After the End

After

THE END

Feedback (good, bad, indifferent, just want to bother me, whatever) is appreciated. Please write to: theangstguy@yahoo.com

Synopsis: Jane eventually forgave Daria for kissing Tom . . . but what if she hadn’t? What if the “freakin’ friends” were no more? An AU story with a twist.

Author’s Notes: This was an alternate-universe story I’ve been fiddling with for a long time (since January 2003, at least) and had once shelved for several years. A discussion about “The Kiss” in a PPMB thread got me thinking about the story again, and I decided to finish it. No SF special effects, no fantasy stuff, just characters acting and reacting as reasonably as possible. It was previously called “The Year After,” and portions of it were placed online at Lawndale Leftovers, but the plot has since been revised and taken here in a different direction. This tale strikes me as perhaps the most logical but least considered AU; many in Daria fandom have thought Jane’s forgiveness of Daria for kissing Tom was unrealistic, with the end of the friendship being a more likely outcome. The cascade of consequences is fairly clear at first, and the AU starts out not much differently from the canon Dariaverse. How things end up is a different matter. It helps immensely for the reader to be familiar with all of the Daria episodes from “Die! Die! My Darling” to the end of the fifth season, “Boxing Daria,” including both TV movies, as the chain of cause-and-effect from the series is followed.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Roentgen for sparking the idea that led to my finishing this story. Mike N, Ms Hand, smk, and The Professor discovered errors, for which I was eternally grateful. (It never pays to look bad in print.) Thanks also for Mr. Orange, for offering to translate this tale into French. Merci.

Why is betrayal the only truth that sticks?

—Arthur Miller, After the Fall

Janey wasn’t home when Daria called, but her older brother Trent picked up the phone instead while he was in the kitchen looking for a snack, and Daria told him everything. He stood there with the refrigerator door held open so he could scan its contents, though he didn’t do a lot of scanning while he listened to Daria’s depressingly thorough confession of an unforgivable sin. He said little in response, but he didn’t think he needed to. He knew women needed to ventilate more than they needed advice, but he also knew long ago that this particular calamity was fated to happen. Daria hadn’t believed him, that musicians were sensitive to shifts in mood, that guys could always tell when other guys were into someone, the whole ethereal transference thing. And here it was: Daria had fallen for Janey’s boyfriend and kissed him, had been swamped with guilt afterward, then had gone and told Janey what she’d done the first chance she got, which was right in the middle of a crowded hallway at school. It was such a Daria kind of thing to do.

“I know I’ve hurt her. I can’t imagine what she’s going through. She didn’t come back to school after she ran off and I don’t know where she is.”

“Mmm.”

“Trent . . . I never meant for it to happen, I swear I didn’t. I know what you said about Tom and me, but I swear, this wasn’t . . . it sounds awful, I know, but I didn’t . . . I didn’t plan to . . . God, I don’t know what to do.”

“Mmm.”

“I hope she’s okay. I wish I could make this up to her, but I know I can’t, so I don’t know why I said that. I can’t believe I did this to her. Do you know where she went?”

He admitted he didn’t, said he would go look for her, then shut the refrigerator door after he hung up. Janey might need him, and anyway his appetite was gone. He was so glad he wasn’t in high school anymore and didn’t have to go through crap like this himself.

He left the house, got in his beat-up blue sedan, and drove to the high school. No Janey. He then drove down streets at random around town, following his instincts. Ethereal transference, it always worked. As he drove he thought about Janey. She’d been acting really strange the last few weeks, well before this current mess started. Janey had told him she thought Daria was trying to get her boyfriend. She had been edgy, paranoid, volatile, doing weird stuff. She goaded Daria into helping her dye her hair when she knew Daria didn’t know the first thing about hair dyes, and of course it came out a disaster, so she accused Daria of screwing it up to wreck her love life, but Daria would never do that. Not in that particular way, at least.

The problem with Janey, Trent reflected, was that she had sensed she and her boyfriend were about to break up, but she couldn’t face it. It had made her a little crazy. Everyone had run off on Janey, even their own parents, only Trent staying around to care for her. Trent knew that he wasn’t very reliable, either; Janey loved and tolerated him, but she did the grocery shopping because she knew he never would. She grew up depending only on herself, secretly wishing someone else would stick around and take up the burden to get things done, and maybe love her in the bargain, but it never happened. Her worst fears had blown up in her face.

As for Daria, Trent knew she hadn’t meant to kiss Janey’s boyfriend. Daria was smart but she wasn’t very self-aware. She intellectualized her problems instead of feeling them out, living in denial of her emotions. She shoved everyone away to keep from being hurt, but there was a price for that, and the loneliness had finally gotten to her. She saw her chance to finally get a boyfriend, so she went for it—but it had been Janey’s boyfriend. Given her hostility, she probably couldn’t have gotten a boyfriend in any other way. And now she was dragging herself through miles of broken glass in self-punishment. As was Janey, though Trent wouldn’t have been surprised to learn Tom had gotten a little punishment from Janey, too. She was like that. The saddest part was that they had done it to themselves.

Trent shook his head. High school was hell.

Ten minutes later on the east side, he spotted a thin, leggy figure dressed in black wearing a bright red shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She was walking on the sidewalk in the general direction of home. He slowed as he pulled alongside and stuck his head out the window.

“Yo,” he said conversationally, one eye on the road.

Janey almost glanced at him, but she kept her head down and didn’t answer.

“What you doing?”

She looked at her feet as she walked. He could tell she had been crying hard for a while. He tried a different tack. “Hair looks fine,” he said, thinking she must have dyed it back to its natural black from the tiger-striping attempt.

All she did was shrug.

This was looking bad. “Lift?” he said.

She shook her head.

“Come on. We need to go for more rides.” It was a joke they shared, going on more rides together.

She didn’t take the bait. She kept walking.

“Janey? Come on.”

She exhaled heavily and stopped where she was. When he stopped the car she silently came over and got in. He drove around town once to see if she’d open up. She didn’t. Her artist’s hands lay open in her lap, her red lips sealed, her blue eyes staring out the side window at nothing.

Trent feared the silence more than he did Janey’s grief. He wanted to tell his little sister that everything would be all right. He tried several times to get it out, but it wouldn’t come. It wasn’t true. He was a musician, and he knew these things.

“Where are we going, anyway?” he asked as he drove.

Janey looked out the window. They were on Glen Oaks, about to pass the Morgendorffers’ place.

“Home,” she said in a dead voice.

“Our home?”

“Our home,” said Janey. “Where else?”

This looked bad. “Want to see how Daria’s doing?” Trent said, easing his foot off the gas.

“No,” she said.

The Morgendorffer home went by. Trent drove home. Maybe tomorrow, he thought. Maybe tomorrow Janey and Daria would work things out. He had to have hope.

Daria called twice that afternoon. Janey wouldn’t take the phone when Trent asked. That evening, there was a knock at the front door. Trent opened it and found Daria standing there, miserable as a lost child in the rain. She looked too depressed to cry.

“Is Jane in?” she asked hoarsely.

“Um,” Trent began uncomfortably, “she’s—”

Footsteps on the second-floor hallway could be heard. He turned to look up the staircase behind him.

Janey came down, one unhurried step at a time. She stopped to face Daria when she could see her clearly. Her face could have been cut from stone.

“Hello,” said Janey.

“Hi,” said Daria. Trent could barely hear her.

The silence drew out. Trent uneasily looked from one to the other.

