Daria entered her room with a deep sigh. The evening had been pure hell. While crying she had lost track of time, and had been suddenly alerted by her Dad's voice calling her down for supper. Why he had decided that the family should have a common supper tonight was anyone's guess. The point was that Daria had entered the kitchen so red-eyed that she hadn't even made it to the table before Helen had asked her what was wrong, with a voice that indicated she had at expected the end of the world as we know it - minimum. It was understandable. Daria couldn't remember the last time she had cried. Possibly when she fell off her bike at age seven?

For this reason, however she had been forced to tell her parents about Jodie's suicide. She had just come to the part about how the other students had taken it, when she was suddenly interrupted by an excited Quinn who wanted to tell everyone the news: That Daria had encouraged one of the best students of Lawndale High to hang herself with a piece of barbed wire. Fortunately - and this Daria took as a rare sign of intellect and understanding from her parents - Quinn had been abruptly cut off by three synchronised death glares from the remaining family members. And it wasn't all bad that Quinn had said what she said either. At least now Daria knew that the rumour mills were grinding, and she could be prepared. She had already decided to take Jodie's advice and save the letter. She might need it as a last line of defence against false accusations.

The rest of the evening had been a pain. Helen had been so touched by the fact that Daria had been touched, that she had embraced her for a long time, and almost refused to let go. Daria had also had to convince her at least ten times that she did not need to see a psychiatrist to "talk through" the events. Daria shuddered. It had taken her almost an hour to escape the sudden affection and comforting of her parents.

Daria quickly dug out the letter from the drawer she had stashed it in (just in case), before going down. She hadn't mentioned it to anyone, but there were two people she still thought she had to show it to. One was Jane. This was too big for her to handle on her own, she needed to share it with someone - not a shrink, who was a very good listener for seventy bucks per hour, but with someone she knew and trusted. The other was Mack - Jodie's boyfriend who surely had more than a few questions on his mind right now. That had to wait until tomorrow, though. Right now she would listen to whatever Jodie had recorded on the cassette. Daria made sure her door was closed, turned down the volume button on her boom box, inserted the tape and pressed play.

She was very glad she had turned down the volume as the loud guitar riffs of a heavy metal tune emanated from the speakers. Daria was no expert in the field of heavy metal, but she thought she recognised this song. It was Metallica's "Master of puppets". She had never listened closely to it before, but she tried to get the lyrics, because she wanted to understand what Jodie was trying to say with this.

Dark. Something about the source of self-destruction... That was probably the point. That was what Jodie wanted to reveal - the source.

"Whoa!" Daria thought. This was almost precisely like the things she had described in the letter, and directly to her before she died. She could almost see Jodie's parents as puppet masters pulling her strings. This song was a manifestation of how she had felt - an extension to her suicide note. This also explained the bitter comments about them at the very end.

Another perfect match. Precisely what she had been saying. All her life had been a lie. Where were her dreams now? That was a question Daria had asked herself about Jodie as soon as she had begun to see the changes in her.

Numbered days? Wasn't that like something out of the letter too? Well, Daria could certainly understand that. She didn't feel too comfortable when thinking about her numbered days either. But to consciously even further limit that number? There was something missing... She listened as the song died out with an evil sounding laughter, and left only the howling wind and the rattling rain to listen to. It seemed as if the wind was slightly abating, though. Daria let the tape play a while further, but there was obviously nothing more on it, so she hit rewind instead. She knew she should go brush her teeth, and get ready for the night, but for some reason it just seemed overpowering to stand up. After reading the letter and listening to the tape, there was something inside her that felt hollow. Why did it have to be this way? She almost immediately regretted asking that question. That was the question Jodie had tried to answer in her letter... and in a way Daria already knew the answer. The consolation from knowing that was petty indeed.

