Daria figures that selling books will be easier than selling nuts. She doesn't have to smile, and she's not trapped in a confined space with Kevin. The light is easier on her eyes than the endless fluorescents of the mall. Her boss isn't a tightly-wound hypocrite, but rather a vaguely amiable near-retiree. He lets her put any music she wants on the stereo, as long as it's classical or at least orchestral. Apart from the fact that she's not picking up any trace dust to which Quinn is allergic, it's an improvement in every way.
Finding things that customers ask for is more involved than reading the label on a nut bucket, and since most of their collection is whatever has been traded in, she has to come up empty-handed fairly often, but she's not nearly connected enough to let this faze her.
Her first interesting customer is a week into the job. He's a boy who enters the store alone, during the foxtrot of Shostakovich's Suite for Jazz Orchestra. He ignores the actually pretty decent selection of trade-paperback comics near the front door and walks right up to her counter. "My mother sent me here to get To Kill A Mockingbird for my summer reading, because it will be cheap here if you've got it."
Daria has already sorted all the books which appear on the various summer-reading lists onto the shelves by the register. It's the sort of thing she'd do. "Starting the sixth grade?" He doesn't feel like answering. Probably thinks that it's too obvious to be worth saying out loud. "And let me guess: The reason that your mother wants to be cheap about books makes you angry."
This gets a blink out of him. "My father isn't coughing up the child support on time."
"Tough break," she says.
"You know what that feels like?" The question is confrontational. There might be a plea for sympathy underneath the boy's tone, but he buries it deep. He'd never let the words out of his mouth if he couldn't say them like an attack.
"My Dad is a handful," Daria says, "but not like that." She reads the price penciled onto the inside front flap of the book and keys it into the register. She looks back at the boy. A bit to her surprise, he seems unsettled, not sure what to say next. Maybe he's used to adults delivering platitudes whenever truth is called for. "Two bucks," she says. "And, hey..." She leans over the counter. "How good are you at hiding books?" She turns back to the summer-reading shelf and grabs a bundle that she had rubber-banded a few days before, along with a couple from the end of the shelf. "These are your books for next year. Animal Farm was my favorite. And I liked this too, when I was your age." She adds The Hound of the Baskervilles to the pile. "I liked this one when I got a little older." The Metamorphosis. "They're all on me, if you can keep your Mom from finding out that you have them. She'll get mad at you for spending more money even if you really didn't, won't she?"
Now the boy is dazed, but still trying very hard not to show it. He takes the paper bag of books and turns halfway. "I'm Link," he says.
"Daria. Like on the nametag. See you around, Link."
After the door chimes, Daria exhales through her hair. And a young woman says, "I'm shocked to say it, but I think you have a kind heart."
Her head is poking around a shelf. The rest of her follows. She's wearing a lot of black and could be any college student.
"Let this be a secret between us forever," Daria deadpans.
The woman grins. She carries a stack of books and drops them on the counter. "I was hoping to get store credit at least for these, if you don't do cash."
They're all books of art history and technique. "Figures," Daria mutters to herself. Thinking of Jane, gone for the summer, maybe not coming back in the real sense of the words, all because of Daria and her inability to keep from hurting her first and best and only friend.
"Hmm?" The customer is a bit quizzical.
"These look like they're for college? We have a pretty good trade in textbooks. Store credit might go further. Why don't you poke around and see if we have any of what you'll need next, and we can settle up from there."
"I'm only part-time," she says. "I don't know what I'll need next or when I'll need it, really... But I'll hold onto store credit if you say it'll be worth more."
"A reasonable gamble, anyway." Daria starts going through the stack, separating the hard- and softcovers, doing a quick first check for anything that would bring down the value. No point in not being scrupulous, when it means a chance to handle books. "If you'll bear with me a moment," she says, remembering that when she is about to get absorbed is when she needs to be deliberately polite.
"Sure, sure." The woman is silent for a beat. Daria's eyes are down on the books. The customer might be browsing the bookmarks and the other little oddities on the impulse rack. "What's this music, now? Chopin?"
"Uh, yeah. Piano Concerto Number 1."
(And Daria is off thinking about Jane again. One of her first visits to the Lane family home. Idly browsing Jane's music collection, about halfway split between CDs and cassette tapes, many of the latter redubbed and labeled by hand. "The Eroica?" she had said in mild surprise. "Yeah, Beethoven, real obscure," Jane had replied, "deep knowledge have I." Then after a pause Jane had gone on to explain that the one year of her childhood they'd actually had a Christmas tree because she and Trent had scrounged a plastic one and decorated it themselves, she had crept out of bed Christmas Eve and listened to that on the radio while she sat and looked up at the tree lights...)
Daria pulls herself out of the past and forcibly turns her attention to the customer. She is... alterna-curvaceous. She wears a halter-vest type thing that leaves her midriff and arms and shoulders bare, showing off some small but pretty intricate ink. Her hair falls midway down her back. Her lipstick is coordinated with her belt, little moments of color interrupting and accentuating the black fabric.
Daria realizes that she has mentally glided from not knowing what to call a garment (she's not Quinn for heaven's sake) to evaluating how and why the look works, and she gives herself an inward shake.
The books are in good condition. Store credit involves writing a receipt in the ledger of honest-to-God carbon paper. Daria fills in the number total first so that she doesn't risk losing it and having to redo the addition. "Name?"
"Millbrook. Alison Millbrook."
Daria sits up in bed as she holds the telephone. She's out at five, home by five-twenty because her mother picks her up punctually, and a summer evening is stretching out before her with less sense of possibility than that phrase ought to imply. "I'm glad you called."
"Well, I was glad to call," Tom says.
