To Me You Are A Work Of Art
Rating: T for future chapters
Warnings: IT'S GHEY.
Disclaimer: We don't own Daria, and are not making a profit off of writing this stuff.
1.
A yellow-lined paper in her fist, Daria stepped onto Raft's white school shuttle. She couldn't help but think it looked like a veterinary van. Her boots clomped on the muddy floor as she showed her school ID to the bus driver, a middle aged, bored looking black woman. There were two boys in neon plaid newsboy hats and ironically ugly facial hair on one side, and a tawny colored girl in a mustard pea coat and knit hat reading a copy of The Bell Jar on the other. In the back, some indistinguishable people with mushy banana like faces. Maybe this wasn't the best idea. Before she could turn around to leave, the doors had closed, and the bus started moving, relentlessly. Daria stumbled into a seat - no, more like slammed into it sideways.
When Daria was eight years old, she had read Animal Farm, with illustrations by Ralph Steadman. She remembered the cartoon of Boxer, the horse who had worked himself to death and whose final reward was to be tricked into the glue factory truck- the drawing showed the horse screaming through the barred windows, its eyes red and wide with fright, the vehicle winding down a spiraling path to the slaughtering grounds. She grimaced, thinking of herself as a decrepit animal, deceived and mindless into compliance, whose destiny was to be compressed into homogeneous gunk product. Whoopee.
Daria hadn't forgotten. She opened the paper. On it were names, and numbers: Maureen Feller, Alice Dulay, James Dillons - the referrals for psychiatrists in nearby areas. Helen had been begging her to get those referrals from the school counselor. Helen had even called the school counselor and insisted on meeting with her.
"Don't you think she s helping, sweetie?" Helen had chirped. "She seems bright enough." Daria had grunted in response. Jake had even called her.
"I know things get tough sometimes kiddo. But you need to keep positive! College is a great time of your life!"
"Probably, compared to the relentless psychological trauma and the ritualized torture of military school," Daria had muttered. As Jake relapsed into another tirade, Daria had listened listlessly, waiting until Jake would inevitably forget what he was talking about.
At that moment the bus jarred to a sudden stop, her nose crushed against the window. Daria realized, despite the embarrassment and the pain of impact, that how she never looked outside of windows of cars anymore- when she looked out, she would only truly see her own pale reflection superimposed on the passing blur of scenery, that familiar yet alien girl staring back at her dully, unimpressed. She rubbed her sore nose ruefully and readjusted her glasses on her face: every place eventually lost its charm anyways. And admittedly, so had she. Daria felt as if her teen cynicism had staled - it was the costume of a girl who knew she wasn't pretty, and that there no one interesting to talk to anyway, so she had gotten by pretending she didn't give a damn. Now, she really didn't give a damn.
At least there was Jane. She had been waiting to see Jane all afternoon- no, Daria admitted, all week.
Jane was at her Boston Art school, and Daria hoped against hope that Jane was not metamorphosing into some hideous stock art school asshole. But, ah what happened to the rest of wacky cast of characters after high school? She could imagine Brittany, sweet, dense Brittany in the cute girl sorority, her twiggy legs and arms pumping and her large breasts bobbing up and down hypnotically during her cheers. And Jodie, at Turner- the popular and academic girl as always. Mack was playing football somewhere, Upchuck was tormenting girls somewhere else, Kevin had been left behind a year (god knows what would happen to him.)
The bus stopped and Daria made her way out. Boston was a strange mixture of the quaintly historical and the crummy and impoverished. Daria didn't have any illusions that college would be any better than Lawndale, other that her family's usual circus of dysfunctional and arbitrary rules wouldn't be there to inconvenience her anymore. It was odd having all this freedom. Daria considered how relatively dull her high school experience was. No drugs, no STDs, no arrests, no shock therapy or man-eating composite creatures.
Oh yeah, there had been Tom. Daria cringed. What the hell had that been? A comedy of errors that in every aspect had been incredibly, acutely... high school. What the hell had been so captivating about Tom that had compelled her to hurt Jane, her best and only friend? To damage their relationship to such a crippling degree? Nothing really. Other that Tom was a guy and, more to the point, she had never thought that a relatively normal guy would take her out for pizza, pretend to listen to her when she talked.
Maybe, too, that she had wanted to hurt Jane a little. Jane had changed for the worse when she begun dating Tom. Her shift in priorities and her overall shift in attitude were disappointing. Jane had fallen from grace in her eyes, if even she was capable of such very mundane stupidity. Not only that, Daria had felt forced out - and then forced into the role of "taking it well". They were Daria and Jane, and the unspoken thread between them was that they could not permit anyone into their private snarky little word.
