1.

The worst part was that her mother had been trying to help.

Helen had found out about Grove Hills by sheer chance when researching Lawndale, and could easily have missed it. Even the kids in Highland would find this a no-brainer: why send Daria to a regular high school again when she could go to a school for gifted, intellectual youngsters? (Aside from the cost, but Quinn would have to make do with just one new outfit per day.)

In all the rush of the move and getting the admissions test done and all that, the Morgendorffers had never had the time to visit Grove Hills before it was time for Daria to actually go there. In retrospect, that had been a mistake. Like the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

It seemed to go fine at first, she'd lucked out in getting a single dorm room and the other kids she met seemed misanthropic and surly. Common ground at last.

The problems started at the first night.

"They say high school is supposed to be the happiest time of your life."

"Only if your life is extremely short," she deadpanned.

Graham grinned. "Exactly!"

And then he really grinned, a shark who'd spotted the Titanic sinking. "Our happiest years will begin when we make our first million! I can't wait to stroll down the Riviera with a model on each arm."

"I guess you can be intellectually gifted and still be morally bankrupt." She'd been kinda, sorta, maybe, not-really-but-I-hope-you-are joking.

"Well, I certainly hope so." He'd not been joking.

She'd tried to give the other kids a chance- okay, she'd thought hard about giving them a chance. But then the conversation had gone onto Ayn Rand and objectivism and opposition to the ethic of altruism, and she just couldn't help herself:

"I wonder if she got upset when people opposed altruism and objectively decided not to get her anything for her birthday."

Lara turned to Daria with bemusement, but didn't say a word. The other kids looked equally confused.

"I thought I'd add to the debate. I'm not sure what I added, but hey."

Graham frowned. "You're awfully full of yourself for someone who's just started at this school."

"Intestines, pancreas, stomach... it all adds up."

He ignored that. "Maybe you should hold off giving your opinions until after you've been at Grove Hills for more than ten minutes – until you've got an opinion worth hearing."

She'd never admit it, but that actually stung. This wasn't how things were meant to be going. She was out of regular high school, for god's sake, she wasn't the lone smart kid among idiots, it was supposed to be good. That was the whole point.

Her principles slipped for a second, and she rushed to patch things up.

"Look, Graham, Lara, maybe I've started off on the wrong foot but-"

And they were continuing their conversation and ignoring her.

"I want to apologise for-"

They'd actually shifted position slightly when she said that, just so she'd be less visible. Okay, that did it.

"So who's the QB here? I sure love those football jocks. Rar rar. Go team."

The conversation stopped, briefly, so they could glare at her like she'd just announced she liked to strangle kittens. And then it started again, louder.

She tried talking to other kids but word spread fast. She'd actually overheard someone say "she's so public school", something clearly akin to leprosy.

This isn't a problem, Daria told herself. It's just isolation. You're used to that. Nothing you can't handle.

Isolation, it turned out, was a tad more isolating when you didn't have a family to come home to. She never thought she'd miss Quinn's babbling, but after the first week of school even a tirade against sweatpants would've been a relief.

The parents were allowed to visit but… well, the law firm. They phoned, at least, but her mother's voice was so full of desperate hope she found she couldn't say "this place doesn't just suck, it's become an event horizon".

She'd been working up to that zinger. She'd spent hours hoping to lay the law down, and then came questions about Grove Hills and her new friends and how great it must be to be with others like her and she's enjoying it, right?

"It's okay. I'm meeting a finer breed of idiot."

After the first week, she found the library – the last redoubt, her Masada – was a refuge no more. The cliques had infiltrated there, trying to show off their smarts and how they were smarter than those guys, yeah, them. It was hard to read James Joyce when you had people tittering and laughing about you juuuuust out of earshot. She started to stay in her room after that.

Class was a brief refuge, intense and distracting – the teachers didn't slow down, especially Arthur "the Calculator" Schwartz the maths teacher, who mercilessly tore through his lessons without pause, abandoning the bodies of those with tired wrists or who committed the sin of not understanding a concept first time round. (He had nicknamed himself "the Calculator", always saying it in a gruff Arnie voice, imagining himself to be considered a scary badass. The students had nicknamed him Dickhead.) Other classes were slower but the course matter, she had to admit, was fascinating. She was being challenged.

This was how her fellow classmates responded to her keenness to learn:

"Clearly struggling. You want to bet she starts crying when we get to Ulysses?"

Lana had mispronounced it "You lice's", which was just insult to injury.

"I hope we get around to One Thousand, Nine Hundred and Eighty Four by that Orwell guy soon," said Daria loudly. Nobody got it.

Daria spent the first month studying harder than she'd ever studied before, determined to keep her grades as high as humanly possible as her big "up yours". Life was all study, all the time (except for peeing, obviously, but she classed that as Biology revision). It kept her off the streets, it kept her occupied, it kept her from having to look at Graham's face. It unfortunately meant the Science teacher, elderly Mrs Wright-Cotman, kept catching her after class to tell her "well done!" and speak in patronising tones about how well she was doing for someone who'd come from Texas. (Daria began talking in cowboy slang with a horrific drawl, and became very worried after noticing Wright-Cotman genuinely didn't realise "wah thank'ee missus ma'am" was taking the piss.)

