Dear Jane,
I feel like a total smeghead, but I've checked everything and there's just no way I can get back from this conference in time for your first day at BFAC. Endless apologies, my friend. I won't return until late-late Thursday night. But the good news is that there's a party at my living group on Friday. You should come. I promise pizza.
* * *
Jane didn't have a clear sense of what "off-campus living group" meant. Apparently the term could encompass a brick townhouse on a street across the river from Daria's university, a street so scenic in a tree-lined boulevard way that it felt wrong to have it exist in the same city where Jane lived.
A few seconds after eight in the evening, she climbed the steps and pressed the doorbell amid the brass filigree.
A subwoofer rumbled inside the building. On the other side of the thick wood-metal-glass door, she heard somebody yell, "Door's broken!" And then a green-haired boy in jeans and a sweatshirt opened the door for her. "For the party? Welcome, welcome!"
Jane stepped across the threshold. The entryway was full of coat-hooks and shelves of mailboxes. "I'm looking for Daria?" It came out as more of a question than intended.
"Oh, sure." He quickly walked around the computer terminal at the end of the foyer and into a central room at the foot of a staircase, and then he tilted his head back amid the students carrying pizza boxes and chairs and tubs of ice cream and yelled up the stairwell, past two or three balconies, "Hey, Dungeonmaster!"
Jane saw several things happen in quick succession. The first was a red glow, spirals of scarlet light projected over the polished wood handrails and the underside of a balcony, sedately turning. The second was a girl's head peeking over the rail. The third was the girl vanishing again, followed by the focus of the spirals moving and the light getting brighter as sock-covered feet padded quickly down and around the square-helix stairs.
"Jane! You made it!"
The source of the light was, somehow, a colander that Daria was wearing as a hat, its holes filled with the brightest LEDs that Jane had ever seen, switched on and off in successive spirals to create the sense of motion.
Daria paused at the bottom step. Thick black wool socks instead of boots, leggings under her skirt, blue cotton instead of rust-orange under her jacket, the same glasses.
"Hi. Um..." Jane considered that a valiant effort. She brought her right arm up to wave, and Daria stepped down and reached out and clasped her hand.
"I missed you," Daria said.
Jane was about to speak when a girl hefting a plastic tub labeled SPICE CREAM paused on her way to the dining room and said, "Wait, are you Jane? From, like, the time the cruise ship hit the garbage barge?"
"We shouldn't let such things define us," Daria said. "But yes. Jane, this is Beth, a.k.a. Milkweed. Milkweed, Jane."
"Rock on. Oh, excuse me." She adjusted her grip on the spice cream, whatever that was, and continued on her way.
"OK, my questions are piling up," Jane said.
"Dungeonmaster is from my initials. The joke was supposed to be that it's funny because I have no interest in D&D. And because I act less horny than anyone they've ever met."
A boy halfway up the stairs to the next floor leaned over the rail. "If it's not funny—"
An answering call from above: "Repeat until it is!"
Daria put on an exaggeratedly world-weary expression. In a matching tone, she called out, "And if it is funny—"
The boy on the stairs and the voice from farther up, in unison: "Repeat until it isn't!"
Daria was still holding Jane's hand. "You're punctual," she said.
"Making up for missing you at Christmas," Jane said. Colorado with Trent and both her parents—not an opportunity she'd wanted to skip—and a couple more weeks' delay in seeing Daria again hadn't felt that long...
"Come on," said Daria from underneath her glowing kitchen-gear hat. "Cocoa will be up in a minute."
* * *
The pizza was cheesy and greasy and filling. Spice cream turned out to be vanilla ice cream made with capsaicin extract. "Once you stop eating," Daria warned in her dry monotone, "the pain begins."
Jane tried a bite. Once the milk fats started to dissipate in her mouth, she began to appreciate the truth of Daria's statement. "It's hard to shake the feeling, my friend," said Jane around the burning, "that you are... happy."