"Reading feels a bit too much like work right now, and watching dumb TV reminds me too much of Jane." Is this too harsh a comment to drop in here? She doesn't know. "So does going to the Zon. Or getting pizza." Definitely going harsher than she wants. "That leaves writing, and..."
"We could watch something that's less dumb?" Tom suggests. "I'm building up a video shelf that's pretty decent."
"Maybe not something so arty as, I dunno, Der Himmel über Berlin... What's in the middle of the pack?"
"Reservoir Dogs?" he offers tentatively. She imagines him looking over the spines on his shelf as he speaks. "Or the original Thomas Crown Affair?"
"I haven't seen that second one."
"All right. How about dinner, too—Chinese takeout, maybe?"
"I'm starting to like this idea."
"Great. It's a date. See you in about fifteen minutes?"
Oh. Date. Yes, yes it is.
"See you soon." She hangs up and immediately wishes she had dropped in a quip about fixing her hair or having her housemaid tighten the stays on her corset or something.
In the car, they chat easily. "All of my father's friends insist that steak has to be rare," he observes, "and they're all wrong. Every buffet with Wok in the name has figured out how to make well-done beef delicious."
"My father keeps trying to reinvent the recipes he suffered through in military school. And my poor brain struggles to remember the last time my mother used the kitchen for something other than defrosting a bagel. I think I've eaten so much frozen lasagna that it doesn't taste like anything anymore. It's just neutral food substance now."
"I wonder if you could reconstruct the recipe by adjusting it until it tastes like nothing," Tom ponders.
Daria knows, intellectually, about the Sloane family, but driving up to their house still unnerves her. It's an awful lot of house on display. She's reminded of the hotel where her cousin Erin's disastrous wedding had been held. The Sloane home isn't just comparably posh; it's also as impersonal.
But she stuffs herself with wonton soup and kung pao chicken, and this works surprisingly well to put her at ease. The movie is stylish and fun. Tom is, in a word, gentlemanly. It's not just that he keeps his hands to himself. Daria feels at certain moments, oddly, like he's dating Quinn, anticipating her requests for this and that.
He drives her home and kisses her at her front door. She lets him, invites the approach, enjoys the contact... Jane would have a leg draped around him right now, would be using every trick in her touch arsenal to make it last longer and go deeper. Daria remembers not their first kiss, the shock that had blown her circuits, but their second, the one where they knew it was a mistake, the one where she had caught herself wishing she knew those secrets of caress and provocation. This time? They'd had dinner and a movie. She is enjoying herself.
She had thrown Jane away for those first two kisses. Would she have done the same for this?
Two days later, Daria is sitting at the cash register stool, scribbling in her notebook—thoughts towards a poem, perhaps—when the door chimes and Alison pushes it open with a backwards step, her arms filled with another stack of books. "Hope you don't mind seeing me again," she announces herself.
"Afternoon," Daria greets her. She closes her notebook upon her pen and sets it on the shelf beneath the register.
"My sister finally let me get rid of some of the stuff she left behind after she moved," Alison explains, not that she needs to. She looks up and about, as if that is necessary to listen to the music. "The Kreutzer Sonata?"
"I get to play anything you'd hear on NPR," Daria says. After she says it, she realizes this is the first time she's specifically admitted to choosing the music, and she wonders why this seems meaningful.
Alison's lipstick and belt are a different color than before, but they're still coordinated. "This stack is all fiction, I think."
There's some Stephen King, which they don't particularly need more of, but it is in better shape than many copies Daria has seen. Tony Hillerman, Patricia Cornwell. Stranger in a Strange Land, which Daria now remembers that she never managed to finish and notices that she doesn't feel guilty about it. At the bottom of the pile are a couple hardcovers. "These are worth more if you save the dust jackets, for some reason," Daria says. She picks the top one up and looks from it to the book on the counter and back again. "The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty and... Story of O?"
Alison is quiet for a moment, as though she does not realize the words that Daria has said carry any particular import. Then she claps a hand to her mouth. "Those got in there! I'm sorry. Cleaning house has been a disaster zone, and—"
Daria shrugs. "Is that the kind of books they are? They'll probably sell."
At the end of the day, Daria shoves her notebook into her bag and adds a couple volumes to go with it. Her boss has blessed this kind of thing, as long as she has the inventory back in the morning. She picks a new arrival in detective fiction—looks like it'll be engaging but not too demanding, like Thomas Crown in print form—and one other.
She blitzes through Story of O by midnight and holds her head in her hands. "Jesus fucking Christ," she says to herself.
For the first time all summer, she wonders if she's fucked in a way beyond what she had known about herself when Jane walked out her door.
The shop is closed for the aftermoon because the owner needs to drive his wife home from cataract surgery. Daria wonders if there is family money or the windfall from an insurance scam sustaining this place, because she's not convinced that the rush of college kids a few times a year and the trickle otherwise is enough to do it, but it's been in Lawndale longer than she has.
Daria offers to stay in the shop and finish what needs finishing so the only other employee present that day can leave. Because there's A/C, and no Quinn, and her parents would be happy with her seeming dedication, and the narrow back hall—paperback science fiction and fantasy—is almost enclosed and feels soothing on a level she thinks she needs now.
She unpacks the special orders—the cardboard packaging smells pleasant in a way she can't quite pinpoint—arranges them on the dedicated shelf with the paper slips to indicate who is picking them up. She takes down the expired notices from the little community board—the name on a tutoring ad sounds vaguely familiar—and wipes down the couple glass surfaces that she'd been told could stand a good de-smudging.
What was this? A tap-tap-tapping at her chamber door?
