Daria drops the last box of her books in the tiny room she has claimed as her office. As she straightens up and stretches the ache out of her back, she hears an acoustic cover of "Paranoid Android" playing in the living room. It is oddly danceable, and sure enough, when she pokes her head around the doorframe, Brittany and Jane are slow-dancing.
They hadn't been sure how serious they were. All the signs for a relationship being serious had apparently been made for two, not for three. But Brittany had been needing to stretch her paycheck further, and splitting rent three ways would help, and then Jane had gotten into the middle of a whole damn thing in the BFAC dorm. She'd been out of town when some drama went down, came back to a crowd where nobody wanted to explain what had happened, discovered that people on both sides still wanted to be friends with her, and somehow this had flipped into everyone turning on her... And then a couple of Daria's friends were graduating and wanted to pass on their lease. It was on the right T line for Brittany and for Daria, and Jane was willing to eat the commute if it meant getting out of that residence hall. The place was the ground floor of a three-story house, one with a classic New England creepy basement they could access for storage.
Standing in the glow of a bare bulb, Daria said, "For the love of God, Montresor," and that sealed the deal.
Now, unpacking feels like a tomorrow job.
"What would you say to a pizza?" she asks.
"Hello, pizza," Brittany suggests.
Jane nuzzles her dance partner. "Oh, we are so learnin' ya, girl."
The order becomes two pizzas and a side of breadsticks and a 2-liter of Ultra Cola, because that's just how decisions are made sometimes.
"Don't worry, we'll finish it," Jane promises, taking out a blue-tinted glass pipe and a bag of something that is not oregano.
Daria and Brittany always cough. For Daria, this echoes somehow that while Brittany had been popular, Jane had always been cool. Not that it matters now, since they'll all be caressing each other in bed in a few hours.
They sit on the floor around the pizza boxes. On the third circuit of the pipe, Jane hands it to Daria and jokes, "Suck on this for me, will you?"
"Not that I'd know how," Daria says, partly under her breath.
"Way-ay-ait," Brittany says. "Is Daria the only one of us who hasn't, you know, touched a guy's dick?"
Jane lifts an eyebrow. "How about it? Do you earn the gold star?"
Brittany interposes, "I thought we got those for reading books in grade school."
"Oh, I have plenty of those," Daria says. "And can we... drop it?"
"Counterargument," says Jane. "I am curious. It's not like I have secrets to hide here."
"Please tell me this is not a Tom story." Daria lights the bowl and inhales a lungful.
"No, good grief, no. Larry the Lunkhead in ninth grade. I used to blow him now and then for beer and weed."
This sends Daria into a coughing fit. While she repairs to her soda glass, Brittany pipes up. "Larry? He was a year ahead of us, right? He got expelled for... do you remember?"
Jane makes an eh, whatever wave, like she's brushing history over her shoulder. "Bringing a switchblade to school, or some damn thing like that. I probably would have had a reputation as the school bicycle if he hadn't been. And if he didn't have a hangup about telling his friends he was doing anything with the weird art chick."
While Brittany takes her turn at the pipe, Daria says, "I remember pretty clearly that you said you were going to wait for college."
"Well, I stopped, and so I was waiting then, wasn't I?" Daria can tell that Jane can tell that this sounds weak. "OK, I had some issues about it. I wasn't proud. And..."
Brittany coughs, takes a swig of soda and then says, "Daria wouldn't have cared, would you?"
Before Daria can reply, Jane continues. "It's more complicated than that. I stopped because I didn't need it so much, because I finally had a friend who made life feel... better. And then—all right, fuck it, this is a Tom story too—the reason why that hurt so bad wasn't just that you kissed him. It was... I had already been losing him, and suddenly I was losing you to him... I felt like you had taken everything and left me with nothing."
"I was a shitty friend," Daria says.
Brittany interjects, "Hey, that's my girlfriend you're talking about that way."
"I knew you had felt," Jane says, "that you had lost me to him. That you hadn't just lost a friend, but your first and only friend."