Jane remembered plenty of times when Daria had smiled. "I think it was Jefferson" and "I'm jiggy with it"... Dozens of subtle signals over the years when one of Jane's jokes landed particularly well, each time making Jane feel a little lighter for a thankful moment. Daria had a well-buried playfulness, a trait that usually only came out when skewering someone deserving... But this was playfulness without malice, without the need to deploy her sharp edges as a survival mechanism.
"Lawndale was a fucking poisoned knife in both our hearts," Daria stated.
Jane was sure she had something to say to that, but there was a sudden tumult, another boy running up the basement stairs screaming, "Carrot! In my no-o-ose!" And Milkweed was leaning over the balcony handrail to announce, "My Santa dildo got used, apparently!"
"This again," Daria observed.
Again? Jane mouthed.
"Jane, as long as no one has the kind of capsaicin incident that ends with them humping a bowl of milk on the center stairwell, I will count the night a success."
* * *
They were one landing up when the ceiling lights started getting switched off. "Uh-oh," Daria said. Something was being brought out and plugged in below them, in the central room at the stairwell's end. "Don't look at the Ark, Jane."
Naturally, Jane craned her body over the handrail to see.
"Aah! Fuck!" She sprang back and covered her eyes.
Acrid white light poured from a single point below like a captured star. "Salvaged airway landing beacon," Daria explained. She rested her hand on Jane's shoulder. The commotion provoked by the light was loud. "My room ought to be quiet," Daria said, her voice almost lost in the background. "It's a quad, though. And we'll have to follow food-orgy rules."
Jane was still blinking afterimages out of her eyes when Daria swung the oaken door inward and ushered her to join. The overhead lights were off, and Daria's hat was the brightest source of illumination. Her room was traced out one spiral at a time. Almost enough to read by, if reading in fragments to the cyclic sweep of digital control was your thing.
It was bigger than Jane's room in Lawndale. Three desks—no, four—under a loft that made an L shape above them, and... a cargo net strung over the remaining space, under which were two sofas arranged to face a coffee table that currently hosted an array of sweet and savory morsels.
"OK," said Daria, "room rules are that you can only eat something if somebody else feeds it to you." She shrugged. "Not my idea. And if you want anything from my own personal snack drawer, I'll claim an exemption."
"Still full from downstairs," Jane remarked. She noticed a bowl of chocolate-covered strawberries and wanted to laugh. Here in Brain Town, home planet of Daria-caliber intellects, everyone was still a horny idiot. "All right, next question."
"What, this old thing?" Daria tapped the rim of the colander around which crimson spirals orbited. "Engineer roommate's project to get his mind off a break-up. I helped put it together. So yes, Jane, he and I plugged a lot of holes."
Jane slipped her fingers through the interstices of the cargo net above her head. She gave it a gentle, experimental tug. Nothing came loose. "And is this safe?"
"It's held a dozen people. Volume is the limiting problem, not weight." Daria stepped over to a wooden ladder and started to climb. "Come on, if you like."
Daria pulled a blanket off her mattress and tossed it into the net ahead of them. "Cords can cut into you a bit otherwise." She sat cross-legged at one edge of the blanket and gestured for Jane to sit in front of her.
Jane settled in, knees together and pointing off to her side. "I take it back, Daria. You are definitely happy here."
"If this is a wind-up for a positively glowing remark..."
"Dammit! Knew you'd beat me to it." Jane paused. "But, like, a party? You invited me. You know everybody. You've shared stories. You're... relaxed. At a party."
"I have to work for my grades for the first time in my life," Daria said. "I suppose I've had to learn how to relax, too."
"And what does that involve, when it's not a night like this?"
"Movie screenings on campus. Video games downstairs. Exploring the city. Shooting the breeze with everybody here over dinner. Plugging holes."
"You mean..."
"No, Jane, I was being ironical."
Jane felt that actually, they'd just crossed over a line into a hightened realm of sincerity.
And then the door opened again and four or five people milled in.
"Food orgy rules," Daria reminded them, projecting her voice downward.
Someone started "Little Fluffy Clouds" by the Orb playing on the room's speaker system. Daria nudged herself closer to Jane and spoke a measure more quietly. "I haven't been tempted to have sex. I tried getting high at a party on campus, and I got jittery and paranoid."
