The Boy with Sea Green Eyes

The Boy with

Sea Green Eyes

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Synopsis: Of all the “what ifs” of Daria, the most intriguing pivot around Tom Sloane’s appearance in the series. What if neither Jane nor Daria had hooked up with him? Here is one possible outcome.

Author's Notes: For the March Madness Semi-final #2, held on PPMB from late March to early April 2010, Quiverwing posed the following challenge: write an alternate version of "Jane's Addition" in which Daria (not Jane) is the first to meet Tom at The Zon, and detail the consequences. The limitations on the stories were that Tom cannot date Jane, and Tom cannot die (a restriction added specifically for me. In addition, writers had to counter an argument offered by Glenn Eichler concerning the reason for adding Tom to the series. Glenn made this statement in an interview conducted in 2005 with Kara Wild.

We had [Tom] start life as Jane's boyfriend for two reasons. First, Daria is not the type of person a high school boy would ask out after first meeting her—she's too formidable. In order for a boy to be attracted to someone as sarcastic and aloof as Daria, and vice versa, the two of them would have to grow on each other—in other words, he would need to spend a fair amount of time in her company BEFORE they started dating.

I changed the name of the Zon to the Zen because my viewing of that episode seemed to indicate the latter was the correct spelling. Doesn’t matter too much, I hope.

Acknowledgements: Thank you, Quiverwing!

The Zen that evening was dark and loud and crowded and filthy, as always. The stale cloudy air tasted of cigarettes and filled the unwary nose with the memory of unwashed armpits and cheap beer, with a whiff of burning marijuana and an occasional stench from the unisex bathroom whenever the door opened. As she waited for her best friend to reappear from wherever the hell she had gone, Daria Morgendorffer realized her right boot was planted in something sticky and potentially nasty covering the floor. She had no intention of looking down to see what it was. With luck it would wear off her boot sole on the long walk home. At least no one had spilled anything on her green blazer, not that even an ink stain would be visible in this light.

The alternative garage band led by her best friend’s older brother had the stage, jamming to an impenetrable song called “Icebox Woman.” The tavern’s acoustics were deadening, the singers’ voices were half-drowned by the guitars and drums, and several of the Zen’s decrepit loudspeakers were starting to buzz. No one in the tavern was dancing, but the place was packed. Normal conversation was impossible unless it was shouted.

It would have been a fine evening out, all things considered, if only Jane hadn’t—

“Did you get to talk to Trent?” Jane Lane shouted from behind Daria.

Daria pushed her glasses up on her nose as she turned to face her taller friend—black bangs, red shirt, black leggings, long-limbed and athletic. “For a few minutes during the break, yeah,” she said. “He thought at first we were going to do our multimedia presentation about Mystik Spiral’s climb to glory, but he was okay with producing a thirty-second digital segment for our report. I think he was okay with it.”

“Ah, good,” said Jane. “Sorry I took so long in the bathroom. I was talking to some guys.”

Daria rolled her eyes. “My spider-sense warns me that asking for more information will cause me to regret it. Do you want to stay any longer?”

“Nah,” said Jane. “We can head out. Nothing’s going on here. The guys I met were more into drugs than they were into me.”

Moments later they pushed open the tavern’s doors and walked out into the fresh, crisp late evening air. Daria made a mental note to shower and wash her hair immediately after getting home, then throw her clothes into the washing machine to get the cigarette stink out of them. And then do something about her right boot.

“I’m kind of worried about this assignment,” muttered Daria as they headed for home. “I know Trent’s… um, pretty busy—”

“You were going to say ‘lazy,’ but your politically correct side took over, or maybe it was your romantic side. Look, I promise to ride him without mercy until he cranks something out. I can be relentless, you know.”

“I’m sure those guys you met know that, too.” Daria made a face when she realized what she’d done.

“Yeah, they were pretty interesting,” said Jane cheerily. “Glad you asked about that. They—”

“Wait, I didn’t mean to—”

“—were from Lawndale State, some freshmen trying to sell joints they had soaked in embalming fluid. I thought that was supposed to be a joke, but—whew!—those things stank! They smelled sorta like bad gasoline. The guys were pretty interesting, though. Anarchists, the way they tell it. They said they didn’t have girlfriends, and I thought about putting in a word for you but decided against it only because you were busy trying to bring out Trent’s deeply hidden creative side—wink wink, nudge nudge.”

