Janine means everything to me she to me is so relatable to me because she is an accurate depiction of a a 26/27 year old. She’s exactly like me, optimistic, happy, over explainer, empathetic, thoughtful, and I have bad social cues. There’s so much in her that resonates with me and I’ve never felt more seen in my entire life. I love seeing her grow and I’ve felt so proud of her while also hoping I grow as well. Janine is very misunderstood and seen a annoying for wanting to help and not acting in the way a neurotypical person does but that’s just who she is. They may not have said she’s autistic but I believe she is. She’s also just a young adult working through life and it’s hard and scary. Janine is smart, talented, resourceful, capable kind, caring and a delight to have around. I could go on and on on why I think she’s incredible. In conclusion she’s an amazing woman who’s flawed and complicated messy and has trauma but is still a great person who I love. Janine is my favourite character on television and I’m so happy Quinta made her and plays her.
One week to go until the start of the Abbott Elementary Rewatch and our Janine Teagues/Quinta Brunson Appreciation Week! We’ll be watching the pilot episode on 8/6/23.
Summary: After the end of yet another long work day, Melissa comes to collect Barbara. [Post-1.01]
CW: Emotional Infidelity
AO3 Link
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At precisely five past three, there are two blunt knocks on her halfway open door. Barbara doesn’t even have to look up from the reading diagnostic that she’s skimming to know that it’s Melissa dropping in to either say goodbye or to forcibly collect her at the end of yet another long day. She glances up anyway, her golden-rimmed glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose, and smiles softly.
For this is habit between them, long-established and well-loved tradition—as baked into their daily routines as their shared communions at their favorite round table in the teacher’s lounge or their little rendezvouses at the copier, where they trade new bits of gossip with their elbows pressed on top of the machine.
Melissa comes to look for her at the end of every day—of course she does.
And Barbara’s enduring role is to simply let herself be found.
“The ops are upstairs with Jacob,” the younger teacher says, leaning against the door like it’s both habit and home. Her vivid hair is haloed by the ring of Barbara’s sunflower wreath, and the effect is lovely—all that scarlet, crowned in pops of autumnal gold.
“Quick. You ‘n me can make a break for it if we hustle.”
“Girlfriend,” Barbara can’t help but chuckle, “you’re fooling yourself if you think I ever belong in the same sentence as the word hustle. I don’t hustle, I—“
“—sedately shuffle from place to place?” Melissa grins, waggling a mischievous brow.
“—gracefully swan from one destination to another,” she finishes with a mock sniff, unable to be especially affronted when Melissa laughs like she does, so loudly, with the entirety of her belly. “Don’t tease! You’re not making it anywhere quick either on that hip of yours."
They both have a bad something or another. Melissa’s bad hip and Barbara’s bad knee. They're mutually bad backs. They complain about these grievances to each other often, especially now that it’s fall and the cold is starting to seep into their bones.
“Sheesh, don’t remind me,” her friend half-smiles. “Almost threw it out again luggin’ that new rug to my room.”
But then she half-grimaces too, lightly rubbing the affected area with three fingers, and Barbara frowns just as immediately, pushing her playfulness to the side along with her class’s reading report.
"You should really go see a specialist about that, you know.”
“And let some rich quack put me on a bunch’a painkillers? Hell to the no,” Melissa scoffs easily. She has distrusted doctors for as long as Barbara has known her, thinks they’re all two-bit charlatans and overhyped clowns. The only person she ever goes to see is her second cousin, Frankie, a general practitioner whose practice is adjoined to a pizza joint that may or may not also be a money laundering front.
Barbara doesn’t like to think about that fact very often.
“Well, at least come here and get yourself an Advil for the road,” she exhales, making the more expedient decision not to press the point. They’ll have that row another day, and it’ll likely be spectacular—as their rare arguments usually are—but that’s future Barbara’s cross to painfully bear. “You know I hate it when you’re hurting.”
“I hate it when I’m hurting too,” Melissa quips, always a snarker, even in the pits, but all the same, she obediently peels herself off of the door and limps on over, one plod of her clunky boots at a time. Barbara’s heart inexplicably plummets into her gut when the second grade teacher decides, apropos of absolutely nothing, to partially lower herself on the edge of her desk, rattling her pencil cup with her added weight.
Her sheer and overwhelming presence.