No the question "Why?" was bigger than that. Why did the universe have to be constructed in such a way that it allowed something like this to happen? Who was responsible? Was there even anyone responsible? Or was everything just a part of the inevitable passage of time? Something predestined to happen on the day of the Big Bang? No. Daria had never believed in the "billiard table" theory. She remembered first reading about it in a book when she was eleven. The theory in all its simplicity stated that the universe was much like a (complex) billiard table, and the elemental particles were the billiard balls bouncing into each other. If one at any specified moment knew the position and velocity of all particles one could in theory calculate both the future and the past, as it would be possible to exactly predict how the particles interacted. Even at age eleven Daria had thought it was stupid that someone could make such a claim (and with that claim - among other things declare the free will of man invalid) without any solid evidence to prove a theory like that. With the defiance of a witty eleven year old, she had declared that she would believe in the theory the second someone proved it correct through scientific experimentation. (Even then she had realised the impossibility of such a task.) Later she had come to understand that the theory was not based upon science - it had been based upon the mechanical paradigm(*) of the 19th century... a paradigm that more or less crashed and burned with the introduction of quantum physics.

(*): A paradigm is a set of "truths" accepted by most of the people in a certain time, place and culture. (Just in case you didn't already know.)

No. Daria didn't believe that man's free will was just an illusion. Of course she could not proof her opinion correct - it was just as impossible as proving it wrong - she simply had found no reasons to believe otherwise. Funny though, she thought - how the people who came up with these theories and defended them, wanted credit for their smarts and efforts - as if they had not just claimed these efforts to be merely the result of the inevitable way of the world. In the name of honesty Daria had been forced to admit to herself that one of the reasons she didn't believe in this theory was that she didn't want to believe it. It would be too depressing to know that nothing you said or did actually mattered.

"Actually mattered." She felt almost like she had stepped on a landmine. This was just the kind of thing Jodie had been talking about. To know that the world continued just fine without her had, to her, been the same thing as knowing that "she didn't matter". Well did she? Of course she did. "If she didn't matter, then why would I feel this way?" Daria thought. But how does one explain something like that? What would she tell her now if she had the chance? It bothered Daria a lot that she still couldn't find a satisfactory answer to that. Had Jodie in fact had a point there as well? After all, what would the consequences be? All of this would settle of course. It might take some time, but it would settle. Daria actually felt a slight sting of guilt for thinking that, but she kept pushing anyway. Nothing would get better from lying to herself - she had to be realistic about this. Lawndale wouldn't be quite the same place it would otherwise have been, but would anyone notice that in ten years? Probably not. What was that thing Jodie had written about "Kill 'em all, and you're God"? Suddenly Daria realised Jodie's dilemma. She bolted upright like she had received an electrical shock. Jodie had wanted to matter. Daria had been telling her that she could in fact matter - to other people, but Jodie had wanted more than that! She had wanted to matter in a way where she was not dependent of people to do so! She had wanted to make a difference, but according to her there was no difference to be made. If all the people were gone (and eventually they would be gone) - what could she do that mattered then? If everything you did was done for the sole purpose of either other people or yourself, could you truly do anything that mattered? The other people were in fact as good as dead already. Their days were all numbered. No matter what you built - nothing was more certain that the fact that it would not last! And if you could do something that "mattered" today but didn't matter tomorrow, could one really claim that such an act mattered at all? Now she finally began to realise the meaning of Jodie's letter where she claimed that there was nothing left to struggle for except the pleasure of the moment. If eternity was out of reach, beyond your grasp - what else did you have left?

Daria stared into the opposite wall. She had begun to see what Jodie had seen - and she definitely did not like it. Daria felt she was going through a moment of revelation: She was looking into hell. On the one hand it was extremely exciting - she had never seen anything like it before. On the other she didn't like what she saw - in fact she was terrified by it. She shook her head vigorously as if to shake away the unpleasant thoughts, stood up and headed for the bathroom. Tomorrow would be bad enough without the added disadvantage of sleep deprivation.

***

The day went by slowly. Daria thought it felt like a slow march through a tar pit. There had fortunately been a lot less harassment from other students due to the rumours than she had expected, but otherwise everything had been a total pain. She wanted to have some time for herself - to think everything through. She hadn't had time to do that yet, and every sensation, every sound at this place was nothing but a distraction. She also needed to sleep, and by the beginning of the third recess she felt she was walking around in a weird blur; unable to see where she was going, and unable to care. She almost didn't find the way to her locker, and she was almost late for history. To make it all complete she still hadn't told Mack about the letter, and she knew that she had to.