Daria says, "Not my only friend... Not only my friend. As I realized much later."
"And I wasn't just losing you, but losing... the hope of being yours. As I realized much later."
"So," Daria says slowly, "the fact that you stopped having sex after you met me was part of your whole mess of feelings about how you felt about me. And you didn't want to bring that up."
"That and me in the middle of the Tom incident thinking you were prettier than you saw yourself. And how I could see you put more work into bringing us back together than you did holding you and Tom together... Yeah."
Brittany gathers Jane into her arms, then beckons Daria to join. "Group hug! Stoney group hug!" she declares.
Daria crawls around the pizza boxes and finds a comfortable arrangement of limbs that encloses Jane from the side opposite Brittany.
"You know what's funny?" Brittany asks. "This means Jane had sex before me."
This makes both Daria and Jane snort-giggle.
"Please tell me," says Daria, "that we're not in for a Kevin story." This makes all three of them laugh.
"I love you two," Jane whispers.
"You better," Daria says, "since we're living together now."
"Hush," Brittany tells her.
"Love you both," Daria mumbles.
"That's better," says Brittany. "And hey—is the pizza getting cold?"
"Hug just a minute longer," Jane requests.
Tuesdays and Thursdays are Jane's glassblowing workshop, and so it is Brittany who comes home first. "Daria? Why are you sitting in the dark without even the stereo on?"
Daria says nothing for a moment. Brittany drops her bag by the door and asks again, "Daria?"
"I choked on my big presentation," Daria says at last, a remnant of crying in her voice. "A big chunk of my grade gone, and my professor probably respects me less."
"Oh, dear," exhales Brittany. She sits beside Daria on the secondhand sofa. "Would you like me to hold your hand?"
Daria pauses, then nods.
"I'm so sorry," says Brittany. "This must be your first punch in the smarts in, I don't know, ever?"
"Not ever," Daria says, maybe a little rueful. "Bromwell... Oh, forget it."
"I'll forget it, but I want to keep holding your hand, OK?"
Somehow it is always Brittany who navigates the spaces of tenderness for them, who learns for all three of them how much is too much for Daria and, in a different direction of sensitivity, for Jane.
"Would you like to hear about my day?" Brittany asks. Daria pauses again and nods again. "Well, I helped with the archery club. Led them through all their warm-up stretches. And I got a call about a photo shoot. I might get to be a space warrior in the ads for a video game."
"Cool," Daria says. "Sorry, I wish I could be happier for you, and it is cool, but I'm just..."
"You know what I spent all day wanting?"
Daria opens her mouth like she's going for a joke and then stops, not having one to deliver, and she slumps back and shrugs.
"All day, I've been wanting you to read to me."
"Oh."
"Can I turn on the light?"
"Uh, sure."
Brittany clicks on the halogen lamp by her end of the sofa. "I'll be right back," she says, "OK?"
The Annotated Anthology of American Verse lived at first in Daria's tiny study, but it has migrated to the bedroom.
"Where were we, where were we..." Brittany flips pages.
And so when Jane walks in, Daria has moved to the spot under the lamp, and Brittany is curled up into the other side of the sofa, and Daria is reading:
Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom—
And conquered her scruples and gloom:
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb—
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said—"What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?"
She replied—"Ulalume—Ulalume—
'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"
In the morning, Daria decides that she will write her whole damn presentation out next time, every word. And she'll write a speech for this last topic too, and she'll ask if she can do the same topic for her final talk at the end of term. Brittany had calmed her enough to think of options. Jane had asked over dinner, "Do you think your professors have gone their whole professor careers with zero fuckups?" And she had gone on to relate a couple stories from her own teachers about projects going horribly, entertainingly wrong. If Daria can make this just a fuckup, she can keep herself on track.
When the other two make it to their tiny kitchen, Daria has a glass of orange juice for Brittany and a cup of coffee for Jane. "Lots of pulp," she says, "and black as night and sweet as sin."
"Darling girl," Jane says.