Her leopard-spotted blouse and those tight black pants. The way the leather rasps when her thighs brush together as she incrementally shifts and makes herself comfortable—cozy even—on Barbara Howard’s extraordinarily immaculate desk. The endless cascade of her fiery red hair and the saints that are perpetually worshiping at the altar of her marble bosom. The slight citrus smell of her favorite perfume.
“What?” Melissa chuckles, apparently seeing something complicated in Barbara’s expression, something that Barbara would probably shy away from in the uncomplicated honesty of a mirror. Sudden heat crests within her. It becomes a knot in the column of her throat, becomes a ticking time bomb, a violent pleasure, a pleasant wound. “You prefer I keep my ass off your stuff?”
She has less than three seconds to decide which is worse—having Melissa Schemmenti on her desk or not having her there. Neither of these options frankly brings her closer to God.
“You’re being absolutely facetious,” she finally mutters, not looking the second grade teacher in the eye as she dives down to retrieve her purse. She makes quite a meal out of rifling through it for a bottle that she handily keeps in a side-pocket.
“That isn’t an answer.”
“Your question was hardly appropriate enough to warrant a response.”
“So I’m being naughty, huh?” Melissa guffaws. Melissa jokes. From Barbara’s limited perspective, it’s all a joke to Melissa: her innuendoes and habitual crassness, the intimate geography of their bodies in relation to each other.
Their closeness in general.
In so many more ways than one.
She’s always like to flirt with Barbara, no matter their respective marital statuses.
Nothing ever truly inappropriate, of course, calling her hot mama here or lightly ribbing her about them being work wives there. And that was all fine and good until one day, after many, many years of them being the very best of friends, Barbara suddenly collected the punchline like a baseball bat to her gut.
Until one day, every touch and casual glance, every hon and other pet name lightly thrown her way, actually did something to her.
Set her eternal soul on fire for one thing.
Condemned her.
(Saved her.)
Condemned her.
“That word has an entirely different connotation, and you know it.”
“I mean, depends on how you’re using the word.”
“Melissa!” She groans, flushing, feeling nauseous, vaguely suspecting that she’s flirting back.
“Okay, fine, fine. I’ll stop being a cagacazzo—“ Melissa chortles obliviously and goes to get up, but before Barbara can capably stop herself, before morality can catch up to the rest of her usually well-ordered senses, she impulsively places her free hand on her best friend’s knee.
They both shiver violently upon first contact, stunned silent, both incredulous that she actually dared.
Melissa’s cheeks blanch and then just as immediately color, all the mirth draining from her face and becoming… well… Barbara doesn’t know.
(Barbara doesn’t want to admit the mirrored emotion—even to herself.)
(Especially to herself.)
“You don’t have to get up,” she croaks, withdrawing her hand as though burned, cupping the pill bottle she finally retrieved like it’s the only thing keeping her from kissing her colleague. Surely, there are other barriers, though.
Surely, there is her wonderful husband.
Surely, there is God.
“I was just… joking.”
“Me too,” Melissa says quickly, eyes averted. “I was just joking too.”
And they both laugh then because they’re both joking—obviously—a little too loudly to ever sound entirely sincere. Still, they grant each other the kindness of overlooking this inconvenient truth. Still, they laugh and unpleasantly laugh.
(That’s how this—whatever this is that exists between them—keeps going after all: this almost tango, this halfway song-and-unending-dance. This terrible thing. This beautiful thing. This unfathomable sin. This simultaneous grace.)
(They’re a chemical collision that keeps never, ever happening, and there’s primal relief in the fact. There’s unspeakable sadness too.)
“Here,” she says, untwisting the cap of her bottle and finally shaking an Advil into the palm of her hand. Extends it. An offering. A perfect opportunity to move on from the stickiness of the moment.
Melissa takes it. Her fingers scrape Barbara’s lifelines.
“Take a swig of my coffee,” she continues weakly, all her atoms thrilling at even that barest touch. “I don’t mind.”
“Thanks,” Melissa grunts, popping the pill into her mouth and hastily lifting the aforementioned drink to her lips. Her nose promptly screws up in disgust.
“Blegh. Too flippin’ sweet.”
An unsurprising criticism coming from this particular woman. Melissa usually takes hers black.
“It’s just French Vanilla creamer.”
“It’s a milkshake in a mug is what it is,” she shakes her head fondly. “Don’t how you flippin’ stand it, Barb.”
“Oh, well, believe it or not, I have my sundry vices too,” Barbara chuckles lightly. They both do. And it’s far more genuine this time, perhaps simply because it’s the kind of banter they’re more accustomed to. It's familiar territory, safe and solid ground. They won’t get themselves in trouble joking about their coffee preferences, and Barbara almost convinces that she doesn’t regret their capacity for discretion, their exercise of extraordinary and remarkably Christian restraint.
