The rain spritzed ominously when they slipped beyond the city, but it cleared as they got further out, the clouds moving to the north as the van drove east. Jane drummed her fingers against the drink cooler, in time to "Frontier Psychiatrist" blasting through the speakers. Qiana, in the front passenger seat, was having a stationary dance party. Trent, for a wonder, was keeping the van in their lane. Actually, he had been remarkably together about getting the preparations together for this trip, which didn't change the fact that Qiana was too good for him, but then again as his little sister she was obligated, law of nature-like, to maintain such things.
Looking out the window, Jane let herself lose track of landmarks, opening her thoughts to the rising unfamiliarity as the names she recognized became fewer and less well-placed in her memory. Names from rail maps, Daria would have said, and cop shows that get their geography wrong when chasing a suspect or dumping a body.
"Same threat of rain the beach party had last summer," Trent observed. "It blew past then, too."
"Lucky," Jane said, to say something.
Qiana leaned around her seat and signed at Jane. « Daria already at party? »
"She said she was going down with the early crew, to help with the tents and stuff like that. Honestly, I think she just wanted to skip town as early as possible."
« School trouble or boy trouble? »
Jane chuckled. "Daria never has school trouble."
"I hope she remembered to pack her salsa verde," Trent said. "I have a powerful hankering for tomatillos."
Qiana's hands moved.
Knowing that the gestures had been in his peripheral vision, Jane interpreted. "She says she thought you were craving peanut butter cups."
"I'm a man of many talents, Janey."
Jane's chuckle was fond. Her gaze drifted back out the window, while her attention flickered to the plans that she and Daria had made for the night. The most fun part hadn't been put in writing. There had been a few e-mails with times and directions and suchlike, the details that were most convenient in text. And Daria had written an odd postscript in one message: "Would you put me in your LD portfolio? I will owe you. I'll explain when you get there."
* * *
The party was on a stretch of private beach surrounded on one side by a tenacious little forest and on the other by a jumble of rocks. And surrounded further out, she felt, by a perimeter of unreality: the peculiar mix of specificity and anonymity granted by the sea. —South of Amity Island, way out past the old Gatsby place. Jane wasn't entirely sure which alums in Daria's college circle had a family summer house out here, but she made a mental note to thank them enthusiastically when she met them.
It was not quite sunset. They parked the van at the end of a gravel street, beside a stand of goldenrod, past which the land rose into a scrub-covered hill-type dune-like thing. Beyond that, she heard the ocean. Between here and there, somebody was doing sound checks on a speaker system.
« Three, two, one, let's jam, » Qiana declared. She hopped out of the van, stretched mightily and gave a head-shake that sent the waist-length dreads of the unshaven side of her scalp pendulating. Lanky in tank top and baggy dungarees, she turned to Jane and signed, « You get snack cooler? »
"Sure thing," Jane said.
Enrique saw them coming over the dune. "Hey hey, T, Q and J!" Trent and Qiana each freed a hand to wave, the bigger cooler between them.
Jane called back, "Enrique! You been here long?"
"Helped get the fire pit ready and everything." He met her halfway up the dune and took one side of the cooler from her.
"Thanks," Jane said.
"Think nothing of it, friendo. You bring Cendrine with you?"
"She had an important-as-balls work trip this weekend."
"Ah, fuck, too bad." He watched her as he walked sideways, both of his hands on the plastic handle. "Or is it not too bad?"
"She dumped a lot of family bullshit on me these past few weeks," Jane admitted. "I've been a good girlfriend and held her hand for it, and I like that I can be there for her, but by Gad do I need a weekend to recharge."
They reached the rain shelter beside the fire pit and lowered the snack box to the tarp that covered the sand. Several other food and beverage containers were already waiting. "Advantage: boys," Enrique declared. "Gotta admit. Never fuck the same one twice, and everything's cool."
"In my youth," Jane replied, "in my youth." She flipped open the lid, grabbed a cold package of peanut butter cups, and threw it at Trent, who caught it. "Hey, you seen Daria?"
"She was puttering around in one of the tents earlier. I guess the one she brought. And she set up her sauce collection by the grill."
« Lucky you, » Qiana told Trent.