Jodie Landon looks, if anything, even more impossibly put-together and businesslike than she did in high school. She is part of a big-name professor's entourage to a convention in the Hynes Center. Daria meets her in the lobby of the attached hotel. "Thanks so much for this," Jodie says. "I barely have time to get away for lunch."
"Nearby but outside," Daria suggests. She leads Jodie to a trattoria on Newbury and orders the penne alla vodka. "Florentine ravioli is good, too," she advises. "Heck, everything I've tried here has been good. But it does feel odd when I hear the violinist and see a fruit vendor selling oranges."
"Jane's in town, too, right? Maybe we could all meet to catch up this evening."
And so their food has not yet arrived when Daria breaks the news, and Jodie only sputters a little on her mineral water.
"OK, OK, Jane I kind of saw coming, but Brittany? Has she... changed a lot since Lawndale?" Jodie quickly adds, "No offense. I just never thought of you two... of you three... having much in common."
Daria is not sure how to explain in public that Brittany is both incredibly kind and incredibly hot. She wants to say something about how high school had brought out the worst in each of them, how Brittany had grown past that once she was away, how Daria hoped this was equally true for all three of them, how it felt like impossible poetry to watch Brittany and Jane discover the ways their personalities fit together once they had begun to trust each other, the artist and the acrobatic as two complementary kinds of anatomist...
And now their giant plates of pasta are before them. Daria stabs a forkful of penne. "She never treated me the way that the movies say a cheerleader should treat a brain. She was always kind... except for that time when she thought Quinn and I were working to steal Kevin. And, oh, Quinn was. But..." Daria smiles, a little gently, a little wickedly. "That meant she thought I was pretty enough to steal him, too."
Their playlist is on random. Daria is leaning back in bed, getting a headrub from Brittany while they listen to Fiona Apple's version of "Across the Universe", when Jane slams the front door. "Dotson!" The name already sounds like a curse in her mouth, but she expands upon it anyway. "Daniel fucking Dotson!"
Both Daria and Brittany are sitting up, not quite alarmed, when Jane storms into the bedroom.
Daria finally twigs on the name. "Oh. What's he done?"
"He's coming to speak about his latest goddamn 'masterpieces' at BFAC."
"So?" Daria is puzzled. His mere brush through the periphery of Jane's environment would not prompt this level of anger, unless... "Oh, right, your workshop."
"For which," Jane bites off the words, "we are graded on perfect attendance for all guest lecturers."
Brittany does not know who this particular fucker is. She'd never heard the Ashfield story in high school, and whatever little Jane has mentioned of that disaster has not featured his name.
Brittany says to Jane, "You know, just because you have to go, doesn't mean you have to pay attention. Trust me, I'm an expert." She bats her eyelashes outrageously.
Jane chuckles aridly. "Yeah, yeah, you're right. And he was just a creep and a hack. He wasn't the one who pretended to be the woman who understood my art, who got me drunk and wanted to use me as a piece of meat, a goddamn thing with no value."
Daria rises, stills Jane's furious pacing with a touch to her arm, lifts herself up to plant a kiss on Jane's lips. Daria starts the kiss gentle and quiet. Jane slowly escalates it into something hungry, an assertion of her power, of her ability to pull better options than Alison and make them love every minute of it.
Brittany has to move aside—"Eep!"—as Daria falls on her back. The mattress bounces. And then the nearness of Brittany's skin registers in the animal drive of Jane's brain, and she raises herself over Daria and fixes Brittany with a look that is hard and pure and predatory. And she transfers the kiss to Brittany, wedging the blonde against the wall as she clutches her other hand into Daria's hair.
Then she pulls back. Not far, just enough to see all of Brittany's face.
"Daria," she asks, "what the hell is this music?"
"Sephiroth's theme," Daria squeaks. "It was on random!"
Jane laughs very briefly. Her head hangs. Now her hands are migrating to Brittany's shoulder and Daria's cheek. "I don't want to go further when I'm angry," she says. "Come on, you two, make room." She wriggles in between them.