“You? Vices?” Melissa arches an amused brow. “Get outta here, Mrs. Barbara Howard, perfect woman of God.”
Barbara opens her mouth and then abruptly closes it, immediately wants to refute the point, needs for Melissa to know that faith and perfection aren’t necessarily intertwined, that she is as flawed as any other human on this God-blesséd earth.
But she stops herself; she disciplines her wayward tongue.
She’s spent decades upon unceasing decades constructing the meticulous reputation that her friend is proposing that she has achieved. And that gratifies her, of course—sure, yes, absolutely. Her lifelong project of embodying excellence beyond excellence has clearly been a quantifiable success.
But still, there is something in her that instinctively balks at Melissa elevating her to a lofty pedestal. She wants the whole world to believe that she is perfect but needs just one person—this person—to understand that it’s all just a well-executed and beautifully performed facade
She’s saved from trying to resolve this frankly unresolvable contradiction, though, by Melissa suddenly wincing again, her hand going to her hip as she shifts a little on the desk, and Barbara latches on to this microgesture and readymade excuse gladly. She leans forward, shoving her own thousands of invisible hurts away.
“You should have told me that your hip was bothering you, sweetheart,” she murmurs seriously, still flexing her fingers around the Advil bottle, resisting the urge to reach out and help her friend, to work her fingertips into the sore tissue there… discovering the plump softness… the forbidden fruit… of her rosy skin…
She briefly turns away, coughing into her own shoulder.
Ridiculous impulse.
Absurd.
“We could have gotten one of the Three Musketeers to shoulder an additional load.”
“Pssh,” Melissa rolls her eyes, “I don’t think Jacob could lift a log if the log was a two-by-four with the word log written on top of it.”
“Foul!"
“But I’m right,” the younger teacher grins.
“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” she agrees as Melissa laughs again, all mischief, so playful and unapologetically loud. Barbara swats at her arm, always pretending to be the sanctimonious one between them.
A smile smuggles itself at the corner of her lips anyway.
“‘Sides,” Melissa eventually shrugs, “it was worth it to see the pipsqueak all happy.”
“Mm,” Barbara shakes her head fondly. “That Janine.”
She’s certainly a handful, that’s for sure—overeager and overzealous, clearly overcompensating for something that’s likely above Barbara’s thoroughly abysmal pay grade to ever fix. But even still, the young lady has a kind heart and an admirable passion for what she does. She’s good with her kids and tries hard to be better for them every day.
Those traits alone aren’t sure signs and predictors that she’s going to survive this Sisyphean hell of a public school system, of course, but they’re certainly not going to hurt her chances either.
After a year of having known her, Barbara likes her—not that she'll ever admit as much to her, though.
“A flippin’ mess.”
“Oh, beyond a shadow of an entire doubt.”
“Think she’ll last?” Melissa asks, which is a pretty remarkable question in and of itself. No new teacher has stayed long enough recently for either of them to bother caring. Their investment is hard won, fought for, far from easily earned.
They’ve both been endlessly burned in the past, or rather, more accurately still, they’ve mutually spent their lifetimes burning themselves trying to care for other people.
“If life has taught us one thing,” she starts thoughtfully, “it’s that good things rarely do…”
Before she can continue, though, Melissa cuts her off with a short laugh like a bark.
“Ha!” Her verdant eyes twinkle. “What about us old bats then?”
“Exceptions to the rule clearly.”
“Clearly,” the younger teacher mocks.
“Girlfriend!” She chides, laughing. “Let me finish.”
“Okay, okay, go on telling me about how shit the world is.”
“Vulgar,” Barbara shakes her head in a long-suffering manner, “and not where I was going with that sentence anyway. Good things rarely last, yes, but who but the good Lord ever truly knows? Perhaps Janine will surprise us in the end. Maybe Mr. Hill too.”
“Oh, look who’s bein’ all facetious now,” Melissa grins as she finally sidles off the desk, straightening up on the tiled floor with a thud and a slightly pained grunt. She towers over Barbara now, who’s still in her rolling chair. The skin of her leopard-print shirt stretches across all her delicious curves.
“At least it’s not the same thing as being naughty,” she mutters, glancing away as her friend seizes with laughter.
“Semantics, schemantics, Barb. We both sound like total lesbos sometimes, y’know.”
