~*~
That evening after dinner, Daria wound up back in her room. Removing her jacket and boots, she fired up her computer, checked her email, and visited her usual list of web sites. After answering an email from Amy and posting a few messages, she disconnected from the Internet and loaded her word processor.
Opening her Works in Progress file, Daria scanned the titles, looking for something to work on until bedtime. After browsing for several minutes and only managing to discard or refile a few stories that were no longer 'in progress,' she turned to her Writing Ideas file. Its contents also failed to spark her imagination or interest.
Sighing, Daria moped over and fell onto her bed, staring up at the network of cracks in the ceiling. Jane and her problem were still on her mind. If Jane didn't come up with at least two thousand bucks somewhere soon, Daria would be spending her first semester in Boston alone.
It was possible that Jane would manage to come up with a painting that would win that thousand dollar purchase prize, or that some art lover would buy it, but Daria was less than optimistic. Jane's artistic vision hadn't shown any signs yet of catching on with Lawndale art lovers.
Being a gallery owner, Gary knew what would sell. Jane was very good at drawing and painting people, clothed or not, Daria knew. She remembered the poster Jane had done for that school contest, and all the sketches Jane was always doing of her and other students. Jane could paint a nude that would sell for big bucks, if she had a model. Daria thought about who Jane might get to model for her, and reached the same conclusion that Jane had earlier in the day, unbeknownst to her. She scanned the cracks for an answer. She didn't like the one that kept coming up.
"Should I model nude to help Jane pay for college?" she thought. "Would I really be doing it for Jane, or for me? Isn't the real reason I'm even considering it that I don't want to be all alone in Boston? Does the fact that I have a selfish reason invalidate the unselfish reason?
"If I were to do it, what kind of person would that make me? The kind who has high moral standards as long as it's convenient, then chucks them when it's not? The kind who takes off her clothes so she can have company? Would I be any better than a slut? Or those girls who have webcams in their dorm rooms? If indeed there actually are such girls.
"What if I don't do it, and Jane can't raise the money? Or what if she takes on a huge student loan and can't pay it back? Or what if paying it back keeps her from getting a studio and becoming a successful artist? What if it forces her to take a job she hates? What if it ruins her life?
"But what will doing it do to my life? Isn't abandoning your principles a bad thing? What principle is it, anyway? Public nudity bad? I'm practically nude whenever I wear that bikini, and Mom bribed me heavily to get it and wear it. Well, I never really considered Mom a final arbiter of morality.
"I really wouldn't be naked in public, though. Only Jane would actually see me naked. Everyone else would only see some pigments smeared on a piece of canvas. Or is that a colossal rationalization, even though it's true?
"Does it matter how many people I'm naked in front of? The more people, the more degraded I am? If that's the case, I'm already degraded way past modeling nude. I had to shower nude with about fifty people I hardly knew every day in gym class, for the last six years. That's government and parent approved.
"But just because a thing is commonly accepted doesn't mean it's right. Every major religion I know of is against being seen naked. Doesn't that count for something? If so, how much?
"Am I even worrying about the right principle? Maybe the real principle is: Don't do something you think is wrong to get something you want. No, that's not quite right. It should be: Don't do something you know is wrong to get something you want. I need to know whether it's wrong to model nude, and why.
"But what if I decide that it isn't wrong, or that it isn't as wrong as not helping Jane get to BFAC? I don't want to. I don't want to take off all my clothes in front of Jane and sit still, or lie still, for hours and hours while she peers intently at every inch of my scrawny little body and paints my likeness. And I don't want innumerable strangers looking at a picture of me naked and thinking unimaginable thoughts, or all-too- imaginable thoughts either, for years and years, maybe long after I'm dead. And what would it feel like to walk down the street knowing that any stranger I passed might have seen that picture? How much weight, if any, should I give to my personal feelings?"
As she lay pondering these imponderables, Daria's eyes gradually closed, and her thoughts became less focussed and incisive. She fell asleep with her light on and her door open. Sometime later Helen looked in on her, smiled, turned out the light, and closed the door to the five-inch opening Daria favored.
~*~
Daria awoke with morning sunshine penetrating her eyelids. She turned away from the window and tried to pull the sheet over her head, but found that she was lying on top of it. Her legs were cold between her skirt and her socks, as were her arms. She had fallen asleep in her street clothes. Surrendering to the inevitable, she sat up and squinted grumpily at her cheerily sunlit room.
Ugly carpet with uglier throw rug, ugly gray padding on the walls, ugly nonfunctional TV hanging from the ceiling on an ugly bracket, ugly posters on the walls, ugly blanket on the bed, books and bones on the floor. Yep, this was her room, all right.
Daria rose and shuffled off to the bathroom. Turning on the hot water tap and removing her clothes, she looked at her reflection in the mirror. A short, slender teenager stared back. Her head was too big for her body, she thought, an appearance that was heightened by her thick head of hair. Dark auburn in this light, it appeared plain dull brown under fluorescent light. Afternoon sunlight brought out its coppery highlights best, she thought.
Daria looked down to the other visible tuft of hair. Not kinky, just barely curly, the hairs grew inward toward the centerline of her body and then turned downward. In shape it was like one of those early eighteenth- century style eagles with its short wings spread and its head in right profile, although missing the legs. The direction of hair growth gave the impression of feathers. In color it was slightly lighter and redder than the hair on her head. Daria smiled a bit. She thought it was one of her nicer physical features. No male had ever seen it.