Alison of all people was standing at the door, making binoculars with her hands to peek inside the darkened store. Daria figured that the woman was capable of reading a CLOSED sign, so there might actually be a reason of passing interest for her to be here. As she approached, she saw that Alison was grinning and carrying a grocery bag. She saw Daria, hefted the bag and pointed to it with her other hand, making inquiring motions with her eyebrows.
Daria unlocked the front door and opened it about a third of the way.
"I know you're closed and I know they say there's no such thing as a free lunch, but... free lunch?"
There are a few tiny restaurants on this block, catering to Lawndale State students. Daria hasn't felt up to trying their pizza yet. Each morning, she slaps peanut butter on a couple bagels and grabs an orange or a banana. That has worked well enough.
She considers. There is really nothing left to do here. At this point, more work would just make tomorrow morning more boring.
"Antonio's Delicatessen and Imports," she reads from the bag, in lieu of answering just yet.
"As of two weeks ago, I'm shift manager," Alison says, "and this is me clearing out what's perfectly fine but needs to be cleared at the end of my shift."
"Well, far be it for me to let you suffer under your burden of excess food."
"That's the spirit!"
It is more mild outside than Daria had anticipated, and there is a serviceable bench just down the block. Daria fetches her soda can from the back, locks the door behind her and promises to return to make a final sweep for anything overlooked after they eat.
Alison has brought baked macaroni with bread crumbs on top and something aged and smoky in the cheese. It reminds her of Jane saying she had focused on the well-stocked cheese drawer whenever she'd felt odd at the Sloane house. And there is garlic bread, and olive salad, and deviled eggs, and something that looks like vegetables but also different.
"Roast veggie medley," Alison says after swallowing, pointing with a pinky finger. "Everyone who works at the deli loves it, but it just doesn't move. I think people just can't handle the char. And they don't believe that the Brussels sprouts can actually taste good."
The cauliflower does look like it's survived to the third act of an action movie, and... "Brussels sprouts?"
"There's a new cultivar from Holland or some place that's a lot less bitter."
Daria readies her Ultra Cola in case she needs to eradicate the aftertaste and tries a bite.
"Huh. Christmas dinner might just be redeemed after all."
Alison laughs. It sounds more carefree than Daria has prompted anyone to act in a long time.
"Stop in sometime," Alison says. "We've got the French Ultra Cola that's made with real sugar."
"What's their slogan, Ultra vôtre Cola?" Daria speculates. "Or maybe Plus caffeiné que l'Orangina?"
And Alison laughs again.
"I don't see another stack of books," Daria says, feeling like she needs to keep talking. Mentioning the books after her discovery last time is running some kind of risk, she senses, but she's curious.
Alison shakes her head and forks a roasted potato. "I was on my way to buy art supplies," gesturing with her head and arm and fork towards Dega Street a block over, "and I realized I didn't want to carry all of that and all of this."
"Isn't that why America invented the automobile?"
Alison points with her other thumb over her shoulder at her bicycle, locked to a signpost. She chews and swallows. "I don't live that far, actually. You know those apartments they built for the 'revitalize downtown Lawndale' project?"
"I thought they spent all that money on signs."
"Well, they couldn't get people to move into those apartments."
"Not enough signs, obviously."
Alison chuckled. "So, they lowered the rent on a bunch of 'em. Not the worst decision Lawndale has ever made."
"I would have guessed they'd let them sit empty until they could arrange an accidental electrical fire."
"And who knows?" Alison asks in a tone of agreement. "I might be looking for a new living situation tomorrow."
Their meal ends with splitting a half-Moon cookie so that each of them gets a piece with both kinds of frosting.
Daria suddenly feels relieved that the conversation is coming to a natural end. The only question she can think to ask is what kind of art do you do, and she knows that will hurt her inside.
She remembers that she can bury feelings under politeness. "Thank you, it was delicious."
"Thank you for sharing the burden." Alison begins gathering up the remnant pieces of their impromptu bench picnic.
A nerve cluster relaxes inside Daria. So. The edition with the front matter that had proclaimed "It shocked France as Histoire d'O!" was an accidental inclusion that bothered Alison as little as it should have bothered Daria.
Alison rose to her feet. "A demain?" she asked, hopefully.
Link returns. He has written his report on To Kill A Mockingbird and doesn't trust that his teacher in the fall will accept it and has no one else to read it for him. Daria reads it while he waits. He accuses Atticus Finch of being unrealistically perfect, which does not surprise Daria very much.
"Criticizing a book that the teacher says everyone loves is always a risky move," she tells him. "If you do it, go all in. Ask whether the unrealistic perfection was deliberate. Could it be a picture of a man seen through a child's eyes? What does that say about the kind of child who would see that image? Does that tie together with anything else the book says about growing up, about the loss of innocence?"
Link nods. He's curt with his good-byes, as before, but wheels of thought are starting to spin for him. Daria wonders if there's some way to find him friends, or at least a thing to do with schoolmates, some activity that will help a teacher see the best in him.
She ponders the topic while returning to the task of munching the chips that Alison had given her that day, made from fried pita bread. Substantial, and just the right amount of salty.
* * *
Her parents are on edge with each other more than usual. She doesn't know why. Maybe it's just a bad alignment of cycles, Mom getting another bump up towards partner and Dad having a run of clients who ignore his opinions. They've been this way before and swung back.
Daria doesn't feel like bringing any more problems to them, however.
* * *
The man putting up a Xeroxed ad on the community board is familiar.
"You're my sister Quinn's tutor, aren't you?"
"David, hi, David Sorenson." He's a bit disheveled without being scruffy. "Quinn is... actually making progress, some days."
"Color me surprised on those days," Daria says, but she doesn't really mean it. Quinn has plenty of potential to be better than what her friends dragged her down to.