Christobel came over from the audio command center, gesturing to Trent and Qiana that they should plug in their gear. " 'Sup, Jay-yane," she greeted. She was not much taller than Daria, and much more freckled. "You got any cheese in there?"
"A brick of gouda from Payday, just 'cause I knew you'd be here."
"Best Jane ever. Hey, is something up with Daria? I gave her one of my magic brownies, and then she ate it along with a gelcap of something, and then she got really into collecting seashells."
"We were gonna trip on 2C-B tonight," said Jane. "I guess she... double-fisted?"
Enrique quipped, "And she seemed like such a modest girl."
"Hey now." Ribald comments about Daria when she wasn't even present sat wrong with Jane, in a way she couldn't easily articulate. "She's had angst coming and going lately." Jane thought about explaining further. One boy in Daria's poetry workshop elective who had asked her out and then gotten bitter and resentful when she declined. Another boy that she had gone on a first date with, after months of warming to the idea of seeing him as more than a friend. Once in the context of dating, he'd been vain and demanding. Jane decided that further explanations would feel too much like gossip and summarized: "Crash course in guys being the worst. We both need a break."
Enrique admitted the justice of her remarks with a canted nod. "Good time to take some brain drugs."
"Amen to that," said Christobel.
Jane looked around, let the salt breeze wrap around her and flow within her loose cotton blouse. At least a dozen people had already arrived, and more would filter in soon.
Daria was on the far side of the fire pit, crouching down just at the uppermost reach of the waves. Her hair was abundantly loose over her shoulders.
"Talk with ya more soon," Jane said with a wave, and jogged down the beach to meet her best friend.
* * *
Daria was wearing less than Jane. This momentarily threw Jane for a loop. She herself had gone with the black denim knee-length pants over her most boyish pair of swimming trunks, and a free shirt from a BFAC event that she didn't mind destroying with sand and smoke. Her friend... Well, it wasn't unusual for a beach. The running shorts and sports top, in black and green, covered more of her than many a bikini would. On a lady jogger, they'd be clothes that Jane would consider a fringe benefit of running as a hobby. On Daria, the outfit was honestly a little unsettling. "Good evening," Jane said, then bent down to untie her sneakers and peel out of them and her socks.
Daria was mumble-singing to herself a tune that Jane did not quite recognize. She looked up and smiled. "Good evening, friend."
—Clothes that Daria would only wear at a private beach party, where no one cares, where other people will end up in the buff, in semidarkness, on hallucinogens.
Phenethylamines did nothing to Daria's inhibitions directly, Jane knew, but they did fill her senses with distortions and distractions so that many anxieties were pushed to the side.
"I came up on two drugs at the same time," Daria informed her. "I'm multitasking. Also, I heard the music of the spheres. The harmonies that underlie the order of creation."
Jane knelt beside her. "Oh? And what does the music of the spheres sound like?"
Daria spoke-sang, "Video killed the radio star..."
Jane guffawed. Daria gave her one of her looks, the one that said ha ha, yes, but also it's funny because it's true. Then she turned and stared off towards the sea. Far away, the clouds that had missed them were making summer heat lightning. "I think there may be a deeper level than that, though."
"I wish I had gotten here sooner," Jane told her. Back at the nucleus of the party, Christobel was still fiddling with the sound system. She was testing it with "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Daria's friends.
Daria asked, "Would you come with me a little farther out? I don't want to fall over and drown."
"The drugs got on top of you, did they?" Jane undid her belt and rose, kicked off her black denim, offered Daria her hand. She let Daria set the pace of wading out into the surf.
Daria sat again, in water that covered her stretched-out legs. The receding waves piled up around her waist and splashed upon the small of her back. She sighed in what might have been contentment.
Jane held her palms out flat just beneath the surface of the water and felt the waves move first one way past them, then the other.
Without prelude, Daria asked, "Does it hurt you that I can only say I love you when I'm intoxicated?"
"What? Where did this come from?" This was unfiltered even on the scale of her tripping.
Daria tipped her head back to the zenith and watched the darkening sky. "I know I'm barely enough, Jane. And I struggle to be even the little that you've rightly come to expect of me."