At the very start of the second month, Daria sat in her room with the book on Noam Chomsky and realised with horror that she didn't want to read it.

She didn't want to read at all.

There was no fun in it anymore.

And at that moment, there was nothing to keep the loneliness out: the vast waves come to rip apart the town and leave it so much useless rubble, something that could not be stopped and showed you how pathetic you were to think you could do it. She was in a tiny room in an unfriendly place far from anyone she knew and anyone that she could possibly stand to know, and nothing could distract her from that.

She wanted to call her parents, call out mayday and hope for rescue teams. But that hope in her mother's voice…

"Hope is keeping me in despair. It's the reverse Pandora's box."

She didn't notice she'd just talked to herself.

She hadn't slept. She'd barely moved. Night had crawled past in a century of time, and she stood up and walked out to go to class solely because it was there. It wasn't even a fun class, it was maths with Dickhead.

Dimly, watching the Daria biopic from inside a prison of meat, she was aware that something was wrong. Dickhead was talking about advanced calculus in macho, strident tones as he truly rapped with the kids and got them hip to the numbers biz yo – and she wasn't thinking anything snarky about it. And she could no longer feel the atmosphere of unrestrained boredom and loathing in every Maths class; it was being shut out.

Many senses were being shut out. The world felt grey and soft, but the meat thing continued to scribble down notes. From the outside, it probably looked just like a girl writing.

Two more days of this. She was lurching to the canteen and it struck her that she missed Beavis and Butt-head.

"Well now I know I've gone mad," she said to herself, standing in the line for lunch. "Don't worry Daria, you probably just miss the easy science experiments. I wish, Daria, I actually want to talk to them. You clearly need help."

Nobody around her had registered her talking to herself – or so she thought, until she heard the sniggering in the background. Joy. No wonder she missed the two idiots, they were at least upfront when being dicks.

Lara, Graham and Cassidy were behind her now, once again having the fascinating discussion of how glad they were to not be studying with the great unwashed.

"…instead of idiots and fools and a quarterback who tells the whole school you shower in a towel."

"Heh heh heh, undercover weiner. It's agent Dong-Oh Seven. License to shoot to thrill. Hur hur hur hur."

It was a few seconds before Daria realised it was her who'd said that.

"I got my gun at ready. Fire at will. Hur." She was aware she was saying that, and making a 'rock-on' gesture and headbanging.

Dimly, she was aware she should stop, that people were looking. And she could stop, any time she wanted. And she would. Slow down, ol' meat robot.

"True IQ at last, Morgendorffer?" sneered Graham, a man trying to get the situation back under control.

Daria reconsidered stopping.

"Are you threatening me?"

"Wh-wha-"

"I am the Great Cornholio." She leaned in closer to him. "I need TP for my bunghole."

"..."

"Are you threatening me?"

She hadn't meant to actually scream that. She could feel a hundred pairs of eyes staring at her in confused horror, could feel the blush spreading like a rash, and abruptly walked out of the canteen.

"I can't miss them that much. The disciples didn't miss Jesus that much. Why didn't you stop earlier, Daria? Well how should I know? Hey, don't bite my head off—did I just wait for myself to reply that time?"

Once back in her room, she locked the door – now she was safe – and began pacing. There was a clear problem. This needed to be looked at objectively.

Option the first: call parents screaming for help, then puke up intestines and live forever with the shame of disappointing them and wasting their time. Option the second: negate the isolation by finding someone outside she could correspond with. Option the third: go "blblblblblblbblblbbl".

Objectively, option three looked like the crowd favourite.

"Be honest, Daria, if you knew someone you could call or write to you'd already be calling and writing to them. I could call the idiots. No, that would involve finding their number and that would involve writing to them and that would involve them being mentally capable of reading a letter. Okay. That guy I exchanged a few words with back in eighth grade music class, he seemed alright. Yeah, great idea: Dear That Guy, what is your name, regards, Daria. Quinn? No, that's just option one outsourced.

"Maybe Mr Potts from Camp Grizzly, that'd be fun, I could ask him what he was drinking when he came up with the watermelon game. Wait, you're onto something now, Camp Grizzly had people in it you know the names of, contact the camp and they could forward your mail on... On to..."

She tried to think of a single person from the camp she'd willingly talk to.

Crap.

She looked at it from another angle: who from camp would willingly talk to her? Better than nothing, at least it'd be a different kind of annoyance. So, people who would willingly want to communicate with her... There was Amelia, and... er...

Crap.

Amelia was it.

Crap.

She hadn't even liked the girl. She'd just been trying to survive camp and there'd been Amelia, following her around and not saying anything, getting in her personal space but being too shy to do anything – and having nothing interesting to say when Daria, fed up, had started conversation. Engaging in long-distance communication with Amelia...

Was going "blblblblblblblbl" so bad, really?

"Yes. Yes it is and you know it. Crap, you're right. Okay."

She began to write out her letter to Camp Grizzly.