She tried to listen to Mr. DeMartino's exposition of the French Revolution, not because she felt particularly interested hearing about which celebrity of the time got guillotined when (a subject she normally wouldn't have minded), but merely because she wanted something that would take her mind off things. (If she couldn't think through the matter undisturbed, it was better not to think about it at all.) It turned out it was harder than she thought. Everything Mr. DeMartino said suddenly seemed so ridiculous, puny and insignificant. HOW COULD THE MAN BE STANDING THERE TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED CENTURIES AGO IN A COUNTRY THOUSANDS OF MILES FROM HERE?! Jodie was dead, and here he kept talking about the assault on the Bastille! WHO THE HELL CARED!? The contrast was just too much for Daria to stomach. Insignificant... she couldn't think of any better word to describe the verbal flow that emanated from behind the desk. Totally and completely insignificant. Something slowly hardened inside Daria's stomach as she listened to the insignificant words. She thought about all the times she had been sitting in this class taking notes, trying to remember everything that was said - trying to learn. She looked back at all the dates and years that were stored in her memory. How insignificant they all were! How little they actually mattered. How useless they were. It felt almost like an echo inside her head, an echo caused and enhanced by the emptiness of the knowledge in it.

That was when it struck her: Was this possibly what Jodie had felt? The emptiness and the futility of it all? If this information didn't matter now, why would it matter later? It almost felt like a big cold hand had grabbed her by the throat and began to strangle her. This was who she was: A Brain. But what if all knowledge was insignificant? Had all her life been a lie? She almost felt sick when recognising the same thoughts as she had found in Jodie's letter. She kept thinking about it... A Brain. It was her identity, just as "Achiever" had been Jodie's. Jodie had lost her identity, and declared it all to be a lie and then she had---

Daria exited the history class feeling like a zombie. Never before had she experienced such a complete lack of interest as to what happened next. Would she get run over by a truck on the way home from school? Would the world end? It all seemed strangely insignificant. She didn't know the reason, but that too seemed insignificant. The only thing that didn't seem insignificant was that she wanted to sleep, but unfortunately that was not possible. Instead she went to the bathroom and splashed some cold water in her face. After doing this she felt almost human again, and decided this would be a good time to look up Mack and show him the letter. Mack wasn't hard to find. He was standing by his locker trying to get rid of a certain annoying quarterback.

-"So... You wanted to talk." He didn't quite know how to get a conversation like this started. The news had come as a total shock to him on Saturday night. He had had a date with Jodie - the first one in three weeks, and he had really been looking forward to it. He was probably the one who had been most delighted by the news that Jodie was cutting back on her intense schedule. First of all he knew how well she needed it, second he hoped that she would finally have some more time to spend with him. The entire scene when he had showed up at the Landon residence had been about as pleasant an experience as getting a gallon of ice water poured into one's pants. He vividly remembered the face of Michele Landon, eyes red swollen with weeping, and the expressionless face of Mr. Landon who had eyes that just looked through everything they pointed at, without focusing on anything. He remembered receiving the news, but not quite being able to believe it. He remembered driving home, completely oblivious to the other traffic. It had almost felt like being in a coma. He couldn't recall a single separate thought from that entire evening. It had all been just a blur - one big "feeling" that had laid upon his shoulders like a gigantic rock, slowly crushing him under its weight.

***

Surviving English had been easier than she had thought. It turned out that Mr. O'Neill had not yet been able to "get over" the incident, and so they had spent the entire lesson reading. Daria had gratefully slid into the world of Mika Waltari's "The Egyptian". It was a nice thick book that was just depressing enough for Daria's taste. After school she had headed straight over to Jane's place, and now she had to face the decision of whether to accept a cup of Jane's rat poison or risk hurting herself by falling asleep standing.