A borrowed space in late summer, between the arboretum soil and the branches of a weeping linden. Two young women.
"Jane, when did we meet? For the first time?"
Flat on her back too, beside Daria: "Self-esteem class. Why, need a refresher?"
"That's when we first spoke. But you saw me before then?"
"In, uh, in history. Sure."
"I think I remember seeing you there. But maybe I saw you for the very first time... I can't quite..."
"Does it matter?" Not bothering to prop herself up just yet.
"In the context of everything that has happened since?" Pushing her fingers across the ground, through the barrier of a sunbeam. "Probably not."
It would have said little, after all, about why she stayed, about what had led them here.
Jane turning, now, her eyes the bluest that Daria had ever seen.
"Maybe I saw you first. Maybe it was portentious and heralded by a cataclysmic noise on the organ pipes."
"A toccata and fugue?"
"Sure, both barrels."
"And I just forgot?"
"You weren't listening. Serves you right. But I learned not to expect any better from the likes of you."
"Likes of me?"
"You've got to have at least a couple."
Daria giggles, then, just a little.
"Oh, let yourself go."
"This is my letting-myself-go face. Can't you tell?"
"Every time."
Jane flips her head back to stare up again through the linden branches. Daria, looking close to the horizon, is mesmerized by the royal purple of a beech across the clearing. And Daria realizes that the sunshine with its load of leafy interruptions might last, that the world could still turn away, and the strawberries in her bag and the ink under her nails could still be enough. The munchies in their sacks and pockets could last until tomorrow, and the pantry at home was stocked for a week, and their hard drives were filled with music for the next month, and the LSD and the space between her hair and Jane's---
History never assured anybody a happy ending.
To freaks like us, she reckons, one hadn't even really been promised.
"Borges wrote," Daria begins, standing under the disco ball so that the starlike reflections of the spotlights under their colored gels make tilted orbits all around her, "that we can tell the Koran is authentic because it contains no camels; a European attempting to imitate an Arab holy book would fill it with camels end to end." She closes her eyes and cranes her neck this way and that, stretching her arms to feel the flex in her tendons. "Relatedly, Laura (1944) is a noir that begins with the sun burning in the sky like a giant magnifying glass. A noir so confident in itself it does not even rain until almost the third act."
Jane leans forward on the ratty sofa, smirking a little, and blinking with unusual rapidity. "I could listen to her for hours," she drawls.
Daria wraps her arms about herself, and her slow rocking gradually takes her to a crouch on the floor. She opens her eyes and takes in the image of Jane.
Then the door swings open and the party starts to flow back in, raucous and happy, and Daria just has time to whisper, "Thank you."
"Gahdammit, Tom didn't tell me this movie was actually funny."
"Wait, what?"
"Just, I mean, just look at it: Jesus, flying over the city, because he's hanging from a helicopter! Wheeeee!"
"No, I mean, what does Tom have to do with it?"
"That night, when your house had burned down, and you came over — oooh, foxy ladies."
"Forget I asked."
"Already have."
"Hey, just what was in that cookie you ate —"
"Uh uh, none for you. Studious Miss Morgendorffer is watching this movie for class."
"Come on, it's Intro to Film Studies. As long as I run spell-check before I turn it in, I'll be fine. Bizarre might even get me bonus points."
"Cookie tin is in my coat pocket."
Later:
"Hey, Dariatron, just how much of an asshole is this Marcello guy supposed to be? Like, this running gag of him calling his photographer buddy 'Mr. Paparazzo'. Dude, he's your friend, and that's how you introduce him to your own father? Way to rub it in."
"Uh, that's the guy's name. It's where the word paparazzi came from."
"Whoa, fuck me."
"Quiet, I feel a thesis statement coming on."
Daria steps into the room and out of her coat. She launches the latter at the armchair and curls over to begin untying her boots.
Jane asks, "Soooo, how did it go?"
Daria looks up to stare at her in silence.
"That well, huh?" Jane lifts a cardboard box from the coffee table and shakes it so that metal clinks gently within. "Nitrous, then?"
* * *
Jane always finds herself oddly charmed by watching Daria pull herself back together as the effects of a nitrous hit dissipate. The most tightly controlled person she has ever known, letting her guard down because Jane is the only one to see... the appeal is obvious, but it never grows old.
Jane has, a few times, shared a lungful of nitrous with a lover through a kiss. She can tell that Daria has put that on her mental list of experiences she expects she will never be able to try.
Daria's focus wobbles. She is clearly a little off from baseline still. She smiles faintly, at nothing in particular, and then towards Jane. "I'm glad you were here when I got back," she says.
"You want a distraction? Movie, video game?"
"Mmm. Just something to watch, I think."
Their video library is stocked with things that Daria has had to watch for her various media-studies courses. Jane has enjoyed more of them than she had anticipated. Neither The Last Laugh nor McCabe and Mrs. Miller had been her cup of tea in the story department, but as slices of cinema history to be appreciated for what they said about how that history unfolded, they had gone down easily. She gauges how tired Daria must be and turns to the TV episodes, settling on the Jeremy Brett Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. A period piece feels like the right sort of escapism.
Midway into "A Scandal in Bohemia", Daria has let her head fall onto Jane's shoulder.
Jane says, "I like how they make Irene Adler attractive by loading her up with guy traits. She's better than the King at horseback riding and pistol shooting. And then they dress up in men's evening kit and visit the Moulin Rouge," she continues. "And she completely ignores her date to really appreciate the chick dancing the can-can."
"She's an opera singer," Daria replies. "Theatre kids were never straight."
Jane and Daria lay in the sand, listening to the waves, hearing them counterpoint the crackles of the fire, as the Earth turned under the stars.
One of Daria's friends, being one of Daria's friends, put a chant from Ghost In The Shell on the stereo.
"Oh, fuck, man, that is not kind," Jane declared. "Not to those of us who are having our brains dissassembled right now."
"You like it, don't you?"
"More than I could have ever known. Daria, what are you thinking about right now?"
"How I really am as simple as what I write. How perhaps sweet mother I cannot weave and Euclid's proof of the infinitude of the primes are mortal attempts to access the same truth that longing will never end if we let it. How I really am as complex as what I write."
"Daria, that makes no sense whatsoever."
"You like it, don't you?"
"Never stop talking, my love."