The Ashfield story pours out of her.
"Wow," Brittany says when she is done. "I don't think I like her at all."
Jane whispers between them. "It took so long for the thought of... just touching a girl not to bring all of that back. So long..."
"But you did know who you were at the end," Brittany whispers back.
"Hunh?"
Brittany elaborates, "You were the girl who wanted to be Daria's best friend."
Jane admits, "I guess I did know the important thing."
Daria's eyes are closed. One of her hands is reaching over Jane to hold Brittany's. Daria says, "I don't think I could have handled you just kissing me then. Particularly not like you kissed me just now." She squeezes Brittany's hand and adjusts her leg so that it makes more contact with Jane's. "I wouldn't mind more of that later, though."
"Whoof," Brittany agrees.
"All right," says Jane. "When I have energy and not so much anger." She seems on the point of dozing off, actually. "So what do I do about the... the that guy problem?"
Daria suggests, "You know all the biggest cynics in your BFAC class. Get 'em together, sit in the back row and drink blackcurrant lambic from a thermos jug."
"Classy," Jane says.
"Figured I'd elevate the idea a touch."
Brittany is stroking Jane's hair, and Jane has an arm around Daria, and the world is becoming softness.
Then Brittany begins to hum. Daria picks it up and the tune becomes whispered syllables. "Estuans interius, ira vehementi, Sephiroth!"
Jane laughs, deep and throaty, and she relaxes further.
Jane rounds the corner and walks up their little residential street, whistling The 1812 Overture or something meant to be that, and she sees Brittany sitting on their front steps, staring out into the evening. The closer she gets, the more worried she becomes.
"Hi," she says at last. "Um, is it a not-so-happy birthday?"
Brittany's hands hang between her knees. "My Mom called."
This sounds like it should have been a good thing and very much was not. "Your Ashley-Amber mom, or your Vivian mom?"
"Ashley-Amber," replies Brittany. "She told me... My Dad is cheating on her."
"Oh, no. That fuckin' sucks, girlfriend." She sits on the concrete step beside Brittany.
"I don't know anything," Brittany says. "I can't tell that this is happening, I don't know if Mom and Dad will get divorced, I don't know if it's worse if they split up or if they stay together. I just don't know anything at all and I feel so useless." And before Jane can console her, she barrels on. "And I'm supposed to be the happy one. You two count on me to be happy and fun and if I can't be happy then I don't know what good I can do for you and that makes me more sad than ever!"
Jane takes a deep breath and lets it out in a puff that she aims at a dangling strand of her black hair. "It's a shitty situation," she says. "But it's not your fault. And you know what? Me and Daria, we're not the misery chicks. Yeah, we needed your joy and your verve to get us over ourselves and together in the first place. And your joy is a big, big part of what makes this whole weird situation so important to both of us. But you don't need to be happy all the time. When life dumps on you, we'll be here for you."
"Promise?" Brittany asks, waveringly.
"Promise," declares Jane. "And hey." She stands up, plants her feet apart, locks her knees into a sideways lean stance, punches her elbow out horizontally, then punctuates by elbowing along successive diagonals. "Two bits! Four bits! Six bits, a dollar!" Arms up in a high V. "All for—Brittany—stand up and holler!" She jumps, and makes a credible effort to bring her toes to her fingertips, after which she hits the ground and wobbles before she regains her balance. "Damn, you make bouncity-bounce look easy."
Brittany is managing a smile, at least, when Jane sits back down beside her.
Jane says, "Gimme a break. I practiced for all of, like, ten minutes before trying out that day." She rests her head on her hand and lets her eyes take in Brittany. "Daria's on her way with a new blender," she says. "Try and act surprised."
"For me and my smoothies?"
"A dedicated blender for you and your smoothies," affirms Jane. "And on Friday night we have dinner reservations at that Egyptian place, with the eggplant dish you loved, and the bread pudding? We'll have to fight Daria for the kunafeh."