Barbara can't help herself—she splutters incoherently, accidentally dropping the Advil bottle she’s been fiddling with for the last five minutes. It rattles and comedically rolls somewhere far beneath her desk.
“W-what?!” She eventually gets out, now gripping the arms of her chair. “We don’t? I could never. Melissa! You and I—“
“God,” Melissa goes on, all her features alive with raucous delight, positively shit-eating. She taps her chin with one finger. “Come t’think of it. I’d make one hell of a good lesbian if I didn’t also like dudes—“
“Melissa! Be serious!”
“I am serious,” the second grade teacher laughs, not sounding particularly serious at all. “About who I am anyway. Don’t worry, hon. I know you play for a different team.”
But that last sentence, even if it’s a part of the joke—of this game of fluster-Barbara-Howard-senselessly that Melissa is expertly playing—suddenly veers into an earnest sadness that Barbara can’t quite unhear and her friend can’t just as quickly disguise.
“Shame,” Barbara mumbles without really intending to, but the word slips from her mouth before she can catch it and scold it for being reckless anyway.
“Shame,” Melissa agrees and tries another smile. It's an exhausted, little thing; it slumps like a body in the darks of her eyes.
so i'm taking part in the abbott rewatch and honestly??? abbott is such a gift
some of these things i'm noticing in the rewatch??? beautiful
like:
Janine being a Buzz fan for the ambition (i mean predictable but also i love her for it)
Andrew's sassy pencil throw is a mood ngl
her student Erica calling her Janine like they're friends outside class??? maybe my brain is overthinking by calling this foreshadowing lmao
Janine thinking twice on her Xanax rug thing and realising that it's actually a good one to use forever
"Back That Azz Up" for kids BARBARA PLS
Janine calling Barbara "mom" and basically babbling excitedly to her at how great a teacher she is and how she wants to be like her 😭
the staff room being upstairs???? i hadn't noticed it before but now it's 100% an important factor to me because that means all the ground floor teachers have to go upstairs instead of the upstairs teachers coming down
also is it the upstairs hallway that's white because a lot of the later interviews are in a warmer brown corridor (downstairs) i think
they're sitting at different tables in the pilot - they're sitting further from the kitchen counters here
as much as i disliked Ava in the pilot originally, her calming down that other teacher (Tina. her name is Tina.) showed a hint of professionalism that we see more of later (she wrecked that literally 5 seconds later in true Ava fashion though)
Barbara smiling every time she fires a shot
five year old bra. that's so HARSH Barbara. also the fact that she noticed (and the bra is probably older than that)
Jacob talking about Africa 😭 he truly does need to stop
...i feel like Janine's ENTIRE CLASS calls her "Janine" and not "Miss Teagues" and that's great tbh. absolutely hilarious. but it also shows the differences in power and respect between classes because Melissa's kids would never call her "Melissa", and she and Janine teach the same grade
Barbara's expressions are genuinely wonderful
why is Jacob trying so hard. i love him but also why is he like this
Janine absolutely keeps her shawls as emergency cover ups for kids with bathroom emergencies
"that was disgusting... but she seems nice" the beginning of the fall ladies and gentlemen
Janine walking straight into Barbara's classroom like she's always a welcome guest lmao. where was the knock on the door, Janine.
that smirk on Barbara's face when Janine starts gloating like she knows something's about to go wrong
Gregory, Janine and Jacob walking together down the corridor. the after school squad begins. except we all know Gregory is just walking there because he wanted someone to follow and Janine was his first choice
"am i even a Sagittarius?" Janine your exaggeration is simply glorious
Ava's nicknames for Gregory are incredibly imaginative and i may need a full list of them
the way Jacob was about to start making comments on Janine's hair 💀
Sheena refusing the food 💀 how bad was that pizza???
Gregory definitely followed last minute to see what was going on with Janine because at that point he's known her for less than a week (maybe even a day) and he's already 😍 for her
veryone just wanting Jacob to not talk or bring in one of his "inspirational quotes"
Jacob why are you trying to hug this stranger past a rug
that small smile on Gregory's face that he clears as soon as the cameras appear
Barbara bringing in the odor and stain spray for Janine 🥺
that blue dress that Janine wore? i want it
anyway i really re-enjoyed the pilot, it just brought back a whole lot of feelings and revealed a whole lot more about the characters than i thought it would. it may be surface-level understanding of the characters, but it leaves you wanting to learn so much more about them through the show.