“I don’t have a crush on him!” Daria said, more sharply than she had meant. “I mean, um, maybe I used to see him a little differently, a long time ago, but… um…”

“Waiting,” Jane sang a few seconds later.

“—but I don’t have a crush on him.”

“Not any more, eh?” Jane sighed. “What a shame. You would have made a great sister-in-law.”

“Cut it out,” Daria grumbled. “You always do this. Nothing happened like that. We just talked about the report you and I have to turn in for O’Neill.”

“Fine, no more teasing. The sad thing is, I guess, that I believe you.”

“What? What are y—no, forget it, don’t—”

“No, I wanna talk about this.” Jane held up her hands in partial surrender. “Okay, not about Trent, I won’t do that. You can keep your dirty secrets to yourself. But I wanna ask you about you and guys. Haven’t you lately thought about asking a guy out?”

“I’ve asked lots of guys out,” said Daria hotly. “Out of my sight, out of my business, out of my hair, out—”

“Admit it, amiga—if Trent was a few years younger, you’d ask him to go out with you.”

“Hey! You said you weren’t—”

“Tut, tut!” Jane wagged a finger at Daria. “Answer my question, missy.”

Daria’s angry look began to soften. “It’s… well… I…”

“Exactly. I’m not a flaming extravert, mind you—”

“Flaming, yeah.”

“—but I take a minute or two here and there to say hi to guys who look like they might be interesting. Why don’t you?”

“I’ve never known any guys around here to be interesting at all.”

“Ah, ah, ah, that’s not right and you know it. There was Ted, correcto?”

Daria did not like the direction this was going. “What about him?”

“You thought he was interesting. Or else you did a damn good job of faking it.”

Daria hesitated. “He was a little… interesting... at first.”

“You went out on a date with him, right?”

“Once, but he—”

“It doesn’t matter what he did to screw it up, I know all about that. You went out with him, and that’s what counts. Right? Am I right? I guess I should take your silence to be a ‘yes’.”

“That was different,” Daria grumbled.

“Different how?”

“Jane, I don’t want a boyfriend right now. I just don’t. There isn’t anyone around here worth looking at. It’s more than that, though. It’s… oh, listen to me. I don’t know.”

Jane’s soft tone became insistent. “Talk to me.”

“I’d have to get to… if there was someone, and there isn’t, I would have to be around him for a while and get used to him. There are too many jerks around. He’d have to grow on me. And no, I don’t mean it that way!”

“He’d have to grow on you,” said Jane. She did not laugh or poke fun. She put out an arm to grasp a decorative lamppost, swung around it once, then let go and caught up with Daria again. “Go on.”

“You’re doing that psychological reflecting thing that Mrs. Manson does.”

“Just talk. I wanna hear this.”

They walked in silence for a dozen seconds. “I don’t like people that close to me,” Daria finally said. “Not counting you, I mean. I need some space. Most people around here aren’t worth the time it would take to push them off a cliff. Before I even dream of getting close to anyone, I’d have to be around him a long time. I’d want to know him through and through. I can’t even say what kind of guy I’d be attracted to, except he couldn’t be like anyone I already know.”

“Question, then,” said Jane. She clasped her hands behind her back as she walked. “How was it that you and I hit it off so quickly?”

“That’s not the same thing,” said Daria, turning irritable again. “That isn’t the same at all.”

“It isn’t? Friends click pretty much the same way as dating partners click. I was watching you when you went out with Ted, for instance. That moved along pretty fast.”

“I’m not going out with Ted!”

“That’s not the point,” said Jane calmly. “All I’m saying is, there was a little chemistry there. Not much, but it was there. You two went out less than one week after you met.”

Daria huffed and made a horrible face, but did nothing more.

“Chemistry is funny,” said Jane. “I’ve felt it with a few guys, never very strongly. I like dating—well, I like it better than having teeth pulled, it’s got its drawbacks, but it’s all right. It’s good. Chemistry makes things click along a lot faster than you’d think. There was this guy in the Zen tonight—gray sweater, light Dockers, brown hair—”

An uncomfortable look crossed Daria’s face. “Was this the guy with the mullet?”