“I’m sorry,” Daria said in a louder voice.

Janey gave no sign she heard that. Only her cold gaze betrayed her.

“It won’t happen again, I swear it,” said Daria, the words spilling out. “I can’t believe I did that. I had to tell you the truth. I’m sorry I hurt you. I mean it.”

Janey inhaled slowly, studying the diminutive brunette in the doorway, then let her breath out through her nose. “The lady or the tiger,” she said, and shook her head. “You turned out to be a little of both.”

Daria swallowed, badly frightened. “Are we still friends?” she asked, looking up.

Janey seemed to consider this. “You were honest with me,” she said at last. “The least I can do is give that honesty back.”

A second went by.

“No,” said Janey softly. “We’re not.”

Daria’s eyes grew large. Her lips parted. Her face went white.

“What?” she whispered.

“Goodbye,” said Janey. She looked at Daria a moment longer, then walked back upstairs and went to her room. She did not shut her door. She was simply gone.

Trent stared after her, open mouthed.

“Jane?” Daria cried. She looked at the staircase in disbelief.

It was very quiet.

Daria’s mouth closed. Her face reddened and screwed up, eyes narrow and glistening. She turned away and walked down the sidewalk to the street, stopping once to take off her glasses and cover her eyes with the palms of her hands. She drew a quivering breath, then walked eastward toward her home. The last Trent saw of her, she was still holding her glasses by an earpiece with her hands pressed to the sides of her head, staring at the cement as she left.

Trent sat in the kitchen at the table and played with a pencil and a scrap of paper. Sometimes when he felt bad, he wrote about it and made it into a song. Nothing flowed out of his pencil. An hour later, Janey came down, ate something out of the refrigerator, then went back upstairs. She said not a word. After a while longer, he put the pencil down and went to bed. He had written nothing. The phone did not ring that night at the Lanes’.

The phone rang at the Morgendorffers’, though.

“Daria!” called her sister Quinn. “It’s for you!”

She got off her bed because she thought it was Jane. She took the portable phone at her bedroom door. “Hello?”

“Daria?” said the voice on the other end of the line. “It’s Tom.”

After a moment of dull surprise, she closed her bedroom door and walked back to her bed, where she sat with the phone pressed to her ear. “Hello,” she said.

* * *

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the

broken places. But those that will not break it kills.

—Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

The stars were coming out and the songs of crickets filled the dusk, warm from the long day.

Tom came to a stop on the sidewalk before he reached the rusting beige Jaguar at the curb in front of the Morgendorffers’ home. “Is something wrong?” he asked Daria, who had also stopped.

She wouldn’t look him in the eye. “No,” she said to the Jaguar.

“No, seriously,” he said. “I had to beg you to come out tonight, and the first thing you do is jump all over me for no reason. Talk to me this time, okay? What’s wrong?”

“I said—” She broke off and steeled herself. “All right, you want to know what’s wrong. It’s the art museum, the country club, your family, just a lot of things. It’s your whole elitist world that I’m not a part of.”

Tom felt himself grow hot with anger. “Let’s don’t start this again. I’m not an elitist and you are a—”

“Oh, don’t tell me!” Daria interrupted. She was looking at him now, her face tight with rage. “Tell it to your Aunt Mildred tomorrow when you get to your private island paradise, and be sure not to tell her anything about me, okay?”

“What?”

“Oh, come off it! It’s so obvious that you don’t want a low-class prole like me brushing against anyone in your family. You didn’t ask me out to the fundraiser or that fireworks display or anything. Am I so shameful to be around that you can’t even tell your parents about me?”

“No! Damn it—look, I didn’t want us to go to those things because I sure as hell didn’t want to go, and I assumed you wouldn’t want to, either. So maybe I was wrong, okay? Do you want to go sit in lawn chairs until ten at night and watch fireworks? Do you want to go to that fundraiser?”

“Well, what if I had? You didn’t even ask! Do your parents hate me that much, or are you protecting them from me?”

“What? What the hell are you talking about? My parents think you’re wonderful! You’re really smart and heading for college and you’re going to do all kinds of things in life! It’s not like you’re Jane!”

For a second Tom thought he saw actual flames roar up in Daria’s eyes. “What did you mean by that crack?” she snarled. “What the hell’s wrong with Jane? What’s your problem with her?”

“Whoa, okay, wait a second. Jane’s—”

“Wasn’t Jane up to your family’s standards? Wasn’t she smart enough for you? Did you think she was some plebeian loser who wasn’t going anywhere and—”

“No! God damn it, that’s not it!”

“—you needed someone who fit your privileged ivory-tower world better than she did?”

“Jeez, what’s wrong with you? Would you stop trying to pick a fight with me? And why the hell are you sticking up for Jane all of a sudden?”

“I can stick up for anyone I want!”

“What, are you two friends again? Is that it? You told me yesterday you haven’t talked to her since you told her we kissed! Get over it, Daria! I’m sorry it happened, I really am, but it’s over and done, and I’m not apologizing for it anymore! Move on with your damn life!”

Something inside Daria’s head went pop. “You go to hell!” she roared at the top of her lungs, then turned on her heel and stamped back toward the front door.

“Does the truth hurt, Daria?” Tom shouted after her. He couldn’t control himself; he thought he was going insane. “Is that what this is about, that you can’t handle reality? Or is it that you can’t stand to get close to anyone because that would make you vulnerable? Is that it?”

The slamming of the Morgendorffers’ front door cut off the shouting match. Tom noticed Daria’s parents at a lamp-lit picture window, peering outside. He suddenly felt ashamed; he was acting like a complete ass. Mortified, he rubbed his mouth, looked away, and walked around to get in his car and get out of there as fast as possible.

“I can’t believe this,” he said as he got in and slammed the door, seeing red. “I cannot frigging believe this.” He started the car, buckled in, put it in gear, and pulled away from the curb with squealing tires. He realized too late that he hadn’t looked behind him to see if he was cutting into traffic, but he had lucked out: no one was behind him this time. He stopped at the end of the street and put his forehead against the steering wheel. “What am I doing?” he said, his eyes closed for a moment. “I can’t be doing this. I can’t drive like this. I gotta calm down. It isn’t worth being this angry over this.” He blew out his breath and felt marginally more in control. He noticed then he hadn’t turned on his car’s headlights, either. He grimaced and turned them on, took another deep breath, let it out, then turned the wheel and headed down another street to get out of the subdivision.

He glanced up once at the rear-view mirror as he left for home. “Nice knowing you, Daria,” he said sarcastically, though it hurt to say it. Everything that could have been was gone. He shook his head and forced himself to focus on getting home in one piece.

* * *

This could but have happened once—

And we missed it, lost it forever.

—Robert Browning, Youth and Art

It was difficult to concentrate with so many distractions lurking on the edge of consciousness and preying on her mind, but Daria was determined to gain a brief but welcome escape from reality by burying herself in a book for the evening. She was done with her accursed work at Mister O’Neill’s It’s Okay to Cry Corral, a too-sensitive summer day camp that managed to upset everyone who attended it. Her escape plan worked agreeably for perhaps ten minutes, at which point she heard the light but unusually slow tread of her sister’s shoes come up the stairs and down the hall. A moment later, Quinn walked into Daria’s bedroom uninvited and stood at the foot of her bed.

Daria struggled to contain her irritation. “No,” she said with barely a glance up, “those sandals don’t make your toes look fat.”