David Sorenson continues, "I had hoped to fill the rest of my tutoring schedule with the friends she recommended me to, but..." He sighs. "The only one who anyone could teach anything needs some kind of miracle to handle her anxiety first."
"That would be Stacy," Daria confirms.
"Well, must be off," he says. "Unless you have any of the Eyewitness Science series, or The Way Things Work."
"A request of mammoth proportions," Daria says. "Let's go look."
* * *
Tom calls again. They're making a regular thing of it by now. This time they do go with Der Himmel über Berlin.
Early on, Daria sits up. "My God, it's Columbo."
Peter Falk in this might be the most perfect casting she has seen in anything.
"You liked it?" Tom asks afterward.
Daria downplays out of instinct, out of the sense this is what's expected of her. "It was definitely arty, but at least it wasn't French." She isn't quite sure if she means to put another layer of meaning under the obvious joke.
"So, we're shelving Le Dernier Métro, then," he says cheerfully. "And I guess I'll keep Renoir's La Grand Illusion to myself."
"With a title like that, it has to be about love, doesn't it?"
In the bookstore, she'd found The Five C's of Cinematography and a film-studies textbook, so she is not much adrift when it comes to recognizing the classics, at least. She is on the verge of suggesting Jacqueline Audry's Olivia but shuts herself down.
"How are you on noir?" she asks instead. "I've heard good things about The Postman Always Rings Twice."
"I'll try and buy it on my next trip," Tom says.
* * *
At their next meeting on their habitual sidewalk bench, Alison offers Daria coffee and a slice of pizza.
Daria had tasted coffee a couple-few times, mostly when Trent and Jane made it for one another. She had only been able to finish a cup if it was strongly cut with milk and sugar. The cup Alison is presenting is cold, iced, which is new. Daria takes a whiff, and then a sip. Maybe she's just older, or maybe it's the temperature, or maybe there's a difference among coffee beans after all, but she actually likes it.
And the pizza slice...
Alison is saying, "I guess this town's not ready for a potato pizza with fresh chives."
It's different, for sure, well outside the spectrum of anything that she and Jane had fed upon, which lets her work up her courage and take a bite.
"Mmm," she says eventually. "The more fools, they."
* * *
And so when Tom calls on Friday and suggests the botanical garden for the next afternoon, which had been a place she'd only visited with Jane—snapping photos for reference of flowers, and of birds when they perched still long enough dammit—Daria has the gumption to agree.
* * *
The garden is well-groomed, for Lawndale, and features unusual plants, for Lawndale. It's built around a pond that sends amoeboid offshoots in various directions. Footbridges lead over the water channels. Daria's boots make a pleasant clunking sound against their wooden slats.
"Have a lot on your mind?" Tom asks.
"Just enjoying how all the plants are labeled here. Makes a city girl like me feel less bad for not being able to recognize anything."
He chuckles a bit.
She finds a spot where she can look out over the pond. One boot-heel grinds idly into the trail gravel. "And you?" she asks. "A lot on your mind?" It is easier to ask this than to try expressing how she's been unable to focus, how each thing she doesn't understand crowds out the next. How colors in the flowers are familiar from Alison's accent marks. How Jane's boots had sounded running up and down those wooden bridges.
"Why do you ask?"
"Well, I give you an opportunity to kiss me among roses, and you're not doing anything about it."
So he does.
She pulls away more slowly than usual when they separate. Her lips are still parted, and her face is flushed.
He asks, "Want to sit down for a bit?"
They find a stone bench among tiger lilies.
Is the garden a setting with some kind of romance that works for her? Or is everything in her mind that she cannot name—or that she refuses to name—now trying to claw its way out?
"I feel... odd," she says at last.
She holds his hand for a longer stretch of time than she's attempted so far.
"My family will be going up to the Cove for a couple weeks soon," he says eventually.
"Don't forget to write," she deadpans. Then, with a little more emotion, "Or you could call."
A while later, she mentions Link.
"If he's getting into books," Tom hazards, "maybe his school has a literary magazine? Or an academic team? You know, quiz competitions?"
Daria is dubious. It all sounds very Fielding Preparatory. "I was thinking more like suggesting he start a Banned Books Club of some kind."
A family walks past. The children are noshing on vanilla ice cream in waffle cones.
"That make you hungry?" Tom asks.
"Why, Tom, I haven't even a gingerbread house."
"Har har. I meant... ice cream? Or we could get dinner after this somewhere?"
"I'm amenable."
"I've been curious to try that deli you've had some leftovers from."
"Eh... Err, I've had lunch from there a lot lately."
"Hey, how about my parents' club?"
"What?"
"They charge us the same whether we eat there or not."
"And they'll let me in the door?"
"Come on, it'll be great."
Their habitual bench is empty.
Alison strolls further up the block to the bookstore. She doesn't see Daria through the plate glass. Stepping in, she turns her head this way and that, finding no Daria in any of the wood-shelved and pulp-scented aisles. She puts her bets on the paperback science fiction and fantasy closet, but it is occupied by a scrawny boy perusing the fantasy covers and declaring, "Rawwr! Feisty."
She makes an expeditious retreat, stepping backwards before she turns, so that she has only reoriented herself halfway when she collides with a hard-edged man with streakwise-graying hair.
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry," she says, at a low volume suitable for close quarters in a bookstore.
"The FAULT is equally MINE, miss," he says.
"I was just looking for a friend of mine who works here, and..."
"DARia? She beat a hasty reTREAT after she helped me find this book on dePRESSion-era SOUPS and STEWS, which may well CONstitute my diet given how aMERica treats those responsible for EDucating the next generAtion. I believe Mr. RUTTheimer's arrival was the last straw for her."