"That's not the Daria I remember," Jane said, equally quietly.
"Maybe then you were a calming influence."
They had smoked up a few times early in their friendship, before Jane had gradually lost interest—it had been one of the things she'd done to fill the empty space, and then Daria had arrived and made the space no longer empty. "I tried a couple times after you moved up here," Jane said. "It reminded me too much of the time before we met."
"Hey, it's Daria's Jane!" Milkweed below them.
Jane looked through the netting and waved her fingers.
The guy on Milkweed's arm said, "Oh, wow, we thought you were mythical."
"No, just legendary," Jane quipped.
"You're the one," Milkweed asked, "who convinced the store clerk at 3 AM to let you drive off with the whole kiosk full of AOL CDs?"
And they're off. Jane confirmed the story of their Tank shenanigans the previous summer, and the one about the potato gun, and the teachers' strike, and paintball. "Hey," she asked, "did Daria tell you about the time we tried to go to Alternapalooza?"
"Pervy squirrel," Daria recalled. "Lump on my head, bee sting on my arm, defunct peanut butter sandwich on my ass, and I missed my calling to become a diner waitress."
Jane considered adding and all in front of her crush, my brother, thereby proving her bad taste in men, but she didn't feel like ribbing at Trent's expense, and anyway that would have set Daria up for a riposte like bad taste I confirmed by stealing her boyfriend. Jane realized her mouth was halfway open to make that gambit, and Daria's right eyebrow was raised a few degrees. Obviously, Daria could tell where Jane had thought of going.
Retelling their old stories, and hearing about Daria's semester from her housemates—she had apparently learned to pick locks and could make a pretty good bread pudding—and sharing her own hopes for BFAC... Jane was at ease. More than that, she was bordering on giddy.
Milkweed and her guy fellow and the green-haired boy who had let Jane in the front door were sharing the sofa under the windows, making a closed loop of feeding one another bits of cheese.
"That does look pretty good," Jane admitted.
Daria twisted herself sideways and called down. "Hey, Pinhead, Sophitia, one of you pass up a couple strawberries."
"Ah!" Milkweed exclaimed in jest. "The voice of God from above!"
"No, just the talking chandelier," Daria said.
"One moment," said the green-haired boy, briefly disentangling himself to fetch two strawberries from the bowl and hand them upwards. Jane pinched hers through the cargo net and held it by the leafy end.
"Thanks," Jane said. The adjustments needed to receive fruit meant that both of them were closer to lying on their sides than sitting upright.
He smiled and sat again, grabbing another strawberry on the way, which Milkweed then proceeded to eat from his hand, passing her right arm under his to feed him a hazelnut truffle. "No exceptions, you two," she said.
Holding the chocolate-dipped fruit in her right hand, Daria shrugged her left shoulder.
They mimicked the model provided for them and crossed their arms. Jane bit down first, by a fraction of a second. On her tongue she felt first chocolate, then strawberry, then realization.
She looked back at Daria. Unlike Jane, she had closed her eyes. She opened them again and regarded Jane levelly.
Jane said, "That must have looked incredibly gay."
Daria nodded fractionally. "I'm sure of it."
"Maybe half as gay as it felt."
Daria moved her free hand, the one that was not still resting a few centimeters from Jane's lips, to interlock her fingers with Jane's, down where Jane's free hand was waiting in the narrow space between their bodies.
"I think we just explained a lot about ourselves," Daria said.
Jane breathed out. "Yeah."
Neither of them wanted to move or to talk for a while.
"You light up the room," Jane said.
"You light up my life," Daria replied.
"This is going to get in the way," Jane said. She reached under Daria's chin and detached the buckle for her electronic colander hat. Daria gripped it with both hands and lifted it away, setting it on the cargo net beside them so that the spirals played over the ceiling and its junction with the walls and their own bodies.
"No more obstacles," Daria said.
Jane's fingers were still making featherlight touches along Daria's jawline. "Lawndale was a poisoned knife in our hearts," Jane said.