Jane hadn't had sex with him, but Daria was a modern girl. She knew what the kids did nowadays. Why hadn't it occurred to her when she had been kissing Tom to ever think of where his mouth had been? She shook the thoughts out of her head - her psyche was inclined towards perverse pranks on itself. Besides, she thought bitterly, weren't friends supposed to share everything?
Good job, Morgandorfer, you dated Tom and in the process you proved yourself to be more childish and passive aggressive than any fashion club member. She crumpled the yellow paper into a ball and threw it in the gutter. Guess Mom will have to wait.
Before she knew it, she had arrived at their usual meeting spot. She realized that she had been walking thoughtlessly, that she may as well have been sleepwalking, and woken up there. Daria took out her cellphone from her hoodie pocket. She jabbed the button of the phone, and wisely held it away from her ear - Jane decided it would be funny to have picked a piercing scream for her ring tone. Pick up, you bitch, Daria swore under her breath.
There was a beep, then Jane's chirpy mirthful voice: "Hey , you have just failed to communicate with the artist Jane Lane. Either I'm asleep, I've lost my phone, or I'm blowing you off. Anyways, leave me a nice message and we'll get in touch, alright?"
Daria hung up the phone. She stood there, fists clenched by her side, feeling uneasy and undecided. It wasn't like Jane to be like this- unless she had found someone. A boy...? Daria stared gloomily into space. The phone rung. Daria snapped the cover open and pressed it hard against her ear. The first thing she heard was loud, unrestrained laughter.
"Where are the hell are you?" Daria said, trying to keep her voice monotone. "In the set of a sitcom?"
"Hey, DARIA. What's up? Boy, have I missed you." Jane was still laughing merrily. Her happiness irritated Daria.
"Jane, you knew I was arriving at 3 at the usual spot. So let me reiterate my previous point: where the hell are you?"
"Awww, I can't hear you so well- will you kool aid drinkers shut the hell up!" Jane's voice wavered.
There was a yell from a girl, a husky voice: "Is it your mom? Hey Jane's mom, Jane was just about another hit from the crack pipe ."
"I'll have you know," Jane yelled back, "my mom encourages crack use. As children, she would sprinkle it over our heads to get us to sleep at night. "
"That's fucked, Jane," the girl said, "but it explains a lot. "
Jane smirked at the girl, then fished around in the open box of art supplies next to the bed. She drew out a kneaded eraser, and tossed it at her... friend, was it? She supposed so. Maybe. Being with these people wasn't much like the friendship she'd gotten accustomed to. Iris smoked out her window and came over to sketch things, and liked to pull Jane out of her room and push her to go out and roam Boston. She was quickly becoming a fixture in Jane's room, bringing over an ill-formed piece of pottery to serve as her ashtray. Jane thought at one point it might have been trying very hard to be a duck, but that was before she'd seen Iris' art. Whenever Iris drew something, she took it apart and put it back together in a way that sort of made sense, but didn't look much like what it was originally supposed to be. She couldn't imagine that Iris would make such a straightforward duck, even if it's head appeared to be half-caved in, and one of the wings was noticeably smaller than the other.
"Hey!" Iris yelled, as the eraser bounced off her forehead. "Jane's mom, your daughter's getting violent over here!"
"The duck's next if you don't shut the hell up!" Jane shouted, taking the ashtray in question in her hand and waving it around. A scatter of grey fell loose and sprinkled the carpet.
"It's not a--" Iris started to say, before Jane cut her off.
"Who cares? I'm trying to talk to Daria!"
"Ohhhhh," Iris continued, grinning like mad. "Everybody, be quiet! Jane's on the phone with her girlfriiiiiend!"
The ashtray fell out of Jane's grip, and hit the floor, spilling Iris' cigarette refuse all over the place. Where did Iris get off saying something like that! Jane wasn't... and Daria certainly wasn't, either-- why, she'd practically thrown herself into dating Tom the way Jane thought Daria would have verbally ripped to pieces any other girl for acting over any other guy. Girlfriend? The idea was so preposterous that Jane would have laughed, if she hadn't felt so caught off guard, if she knew what to say anymore to this, if she could even get a word out.
It wasn't as if everybody even needed to be told to be quiet. Iris had been the only one still saying anything. Lila was sitting cross-legged and leaning up against Jane's bed, observing the exchange and shaking her head, Ellie had her headphones in and was fiddling with her MP3 player, and Maria was hogging the Fritos, grabbing up a fistful of them from the bag.
Now, Maria looked away and Ellie looked down and Lila suddenly found the beading on her skirt to be about the most interesting thing in the room, and, finally, Iris was shutting up.
