Her first day at Lawndale High was not going well.
Right off the bat, she had noticed something was off with the way the other students dressed. The boys mainly wore blue jeans and leather jackets, with their hair styled in pompadours. The girls had skirts - wide skirts, not like hers, all in bubblegum pink. Their tops were also pink, and some even wore scarves and sunglasses (the scarves were, naturally, pink). It was as if everybody was auditioning to be an extra in Grease.
The principal had told the new batch of students (that right there should have raised a question - why the hell was the school getting a large chunk of new students mid-semester?) that they would be going to see Manson, the head shrink, and the way he said it unnerved Daria a little.
Dr. Manson (Daria doubted whether the woman had ever seen the inside of a psychiatric learning institution) had showed her an image, a silhouette of two people talking, and asked her what she saw in the picture. Daria replied with her stock answer ("A herd of beautiful wild ponies running free across the plains,") and Manson asked if she was being a wise guy. Daria replied that she lacked the genitalia to be a wise guy, and Dr. Manson PULLED A GUN ON HER IN RESPONSE. She informed Daria in no uncertain terms that she would 'whack' Daria and have her buried in the cement of a foundation at a construction site.
After escaping from the run-in with Dr. Manson with her life, Daria was instructed to immediately go to her next class. Upon telling the school's secretary that a gun had been pointed at her less than five minutes previous, the older woman shrugged and said she shouldn't have mouthed off.
Her schedule had listed the teacher as simply being called 'Tony the Teeth'. She had wondered at that, before finding that Tony 'the Teeth' DeMartino had, instead of regular teeth or even regular dentures, a set of stainless-steel metal teeth, each of which was razor sharp. She would have asked him what it was like working with Roger Moore in the movies, but the sawed-off shotgun he had nestled in his lap when she entered the room disavowed her of that idea post-haste.
Tony the Teeth (he insisted all his students call him that) asked Daria about the effects Prohibition had on organized crime. Daria related what she had read - that Prohibition had opened the gates, via bootlegging, for individuals like Al Capone to profit greatly on the black market demand for alcohol. "Of course," Daria had said, "Capone later went to Alcatraz and was driven crazy by syphilis, so crime doesn't always pay."
Tony the Teeth had sneered, said that Daria's answer was almost suspiciously good, and coldly informed her that she would be sleeping with the fishes if he ever caught her cheating. She looked around, hoping to see the other students laughing at the joke, but nobody was laughing, and it wasn't a joke.
After that class period, she went back to the office to call up her mother, informing her that two staff members had directly threatened to murder her, but Helen seemed to ignore her, laughing it off and telling Daria she was just going through new school jitters. Daria began to shout, but Helen had simply wished her a good day and hung up.
She was called to the office once again at the end of the day, where she was met by Dr. Manson and given an offer she couldn't refuse. (Dr. Manson used those exact words). She told Daria that she would be attending self-esteem classes, to learn how to value her own life better, because otherwise something might just happen to end that life. An accident, perhaps. A tragic but unavoidable accident.
Daria accepted the offer.
So now she sat as far away from the front of the room as possible, waiting for the teacher to come in as the other students filed in.
He dramatically kicked the door in and just stood there for a few seconds, allowing Daria to take in his appearance. He was wearing a freaking zoot suit and fedora, and held a violin case in one hand. Daria doubted it held a violin.
He stormed over to the desk, where he sat the violin case. "Alright, youse mugs, simmer down!" he shouted. "My name's 'Tommy' O'Neill. You know why they call me Tommy?" He didn't give the kids a chance to answer, as he whipped open the violin case, snatched out the Thompson submachine gun inside, and emptied a whole clip into the ceiling. Daria shrunk down as far into her seat as she could as dust and plaster rained down on the rest of the students (who sat there as docilely as if 'Tommy' had done nothing at all).
O'Neill replaced the Tommy gun in its case, then straightened his tie. "I wanna talk to youse all about realizing your actuality, and you all better stand up afterward and proudly proclaim 'I am', capische?" He snarled the last word.
Daria wanted to know what realizing your actuality actually meant, but she wanted to not be gunned down by the insane teacher even more.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw some motion. Turning, she saw that the girl who sat next to her, a raven-haired girl in a red dress with white polka-dots, was handing her a note. With a quick glance to see if the gun-toting maniac was watching, she snatched it, unfolded it, and read it.
'I know a guy who can get you dressed up properly,' it read.
Daria scribbled a reply. 'What makes you think I want to fit in?' She handed it back.
The girl read her reply, jotted down a counter-reply, and passed it back. 'You were scared shitless by that machine gun display. I can tell you right now that if you don't fit in, he won't be gunning down the ceiling next time.'
Daria gulped and wrote down, 'Fine. But I reserve the right to hate every minute of it.'
The girl read this last response and smirked at Daria. A final scribble at the bottom of the page, then a hand-off to Daria.
'Just like regular high school. Call me Jane.'
XXXXXXXXXX
Astute readers will notice that this is a greatly revised and expanded version of the first half of the first chapter of my fic 'Untitled Crazy Themed Schools Fic', which I originally wrote for an IC submitted by MystikSpiral entitled 'Gangster School?', about what Daria would be like if Lawndale was an inner-city type school. However, I decided to take the title of the IC quite literally and came up with a silly story in which most everybody in the school were literal gangsters, either Prohibition-era mobsters (the teachers, mainly) or 1950s-era greasers (the students). This is also partially borrowed from an episode of Star Trek where an entire planet had a Prohibition-era gangster-inspired culture, which is quite an oddity in and of itself.
When I elected to continue that ficlet and branch off into other crazy themed schools in the area (a Nazified Fielding and a Cowboyified Oakwood, I didn't really have any specific direction in mind, so it kind of sputtered and died. But just recently, I figured out where I could take the series! So I start it anew. Have no doubt that it won't be a ludicrous ride at times, but this time there'll be bits of serious stuck around here and there.