Quinn shrank at Daria’s words. “So David was right,” she said in a small voice. “I am superficial.”

“It’s good to know your strengths,” said Daria sourly, adjusting the book in her lap. Noticing that Quinn was still there, she looked up with a glare. To her surprise, her younger sister was on the edge of tears. Daria replayed the conversation in her mind. What the hell was going on? “He really said that to you?” she asked, confused.

“He said he only dates girls with ‘depth,’” said Quinn. Her cheeks were turning red.

Daria snorted softly. “Well, at least he’s got his standards. How did that topic even come up?”

Quinn swallowed, blinking rapidly. “I—he—”

In a flash, Daria got it. Her eyes widened. “You asked him out?” she said in astonishment.

By way of a response, Quinn screwed up her face, covered her eyes with her hands, and began to cry. Daria looked on in disbelief. Not since childhood had she seen her sister so undone. She glanced down at her book, which she knew she would never get to finish tonight thanks to this interruption, and looked up again in ill-concealed anger. Where was the justice? Was she ever going get a few minutes of peace to herself this miserable summer? Her sister was arguably more important than the book, but still—

“Oh, screw it!” she snapped, and flung the book across the room at her padded closet door. It made a satisfying thump when it hit and fell open on the hardwood floor, its pages bent. She crossly swung her legs off the bed to get up. “Look, Quinn,” she began, meaning to offer a token of sisterly advice about giving people a chance and learning from disappointment—

—but Quinn, startled by the violence of the thrown book, fled the room. Her bedroom door slammed shut a few seconds later. The interruption was over.

Despite the unexpected reprieve, Daria found it impossible to even think about sitting down with her book again. What was started had to be finished. She got up, leaving the tome on the floor, and walked from her room down the hall to Quinn’s bedroom door, trying the handle. It was locked. “Quinn?” she called, knocking. “Quinn, can we talk? Hey!” No response. She could hear her sister’s muffled sobs. No doubt she was face down on her bed, bawling her eyes out over being refused a date for the first time in her life. And she had been refused by a brain, yet. What could have prompted her to ask out her school tutor, of all people? Now she’d never know.

Sighing, Daria gave up and went back to her own room, shutting the door behind her. She meant to retrieve her book, but her mood was entirely spoiled and she didn’t feel like doing anything, so she stood by the door in a state of emotional fatigue and mental paralysis. Sometimes you reach out to someone and all you get back is a slap in the face, she thought. Wasn’t that the truth. It had been the same way with a kid at the summer day camp where she had worked that summer until a few days ago. Link, she’d never forget his name. She had tried to reach out to him, too, but after the third or fourth rejection, she had quit trying. She had enough problems of her own, unable to stop ruminating over the series of recent catastrophes with Jane and Tom. Life sucked, and there was no escape from it if you discounted suicide as being potentially painful and unreliable. Daria had her standards.

Then she heard her mother’s footsteps on the stairs. Daria groaned and swore under her breath. She did not need more trouble, but her mother had no doubt come up to see what the ruckus with Quinn was. The quick footsteps came up to Daria’s door and were followed by a knock. Daria rolled her eyes, waited two full seconds, then gave in and opened the door, a smart remark on the tip of her tongue.

“Oh, Daria,” said her mother, just home from work but still all business. She handed Daria a sheet of paper. “I wanted to show this to you. It was on the news this afternoon, and I printed it off.”

Daria took the sheet. It was from the website of the local newspaper, the Lawndale Sun-Herald. SEARCH FOR LOCAL BOY NOW STATEWIDE, read the headline.

“Did you know him?” asked her mother. “They think he ran away from home last night. It said he had just gotten back from camp, but it didn’t say which and I thought it might be the one you worked at.”

Daria’s insides knotted as she read the article. It was about Link. “I do know him,” she said, feeling sick. “He was in my group at O’Neill’s damn Corral.”

“That’s terrible!” her mother gasped. “Do you remember anything about him that might help the police? I’ll call if you do. His mother must be frantic!”

Daria finished scanning the text. She shook her head. “He hated his stepfather and he looked really depressed,” she said, having trouble speaking. “That’s all I really know about him. I tried to talk to him several times, but he blew me off, and Mister O’Neill kept getting in the way. Oh, crap.”

“I’m so sorry.” Her mother gave her a quick kiss on the forehead. “Well, tell me if you do remember anything. Oh, and tell Quinn dinner will be ready in half an hour. I bought a cheeseless veggie lasagna. She’ll like it.” With that, she left for the master bedroom and shut the door to change clothes.

Still staring at the paper she held, Daria gently shut her door again. I could have tried harder to reach him, came an unbidden thought that made her stomach cramp up again. I could have done more. I could have . . . but probably nothing would’ve worked. He was really impossible. Nothing I ever did got through to him.

She read the article one last time, then dropped it in her waste can. She picked up her book, fixed the bent pages, then closed it and dropped it on her desk. A minute later, she lay on her back on her bed, her glasses on the floor and an arm over her eyes, trying to take a nap. It was impossible, of course. What a rotten summer.

“Is it school yet?” she said aloud.

* * *

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

—Stanislaw Jerzy Lee, Unkempt Thoughts

Multitasking is a teenager’s specialty, which Quinn proved as she sliced carrots and celery sticks while cradling the cordless phone on her left shoulder and rereading the card that came with the bouquet of long-stemmed roses lying on the kitchen counter. Daria, for her part, was content to sit at the kitchen table and eat the leftover chocolates from another of her sister’s admirers while reading the newspaper. There was still nothing about Link in the news. He had simply vanished.

“God, Stacy,” said Quinn to the phone, “you can’t let Gina into the Fashion Club. Her teeth are thick.” She reached for another carrot. “Heidi? With the clogs? Yeah, right, we’ve already talked about Brooke. No way. Well, gee, I guess there really aren’t any other suitable girls at school. Maybe the club should break up.” She stopped chopping up vegetable snacks and rolled her eyes. “Stacy, stop crying. Stacy! Oh, forget it.”

She sighed and snapped off the phone, setting it on the counter, then walked over and sat next to Daria at the table with her veggie plate.

“Has the Fashion Club crisis reached DEFCON Two?” asked Daria, examining a chocolate she suspected had a cherry filling.

“You’d think I would go deaf from listening to her complain,” said Quinn. “It’s bad enough with you around.” She ate a celery stick and pointed at Daria’s meal. “You know, you keep eating those chocolates and you’re going to end up like Sandi.”

“I’d have to break my leg and mope in bed for a few weeks first,” said Daria, reading at the newspaper again.

“Funny. You lay in bed every chance you get.”

“I’m thinking while I do it, though,” said Daria, not looking up from the paper. “That consumes calories. Sandi, on the other hand, doesn’t have a—”

“Don’t say it.”

“Then it goes without saying.” Daria selected another chocolate. “I thought your friendship with her ended when she couldn’t squeeze into a size zero.”

“I’m not like you, Daria,” Quinn snorted. “I can keep my friends. Besides, it’s not like she’s gotten ugly or anything.”

Daria’s jaw tightened as she continued to read the paper. Quinn’s little jabs about Jane never failed to sting. “Not ugly on the outside, anyway,” she shot back.

“Whatever.” Quinn craned her neck to read the newspaper’s front page. “What does it say about Ms. Li?”

“She’s still at Brookside getting that psychiatric evaluation. Her lawyer says she’s mentally ill and can’t stand trial. Damn, and I was going to bring popcorn to the hearing.”

