The skirt, Genevieve decided, was not her. She was not a skirt person, and this one in particular made her realize just how off the wrong length could actually look. She spared a moment to regret her knees and then shrugged into the green jacket, zipping it halfway up over her rust-orange T-shirt. The boots, at least, were sturdy and felt like they'd give good service long after this episode was in the can, or in the bin, depending. She laced them up almost all the way, leaving the last three of the fourteen holes open and tying each lace off with a deliberate double bow. The costume glasses were on her desk. As she crossed her bedroom to retrieve them, she paused to switch on her ring-light and the camera mounted within. She unfolded the glasses and slid them over her face. One deep breath, then two, and —
"Genevieve!" came the singsong voice of her brother. "Matilda and Drea are coming over for dinner, and Drea said she wanted to make something with chard, so I bought chard, only it turned out to be huge, and now I feel like I need to carry it before me like a torch, like a great big vegetable beacon —" Nicholas stood in the doorway, his face obscured by leaves.
"You're definitely the ... herald of healthy eating," Genevieve said.
Nicholas lowered the leafy bundle and peered over it. "We're going to cook it with chickpeas and Cuban oregano from the garden, and it's going to be the most archetypally vegan side dish ever!" His voice leapt up at the last word. Genevieve paused for a beat and then gave him a thumbs-up. He grinned and vanished around the corner. A moment later, his head reappeared, leaning back into the open doorframe. "Don't worry, there will also be brownies." And then he left again.
Genevieve closed the door. One deep breath, then two, then into the camera's field of view. She checked herself in the video feed on the flatscreen, and —
The pieces had ... come together? Everything was the wrong length or a color that clashed or a size that made her look downright scrawny, but the sum total was ... a look.
She could do this.
The hardback book was waiting on the little stool just outside the camera's view. She hefted it up and compared herself to the cover art.
Yeah. She could do this.
* * *
"Hello, friends! This week in Genevieve's brain, it's time for a very special occasion. For those of you new to the channel, Tuesdays are when I review books that are required reading in schools, and I give my honest thoughts about which ones are nothing but pain and which ones you might actually like if school didn't suck the joy out of them. Up there in the corner is the magic linky thing for last week's episode on Siddhartha, and if you want to binge from the beginning, the playlist starts with The Great Gatsby.
"Last month, in my episode on Kate Chopin's The Awakening, I announced a charity drive for cancer research, with each dollar being a vote for a book on the 'Required and Banned' list, a set of books that have been assigned somewhere but definitely not everywhere. And today, I reveal the lucky winner!"
She lifted the book into view and faced it toward the lens.
"I know, a one-word title: pretty dramatic, right? And that's really the vibe going through the whole book: It's all about one woman's personality and perspective, and how after her loss, the people who mourned her could barely find words to express themselves.
"Spoiler alert and general content warning: We still don't technically know that Daria is dead, but she's been missing since 2013. She and her best friend vanished without a trace. No bodies, no ransom demand, nothing. This book is a collection of her columns and stories and correspondence, edited by her girlfriend, who was also the girlfriend of her ex from high school, who met her because he dated the best friend first — yeah, it gets complicated. Someone quick go add it to the 'Love Dodecahedron' page on TV Tropes.
"It's a very miscellaneous book. As it would have to be, since it's made from bits and pieces written over more than ten years. The older sections are these amazing little time capsules from the early 2000's that feel almost like messages from liminal space: that time too recent to be in history class, but too old to be part of the cultural now. I mean, have you heard of a comic strip called Get Your War On? She wrote a lot of reviews for her college newspaper, and then she had a regular gig with #SickSadWorld, so the book is full of perspectives on things that I never knew about or had no idea what they seemed like when they were new. Her review of Hyperbole and a Half, from before it became a book, led me to see it in a new way, and I would never have heard about a 1951 movie called Olivia, about lesbians at finishing school, if I didn't have her arthouse columns to mainline into my brain.