"And we can get koshari to go around?"
"Mm-hmmm. And then we have these." She pulls three movie tickets from her inside jacket pocket and fans them out in her hand. "There's an arthouse showing of Much Ado About Nothing. She says it's by the same director who did that Henry V that you liked."
"Ken Branagh was so dreamy," Brittany says. "I mean, Jane, if I'll go for any guy it'll be Mister Nice Customs Curtsy To Great Kings." She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead in a mock swoon.
"I'll try and remember that," Jane says.
"Hey, dual darlings," says Daria.
Both Brittany and Jane look up. Daria is standing on the sidewalk, a blender box in her arms.
"Hi," Brittany says, blinking rapidly. She rises to clear a path up the steps for Daria to enter.
Jane waits outside a minute longer. Her thoughts spin and go nowhere useful. Then she goes inside. Daria and Brittany are unpacking the new blender in the kitchen. Jane can tell that Daria can tell that something heavy went down. She gives Daria a belated greeting peck and reads worry behind her glasses.
Jane decides that they will face the problem tomorrow.
"Remind me how it goes," Jane says. "Nice customs curtsy to great kings..."
Daria thinks a moment. "You and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country's fashion: We are the makers of manners."
Jane asks, "How's that suit you, Brittany?"
"You have witchcraft in your lips," says Brittany.
"Prove it," says Daria. And then, a minute later, rather more breathless, "Happy birthday."
"All right, Lane, I'm beginning to think that doing things just because you think they'll be funny is a bad idea."
"But you won't stop doing them, will you?"
"Not if past is prologue." Daria grips her navel region through her shirt in what is definitely not a scratch. "It itches just as much as before."
"But this time it's staying in, not like before," Jane informs her.
Brittany pipes up from her spot on the floor. "Last time, you didn't have anyone who'd help you take your mind off it." She holds up the second controller. "Video games?"
"And if that doesn't work," Daria asks, "sex?"
"Well, naturally," Brittany says.
Daria grumbles something unintelligible and plops down beside Brittany. Jane scritches each of their heads. Brittany giggles, and Daria grumbles again, resentfully cheerful. "Happy anniversary," Jane says, and saunters to the kitchen for snacks.
Jane drags them to an open-studio event near Fort Point Channel. Well, she drags in the sense that Daria ritualistically grumbles at every excursion, and Brittany and Jane get the ritual satisfaction of coaxing Daria out of the library.
The whole block is warehouse and factory space from an earlier age of industry. It's all very brick-and-rivets-bare, and it gets to Daria for having worn time interestingly. Like Chinatown, a Hollywood location scout would sell it as New York, but it isn't.
One floor of an old warehouse building has been acquired and subdivided by artists. They don't try to stick too closely together once they're inside; they've learned that each takes in her own preferences in her own time.
Daria does photography, a bit. She doesn't vary out of rule-of-thirds composition very often. She likes saving memories, and she likes contributing her own small part to the side of their life that Jane inhabits so deeply. Here, she gravitates to a display of urban nighttime photographs. City lights at night are never not aesthetic, she jokes to herself.
She actually strikes up a conversation with the photographer. She correctly guesses one picture as Chicago, and she does a pretty good job of identifying where the Boston ones had been taken. Some of the views don't exist anymore, having been pushed aside or under by construction. The city changes, their life changes. It shouldn't hit her as much as it does.
Daria sees Brittany wander about through an installation of broad, bold color expanses on aluminum panels, looking up and around and generally slowing her movements, and then catches up with her around the corner, staring at a little lake-scape that Daria had overlooked.
"When I was very little," Brittany tells her, "our neighbors had a boat, and in the summer we all went out on the water, and the kids would play with their great big friendly dog, and my Vivian mom would drive the boat while my Dad water-skiied. The dog thought he was a cat, sometimes, you know, because he'd been a puppy without any parents and a momma cat adopted him and raised him."