“Ms. Li’s not crazy,” said Quinn, chewing a celery stick. “She just drank too much Ultra-Cola.”

“Drinking Ultra-Cola doesn’t normally make people want to swing a fire axe around Lawndale High. Attending Lawndale High makes you to want to swing an axe around.”

“What’s she charged with?”

“Uh . . . other than multiple counts of assault with a deadly weapon on school grounds, it looks like misappropriation of funds, embezzlement, forgery, obstruction of justice, and multiple counts of vandalism. Plus there’s all the civil suits pending against her and the school system from the parents. Maybe she wasn’t so lucky when that cop only wounded her when she wouldn’t drop the axe.”

“Why is it the school system’s fault? She was the one with the axe.”

“It’s not that simple.” Daria rejected adding an insult to that statement; she was warming to the topic, even if her sister was the audience. No one else bothered to listen to her nowadays. “Superintendent Cartwright was supposed to be overseeing her contract with Ultra-Cola, but he didn’t care as long as the school stayed in the red after the property tax increase was voted down last November. He said if he’d known there was a problem, he would have come to check it out before it got that bad. What he probably meant was that he would have started the cover-up a lot earlier. Now he’s out of a job, too.”

“The new principal seems okay. I wish he wouldn’t frown so much, though. He’ll get premature wrinkling.”

Daria pushed the first section of the paper aside, which Quinn then took. “They replaced Stalin with the Inquisition. We traded a dictator for a witch hunter.”

“Oh, Daria, that’s ridiculous. Mister DeMartino wasn’t a witch. All he wanted were pay raises for the teachers after Ms. Li left.”

“He shouldn’t have raised his voice to a zero-tolerance principal when he asked.” Daria glanced over the Arts section and took the second-to-last chocolate. “I hope he’s enjoying his new job loading trucks at Parcels-R-Us. He’s probably making more there than he did teaching.”

“He has more people to yell at, anyway. He yelled at me often enough, but I guess that was his job.” Quinn sat back in her chair. “I’m surprised you didn’t say something to him when Ms. Li started going overboard with those soda machines. You sure complained enough about it.”

Daria scowled at the newspaper, trying to concentrate. “Say something to who? DeMartino?”

“No, the superintendent. Maybe he could have fixed things.”

“It wasn’t my responsibility to do anything about it.”

“Except complain?”

Daria’s frown deepened. “I don’t complain that much.”

“Ha! All you ever do is bitch about how rotten everything is.”

Daria finally looked up, visibly angry. “Why didn’t you do something about it instead of debating lipstick shades with the other fashion airheads?”

“Look,” said Quinn, aiming a celery stick at her sister, “you drink soda, don’t you?”

“What? What does that have to do with anything?”

“I’m saying that Ms. Li wasn’t all that bad. The school had lots of money then, right? We got soda anytime we wanted, right? What was the problem? Other than her running around with the axe and all.”

“It was . . . oh, screw it. You wouldn’t understand. You’d have to have a brain first.” It was a lame insult, but she couldn’t think clearly enough to have a better one. Daria finished the last chocolate and got up from the table, Arts section in hand, and headed for her room upstairs.

“Does Jane ever talk to you at school?” Quinn called as Daria was on her way out.

Daria gave no sign that she had heard, but Quinn heard her sister stomp up the stairs and slam her bedroom door. She smiled in triumph. She was glad she wasn’t a brain. That thing with David had been a mistake, but it was behind her now. Being popular, not smart, was all that really mattered.

And Daria was living proof of that.

* * *

Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive,

and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

—Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin

Daria was fully prepared to think that the one-day Camp Grizzly five-year reunion could not possibly get any worse, but that was before she heard that idiot Skip Stevens yell into a microphone, “Is everyone ready for a hike?”

“I wish that jerk would go take a hike,” Daria grumbled as other campers made halfhearted noises of readiness.

“I’m with you there,” said the black-haired girl by her side. She eyed the smaller girl in the green jacket. “Where’s your camp t-shirt?” she asked.

“Who gives a crap.” Daria looked around, royally pissed that her mother had taken away the books she had tried to sneak into camp. You need to make new friends, not read, she had said. Didn’t we go through this the first time you came here? Haven’t you learned anything?

The other campers left in a desultory line to follow ex-camper Skip and the camp leader, Mr. Potts, on the long hike around Lake Grizzly. Daria watched Quinn and her gaggle of former campmates fall in at the end of the line, snickering at a whispered secret. Maybe they’ll meet a real grizzly on the way, she thought, and began to picture the aftermath of a bear attack. Blood, there has to be lots of blood, plus some limbs here and there, and then some more blood . . .

“What do you want to do?” the girl next to her asked, watching the other teenagers go. “Wanna follow along at a safe distance?”

Daria gave Amelia a sidelong glance. She had dreaded meeting Amelia again; she remembered her as barely more than a tag-a-long sycophant, a girl who had tried too earnestly to be Daria’s friend when the younger Daria wasn’t in the mood to share even breathing space. And here Amelia was again, five years later—and Daria still didn’t want to share her breathing space. Things hadn’t changed a bit.

The nature of Amelia’s attraction to her could not be fathomed. The tanned, freckled Amelia was certainly no outcast, though she was peculiar. She was bigger than Daria, broad shouldered and busty with an ungainly but earthy look, decked out in cargo shorts, tan hiking boots, and a purple tank top with a flower on it, hidden beneath her blue camp tee. She wore square-lens glasses and no makeup. Her only similarity to Jane was in having coal-black bangs, which she parted in the middle. The part that really mattered to Daria was that she saw Amelia as a joiner, eager to do whatever was suggested if she sensed it would please. She could have no empathy for Daria’s situation, and Daria had none for hers. She’s a camp follower, Daria thought without humor. And I’m the lucky camper she’s going to follow.

“You okay?” Amelia prompted.

“No.” Daria looked away. “I hate hikes. I hate being here. I hate goddamn everything.”

Taken aback, Amelia looked at her with concern. “Why’d you come, then?”

“It was either this or clean out the garage with my parents.”

“You didn’t want to come here?”

“Right, I didn’t.”

Amelia appeared distressed. “That’s funny, because I was so afraid you weren’t coming. I was really looking forward to seeing you again. You’re my friend.”

Friend? Daria made a snap decision to be honest. If nothing else, it would get rid of the unwanted attention. “You know,” she said, facing Amelia directly, “I had a friend once, the only real friend I had ever had. She and I had the best thing going you could ever imagine, and less than a year ago I threw it away. I destroyed it, wrecked it, burned it up and buried it, and ever since then my life has been one big flaming pile of crap. I lost my stupid boyfriend, my sister’s turned into a big pain in the ass, my school has gone to hell, and there was this kid that—I—” Daria clamped her hands to the sides of her head and gritted her teeth, eyes squeezed shut . . . then dropped her arms to her sides in defeat. “Ah, forget it. It’s not worth talking about.”

“Oh, my God.” Amelia stared at her, round eyed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Wrong.” Daria glared at the other girl. “Let me ask you something. Why are you hanging around me? What’s with that? You hung around me nonstop when we were here the first time, and it drove me crazy. Why are you doing this?”

Amelia took a step back in shock. “I didn’t mean to drive you crazy,” she said.

“Then why are you hanging around me?”

“Because . . . I like you.”

“But why? Just tell me that! Why do you like me?”