"Daria, what on Earth... You are so much for me. You got me into college. You were my steady rock when I came out. You talk art with me from a place of passion, a perspective that I can't get from anyone else, pushing me to grow as an artist. You mean the world to me, and it hurts to see you be so cruel to yourself."
Daria looked helpless. And the thought that she could not stop treating herself this way hurt all the more.
An apology in her tone, Daria said, slowly, "I had hoped the drugs and the sea would wash the angst away."
"Is it working?"
"They help. And it helps that you're here." She was silent for a beat, flexed her feet in the water. "You want... to join me? I have your 2C-B dose in my tent."
"In a minute. When you're ready to get up. I'm not going to leave you to fall over."
"Mmmm."
Jane was vaguely aware of dancing and the beginnings of a fire, back at the party.
Daria spoke up again. "I do love you. Need to say it now. So it'll stick and you'll never forget even when I'm too weak to say it when I should."
—Sentences falling apart means the psychedelics getting even stronger. Waiting for the avalanche...
"Daria..."
And now the words poured out of her. "Everything just tells me that I'm no damn good at it. If a boy wants me, it poisons our friendship. If I grow to want a boy, I burn the friendship to the ground. I'm only still friends with Tom because my lust fell back to nothing and he moved on to another girl and thence to sucking cock. And me? What scrap of evidence is there that it won't always be this way? This is just how my life works, and how it's going to keep working. I'm the freak who will hurt and hurt and hurt again. If there was a drug I could take that would stop my lust from ever waking up again, I would take it in a heartbeat. If there was some way... If I had a villain scar, maybe, across my face right through my eye, maybe I could..."
"Oh, Daria. Don't even imagine it."
"Wouldn't even have the courage... In here, you know," she brought her fist to her heart, "I want to get beaten. To be whipped in time to Wendy Carlos' 'Country Lane' from the Clockwork Orange soundtrack. But there's no one... I can't trust anyone to get that close."
—Daria a masochist? Literally, not just when it comes to her course load?
"That's. Oddly specific."
"You know me better than anyone, and... Do you understand? If either of us ever... I can't handle it."
"If either of us ever?"
Daria pulled her legs in and leaned towards Jane. "I need you in my life. You're the anchor in my thoughts, the light that shines in through my memories, the only one who can always make my life make any kind of sense. I write down every dream with you in it because I can't bear to lose any of them. I can't lose you. And if either of us ever... Jane, I hope with every drop of blood in my body that you never want to fuck me. I can't lose you. I can't live without us." Her eyes were wide, her gaze searched deep into Jane, pleading, with fear that was rising into terror.
Jane found Daria's hands where they made fists in the sand and covered them with her own. "Hey. Hey hey hey. I would never do anything to lose you. I'd never do anything to hurt you. I need us, too."
Daria slumped. Her hair fell before her. Jane shifted so her legs pointed off to the side and put an arm around Daria's shoulders.
Now the words came in a whisper that stumbled over the sound of the breaking waves. " 'm the problem, really. 'm the risk. Just our best guess that'm straight. But your girlfriend is prettier'n me. All your boytoys were hotter'n me."
"I love you, silly tripping girl," Jane whispered back.
Daria's voice was a little stronger now. "Why do you think I asked you to put me in your life drawing portfolio?"
"Hmm?"
"Because that's the only way this body of mine will do anyone any good."
"Oh, Daria..."
"You won't draw me?" Sounding truly hurt.
"Daria, I will draw you as many times as you'd like."
"Mmm. 's good payback." She detached herself, gently, and leaned backward onto her elbows. "You know, you look really cool when I'm on hallucinogens. Spirals suit you."
Jane rose and offered her hand once more. "I wanna be tripping for this."
They walked without hurrying back up the slope of the beach. En passant, Jane scooped up her clothes and shoes. Daria wobbled and weaved, reacting to one motion after another in her field of view. But moving was good for her. New sense input.
Quietly enough that her words did not carry, Daria told her, "I watch you even when I'm sober. I watch ever'one. Gotta learn how gestures work. But you're just... so much person. I must have used motions of yours for half a doz'n characters."