Daria says, "Before we moved to Lawndale, I used to take care of our neighbors' big dog when they were away, because I was the responsible child on the block. One day my parents couldn't find me, and they got worried and flustered, and then I showed up late for dinner, and I quite embarrassingly had to explain that after I had refilled the neighbor dog's food and water, he'd curled up on top of me and we'd fallen asleep."
They find Jane by following the buzz of creative energy. She is deep in a technical discussion about woodcut block prints. Somehow she registers their approach without seeing them—turning, "Hey you two", smiling without restraint—and then she dives back into the shared lore of ink brands.
The display across the aisle is queer comic zines.
The cartoonist has hair buzzed short, an eyebrow stud, and a loose blue button-down shirt with a floral pattern faintly embroidered in gold.
Daria maybe shows a little trepidation when walking over. She feels like she shouldn't, not after this long sharing an apartment in the Biblical sense with two women, not with her own ring in her own navel, but after all that's an under-the-shirt kind of thing.
"You write as well as draw these?" she asks, feeling what Professor Plum would call "pressure of speech".
"Mmm," the cartoonist affirms. They crack open a can of iced coffee. "I had to learn to write after years of focusing on the drawing."
Maybe it's her choice of zines to linger over, maybe Brittany and Jane have looked at her in a particular way behind her back, maybe she just radiates abnormality for all those with eyes to see. She, the writer, is flush with questions she cannot articulate, and she realizes this must be painted across her face.
"So," the cartoonist says, kindly, "you three are three?"
Daria looks from them, to the zine in her hand, to the two women with whom she is in love, who have both very definitely noticed where she is standing now.
"It's rather peculiar arithmetic," Daria says.
When summertime finally rolls around, they make it back to the Aquarium. It's been too long—it's always harder than they'd like to find the time for all three of them—but a day works at last. If dinner and a movie had been their first date, and the party where Daria and Jane and then Daria and Brittany and then Brittany and Jane had kissed was date number zero, the Aquarium had been date number minus one. Daria and Jane had been very intensely not discussing all the important things, and then Brittany had gotten off the bus at South Station, and Daria had been desperate for an idea of something to do, and she had figured, hey, everybody likes penguins.
It turns out that everybody does still like penguins.
They are meandering to the North End for cannoli when Daria finds her skirt bothering her again. Boston weather means many more occasions to cover up than Lawndale's, and so Daria has accumulated more jeans and even a pair of khakis... She's wishing, just a bit, that it was still the season for all that. Not that Jane or Brittany have ever complained about her showing a little leg, or that she's felt compelled to mix up her look, but then again she's always resisted that kind of change, hasn't she? One box of identical uniform skirts at a thrift store, and she'd been set for years. Why abandon what works?
Does it work?
"Hey, Brittany," she says the next time they stop at a light. Jane seems to have vanished inward into her sculpture-planning place, and it will be up to the two of them to make sure she reaches the bakery intact. "Would you say I'm the least girly person in this relationship?"
"Well, I'm me, and Jane wears lipstick, so I guess?"
"Would you say I'm the least girly girl you've ever met?"
"Gosh, Daria! Is something wrong?"
"No, no," Daria says quickly. Her next question would have been do you think I fail at being a girl? or something in that vein.
She's always dressed to minimize her breasts, not that they need too much help in that regard. But she wouldn't say that she minds them, per se, especially not after acquiring two lovers who both enjoy them.
Periods had been escalating Hell since age fourteen, episodes of her body betraying her, with the bad spells where she reviled her entire physical being increasing in frequency until she'd finally been prescribed birth control after graduation, but didn't everybody feel that way? Who didn't put every once of will and wit into acting like they never happened, really?
The line is out the door at the bakery.
"We seem to be following the crowd," Daria says.
"Gee, I think it's OK when the crowd is here for cannoli," Brittany reminds her.
Daria likes her own hair. Having two lovers who both appreciate it certainly helps with being honest about that.
Daria has met many guys with long hair. She remembers Jane pretending to fall asleep against Jesse in the back of the Tank, remembers that very well.