"Um, thanks."
The clerk at the register says, "Try the back," without really caring.
The door that she figures would lead to an office of some sort drops her into the back alley instead.
And Daria is there, head against her forearms, leaning onto a brick wall.
"Hi?" Alison offers.
"Sorry, but I'm not really up for the Algonquin Rectangular Bench today."
"More than your average Monday, I take it?"
"I can't believe that talking with my sister was the last good thing of the weekend and everything went downhill from there." Daria rolls over and leans her back against the wall instead. Her eyes roll heavenward, or what passes in the hazy sky of a Lawndale summer for heaven. "But don't worry, I have a plan B," she adds in her resting monotone.
"Hey, if you want some space..."
Daria shrugs.
"Well," Alison says, "it sounds like this is more than a one-lunch problem. So." She fishes out a felt-tip pen and uncaps it with her teeth. Daria's eyes go wide as Alison takes her hand and inks a number on her palm. "Call any time," Alison says. "Leave a message if I don't pick up. And here, at least take the stuffed grape leaves, OK?"
Daria nods. "Uh. Yeah. Sure."
Later that night, after the Morgendorffers have finished their lasagna, Daria climbs the stairs with deliberate casualness. She calls the number that she had transcribed to her notebook after several minutes of walking around with a hand that felt electrified.
The answering machine picks up.
"Alison? It's Daria. I need a plan C." She holds the headset away from herself to gain a moment to draw a deep breath. Then: "Do you have plans for Friday night?"
Daria's mother snaps at Quinn, then at her father, who comes back with one of his typical "But Helen what did I do" plaintives, and Helen stalks off with an "I swear I don't even know how to reach you all some days".
"Um, Dad? It's still OK for me to go to the movie, right? It's about two hours long, and we might grab burgers after that, like I said."
"Oh, at the college, right, kiddo? Sure, sure. Hey, it sure was clever of you to look for that."
"Thanks. And don't you stay up too late, either."
It had been easier than she liked to elide that she wasn't going with Tom, that this was not after all the grand send-off before the Sloanes departed for the Cove. Her parents losing their vigilance is at once convenient and worrisome.
Quinn is trying new looks in her mirrors, aiming for a median between her current fit and her "brainy poet" phase.
Sick, Sad World is a rerun. She doesn't want to rewatch the world's largest mountain of bat guano by herself.
So, she waits on the sidewalk.
Alison picks her up in a taxi.
"All right, all right!" she exclaims as Daria climbs into the seat beside her. "Out on the town!"
"That town being Lawndale," Daria points out. "And 'out' meaning—"
"You and me," Alison says.
* * *
The taxi drops them off at Third and Twickenham. "Wait," Daria says, "the Lawndale State auditorium is—"
"A brisk walk away with plenty of time on a lovely evening," Alison concurs. "What's right here is the opportunity to use this." She whips out a laminated plastic rectangle. "Big sister's old ID. The only risk is that I'm prettier." She flutters her long lashes egregiously. "Trust me."
"Words up there with 'hey, watch this'," Daria says.
Alison just smiles.
Daria waits around the corner until Alison returns with a brown paper bag that clinks.
"I went upscale to be above suspicion," she tells Daria. "And because you're worth it. Now come on, we don't want to be late and un-buzzed for Kurosawa."
"Cinema Across Culture presents Throne of Blood, here we come."
"So," Alison prompts, "while a girl is plenty flattered to be a plan C, mind filling me in on why you needed one?"
It had begun at the club. Or maybe when she and Tom had dropped by Daria's house because she wanted to change into something slightly nicer for the club. This excursus meant that she crossed paths with Quinn, who was acting atypically troubled. She'd borrowed Daria for a few minutes of conversation and asked—she, Quinn, had asked Daria—about what it was like to date, well, you know, a brain.
"You gave her your best advice," Alison guesses, "on how the right person for you isn't always the one everybody thinks is a person you'd date. And that you won't know until you try."
"And," Daria says, "something about how it might hurt if it goes wrong, but that's the price we pay for trying."
"Not bad for a sister-to-sister talk."
"And then Tom and I went to dinner at his family's club, and..."
Daria does her best to sort out and recount the stages of the conversation. From her quip about smelling the mold on the money, to Tom saying it's not like she's the scullery maid in disguise, to the whole discussion about how the whole place made clear that Tom needed a partner who was prepped from birth to fulfill the social obligations of a Sloane wife, and Tom back-pedaling and saying nobody needs to think that far in advance after a month of dating in high school...
"And then his parents showed up," Daria says.
Tom had tried showing her off, in a subtle way. Part of her appreciated that, momentarily. But then she found herself twisting in knots to justify that being on the honor roll at Lawndale High meant something when she had never believed that before, and then she could tell that Tom saw his parents were disappointed in him but not showing it, and she twigged that Angier and Kay had been willing to write Jane off as their son's wild oats, the escapade to which he was entitled, but Daria was close enough to what they wanted to count as a failure. If Tom was willing to date this simulacrum of a Fielding or Grove Hills girl, why was he wasting his time and not going for the real thing?
And then Daria had brought out her knives. "We were just having a fascinating debate about the Shadean versus Kinbotean readings of Pale Fire, weren't we, Tom? He wants to back up his case with Appel's annotations to Lolita, but I think Pnin and 'The Vane Sisters' are more significant. Care to join us sparring Nabokov over dessert?"
Alison chortles. "Brainiac."
By now they are in line to buy snacks. "Tom called me the next day to say that he didn't like being put on the spot and forced to choose between me and his parents."
"Well, that is a lot to ask a guy before you've banged him at least twice."