After a pause, Amelia spoke in a low, steady voice. “Because you think for yourself,” she said. “You say what you want, no matter what, and you don’t care what other people think about it. I know you’re smart and everything, but you’re so independent. You’re . . . free.” She hesitated. “I wish I was more like that sometimes. I’m not, but I want to be.”

Daria gave Amelia an incredulous look. “You mean you think of me as your role model?”

After a beat, Amelia nodded. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

Daria’s mouth fell open. “Now you’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. Then her face walled up. “Well, if you really wanted to be more like me, you’d leave me alone!”

With that she walked off, leaving in the direction of the girls’ cabin. Once there, she threw open the screen door and walked to the lower bunk bed farthest from the door and climbed in. She took off her glasses and put them on the floor, curled up on the blanket with a pillow under her head, and willed herself to go to sleep.

Except she couldn’t sleep. Her mind would not turn off, and her thoughts kept running and running and running. None of them were pleasant. Eventually she opened her eyes and stared at the wall.

That was what I liked best about Jane, she thought. She was so confident, she knew her own mind, she was so . . . cool. That was it. She was cool beyond words. She had what I wanted most, the ability to be above it all and do whatever came to mind. She didn’t hobble herself the way I do, ruminating and worrying and smoldering and letting it all boil inside. She got it out and moved on. And she sure has moved on. She wears different clothes now, changes her outfit every day, sits in the back of every classroom and draws and chews gum and blows bubbles like she has no problems at all, and it doesn’t even bother her that we’re in the same room or pass each other in the hall. I don’t know if she has other friends or is dating or working or running or anything. She won’t say a word to me. It’s like I don’t exist anymore, like . . . like I’m one of them now, one of the herd we used to make fun of. Maybe I am. I was different when we were together, I felt I was going somewhere, doing new things, coming alive for the first time in my life, but now . . . I’m back to where I used to be, lost in my own world, and alone.

She rubbed her eyes, angry with herself for her tears. It shouldn’t be worth crying over. She had always been alone. Until Jane came along, though, she had never realized how good it felt to have the loneliness taken away. She had been free.

She got tired of lying down, so she sat up on the edge of the bed and wiped her face on her jacket sleeves. When she couldn’t stand to stare at the wooden floor any longer, she got up and walked back to the screen door of the cabin, not knowing what to do or where to go. She looked out across the campground between the main cabin and the lake.

Amelia sat by herself at one of the picnic tables, staring at her clasped hands. No one else was around.

Sixteen years of being alone. One and a half years of having a friend. One more year of being alone.

And now . . .

Oh, what the hell, she thought. I know I’m going to regret this, but—

As she left the cabin, the screen door banging shut behind her and made her flinch. Amelia looked up at the sound. She watched Daria walk all the way across the grounds and come to a stop on the other side of the table.

“Is this seat taken?” Daria mumbled.

“No,” said Amelia softly. “Welcome to it.”

Daria sat down but found it difficult to make eye contact. “Sorry,” she said to the table. “I’m having a bad life.”

Amelia was quiet. She watched Daria and waited.

“Don’t treat me like a role model,” Daria said at last. “I don’t want to be put on a pedestal or idolized. I can’t stand that. It just . . . I can’t stand it. Please stop.”

“Okay,” Amelia said in a whisper.

“I hate this place.” Daria crossed her arms on the picnic table, still unable to look up. “I hated it the first time I was dumped here, and I hate it now. And I hate people like Skip most of all. He’s such an incredible asshole.”

“He’s kind of like the boss of the camp, isn’t he?” Amelia asked.

“Like hell he is. He’s the self-proclaimed Fuehrer of an artificial society that won’t last even half a day.”

Amelia pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Artificial society?”

“This damn camp. It’s not a real culture. We’re forced to come here and co-exist with people we’d never seek out on our own. It’s like school, like prison, like . . . it’s like life. Skip’s just a former camper like we are, no power at all, but he bullies everyone around and tells us what to do because it makes him feel powerful. He’s a total dirt wad, but everyone’s afraid to say anything about it because he’ll yell and make them afraid they’ll be alienated, cast out, ostracized. No one wants to leave the herd, everyone’s unhappy, so everything sucks out loud.”

Amelia nodded slowly. “What happened?” she said. “With your friend?”

“Nothing.” Daria put her head down on her arms. “I ruined it. That’s all. It’s over.”

They sat at the table in silence until Daria began to talk. An hour later she had told Amelia everything.

Everything.

Amelia was very quiet throughout.

“Just be glad I don’t live down the street from you,” said Daria. “I’d drive you away as well.” Her forehead was cradled in her hands, elbows on the table, as she looked down at nothing.

Voices became evident in the distance. Amelia looked over Daria’s head, then made a decision herself. “We need to take a hike,” she said, getting up.

“What?” Daria looked around, her face red.

“The others,” said Amelia, “they’re coming back. Let’s go.”

Daria got up. At the other girl’s urging, they headed for the trail that led around the lake, disappearing into the tree line just as the other campers reappeared. The two were gone for over an hour. They walked completely around the lake and never stopped talking.

When they got back, it was lunch. Most of the other campers were wandering around or were seated at the picnic tables chowing down. A half dozen were holding plates in a quick-moving line at a king-size barbecue grill made from half an oil drum split lengthwise.

“Get your Grizzly Burgers!” Skip shouted, manning the grill with a chef’s apron and spatula. “Rare, medium, but always well-done! Come and get ‘em!”

Daria had taken off her green jacket and tied the sleeves around her waist, sweat stains showing on her amber t-shirt. “It’s not pizza and he’s not Julia Child, but it will have to do,” she said. “Thanks for listening.”

“Thanks for being you.” Amelia pointed. “We can grab our plates there.”

A minute later, Daria in the lead, they approached the grill from the side opposite from the line of other campers. Daria reached out with a plastic fork, stabbed a waiting burger, and dropped it on her open bun.

“Hey!” yelled Skip. “What are you doing?”

“Biology experiment,” said Daria. “Later this week when I’m done with it, I’ll mail it to you.”

“No one takes a burger until I say so!” Skip snapped. “I’ve got a whole system here. It’s timed to perfection!”

“An anal-retentive chef,” said Daria. “I bet it’s hell when you have to squeeze frosting out of those big tubes.”

“You’re real funny, Shorty.” Skip leaned over and jabbed at Daria’s plate with his spatula, deftly scooping her burger from its bun and dropping it back on the grill. “That one’s yours since you touched it. Go sit down and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.”

Steamed, Daria started to turn away—just as a furious Amelia brushed past her, planted her free hand on Skip’s chest, and shoved hard. Skip stumbled and fell on his back on the grass, his spatula waving wildly.

“Ever since I started coming to this damn camp, I’ve done whatever you told me to do!” Amelia shouted as she stood over him. Stunned campers watched her with open mouths. “I did it even when I didn’t want to or I thought it was stupid! I never said anything because I didn’t want to risk being alienated from the group, so I learned to shut up and follow the herd—but now I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore! You can’t bully me around, you dirt wad! I’ll think for myself and do what I want, and I don’t care what happens! And don’t you ever get in my friend’s face again!”

Dead silence for one second—

—then a camper screamed, “You go!” The entire grounds erupted in cheers and stamping feet and pounding tables and potato chips thrown high in the air. Teenagers climbed on benches and roared Amelia’s name as they applauded and hooted and waved their fists over their heads. Skip got to his feet, backed away, then ran off shouting for the camp director. Daria looked around in amazement—then felt something drop on the forgotten plate in her hands.