Daria is fine with being short, now that she is in love with and living with two women who can reach the top shelf and who don't see her as scrawny.
Daria likes being pierced, because Jane had found the shop and Brittany had picked out the ring and being artificially altered to meet her lovers' specifications isn't just hot, it is satisfying.
They leave the bakery with a box of cannoli. Daria picks one whose ends have been dipped into slivered almonds and takes a bite, holding her other hand under her mouth to catch the pastry crumbs and powdered sugar, and accepts that something is wrong here.
While they're in this neck of the urban woods, they buy a pound of fresh pappardelle and some sauce fixings to make for dinner.
Daria stays up late, inwardly repeating you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country's fashion and O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place and Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here...
Daria flips through that pile of zines and, ever the writer, tries a few words out for sound, only at a whisper. "Ze? Hir? E? They?" A problem arises. "Themself?" That can't be right. "Themselves?" That's worse. "Themselv?"
Shit, that's not so bad.
The name Daria still sounds fine, all the more when imagined on a lover's tongue. But Lane as a middle name has grown increasingly appealing (Brittany has been growing less fond of Taylor what with everything), and the mental image of D. L. Morgendorffer on a book cover... oh, that's nice.
Daria writes an e-mail to Jane, who is sleeping on the other side of the room.
Hey Lane, I need to commission a painting from you. I need you to paint me, but about 25% more guy-like and less girlish. I can't explain why it's important, but you'll probably get that anyway. I will trust in your interpretation of what I am to look like that way. Yours, in love unchanging even as other things might, Daria.
The veggie sausage that Brittany likes and that Jane tolerates is on sale, so Daria loads up their basket with several packages. The jarred tuna that Jane loves in macaroni and cheese is discounted, too, so they add a couple units of that. In amongst all the domesticity, potential topics for their honors thesis are bouncing about inside their head.
Their default coasting outfit these days is built around a man's gray button-down with an oddly large number of pockets, a shirt of which they have six identical copies. The green has migrated to the band of their Panama hat. The black, Jane decided to put in their hair, a long streak of it in front, immediately adjacent to another in blue. The asymmetry feels good; it's off-kilter in a way that scans as deliberate. (Brittany: "I'm sure we could do it ourselves." Jane: "We're paying a professional.") The wristwatch, Daria isn't entirely convinced about. It definitely reads as businessman, but the dial feels too large to be proportionate to their wrist.
A passage by William James that they discovered during a recent library dive is orbiting among all the thesis topics: "Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid."
It's getting into cider season, so they pick up a jug of that, too.
At their front door, Daria hears vigorous chanting in a high register. The words resolve as they open the door and step inside.
"Why can't we weave?! Longing! Who do we long for?! Girls! Go-o-o-o Sappho!" Brittany lands from her jump and curtsies with a sideways swish of her pom-poms. She has assembled a cheerleader outfit in colors that hurt the eyes much less than Lawndale blue and yellow.
Jane is watching the performance from her spot on the living-room sofa. "Hey, DL." The initials that are so properly authorial in print carry a you're mine, aren't you purr when Jane says them in private. That's undeniably nice. "Brittany is experimenting with being extra lesbian for balance."
"Oh. Well, don't stop on my account."
Brittany hops over and provides a good-evening peck and a quick little scritch under their hat.
Off to the kitchen to unpack the haul of discounted groceries. None of them come from a family that cooks, really, but the first recipe had been the hardest. After that, it's been saving money and spending time together and making the occasional absurd memory. You only use too much nutmeg once.
They make the very short trip back to the living room. "I don't get a show, too?"
Jane pats the sofa cushion beside her. Speaking just a bit low in her throat, she asks, "Is that the T injection talking?"
Their dosing regimen is incredibly mild, actually, and it's been hard to pinpoint any definitive change in that regard yet, not one separate from the general elevation of well-being that comes with discovering they don't have to live their life as 25% to 50% the wrong thing.
"Jane," settling onto the sofa, offering a Mona Lisa smile, "it's me."