A flush of embarrassment layers on top of Daria's hurt.
"We really got into it. About everything. Maybe about nothing. Then I heard about how Lawndale State does these monthly screenings, and I bought us two tickets as an apology. Only when I called... He said they were leaving for the Cove early."
Alison is, briefly, unreadable. Then she gives Daria's hand a quick squeeze. "Plan C, step two: popcorn and chocolate mints."
* * *
Daria's never been tipsy for a movie before. She doubts it would work for every movie, but here, there is so much spectacle and grandly theatrical emotion and overt yet ecocative stylization... it washes over her, and she loves it.
Tom had been this close, a few times, like when Humphrey Bogart was sending over Mary Astor and promising himself that the rotten nights would pass. Jane has been this close, a few times, when Frank Cotton was declaring that Jesus wept and when Miss Scarlett quipped that she liked getting presents from strange men....
* * *
"That was lovely," Alison says, "a lovely choice, Daria. I had never thought they could make Birnham Wood actually move and have it work... Thanks for inviting me." She is more drunk than Daria.
"You want a cab?" asks Daria.
"Come on, girl, it's Friday night. I could really do justice to a taco or three. What do you say? Tacos?"
"Let me guess: This isn't your first rodeo getting a late-night snack in this corner of town."
Alison spreads her arms wide. "Benefits of a classical education." She makes something like a bow and directs Daria down the road, and Daria follows.
* * *
At the Taco Pit, Daria fills her cup with fruit punch from the fountain machine. Alison tops it off with red wine. "Sangria," she says. "Of a sort."
"Is that the proper pairing with extruded mystery meat?"
"Daria, despite what From Russia With Love would have you believe, you can even pair red wine with fish if you try."
"I don't think they serve fish tacos here," says Daria, "and I wouldn't trust them if they did."
Another unreadable moment from Alison.
"You think this is it for you and Tom?" she asks at last.
"If it is, it sure seems like all I lost wasn't worth it."
Alison raises an eyebrow.
Thus, over the pallid guacamole and the industrial shredded cheese and the really rather respectable hot sauce, Daria relates the whole story. "The lady and the tiger," she says, mocking herself out loud the way she has mocked herself inside all summer long.
Alison taps her plastic cup into Daria's in the Tex-Mex dive version of a toast. "Here's to you, Tigerlily. May all your loves bring you good stories, if they can't bring you joy."
Daria gets a bad feeling as soon as Quinn brushes past her without as much as a jibe. Daria grumbles to her feet and follows her sister upstairs. This was worse than Quinn after a typical bad date. Usually, a bad date meant irritation quickly followed by the declaration that the guy was not worth it.
Quinn is standing before her mirrors, violently undoing whatever she had done with her hair. "Is something the matter?" asks Daria. "You haven't even critiqued my pores today."
"David shot me down," Quinn spits at her. "He called me superficial and acted like I was just coming onto him to get a better report and dumped me as a student because I'm just like the rest of my friends and he can tell that I can't be taught."
Daria's mind goes blank.
"Congratulations, Daria, you finally burned me real good, didn't you?! Hell of a long game, Daria—every little thing you said since we came to Lawndale about how I was better than I acted, like I could be somebody, pushing up my confidence to let David know I liked him—Hell of a confidence scheme, Daria!"
Daria's stomach sinks under the realization that from Quinn's perspective, this is entirely correct, and there is nothing Daria can tell or show her that won't fit the same pattern.
"I should have known better than to take your advice about, about anything! See if I ever do that again! Did you just want me to be a superficial fashion doll so you could feel better about yourself, because your books are obviously making you so goddamn happy?! Well, congratulations, Daria, now you've got an airhead sister forever."
"Quinn, please..." The bedroom door slam cuts her off.
This is starting to feel like a Mom problem. Only... she hadn't seen her mother all day, she now realizes.
Her father is in the kitchen, stirring something in the tall stock pot. He takes a taste from the ladle and is clearly unhappy.
"Dad, where's Mom?"
"Don't you remember, kiddo? She's accepting that achievement award from the State Bar Association. She'll be away until Monday."
Does Daria remember hearing this? Or does it just sound plausible? Now that she hears it, does she actually believe it?
"OK, now where is she really?"
"What?"
"If she's getting an award, why didn't you go with her? In fact, why weren't we all dragged along like that spa retreat?"
"Because it would be a lot of boring convention business that she doesn't want us to sit through," Jake says.
"Uh-huh."
"Daria, is something the matter?"
Her father doesn't have enough duplicitous bones in his body to lie to her. Maybe he's telling the truth. Or maybe her mother lied to him. That was easier to believe than she had ever wanted to be possible.
"I need to make a phone call. In my room."
"Sure thing, kiddo!"
She locks her door and dials Ashfield.
It takes four rings for someone to pick up. "Arts at Ashfield, main desk, Talitha speaking."
"Hi. I'm trying to reach Jane Lane." Daria needs to apologize. To make something right. To fix the tiniest bit of anything at all.
"One moment while I get you her cabin, please."
"Sure, um, thanks."
Ringing again, and then, "You're live with Paris. What's the word?"
"Um, I'm trying to reach Jane Lane."
"Jane? She's out running with Nicholas, like usual for this time of day." Someone in the background yells lovebirds. The woman speaking on the phone shushes him. "They'll probably get dinner after. Do you want to leave a message?"
"Uh, no. No. Just tell her that Daria called."
"Daria." She repeats the name like she's writing it down, like she's never heard Jane use it with any meaning. "Sure. That's it?"
"Yeah. Bye."
"Bye."
The line disconnects in Daria's ear.
"Daria called," she says. "So this is how it ends."