"As you are probably aware, school has been different of late, and in an early episode I joked that I would go through all the teen-angst media I could in order to catch up. You know, start with My So-Called Life and progress through Mean Girls, and by the time I got to Booksmart I'd have the whole experience. And that's when an anonymous commenter down there in the zone of despair suggested that I find this book. It was a season-1-of-lockdown discovery, like sourdough bread. It's not often one says this about anonymous Internet comments, but ... thanks.
"My fit for today's episode is my best attempt to replicate her look from when she was my age. I had to order the boots online. We actually went to a store to shop for them, but the only — hrmpff — the only high-rise ones like this in stock were one size wrong for my feet, and I spent so long walking up and down, trying to tell if they were close enough, that my brother felt bad that the retail staff were maybe on commission, so he bought a whole shelf of shoelaces in different colors. Which I did actually appreciate. I mean, I get just as nervous, but I don't have 'going extremely camp' available as a defense mechanism.
"Daria was a teenage misfit in an era when '80s 'nerd' tropes were on their way out, but superhero comics hadn't yet saturated the planet. It sounds like she was regarded as weird, but not actively disliked. Her default setting was to push people away. What really comes through in her writing and the bits of commentary from her editor is that on the outside, she was an acerbic, sometimes downright caustic person. Inside that shell was someone who didn't bear real ill will but mostly just wanted to be left alone. And inside that was a broken-hearted idealist, someone who hurt over and over again as people failed to live up to the potential she believed they possessed.
"Like I said, it's a book from the Before Times. But there are moments of ... elegiac dread, strange little intervals where it opens up and you see premonitions that the Before Times would end.
"I wonder how Daria would react to what we're living through now. Would she have something to say that makes it all make sense? Would the pain keep her from writing at all?
"And on that cheerful note, A+, would read again!"
* * *
Not everything from her script made it into the cut that Genevieve decided to post. She filmed the part about how the last few months of Daria's writings felt like they had touched a new kind of clarity, and how that made her disappearance hurt all the more, but the musings about how selfish it seemed to compare "oh, the books she might have written!" against the grief of Daria's family were too long. And without that, Genevieve decided her reactions to those final weeks would not work right at all.
She wrote, but did not film, the story of the dream she'd had about assembling the costume. She had dreamed of an abandoned shopping mall, which was plenty aesthetic enough to start with, and the details — the smell, the carpet fibers, the typography on the signs — stood out so vividly that it felt a shame not to record the experience. In the dream, she'd had the whole Daria look except for the glasses, which by sleep-logic could only be found in one particular derelict store, if at all.
She had found the store, facing a dry fountain. Rattling against the skylight above, there had been prehistoric giant dragonflies, straight out of the Carboniferous. The glasses had been on a mannequin behind a roll-down metal grate. From the pocket of her jacket — Daria's jacket — she had withdrawn a key that, somehow, she knew had taken great effort to acquire.
When she had unlocked the grate and lifted it enough to crawl under, the mannequin had become a woman in a red trenchcoat and matching fedora.
"You're a little sneak, aren't you," the woman had said. "Don't worry. That's a compliment." She had reached out a hand to help Genevieve stand. "I liked her. Or at least I wanted to cross swords with her again. And Jane ... she was a trip and a half."
"Uh, hello," Genevieve had replied.
"I just wanted to say that ... there's a reason you're not dreaming of her in person. Nobody does. Not her parents, not her sister, not her girlfriend. She's ... locked away. We can't risk breaching the quarantine. You know about that kind of thing, right?"
"Believe me, I wish I didn't, but yeah."
"What she and Jane did, it was ... Daria would refuse to call it heroic, but it was ... important. In a good cause. I just thought that you should know."
It had clearly not been easy for her to say this. When Genevieve had said, "Thanks," she'd meant it.
The woman — now seeming younger than she had first appeared — had tapped the brim of her scarlet hat and handed Genevieve the black-framed glasses. "Eyes on the prize, Genevieve Moss." Then the flare of a torch, the metal grate rattling down, a cable fired from the trenchcoat sleeve into the skylight, and Carmen rising into the air —
* * *
As per her standard practice, Genevieve shared her video first with Barb, whose feedback was always easier to trust since she wasn't family.
"Thanks," she said again, to no one in particular.