"Glad to make the world of words a richer place."
They made a half-circle around the fire. Jane nodded and gave the occasional fist-bump as they navigated the crowd. The only one who paid them special mind was Qiana. « All cool? »
"All cool," affirmed Jane.
"Really fucking high," Daria deadpanned.
* * *
Trust Daria to bring a place to a party to hide from the party.
The tent was big enough for two sleeping bags, but it only held one. Daria had deposited her backpack inside and apparently distributed some of the contents to the tent floor. Jane switched on the lantern she found by the sleeping bag, then moved back past Daria to zip up the door.
"Fun-time pill in the backpack?" asked Jane. Daria nodded. Jane rummaged past a flashlight and a stash of protein bars and a change of clothes, felt a prescription bottle at the bottom, and then the motion of pulling it out brought her attention back to Daria, who had just peeled off her top.
—Holy shit, she is beautiful.
—She is tiny and beautiful and now she is completely naked and this will never work out and I will ruin everything. I want to sweep her into my arms and kiss her senseless and I will lose Cendrine to jealousy and lose Daria for betrayal and she will be right about everything and we will be over and neither of us will go on
Across the chasm.
Daria's eyes were closed. Her smile was slight and soft but actively changing, as new sights kept appearing for her.
"Towel?" Jane offered, taking it from the pack and holding it to Daria's fingers so that she did not need to open her eyes to find it.
"Thank you. There's a sketchbook and some pens by the canteen. If you want."
"You do all your rough drafts in these, right?"
"It feels... posh. In a nice way. And like you are always a little bit with me."
—Down, down, feelings down, it's a random neural surge that means nothing, just a capsaicin kick, it will pass
"Let's do this." Jane slammed the capsule into her gullet and chased it with a swig of water. "Oops." There was a smile in her voice, and she could tell that Daria heard it.
"Keep your eyes closed for me. You're seeing pretty great visuals, right?" Daria nodded. Jane dropped her voice into the most gentle register she could reach, into the voice her brother had used to console her when the other seventh-grade girls had broken her colored pencils and called her a dyke, the voice he had used when he read Sherlock Holmes in their own family tent, Holmes comforting a distraught client, asking the questions that will point the way to truth. "Can you describe the visuals for me?"
"Strong spirals, and cobwebs... changing to... changing to honeycombs. Curving. Like I could hold them. Now... crystalline leaves... and... flowering gemstones."
"You hear that, Daria? Trent and Qiana have started their jam session. She's breaking out the samples from Fantastic Planet. Remember you introduced her to everything in your film music collection? And how you got them time alone together because you knew they were two halves of a whole? That's your kindness out there, Daria, your caring. The world is paying you back with extras."
"Mmm, Jane. Think'm gonna fall over."
"It's all right. I've got you. There's a soft sleeping bag, on top of soft sand. It's all right." And now she found another tone, one she did not think she had ever used before. "Just sink back if you want to. I'm right here. Just let yourself go. Just breathe it all out. I'm right here with you. Just listen to the music. You don't have to worry about a thing. Breathe out your worry. Breathe in your kindness. I'm right here for you. Listen to the music and let your visuals get stronger. You have nothing to do except be an artist's model and enjoy being incredibly goddamn high."
"You'll be joining me?" Tiny and hopeful.
"Of course. You make it look like a very fun place to be."
"Mmmrp. No lies detected."
Jane began with a warm-up sketch. Only five minutes, only Daria's face. She found herself slipping into the flow, like every figure-drawing session in the studio when the model dropped their robe and Jane was suddenly obligated to make elbows look right.
Next sketch. All of Daria now, her eyes still faithfully closed, resting on her back with her legs up and crossed. Arms above her head, palms out.
"I like drawing your hair," Jane said as she realized it. "It's... simple from a distance, but up close it does interesting little things."
"Hmmmm, thank you. Is it OK if I talk?"
"Sure, if you want."
"God, Jane, your voice is... jade and obsidian and silver wires..."
"And what is the music?"
"Photo-negative clouds, and flashes of heat dark'ning... Chains of DNA unwinding... Ah. Nerves laid bare... Electric pulses that are also touch, taste..."