And now all the obstacles were gone, even the ones within themselves that they had barely known existed.
Recumbent against the cargo net, amid the rotating light, they moved together.
Jane had just felt Daria's exhalation upon her own lips when—
"So, I was, like, masturbating—"
If Jane had ever made a list of sentences she did not expect to hear a man assert with drunken confidence on the other side of a wall, that would have been in the top ten, easily. She rolled halfway over to stare in the direction of the sound, an expression of the purest what the fuck taking over her countenance.
"The keyboard story," Daria monotoned. Jane looked back and saw her pinching the bridge of her nose, pushing her glasses up and squeezing her eyelids shut.
"So, I was like masturbating," the guy said again.
"I promise he's actually very nice," Daria commented.
Then there followed something indistinct about a keyboard, and, "So I'm like, I'm gonna try Robert's trick. I am not gonna cum. And guess what? No... cum. None!"
And the carrot-in-my-nose voice was back: "No cum?!"
"The school's best TA for differential equations," Daria observed. She fanned out her fingers while keeping her eyes shut.
"None!" declared the first drunken voice. Jane watched Daria rub her eye under her glasses. She had never seen a person wince harder. It was delightful.
"Daria, I didn't expect tonight to be so... educational."
Daria called to the people below, "Could someone please turn the music up? We were on the point of lesbian things happening."
"Oh, were we?" Jane asked, eyebrow raised and locked.
She heard tapping on a keyboard and then Milkweed saying, "Well in that case..."
The room speakers began playing Type O Negative's "My Girlfriend's Girlfriend".
"Hey," Jane said, "it's Tom's theme song."
Daria, finally, was provoked to silence her in the way they both ached for.
When they were both breathless, Daria recovered first, enough to whisper in Jane's ear, "How was that for fucking educational, my love?"
A few days before finals, with summer so close that they could taste it, Jane clambered out of a midafternoon nap in Daria's bed to see Daria sitting in the cargo net, scribbling devotionally in a composition notebook. She watched Daria look to her side and refer to a thick book and then return to scribbling.
"Math class in Lawndale must have been shit prep for you here," Jane said, rubbing her eyes into alertness.
"Mm. I spent all last summer trying to give myself a better foundation, if you recall. And all my first semester here trying to keep my head above water."
"Ah-hah. And what grade did you eventually get in Calculus for Brains?"
Daria paused. "B."
"And what's your average so far this term?"
"In Multivariable Calculus for Brains that Pulsate Even Harder? A-minus."
Jane sat up and stretched. Daria allocated a few seconds to find this very distracting. Jane had definite mattress hair, and her only clean shirt that day had apparently been the thrifted man's button-down that she never liked to sleep in because it got too wrinkly even for an artist. The sight of her in bra and boxers lodged pleasantly in the part of Daria's brain that hadn't known what it had been missing for three years and change.
Daria copied out the setup for the next problem and began turning it over in her mind. She felt the net oscillate and looked up again. Jane had climbed from the loft into the net and, folded into a crouch, was scrutinizing Daria through the viewfinder of her SLR. Click, adjust, click, adjust...
Daria asked, "Going through the whole routine of bracketing your exposures on my account?"
"I'll bracket you with my exposure," Jane leered.
Daria closed the notebook upon her pencil and leaned forward into a stretch. Jane obligingly held the camera out for her, and Daria took it and sat back.
Jane looked around at the collection of books that Daria had accumulated in the slight hollow her weight made in the net. "I'll bring the divergence if you bring the curl, baby." She stretched her legs out in front of her and leaned back against the edge of the loft.
Daria smiled behind the camera, focused in upon Jane, and snapped a photo.
Jane heard the door open below her and off to her side. Someone took a few steps in and then more rapidly took those same steps back out. From the landing outside came the plaintive cry, "They're making lesbian porn in the net and I need to study!"
"Sorry!" Daria and Jane called back in unison.
Jane reached her arms behind herself. "Although..."
"Hold that pose," Daria instructed. Click, adjust, click, adjust. "After finals." Click.