"Jane?" came Daria's voice from over the phone. "Jane, who are these people?"
"Holy shit, Jane," Iris muttered, taken aback. "You broke my ashtray..."
"I don't care about your ashtray!" Jane yelled. "Why the hell are you saying things like that? You know I'm not..."
"But I made that ashtray myself!"
"Yeah, in about five minutes so you wouldn't have to put out your cigarette in the sink," Maria muttered. Iris ignored her.
"It has, er, sentimental value," Iris said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "But hell, how am I supposed to smoke here now?"
"After getting ash all over my carpet and accusing me of having some kinda weird thing for my best friend?" Jane cut in. "How about you don't?"
"Hey, look, it's obvious," Iris said, waving her hands in the air defensively. "If you don't want to admit it, fine, but that's no excuse for you to break my--"
"Get out of here!" Jane yelled. "All of you, just get out and let me talk to Daria!" She waved them in the direction of the door. Lila and Ellie left without much of a complaint, and Jane considered grabbing the chips back from Maria, but decided if she just let her take them it would be less of a fuss to get everybody out. Iris had put on an expression like a puppy that had just been stepped on by somebody who it just wanted to snuggle, and while Jane had no idea whether Iris actually felt bad or she just wanted her ashtray fixed, the goal wasn't to have a serious special talk about why broken ashtrays and accusations of lesbianism were bad and hurtful and how they should hug and promise to never hurt each other again and to be friends forever. The goal was to get everyone the fuck out of her room so that she could just talk to Daria and explain why she didn't show up. See, College Jane was different. College Jane set goals.
"Look, you can come back later," Jane told Iris, smiling insincerely and encouraging her insincerely, but it didn't matter if she meant it because it was part of Operation Get Everyone The Fuck Out. "Just for now, leave me the hell alone, okay?"
"Fiiiiine," Iris whined, but she left, and really, good enough was good enough and Jane didn't need to feel bad about pushing away one of the few people who actually wanted to have fun with her anymore because everyone was gone and now she could talk to Daria uninterrupted.
"Hey, sorry about that," she said. Daria didn't say anything back. "Daria, they were just being stupid, okay?" She waited a little while longer, and then looked at her phone. Somewhere along the line, Daria had just hung up.
Well, now.
Jane half sat, half dropped herself down on her bed. Why couldn't she just wait? Jane thought. Then again, she had no idea what she would have said. Part of Operation Get Everyone The Fuck Out was making things up to Daria, giving her an excellent and understandable reason why she hadn't been there, but she didn't even know why she hadn't been there. She liked Daria. She thought about Daria all the time (although not in the way Iris suggested, certainly not!) She had been looking forward to seeing Daria on the days when she hadn't actually been expected to go do so, but today she just hadn't wanted to exert the effort, hadn't wanted to get up and deal with the real, live Daria instead of the partner in crime she remembered from high school. It was funny how people could change in just a couple of months, how maybe it wasn't just a couple of months but everything since Daria had stolen her boyfriend away. It was funny how he was "her boyfriend" instead of "Tom", something to show she wasn't as strange or unlikable as she made herself out to be.
He sure as hell wasn't anything more than that to Daria. Maybe he was also some kind of proof that she wasn't as weird as she imagined she was, what with the thick, unreadable books they both liked, and sitting around having smart people conversations. Like Jane was just some idiot that they both used to tolerate because nobody else would get them even a little bit, until they had each other... but it was Daria she was jealous of, not Tom, right?
No. Tom had stolen away her best friend, and all she'd gotten for it was felt up a couple of awkward times in the backseat of his car. That could be a T-shirt, Jane mused. Yeah, she was bitter. She was jealous of Tom, for taking Daria away, and it had nothing to do with love or romance or anything, it was all about status, about being something in the stupid high school system that they'd sworn they'd never have a part in. Only for Daria, it would have been "insipid", or "conformist", a $24,000 dollar word when Jane would have just thrown in what fits.
She was jealous of Tom for taking what was hers, and she wasn't a lesbian, but it hurt, damn it, and the fact that Tom wasn't here anymore was just a band-aid over a bullet hole.
But Daria was still Daria, right? Underneath the way she looked down and the circles underneath her eyes and the hoodie, the one that was threadbare in the elbows in a way that the old Daria, unfashionable as she was, never would have tolerated in her blazers and t-shirts, there was still the old Daria, right? There was still the same person that Jane had hung out with all high school and liked, really liked, and didn't want to see fall apart like this.
She sighed. This was going to be hard. She picked up her phone, and redialed Daria's number.