Jane was starting to feel the 2C-B now. Coming on as phenethylamines usually did, tension in her back and legs and core. Her central nervous system ratcheting up. The recognition that every breath took her further from baseline. The urge to breathe as deeply as possible to feel her muscles at play.
"Getting the body load now," Jane told her friend. "It feels like... a happier weight than before."
"Sounds... I'm glad. Always want... you happy."
"You're very good at it," Jane informed her.
"There's something... some place beyond the storm over the sea. It's not... what you think. There's... a city. The streets are... the places we find when we are lost, on the right nights with the right people. With each other. The places we can't find again even when we return. The lamps and pavement trees and their leaves against brickwork and stairways making odd connections that you recall in paint, that I keep trying to use to unlock my stories just so. Salience, or the thing that salience is the signal for. The thing that sublimity is the barrier shielding us from. The violinist busking on the summer night breeze is playing... Harmonice altiōre mundi. The deeper music of the spheres."
God, she was getting high harder and faster than phenethylamines had ever done for her, just listening to Daria. She remembered, now, trying to have sex with Cendrine on hallucinogens. It had been an amusing failure. Everything in the orbit of her senses had been a distraction. This? This was different. Visuals were well and kicked in. Shadows were more alive. Contours in the air, a halo around the lantern. Now, her pen just had to follow them. Nothing was a distraction. Everything was an accentuation. Of the light, of Daria.
"Hey, friend."
"Yes, Jane? Your voice, your voice, naf'r, amō..."
"I love you like I've loved no other friend in the world."
"You sound pretty high yourself. Can I see you?"
"Of course."
Daria opened her eyes. The glitter of tears began to form. "I have decided," she said, "that seeing you high whilst I am high is an amazing gift."
Jane felt tears in her own eyes now.
"May I see your drawings?" asked Daria, diffidently.
"Please." Jane handed over the sketchbook.
Daria's fingertips graced the paper. "Also an amazing gift," she said.
The gratitude and the feedback loop of Daria seeing Daria as intensified by the 2C-B rocketed Jane into lunar space. "What I'm seeing now needs... watercolor? Like you're a cyborg girl surrounded by living data streams. I want to... interpret all the pain that you've trusted me to hear, to make it mean something because I can't heal it. You see yourself as a brain in a case, dependent on a body built for the wrong purpose... What are you doing?"
Daria had reached for a pen. Pupils blown wide, she flipped to the next page and began scribbling intensely. "Getting this down. This is good stuff, Jane. We need to hold onto it until you can try it."
Jane laughed. A carefree, melodic laugh that surprised herself. "Good thinking, Daria. Good thinking."
"You know," said Daria, "I kind of want to watch the fire now."
Jane realized she wanted to draw Daria by firelight, Daria like this, Daria bubbling with untried phrases in all the languages she had studied, Daria trusting with her armor off. With a pang, she then realized that it could not be, that her friend could only reach this undefended place when they were alone together.
And she had seen all these thoughts go across Jane's face, and she had understood. "I'm sorry," she said. "I love you."
Jane's heart broke in two.
She let her hands reach out about herself through the spirals. She found Daria's clothes. Still damp.
"The trick is not to mind the cold," Daria said, pulling her shorts back on. She paused, her top in hand. Then she stretched over and rested her fingertips on Jane's wrist. "Hey. Thank you. For everything. Really."
Jane nodded.
Daria continued, "We're going to go out there and watch the fire and talk with your brother and the woman who is too good for him and eat mango sorbet. I have never been too high for mango sorbet."
And now, to her own surprise, Jane laughed again.
"And, Jane... hey, what?"
Jane was peeling out of her own clothes with great vitesse.
"Dariatron, nobody will be surprised if I show some skin at a beach party. You feel safe watching me? Then you should have my gestures by firelight."
Daria found her jacket. It was conveniently equipped with pockets full of goodies, and it might be helpful if they walked further from the fire later at night. Jane, meanwhile, was bare to the waist and grinning madly, the sting still in her eyes. "You know we have hours of phenethylamine ahead of us?"
"Believe me, I know," Daria said, gave one more smile meant for Jane alone, and climbed out of the tent.