Since arriving in Lawndale with the feeling that the best thing about it would be the lower level of uranium in the drinking water, Daria has busted out of self-esteem class and left a cheerleader's party with the bounty of a free sock. And now it's a mild Tuesday afternoon and she is walking homeward beside a girl who might as well be cool pressure-shaped into human form. No one who halfway resembled Jane has given her the time of day before. Daria is starting to think that maybe no one actually resembles Jane at all. She takes the is this what friendship feels like? thought and boxes it up for later consideration.
Jane says, "I heard shrill noises from the Fashion Club canaries about testing eyeliners at, ah, your 'cousin's' place. Want to hang at Casa Lane instead?"
"Not being a Dickensian orphan sent to work in the coal mines, I don't have a lot of use for canaries. Sure."
"Snack options are probably pretty dismal," Jane admits.
"We can stop over somewhere and buy more?"
What would it be like, Daria wonders, to live in a place where you could walk for a mile and find more than one place to buy food, maybe a place that wasn't a gas station convenience store? With the nachitos and the mini chocolate doughnuts and the Ultra Cola they settle on, she figures they probably won't live to find out.
Daria is gently lowering the bag of chips and doughnuts to the floor of Jane's room when she notices Jane fishing a wooden box out from under her bed. It's a handsome box, cedarwood, Daria guesses, with the silhouettes of Staunton chess pieces carved on the lid.
"I promised myself I'd smoke up if I survived the math quiz today, and I'm still here," Jane says. She opens the box and takes out the stuff of numerous after-school specials. "Want any?"
"You... think I'd like it?"
This gets Jane to look up from the joint she has just started to roll. "Don't tell me they didn't have weed in Highland."
"None that anyone offered me. And, to be honest, I'd always filed it away with, like, beer, as a thing that, you know, boring kids did. But..." Sheer curiosity is hitting Daria with physiological force now. The loneliness that she doesn't want to admit, that she calls by other names in her internal monologues and reveals nowhere outside of them, snaps into alignment with the Junior Scientist creed of if I do this, what will happen and the aspiring author's need to know what all those other writers were on about. She wants to find out. "On the list of Jane Lane adjectives, boring is way down there with modest," she says at last.
God, it feels good to put a smile on Jane's face like that.
It's the work of a moment for Jane to finish the joint. Daria watches, sitting beside Jane on the floor. She hadn't given any thought before to how licking anything closed would be a step in the assembly. Then Jane is offering it to her. "I'm sure that brains know how lungs work. Inhale, hold, absorb."
Daria takes the flammable thing in her fingers and puts one end in her mouth, like she's some kind of damn noir character, she's never felt fatale a day in her life, and Jane is offering her a light.
Inhale, hold, absorb, and cough your fucking alveoli out, Daria discovers.
Jane pops the tab on an Ultra Cola can and presses it into her hand. The soda cuts the worst of her troubles.
"Welcome," Jane tells her, "to the wrong side of the railroad tracks." She starts taking a long drag herself.
"You guys got a public library here?" Daria jokes around the residual rawness in her throat.
This gets Jane to smile again, a smile that lasts in her eyes as she turns her head upward and slowly releases a gray cloud of smoke.
"Cirro-cannabis," Daria says, and Jane is offering her the joint again.
The joint is mostly consumed when Jane has gone to her stereo and declared, "Dammit, Trent must have my Dark Side of the Moon CD. We've got a weed virginity loss tradition to uphold here, dammit."
"What do we have?"
Jane pauses.
Daria turns herself to face Jane, flowing by instinct into a pose with her right hand on the floor and the left on her elevated knee. "Don't tell me that we have to put ashamed on the list of Jane Lane adjectives."
Jane confesses, "It is actually from the public library." She holds up a CD case.
"Glenn Gould performing The Well-Tempered Clavier? Sure, put it on."
"It's the kind of thing I like sometimes while I paint," Jane explains, in a tone that suggests she feels an explanation is necessary.
"You don't need to justify playing the music that helped me survive Highland," Daria says. "Hey, Jane, is it normal to feel... um... pleasantly flushed and a little cloud-headed and really eager to eat those chocolate mini-doughnuts?"
* * *
Daria lets her head fall backward off the edge of Jane's bed so that her hair can participate in the stretch that her arms are enjoying. "Hey, Jane."
"Hey, Daria." The open bag of chips and the last few doughnuts are between them.
"What... happens... in the make-out room?"
"I think you can judge that book by the cover," Jane answers.
"Yeah, but, like... out of all the activities that could fall under that name, which do people do? How far do they go? When do they stop?" She pauses. "How does it feel?"
Jane chows a chip before answering. "Flesh meets flesh. Sometimes it feels good. Nothing new to that story."
"Are you saying that you..."
"Do you think a lady would kiss and tell?"
Daria looks up to see Jane grinning and chomping a doughnut in half.
The smile recedes from Jane's eyes but not her lips. "Seems to me I recall a time recently when you passed up the chance to find out."
"I don't know what I want to find out," Daria says.
"There are some things I'm waiting for." Jane flomps forward to lie beside Daria, face-down next to Daria's face-up.
"For what, marriage?"
Jane scoffs.
"Love? The perfect limousine? College?"
"When you're in control of a boy," Jane says at last, "it feels good. When a boy is running you, it feels just like the rest of life. There are some things I won't do until I'm sure I'll be the one in control. So, yeah, maybe college. 10 AM move-in day."
"Duly noted for future reference, Lane."
"I'll trust it to that big brain of yours, Morgendorffer."