She can't fix anything.
The one person she should have been able to trust with all this. The one person she had ever truly been able to hurt, and then she had. "Hundred percent success rate," she tells herself.
She wants to wedge her body into the confines of paperback science fiction and fantasy. She wants...
To crawl into a box. A refrigerator box, that she had decorated as a perfect little house inside her room, where she hid when she heard her parents fight.
Fighting about her.
Daria bites her sleeve, squeezes her eyes shut. She rolls over onto her side. The shakes start in her free hand. She shoves it into her jacket pocket to confine it.
Even her father could lie to her after all, she knows with a chill that makes her curl her body into her knees. All it would take is an omission here or there, an omission that flightiness would cover so easily.
Reconnecting with Jane had been the last thread of hope. It would have been the necessary first step to sorting out everything else about how she felt.
Now she's just a freak. A freak who can't keep even a single friend, who lost the forgiveness of the most aesthetic soul she'd ever known, who drove off the boy who ate Chinese food with her and watched classic movies with her and kissed her among roses. A freak, a degenerate who ruined her sister's shot at improving herself. A degenerate who can't stop thinking about the long eyelashes and tattooed arms of the woman who has been playing her needy little heartstrings.
* * *
Sunday morning, around dawn, Daria pulls herself out of bed. She knows she slept because fragments of bad dreams are hanging about her. She follows the motions of preparing for her day, and she is showered and dressed before the rest of her family have arisen. She makes for the dining room that they seldom use. The cabinet is locked, as expected.
"Is it time for a little martoonie?" Daria asks herself and the empty room.
Her father keeps gin and vermouth around in case his clients turn intolerable or her aunts come to visit. Her parents have a few other kinds of liquor in the cabinet, too, bought for entertaining that they don't do as often as expected. Unlike Quinn, Daria has the patience to learn which keys fit which locks all throughout the house. Chalk the idea up to "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet" and, she supposes, Lolita. She's never needed this knowledge until now.
The rum bottle is the dustiest. She figures it'll be the least likely for her parents to remember exactly how much was remaining. She fills a souvenir Middleton shot glass, pours it into an empty 20-ounce Ultra Cola bottle, then adds another shot for good measure. She leaves the cabinet as close to untouched as she can manage. Then she repairs to the kitchen where she tops off the bottle with soda from a 2-liter.
It tastes like industry on her tongue. "Yeah, that'll do," she mutters, the words sounding like a beratement in her own ears.
The skies threaten rain, and the newspaper agrees. She has a decent walk ahead of her.
* * *
Tap-tap-tapping on her front porch door.
Daria hears the chain being undone. Alison swings the door inwards and stands there, puzzlement and worry and something else in her features.
"Are we alone?" Daria asks. The empty bottle is sticking halfway out of the jacket pocket that is too small for it. Her wrists are crossed high on her chest, her hands clutching her forest-green lapels. "Are we alone?" she repeats.
"Uh, yeah. Yeah. Come in, it looks like we're in for a storm."
Daria walks in past Alison, scans the living room of her apartment, the size of Daria's bedroom, or Jane's.
"Have you been... drinking?"
Daria is still facing away from her. "Well, I sure di'n't think the rum was vanilla." So this is how it ends, in a room of floral and yonic pastels.
"Is something wrong, Tigerlily—"
And this is all it takes. Daria spins on her heel and launches herself forward, planting her hands on Alison's bare sides, just where she curves in beneath her black halter, and she feels Alison's breath catch and she lifts herself to bring her lips to Alison's—
And then hands are on her shoulders. Even that touch electrifies her, but Alison is pushing her back, opening space for her rum-tainted breath to occupy, yet the tension in those inked arms is keeping her from falling back completely.
"What is this?" Alison asks in a voice burdened into hoarseness with emotions that Daria cannot identify.
"That's my line," Daria says, anger and other energies boiling up. "What is any of this? What the fuck has any of this been?"
Alison's lips part. Whatever she intends to do or say, Daria talks faster. "You dine me, you wine me. You pick me up in a taxi for a show. You give me a nickname from a flower garden. What was all of that? In our second goddamn conversation, you passed me literal goddamn pornography. That right there is some '50s Boys Beware grooming shit. What was your backup plan, cruising me at the public bathhouse? Huh? Out to corrupt me? Destroy me? I need to know and I need to know right now because in my heart I don't think I deserve to stop you."
"Daria, Daria... let's sit down, OK?"
Alison leads her to the couch that faces her ancient television. Daria closes her eyes and hears shuffling, rearranging. A pile of books are dropped to the floor. A stack of papers are shoved onto the coffee table, where they nudge a water glass that clinks with ice and a metal bowl or tray inside which small things rattle.
"Sit, please, Daria, OK?" Only touching Daria's open palm, Alison guides her to a now-empty spot.
It smells like Alison has fallen asleep watching TV here. That doesn't help.
"Yer beau'ful," Daria mumbles. "An' nobody else ev'r thought t'call me Tigerlily."
Alison's fingertips have come to rest along Daria's jawline. She touches with the nails of middle, ring and pinky. "It's true," she says at last.
Daria opens her eyes.
"Those books were an accident, I swear," Alison says. "But the way you were completely unfazed, and the fact that the music you were playing was a lover's agitation... Yeah," she chuckles wryly, "I've seen Immortal Beloved."
"You gon' call me your angel, y'r all, y'r other self?"
"I'm saying I don't believe in kismet or in meet cutes, but that felt like what one would have to be if any of that were real. And I... I did everything I could that I could call flirting while still telling myself that I could stop before anything happened. Everything I could do that I could tell myself you would take as friendship unless you... Unless..."