Jane laughed. “Oh, his haircut wasn’t quite that bad, but yeah, that was him. He kept glancing at me, but he’d look away and do something else, but then I’d catch him peeking at me again. I was thinking of going over and saying something to him, but then he left before Spiral was done with the first set. It was weird. I felt some chemistry there even without talking to him, but—eh, there wasn’t enough of it to keep him around.” Jane gave a wistful smile. “I think he had green eyes. Light green, sort of a sea green. Yeah.”

Daria stared at Jane. “How on earth could you tell? I couldn’t even see my feet in there.” Or what I stepped in, thank God.

Jane appeared to be on the verge of answering, then shrugged and smiled and shook her head. “It wouldn’t hurt if you were a little more active and a little less like a ‘Big Brother Is Watching You’ poster. Give chemistry a chance.”

“I… uh…”

“You what?”

“Nothing.”

I could never tell her, she thought. She wouldn’t understand. I moved to this town two years ago and thought I would be a total outcast, as always. Then, in the one single moment of good fortune I've ever had, I met another outcast who became my best friend, someone who ended all those terrible years of feeling completely alone.

What would happen if the chemistry with some guy was there, like it was when that guy with the gray sweater and the mullet bumped into me in the restroom right after Jane and I got to the Zen? He laughed and apologized and I felt something then, something strange and frightening and terribly exciting when I looked at him—I wanted to say something to him, something to make him laugh as I had… but—

“I’m no good at telepathy, Daria.”

“Oh, sorry.” Daria swallowed, trying to get her bearings again. “I was thinking.”

“Yes, I know, but what were you thinking?”

Daria let out a ragged sigh. “That I was lucky to have a friend like you,” she said. Her face began to burn. “That I would never want to lose you for anything.”

“Aww!” Jane’s arm went around Daria’s shoulder and pulled her close for a momentary hug. “I’m lucky to have you, too,” said Jane. She let Daria go, careful not to overdo the moment. “We’re going to meet guys all the rest of our lives, but none of them are going to take the place of you.”

“Good.” Daria coughed and cleared her throat. “People say that a lot, but…”

“When I say it,” said Jane, “I mean it.”

“Uh, yeah. That’s what I was going to say.”

The topic changed as they continued homeward, but Daria’s heart wasn’t in it. In her mind’s eye she kept seeing the guy in the unisex bathroom with the handsome face and warm smile and sea green eyes. She had been afraid for a moment when she saw him, afraid he would reject her as so many other people had done all her life, making it too painful to think of trying to bridge the bottomless canyon encircling her life.

So, when he started to make conversation, she interrupted and said she and her friend were waiting for their boyfriends to arrive, and the guy with the green eyes said, oh, sure, have a good time, and she left him in the bathroom to go back to Jane. And now she was wondering if that had been a good idea, cutting him off like that. The chemistry had been there. Things would have moved along—where, she had no idea, but they would have moved. She was sure of it.

Angry with herself, Daria shook her head and tried to focus on what Jane was saying about growing up in Lawndale, the things she used to do for fun. After a while, Daria got back into the flow of conversation again. By the time she left Jane at her home and began walking back to her own family’s house, she had almost forgotten the guy with the sea green eyes and was worrying again about the multimedia project.

She remembered the guy well, though, when she was trying to go to sleep. The vision of him made her heart ache as it never had before. Maybe it wouldn’t have hurt to be a little friendlier to the guy. He did have a little chemistry going there. Maybe one day—maybe—she would get lucky a second time, meet another guy who had that chemistry going, and it would turn out okay in the long run even if things didn’t turn out okay at first. There was always a next time, always a tomorrow, if she let it happen. She had only to give it a chance…

She and Jane got an A– on their multimedia project, though Trent never delivered the music. By the end of the school year, Daria had forgotten the project entirely. She did remember the boy with the sea green eyes, and the ache of the memory of him drove her to open up a little, one time later, just in case Jane was right. She then opened up a little more another time, and a little more and more until there came one cosmic moment that washed away the rest, a moment she remembered forever after because she had she had never expected it to come. It was then Daria discovered more about chemistry than the high school’s science teacher would ever know. And the grinning maid of honor with black bangs never let her forget that it had been her idea.

Thanks to a boy with sea green eyes.

Original: 04/07/10, 04/30/10, 05/01/10

FINIS