“Here,” said Amelia. “Your burger’s done.”

“Network,” said Daria, regaining her composure.

“God, I love that movie.”

Daria’s parents came back late that afternoon from a day of exploring the local shops and restaurants. Quinn showed up at the car in a foul mood, her campmates nowhere in sight. “So much for being girls together,” she growled as she got in the back of the car, glaring out the window with her arms crossed.

Daria and Amelia traded snail-mail addresses, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers. “You gotta send out some of your stories and get ‘em published,” Amelia said. “It doesn’t matter if you get rejected. Everybody gets rejected, but you get to rub it in everyone’s face later when your story hits the stand.”

“I’ll think about it,” Daria muttered. To her surprise, she actually was thinking about it. She had been rejected all her life. What harm could a little more rejection do, if it was the only real path to glory?

“Think about it, then do it,” said Amelia. “That idea you had about an intelligent flesh-eating bacteria really rocked.”

“Mmm, we’ll see.”

They looked at each other, feeling awkward and shy and right on the edge of being embarrassingly sad.

“I’m not very good at this part,” Daria mumbled at last.

“That’s why we have the Internet,” said Amelia. “You never have to say goodbye to anyone at all.” She stuck out her hand. After a moment, Daria took it, and they shook and felt better.

“Later,” said Amelia, smiling.

“Later,” said Daria. She got in the car as her parents, who had been watching, exchanged glances and shrugged in surprise, then got in the car, started it, and left.

“What the hell are you so happy about?” snapped Quinn when they were halfway home.

Daria merely smiled—and said nothing.

* * *

. . . Time

Mows the brittle stalks of autumn as

It stirs the fresh grass, heals all things

And shapes the blood of new wounds.

—Weldon Kees, “The Hourglass”

FROM: DariaM@Botmail.com

DATE: Tues 04/18/00 23:40:35

TO: Amelia1981@Wahoo.com

SUBJECT: Life at DEFCON One

Where to begin, where to begin . . . you already know what happened on Saturday, when Mom got lured into handling my cousin Erin’s divorce, so perhaps I’ll start with what future generations will know as The Nightmare That Was Tuesday, which is to say, today. It figures that there’s a full moon out, for reasons that will become clear to you.

Aunt Rita arrived yesterday evening, and she and mom dove immediately into planning how my idiot cousin Erin was going to leave her even-more-of-an-idiot-if-that-can-be-imagined husband nothing to wear but legal briefs after the divorce. Then things got complicated when they found out about the 50/50 pre-nup and a lot of other stuff I won’t go into, in case this e-mail is harvested by some secret government security program and comes back to haunt me. Rita began to rant, Mom made some snide remark that Rita thought (correctly) was a slam at her, and the reactors began to overheat. They had cooled before I left for classes this morning, but by this afternoon when I got home from the nightmare that is public education in this town, Mom and Rita had stopped making nice and were going for the jugular—each other’s jugular, unfortunately.

That was when, to use that marvelous phrase that those wacky astronauts are so fond of, I screwed the pooch. I called my other aunt on my mom’s side, Amy, who until tonight I thought was sort of cool and above it all, and I asked if she could drop over and referee what was turning into the prelude for World War III. And she did take an hour to drive over, and she did meet my mom and Rita on the field of battle in the kitchen . . . and then she *joined* them.

That is correct, my mom and her two sisters got into a screaming match that caused deafness and insanity over much of Lawndale and surrounding communities, ending at last when my aunt Amy left tire marks all down the street when she peeled out in her Triumph, and aunt Rita called a cab and swore she would never darken our doorway again, plus said she was disowning Mom (which I’m not sure she can do, legally, but that doesn’t really matter I suppose), plus she had never liked or loved my Mom to begin with, and then she added a crack to the effect that Grandpa Barksdale once remarked that he thought Mom was a . . . mmm, almost forgot about that secret government security program. Anyway, there were megatons enough for everyone.

My dad got home about two hours ago, and he and Mom then had a little exchange of words all their own, over his running off to the movies instead of staying to offer Mom emotional support, then my dad drove off saying he couldn’t take it anymore, and Mom went back to her office, and I don’t know why I bother writing all this down, it’s so goddamn stupid. I want to erase this e-mail, shut off my computer, and jump out of a window, but I won’t. I don’t know why. Stubborn or stupid myself, I guess. Plus I’m only on the second floor, I’d only break a leg so it isn’t worth it. What I want to do even more than that, but cannot, is erase from my brain all traces of the last few days before the toxic tsunami of Barksdale sisterhood rolled over our little home and left nothing behind but a wasteland that not even T. S. Eliot would dare write about.

Speaking of sisters, mine is off at a friend’s house, I think. She did not leave a forwarding address or phone. I am not sure if that is good or bad. The tension drove her away, and I am afraid she and I were starting to get into it ourselves before I called a truce by locking myself in my bedroom after aunt Amy blew that legendary cool of hers and called my mother and Rita the “Scylla and Charybdis” of her childhood. I will let you look that one up in a Greek mythology text to get the full flavor of her meaning. I don’t know if Mom or Rita understood it, but they caught the drift.

Remember, you brought this on yourself when you said I should keep you updated on events here as they happen. I should be revising and re-editing that damn flesh-eating bacteria story, but I cannot concentrate on anything at the moment but the appalling cesspool that is my life. (Okay, yeah, that was over the top, but I’m practicing for my next story, so I’ll let it pass.)

What else is going on . . . oh, right. (You can insert an emoticon here that is rolling its eyes.) Just when it seemed Lawndale High was finally climbing out of the Dark Ages under Principal Li, things took a turn for the worse. I wrote about the English teacher here, O’Neill, who resigned after Link’s body was found, and the sleazebag who replaced him. It seems that even my morbidly cynical and paranoid nature was unprepared to deal with the mind-blasting reality of the horrific nightmare of putrescent slime that lay beneath the leering, drooling, properly groomed exterior of Mr. Ken Edwards. (This part is not practice for my next story, it is the truth.) It appears that “Ken,” as he repeatedly asked the female student body to call him, molested one of Quinn’s friends from the former Fashion Club when he had her stay after school last Friday. This did not come out until yesterday morning when the victim refused to come to school and finally told her parents what had happened, and the police actually came and arrested Edwards right in the middle of class while we were taking a test. I don’t even remember what was on the test; I just remember watching them escort him away and having not one single sarcastic remark to make about it, not one. I can’t even remember if I finished the test, or if I turned it in, or anything. Quinn won’t talk to me about it, so I don’t know if she’s talked to her friend or not, or even if they still are friends. I don’t know much of anything, I suppose.

Why was it you wanted to be my friend, again? I’m having some trouble with that. Something about me being a role model. That can’t be right. Whatever.

There was one bit of good news that I should tell you, lest you think I have nothing better to do than complain. (I confess I do complain, though to me it seems more like telling the truth.) I finally got a letter from Raft College on Saturday, but Quinn misplaced the mail and I didn’t actually find it until an hour ago while looking for something to eat in the now-silent kitchen. The envelope was behind the toaster with the rest of the mail. It was big and thick. I wanted to sacrifice a live creature to the gods to ensure that the news was good, but the rest of my family wasn’t home, so I opened it anyway.

They accepted me.

And I got a scholarship for my first year.