"You were wrong," Daria states. "You were wrong, and you did more than enough to seduce me, and I hurt people. I hurt people just by being me. There's no way I can stop hurting people as long as I am me. I made one real friend in my shitty destructive life, and then I betrayed her, and now even if she comes back there'll be a wall between us because she has no reason to forgive me and she can complete her life without me and she would be the one I tell about all the feelings I don't understand but I can't because she's as much a part of them now as you are."
Daria is hunched over now, hands on her knees. Details of the room return with each shuddering breath. There's a backgammon case under the TV. The metal tray on the Formica coffee table is for an incense holder and a torch-jet lighter.
"I'm sorry, Daria." And then she inhales, sharply. "And this would be easier if I weren't finding trauma incredibly hot, Tigerlily." She guides Daria towards sitting upright, and Daria follows. "I don't know how broken this makes us, but we're both after that second kiss, aren't we? The one we know is a mistake."
"Pretty damn broken."
And they pull each other close again.
This embrace starts like the second with Tom, and the heat grows from there.
"Knew you'd be into hair-pulling," Alison purrs, and Daria's only reply is a gasp.
It is Daria who falls back, Daria whose arm goes wide, Daria whose spasming fingers happen upon the lighter.
"Would you stop if I asked you out of love?" Daria asks.
"This isn't love," says Alison, a growl that lodges in Daria's spine.
"Would you stop if I proved I was too much?"
"Mmmmm?"
"Alors, voici ton lis tigré." A metallic click. "Qu'un moment de Roissy."
Daria holds the blue jet of flame to her own bare thigh.
Distantly, she is aware of Alison calling out in shock, of Alison taking the lighter from her hand and quelling the flame, of Alison pouring something wet and cold on her leg, of thunder outside. She wonders if Jane is stuck inside at Ashfield, imagines her lost and beautiful friend making contours with charcoal while listening to the rain upon her cabin roof. Her friend, who had brightened Daria's life more than Daria could bear, the doomed fool. Je suis pas ton ange, Alison. Pas ta muse, Tom. Pas ton amie, Jane, désolée, désolée, mon âme qui je méritait jamais, jamais, désolée, Jane...
Link packs the last of his haul into the old shoebox. "Thanks," he says. "We'll see how it goes."
And that brings her to the end of business hours. She stands, gingerly, and walks, carefully. Blisters and pain meant second-degree, which was better than the alternative. The bandage is not noticeable under her jeans. Blaming the switch from her usual skirts on the store A/C getting cranked higher had been, and she forgives herself for the pun, a breeze.
Stacy and Quinn have visited the salad bar across the street a couple times. They've come in to ask Daria about history and literature. Quinn is, at least, reading, and Stacy hasn't hyperventilated yet.
She has eaten one of her two bagels and is clutching the other in her teeth as she locks the front door.
"Guess I'm late. I was hoping you had some books on painting technique."
Of all the ways she had dared to imagine this reunion, of all the ways she had pictured the conversation beginning before it inevitably died, none had involved a mouthful of peanut butter.
Jane adds, "I need a book that does not contain the word Weltanschauung. Not even once."
Daria bites off the bagel and tries to chew and think simultaneously. "I wasn't expecting you. Not so soon. Maybe not ever."
"I got incredibly bored, Daria. So I left. Like I would."
"Like you would," Daria echoes.
Trent beeps the horn of his car. "Hey, Daria," he greets her, through the rolled-down passenger window.
"There wasn't anyone..." Daria begins.
"No one to talk to about art," Jane says. Daria can tell there is more she wants to say, but not here.
They buy a pizza from the place down the block. Mushroom and black olive, and extra cheese. Trent drops them off at Daria's house and drives away, munching on breadsticks.
They divide the pizza between themselves in Daria's room. "There's a lot I need to be honest with you about right away," Daria says.
"It have anything to do with why you're bandaged and in pain?"
Daria nods.
The story flows out of her.
Jane has eaten more of her half of the pizza while listening than Daria has while speaking. She hasn't tried to interrupt.
"Daria, you know..." She picks her words carefully while acting like she is trying to choose the most appealing fragment of pizza crust. "You know, there are safer ways to modify yourself and cause yourself pain." As though the gesture is unrelated, she brushes her dark hair back from her ear, and the rings in her piercings gleam.
"What are you saying..."
"I'm saying that I think I can get some of it, anyway." Jane looks up. Whatever is in her eyes, it isn't condemnation. "I went jogging with a boy at Ashfield. A lot of jogging... and I realized I wasn't ready to go the final yard." Suddenly this sounds too coy. "I also saw two girls fuck in the bed opposite mine, and I realized I wasn't ready for that either. But I can't deny..."
"That you want to be ready."
"Do you want," and here Jane finds it hard to assemble the words, "one day, maybe, to get called Tigerlily again?"
"One deeply fucked-up episode in my life, building upon the one before... But maybe that's a mistake I need to hold with me."
"Not just to learn from it."
Daria shakes her head.
"We are two twisted little crullers, aren't we?"
Daria says, "I think you have a lot more to prove in that department than I do."
"I think the fact that I would rather be here right now than anywhere else is plenty of proof already."
They hold each other's gaze in silence, then, and silently let themselves grow unguarded.
"I'll have to take the slow road," Daria says eventually, "to get back to the point of what almost happened with Alison."
"I'm fine with that," says Jane.
A minute later, Daria stands and heads over to her CD collection.
Jane tilts her head quizzically as the orchestra begins. "Yes, Tchaikovsky," says Daria. "Deep knowledge have I."
They listen, together. As the strife theme for the Montagues and Capulets arrives, it detaches from its context and begins to sound like a promise of something else.