest, she says, “Get your pointy face and douchebag gelled hair away from my sister!”
“Sister?” Jeff asks and at the same time there’s a collective gasp from the rest of the group who’s been listening inside the room.
“Britta!”
Ainsley’s smiling and the group is staring at her and Jeff just tried to hit on her older sister.
Track 2 of the sound track is a low ‘dun dun dun’.
Not how she planned.
“I knew you were lying. Your cat only has one eye.”
Jeff says this, and they’re all sitting at the table now. It’s like an interrogation as the study group stares her down.
Annie peers at her with her wide blue eyes, awaiting her question when she asks, “You have a sister?”
“Yes,” Britta says because it’s all out now. And there is the pitying look from Annie.
Shirley is not far behind with a noise of sympathy, a coo from the back of her throat. “Britta,” and she says her name in the way that breaks it hard at the double consonants. “You didn’t have to hide her.”
She crosses her arms, fingers playing with the leather of her jacket, and lifts her eyebrows in disbelief. “I didn’t. You just found out.”
“But you wouldn’t have told us otherwise,” Annie says.
Pierce interjects from his spot. “Oh come on, it’s obvious. Britta’s insecure that she’s not as successful as her older and hotter sister.”
Britta grinds her teeth, her lips lifting in a snarl. She uncrosses her arms. “That is not true.”
“Uh, yeah, it is.” Jeff’s leaning back in his chair and it’s his turn for his eyebrows to lift.
Before she can say anything, Abed chooses to weigh in. “Actually, it’s only natural for Britta to feel this way. She dropped out of high school and now goes here,” he ticks his fingers like it’s a list. “Her sister works for the President of the United States. If they were on a TV show, Britta would be the black sheep who is the disgrace of the family. Her sister would be the opposite.”
“Her sister’s also sitting right here.”
They all turn as one; they’ve really gotten good at that, and Ainsley smiles at them, the corners of her mouth tight. It’s not a friendly smile. She gives them a half wave from the couch. “Hi. Yeah, I’m sitting right here. So is Britta.”
“You work for President Santos? What do you do?” Annie asks, grinning.
“I’m the White House Counsel, his lawyer.”
Britta can see Jeff about to comment and cuts him off. “She’s a real lawyer. Unlike you who faked your degree.”
He glares at her.
Troy sneaks his question in at this time. “Is there a plan for when the zombies invade? Because it’s going to happen and I just wanted to know, if like, you guys had taken steps to save us all.”
Ainsley gives Britta a look as if to say ‘are you for real’. “That’s not really my area of expertise,” she answers and stands from the couch. “And actually I really came here for Britta.”
She walks towards the door and Britta quickly follows.
Outside, the sun is bright as they walk aimlessly around the campus. The sidewalk is empty of most students and it’s just the two of them. They look odd: Britta in her leather and heeled boots, and Ainsley in tailored jeans and a blouse.
“Your friends are interesting,” Ainsley says. Her hair is pulled back and her eyes, the same blue, are hidden behind sunglasses.
Britta knows that this is her sister being polite. Their mother’s graces of hiding insults in thinly veiled politeness had been taught at an early age and Ainsley had learned it well. Her big sister had never stood for anyone dissing or putting them down. Family is important.
She picks her words carefully to answer. “They mean well.”
Ainsley stops and turns to say something, but Britta grabs her arm. “No really they do. They just,” Britta pauses, “Show it odd.”
Ainsley looks at her from behind the dark lenses. Seconds pass and Britta wants to squirm. Finally, she says, “If you say so.”
When Britta is sixteen, Ainsley comes home from law school for the summer. The house has been suffocating since she left, Britta the only child at home, and it’s been too much of her and her mother and father. All of it is too much.
But Ainsley comes home and things get better. Britta can breathe easier, there’s a buffer, deflection, attention taken away from her. Her sister spends the summer as an intern at the General Assembly, but at night she takes her out. The nights are theirs. They drive to the 7-11 down the street and buy the biggest slushy size and sit in the parking lot and laugh at the high school boys that come by and try so hard to pick them up. Or they go to the abandoned quarry that’s filled in with water now and swim till their arms get sore.
It’s the last summer that Britta is happy. She drops out of high school eight months later.
“Why are you here?”
This is later when Britta asks this. This is later when they are in her apartment, sitting on opposite ends of the couch and pretending not to notice the place that she lives in. Britta holds her drink in her hand, feet tucked underneath her, and asks, “Why are you here?”
Ainsley pets her one eyed cat and tilts her head to the side. “Why are you asking?”
Her fingers tighten on the glass. “Did Mom and Dad send you?”
The older blonde shakes her head. “No.”
Silence descends.
“I miss you,” Ainsley says and puts the glass to her lips.
‘I miss you too’ Britta says in her head.
Thursday comes and Greendale looks like someone vomited red, white, and blue all over it. The Dean has gone all out this time. There are streamers and banners, and he’s even painted the buildings. It’s a disgusting eyesore and only the Dean would think this would make Greendale look good to the President of the United States.
Britta stands in the parking lot, staring at the hot patriotic mess in front of her. She doesn’t speak at first when Jeff joins her, choosing to let him say whatever he wants.
“Your sister here?” He asks and they’re watching the workers moving things around for the stage that is hastily being constructed in the cafeteria.
“Yes.” She frowns. “Why? Want another chance at her?”