I can’t think of the words to write. I want to scream, I want to send out the news in gigantic flashing letters with fireworks all around, but this e-mail system sucks. I guess the lady who interviewed me in Admissions wasn’t put off when I prostrated myself before her and grabbed her by the legs, begging her to have mercy and get me the hell out of this miserable pit of damnation, madness, and ruin. (Practicing again for the next story. A little.) You are the first person in the world to know my news, except of course for the Raft administrators, but they don’t count. They never do.

You know what this means. With you at New England State, and me at Raft, we will both be in Boston for the next four years, if you can tolerate me for that long. You can’t know how delighted and thankful I was to learn that you are a pizzaholic. Those pepperonis will tremble in fear at our approach all across Beantown; they will signal to each other with lanterns to warn of our coming—one if by land, two if by sea . . . okay, that’s way over the top, scratch that.

There, I’ve had my say. Please write soon if you have time, or whenever you can, or when you feel like it, or whatever. If the above hasn’t put you off as badly as it has me.

And . . . thank you for putting up with me this long. The last month must seem like a year to you. It certainly has to me. I wish we lived closer than three hours apart. Can I visit you after school’s out? Are you doing anything over the summer? God, listen to me.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Your friend,

Daria

P.S. First pizza in Boston is on me. Any size, your pick of toppings. Except for anchovies, I can’t stand those. Sorry.

* * *

There was nothing dramatic—

no big tragedy,

no terminal illness—

it seems, just,

a lifetime of being . . .

dismissed . . . by everyone, apparently . . .

except me.

—Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

Daria had a hard time pinpointing why she even bothered, but in the end she admitted to herself that she did want them to know, assuming greater issues did not overwhelm her chance to present the news. They were her parents, after all. She decided to hand them the letter in an offhand manner, casually, as if it were nothing. She could not consciously admit that she meant to gauge their response for signs of how she stood with them in this perilous time—and, more importantly, how deep the peril of the moment ran. Still, she kept the letter folded up in the inner pocket of her green jacket when they met together in the family room (what a misnomer that was, she thought to herself: family room). One great issue had to be dealt with before the trivial one could be brought up.

As she sat down on the loveseat, she noticed that her mother and father took places on opposite ends of the couch across from her. She tried to pretend that didn’t matter, but failed miserably.

“You said you’d be honest with me,” she began. Her parents exchanged uncomfortable looks, then nodded agreement.

“Okay.” Daria steadied herself, then plunged in. “Are you getting divorced?”

Her father flinched and turned pale. “What?” cried her mother, aghast. “Good heavens, no! Where did you get the idea that we were?”

“The off-and-on fighting over the last month might have tipped me off,” said Daria, as blandly as she could manage. “Dad sleeping in the spare bedroom half the time was another clue. And the ducts in this house conduct sound almost as well as they conduct the heat and air conditioning.”

Both of her horrified parents tried to speak at once until her irritated mother snapped, “Jake, let me!” and her father subsided. She then turned to Daria. “Your father and I are not getting divorced! Now, I admit we’ve had some difficulties lately with—”

“—a lot of things!” her father hotly interrupted. “Things are tense, Daria, very tense!”

“I want to know what’s really happening,” Daria pressed, fighting to stay calm. “And I mean, what’s really happening.”

“Well—” Her mother looked less sure of herself and glanced at her husband.

“A lot of things are happening!” said her father. He sat forward on the edge of the sofa and began to wring his hands. “For one thing . . . my consulting work isn’t going as well as I’d like.”

“To put it mildly,” said her mother under her breath.

“Helen!” Her father continued, visibly on edge. “I’ve lost a few clients recently and I haven’t been able to replace them. If things don’t turn around . . . I won’t be able to pay for the office rental, and I’ll have to close the business and find work with someone else, like I did with that dot-com company a few months ago.”

“And let’s hope this time they don’t hire and fire you in the same week,” Helen growled.

“And let’s hope that somehow you’ll find the time to be home more often with your family!” retorted Jake. “But, oh no, you’re the breadwinner and we have to make sacrifices for the sake of Big Chief Helen!”

“I wouldn’t have to be the damn big chief around here if you could actually run a business and stop acting like a lunatic in front of your clients! No wonder you can’t keep any!”

Fear spurred Daria to leap from the loveseat and place herself bodily between her parents. “Mom! Dad!” she cried, holding up her palms to signal a truce. “Round over! Go back to your corners!”

Her mother pushed her hand aside. “Daria, stop it!”

“No, you stop it!” Unnerved that she had blown her cool so quickly, Daria was still grateful her theatrics had captured a moment of quiet. She used the moment to walk back to her spot on the couch and take her seat again. “Okay, I got my answer—loud and clear.”

“We are not getting a divorce!” her mother shouted. “We’re just having a few problems!”

“Three Mile Island had a few problems, too,” Daria said, trying to look composed. “I thought the two of you were in counseling or something.”

“We don’t have time for that anymore with your mother’s work schedule!” snarled Jake. “There’s always time for Eric, but never time for any of us!”

“Dad!” cried a wide-eyed Daria, holding up her hands to stop what she knew she couldn’t.

“It wouldn’t matter if I did have the time!” a red-faced Helen shouted at her husband. “You never do anything in counseling anyway except use it as an excuse to tear me down like you did at Quiet Ivy!”

“Mom! No!”

“Right, let’s blame it all on Jakey! It’s always his fault we’re having problems, but nothing’s ever your fault, is it, Helen? Like the fact that our family’s disintegrating and you’re not around to stop it and that makes it worse, that’s not your fault, is it?”

“Where the hell were you when Rita and Amy ganged up on me? What kind of support did you give me then?”

“What kind of support did you give me ever? You run away to work and pretend to care—”

“God damn it, that’s a lie!”

“It’s the truth! Face it, Helen! You love your work more than you love me or your children!”

“I certainly don’t love you when you’re being a complete idiot!”

“You’re the—” Jake abruptly broke off and looked toward the kitchen. He could hear the garage door opening. He glanced at his wife, then they both looked around the room.

There was a wad of paper on the floor that hadn’t been there a minute before. When later unfolded, it turned out to be a letter from the editor of Speculations magazine, accepting a short story called “The Carnivore Within” for future publication and offering one Daria Morgendorffer a sum of $51.30 for First North American Serial Rights.

Daria herself was nowhere to be seen.

When the garage was checked, neither was the family’s red SUV.

* * *

She knew this was a bad idea, especially with a May thunderstorm dead ahead and a sum of sixty-two dollars in her pocket wallet, but on an evening riddled with nothing but bad ideas escape seemed the least terrible option of the lot. The cell phone in the driver’s door map holder began to ring, but she picked it up as she left the subdivision and shut it off. The entrance to the Interstate appeared in five minutes and she took the on-ramp westbound and merged into moderate traffic. Then she reached down, retrieved the cell phone, turned it on again (ignoring the message-waiting symbol), and carefully thumbed in a memorized number. Curtains of rain fell across the highway less than a mile ahead, backlit by the fading light on the western horizon.

“Hello?” said Daria when someone picked up the line. “Is Amelia there?” Lightning flickered above. She gripped the wheel tighter with her right hand as thunder cracked and rumbled. “Hi. Yeah, it’s me. Um, would it be okay if I took you up on your offer to visit? Yeah, tonight. I know it’s unexpected and sort of late, but—” She sighed “—I’ll explain later. Things are kind of a mess. At least it’s Friday night and we don’t have school tomorrow. I can wait.” She drove, then glanced at the dashboard clock. “I can be there in about three hours. Thanks, Amelia. I will. Okay. Bye.”

Raindrops splattered on the windshield as she hung up. Traffic was relatively light as the rain increased to a drumming crescendo. Daria let her mind wander as she drove, struggling to come to grips with the end of her family. Soon she saw she was coming up on a cluster of vehicles not far ahead—coming up too quickly for comfort. She glanced down at the speedometer and was shocked to see that she had been so distracted that she had let it get up to eighty. She took her foot off the gas and moved it to the brake.

At that moment in the downpour, a car ahead of her tried to get into the fast lane but struck a pickup truck attempting to pass it on the left. Both vehicles slid and struck other cars as they spun out in Daria’s path. Her heart in her throat, she spun the steering wheel and stamped on the brake as she hurled at them, hoping to swing around on the right shoulder, but the SUV hydroplaned on the wet asphalt and mindlessly resisted all attempts to regain control.

A few drivers and passengers caught up in the chain-reaction crash saw the red SUV leave the Interstate at a high rate of speed, hitting a guardrail and rolling over as it disappeared down a shallow grassy embankment. Once everything had come to a chaotic stop, a quick-witted driver involved in the pile-up grabbed several road flares from his trunk and ignited them to warn oncoming traffic of the lane-blocking accident. As a heavy rain fell and a long jam developed, punctuated at random by the squeal of tires at the rear of the column, several people made their way back to the spot where the red SUV had vanished, led through the darkness by a man holding a flashlight.

The SUV rested on its caved-in roof at the bottom of the embankment, smeared with mud and grass, its bent wheels going in different directions. The man with the flashlight made his way to the front of the vehicle and aimed the beam through the wide hole where the windshield had been smashed out. A twisted pair of round-lens glasses lay on the crumpled roof, entangled in strands of long auburn hair, but the rest of the driver was hidden by the shoved-up dashboard and bent steering wheel.

Bright crimson droplets began to fall from behind the dash to the leading edge of the roof, along the line where the top of the windshield had been. The undying rain fell and washed each new droplet away.

* * *

Be not too curious of Good and Evil;

Seek not to count the future waves of Time;

But be satisfied that you have light

Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Rock”

The graduation ceremony for Lawndale High fell on a pleasant sunny Friday in the first week of June. By tradition the football stadium was the setting: hundreds of folding chairs were placed in a great block formation across the gridiron, the seats packed with teenagers clothed in blue caps and gowns all facing a grand stage bedecked in vivid blue-and-gold bunting. The viewing stands overflowed with family and well-wishers, and every chair on the field was filled, except for one seat near the center on which a large bouquet of long-stemmed white roses had been placed.

The valedictorian, an African-American girl who spoke of life’s adversities and the reservoirs of strength one needed to overcome them, concluded her talk and received thunderous applause. The new principal of the school took the podium next, and he thanked her and prepared to introduce the next event, the final one prior to the long handing out of school diplomas.

In a folding chair to one side of the seat with the white roses sat a thin, leggy figure with coal-black bangs, blue eyes, and red lips, whose blue robes covered a casual black and red outfit. She glanced at the roses now and then, but displayed no sign of emotion at them and certainly no surprise, as this tribute had been announced well ahead of time during the graduation rehearsal. Even without the anticipation, she swallowed back a lump in her throat when the principal lifted a large black-leather diploma cover and called out a name that the black-haired girl once knew very well.

There was a momentary stir in the front row of the graduating class. Two young women got to their feet on either side of a seated girl and carefully helped their companion to her feet. One of the girls was a slim, attractive redhead in a cocktail dress as blue as a robin’s egg; the other was a tanned, freckled teen, broad shouldered and busty and a bit awkward, who wore a white pantsuit and vest with a purple silk blouse. She had square-lens glasses, coal-black bangs, and no makeup.

The petite student that the girls helped up had a scarf tied over her shaven head, on top of which a blue graduation cap was perched. Her gait was unsteady, one of her arms was still in a cast, and even at a distance a half-dozen red scars were visible across her face. That said, the robed girl’s eyes were bright behind her round-lens glasses, and her mouth was set with grim determination. As the other two held her up by her arms, she began a slow march toward one side of the stage, where a gently inclined ramp had been placed for use in reaching the top. As she went, those who had been sitting with her in the front came to their feet and began to applaud: two who were obviously her mother and father, two women who looked to be the mother’s sisters, a young man in an expensive suit who had arrived at the ceremony in a rusty beige Jaguar, a plump girl in stylish clothes who had been sitting next to the redhead, and two men whom most students recognized as former teachers of the school.

The applause caught on until everyone in the stadium arose in a spontaneous ovation. It took half a minute for the trio to reach the podium, where the principal presented the shaven-headed girl with her diploma and a handshake. The ovation redoubled, and a few students even threw their caps into the air prematurely. When the noise abated and the audience was seated, the girl with the square glasses asked to say a few words before they left, and the microphone was given to her.

The black-haired girl who sat next to the roses watched it all without comment or expression, having given only token applause earlier. The girl on stage spoke of her friend, mentioning briefly how they had met years earlier at camp and reconnected recently at a reunion. The girl was a gifted speaker, praising her friend for her devotion to achievement, her integrity, her willpower, her creativity, and her brilliance—but most of all for her rejection of what was hypocritical and false, whether it was exhibited by others or buried in herself. She concluded quickly, saying that her friend was starting to frown and she wished to remain in her good graces, which brought laughter from across the stadium. After announcing that they were heading for Boston together come the fall, the girl walked over and hugged her friend. As her friend lifted an arm to return the favor, the great ovation began anew.

Troubled by this display but trying not to show it, the black-haired girl who sat by the roses looked down at the blossoms. Had the injured girl not had her accident, she would have been seated where the roses lay, thanks to alphabetical order and the absence of a few students who were in the band or the choir. She reached down then and touched the green leaves and white petals, then thought to pick up one of the roses and enjoy its fragrance—but as soon as she grasped the stem, she instantly released it and drew back her hand. One of her fingers had been pierced by a thorn. She stared at the bright bead of red that welled from her fingertip, then wiped it off on her gown, put her hands in her lap, and looked back at the stage with her jaw tightly set. The two girls were already assisting their companion down the ramp to her seat. The shaven-headed girl was white faced and perspiring by the time she sat down again, her diploma clutched in her fingers, but her tired smile made it clear she was satisfied with the day.

Long after the ceremony was over and the folding chairs had been collected, the stage dismantled, and the students dismissed to enjoy their last summer before leaving for college or jobs, the thin leggy girl with the black bangs ate a slice of pizza by herself in a local restaurant, then walked home in the warm twilight and went up to her room, closing the door behind her. Her brother was at a nearby grunge club with his band, but she did not join them. Instead, she set up a blank canvas by her bed, prepared a palette, and stood before her easel waiting for inspiration to strike her. Sometimes when she felt lonely and down, she painted her emotions and made them visible, gave them life and meaning, but as she stood in her bedroom that night nothing flowed from her paintbrush. She had not been accepted to any college and as a result planned to stay in town with her brother, sleeping and eating and working on her art as she liked, but the idle brush twirled in her long fingers, vacant of purpose and deprived of a future.

In time she gave up and slowly put away her paints and brush, set aside the empty canvas, and crawled into bed without undressing. The night was endless, sleep was ages in coming, and if she dreamed at all, she remembered nothing of it.

Original: 05/04/07, 05/21/07, 11/06/07, 03/18/08, 10/31/08

FINIS