An odd look passes over his face, and it’s not one that she wants to think about putting a name to at the moment. He scrunches up his face, and says, “No. What’s her name anyway?”
The Dean’s running around with the recognizable figure of Annie following; she’s got a clipboard. Britta turns away to look at Jeff. “You didn’t even learn her name? You are a douche.”
“You interrupted us before we got there,” he points out.
“Whatever. Her name’s Ainsley.”
“How Southern. Speaking of, where’s your accent?
“I got rid of it when I ditched the cowboy boots and redneck cousins.” He gives her a funny look and she adds, “Isn’t that what you wanted? Some inbred joke?”
“Or you could tell me the truth.”
They don’t do that. Whatever they are or aren’t, whatever definition they assign to them, they don’t exchange life stories.
Britta walks away, intent on getting a seat in the back away from Starburns.
“She’s not hotter than you,” Jeff calls after her.
She can’t stop the smile that pulls at the corners of her mouth.
Britta sits in the back of the cafeteria, her feet propped up on the opposite side of the booth so no one joins her. From here she watches as Abed talks to a man that looks as harassed as the receding hair line on his forehead. She also can see from the corner of her eye Ainsley talking to a man who looks like he just walked off the cover of a GQ magazine; her sister looks happy as he makes her laugh.
There’s a crash from the front and the Dean has gotten himself, his costume, tangled in the cords. Annie’s frantically trying to untangle him while the Secret Service look on. They fix it and the Dean grabs the microphone to make his announcement and introduction. The packed cafeteria claps and Ainsley slides into the booth when the President walks on.
She’s holding a napkin and picking off a piece of a recognizable brownie. “Your friend made brownies.”
Britta steals a corner for herself. “Yeah, Shirley makes them all the time.”
Ainsley’s eyes widen as she asks, “All the time?”
“Yeah. She wants to start a business.”
“Maybe I should move out here, teach a class.”
“You’d hate it. There’s no one here worth arguing with. You’d be bored in three days.”
Ainsley makes a humming noise and shrugs her shoulders.
Britta changes the subject. “Is Abed bothering your colleague or whatever over there?”
They’re talking softly so as not to be heard over the speech being given. From the back, no one really is paying them that much attention. Looking up, Ainsley laughs. “Who, Josh? No, I think he was telling him something about how we should film our daily lives because it would be a realistic portrayal of West Wing staffers for the general public to see. Josh could use the distraction for a few minutes anyway.”
“It’s not a bad speech,” Britta says, lifting her chin towards the stage.
“No, he’s a good guy,” pause, “For a Democrat.”
They trade smiles because this will never change.
Ainsley finishes the brownie and wipes her fingers on the napkin before turning to fully face her in the seat. “So you going to tell me why you called me crying?”
“I wasn’t crying.” It’s her instant response. She knew this was eventually going to come up, but it doesn’t stop her from denying it one last time.
“Right,” the sarcasm drips like the accent she doesn’t have any more. “You weren’t crying. Want to tell me what happened?”
‘Not really’ is what she wants to answer with. And Britta knows that her sister won’t force it out of her, but she also knows that Ainsley wants her to want to tell her. That she wants her to know that she can tell her anything. It’s just hard. “I did something stupid.”
“How stupid?”
“Pretty stupid.” She sighs and says the next part while looking sideways, her body still turned frontwards. “I slept with Jeff, and then I told him I loved him in front of an entire room full of people at a stupid dance, and then he didn’t say anything back, so I humiliated myself in front of everyone. And I didn’t really love him, I was just being jealous and petty because he was dating someone else.”
It feels good to get it all out, but it makes her throat crawl and tongue curl in annoyance at herself.
Ainsley taps her fingers on the table. “That’s not so stupid. I once danced in just a bathrobe, drunk, in front of the President.”
“This President?”
“No, the one before.”
“The old one?”
“Yeah.”
Okay, so they’re sort of tied. Hayes sisters united by embarrassment.
“You know,” Ainsley starts, “I don’t care what you do. I don’t care if you go to community college, even though this place is a little weird--”
“A little?”
She gives Britta a look. “A little weird. I don’t care what you do or what you will do. Or what you want to do. Stay here, go back to Africa, help people, whatever. I just want you to be happy.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Britta thinks about this for a moment. Finally, she settles on, “I’m getting there.”
Surprisingly, the speech ends well. At least by Greendale standards it ends well. Which means that the speakers somehow mess up, probably because the Dean didn’t spend any real amount of money on them, and then catch on fire while the President continues to speak with only the first three rows actually able to hear him.
Britta and Ainsley stand side by side in the parking lot and watch as the fire trucks pull in, the Secret Service bundle the leader of the Free World away, and the Dean hold back tears because he won’t be able to set off the fireworks like originally planned.
“We should do this again,” Britta says.
“Oh definitely.”
Epilogue:
Ainsley shuts the door to her condo and notices the red blinking light of her answering machine. She dumps the coat and bag in her arms onto the couch before going into the kitchen. There’s a muffin from the bakery down the street she grabs before pressing play.
“You have one new message,”
“Hey, it’s me. I’m not crying this time, ha ha, but you’ll never guess what happened today. Get your ears ready for this tale. Our crazy anthropology professor totally nearly killed Jeff today. It was awesome. Also, I so found the money you left, hiding it in the freezer wasn’t the best place. But anyway…. thanks.”