Daria's eyes traveled upwards over her abdomen. It was flat without her needing to suck in her gut. She didn't have washboard abs, but the muscles were there, and showed up in an angling light. Her navel was- well, okay, she supposed. There wasn't anything unusual or gross about it, nor was there a scar from that embarrassing incident when her hormones had overwhelmed her common sense and she'd gotten it pierced for Trent. She never had figured out why he'd wanted her to do that, and she'd be damned if she'd ask him now.
Her gaze continued upward to her bustline. It was getting hard to conceal the fact that she had a bust, but she really didn't need to anymore. She seldom ran into her male former classmates now that high school was over, and soon she'd be at Raft where, as far as she knew, she wouldn't be seeing a single one of them. In size and shape, her breasts were about like the two halves of a grapefruit. They didn't stand out very far from her chest, which was fine with Daria. She didn't want to have to deal with the sort of guy a rack like Brittany's attracted. Also, she noted with a bit of pride that they didn't visibly sag, even a millimeter, from the front view or the side. The nipples were a pale pink, with even a hint of lilac, an indication of northern European ancestry. A small compensation for pale, easily sunburned skin. The tiny smile returned to Daria's lips as she remembered a scene from an old movie she'd once rented for a Bad Movie Night. They were exactly the same size and color as Julie Andrews' nipples.
Her hips were not wide, but they had a feminine shape, and they narrowed to a slender waist, although not as slender as Quinn's. Daria turned and looked over her shoulder. Her butt was... well, okay, she supposed. There wasn't much of it, but she definitely had one now. Up until about eighth grade, she'd had the classic stick figure. No hips, no butt, no waist. And no bust till ninth grade. Except for her eyes, she'd spent her early teens looking like Quinn's younger sister. Helen used to say she'd had adult eyes from the day she opened them.
Now her butt and legs were slender but not quite skinny. Daria didn't know what characteristics boys looked for in a butt, but her legs were as good as any fashion club member's, except for being short. She and Jane could sit side by side on a bench, and Daria would be over an inch taller. Standing, Jane was taller by nearly two inches. Daria still hoped for a late growth spurt in her legs, but it didn't look promising. Oh, well, she thought, they're long enough to reach the floor.
The mirror was beginning to fog up. Slightly annoyed at herself for incipient narcissism, she turned away and adjusted the water temperature, then entered the shower. Modest, unremarkable figure or no, Jane still wanted to paint her. Well, the model didn't need to be beautiful, she thought. The artist could expand things a little here, shrink a little there, stretch this, recontour that, as long as she had a model willing to hold a pose, and not covered with so much fat that the basic body shapes were hidden. Would it help Jane if I were to pose in a swimsuit, she wondered. And maybe Jane could change her face enough to be unrecognizable. Her thoughts gave way to the memorized motions of bathing, and the tactile sensations of the warm, wet pulsation of the shower spray, and of the soapy sponge and her hand gliding over her skin.
Reaching the end of the bathing sequence, Daria turned off the water, got out of the shower, and went through the drying-off sequence, still not thinking much. Even though she knew she was the only one in the house, she put on her bathrobe and tied the sash snugly for the short trip back down the hallway to her room.
Daria knew she was going to miss this room when she left for college. She didn't actually like the awful color scheme, or the small bed with the cheap mattress, but she was really fond the padded walls and she liked how the lunatic's-cell look tended to keep casual visits to a minimum. She knew it would hurt when she heard that Helen was remodeling it, and she dreaded coming home and finding a bright, cheery room with beige carpet, white trim, white ceiling with little blown-on sparkles, and freshly- painted yellow or sky-blue walls where her beloved padding now hung.
But that hadn't happened yet. She had better things to look forward to. Daria began dressing. A new and exciting phase of her life was about to begin, a phase she'd been looking forward to for many years. Finally, as a reward for all her hard work and perseverance, she would be living in a community whose members had been selected for intelligence. There would be no room temperature IQs there. According to Daria's research, students with IQs below 120 were exceptions at Raft. Which meant that the chance of seeing anyone from the Lawndale High class of 2000 there was small indeed, and that Daria had a good chance of finding people of similar intelligence to talk to.
Before putting on her socks, boots, and jacket, Daria did a few limbering- up exercises, then went through a Jeet Kune Do form, as much to get her blood circulating as for the practice. She made a mental note to ask her instructor if he could recommend a Jeet Kune Do school in Boston for the fall. It would be great if it was taught at Raft, but Daria knew she couldn't expect to be that lucky.
After a leisurely breakfast, Daria headed back upstairs to her room. She thought about just lying down somewhere and soaking up the solitude for a while, but there were several books she'd been wanting to read, and she'd had an idea for one of the stories she was currently working on. Daria was aware that her free time as a sheltered dependent was rapidly running out, and she wanted to make good use of it.
Daria pushed open her room door and walked to her desk, and noticed her mother's camera and camera bag sitting there where she'd put them yesterday evening. Never one to be late to return borrowed items, she picked them up and headed back out into the hall.
She entered her parents' bedroom and slid open the appropriate closet door. As she placed the camera bag on the shelf, a small cigar box was dislodged. Daria managed to catch it just as it slid off. A few photographs fell out onto the floor. Checking to make sure the camera bag was stable, Daria turned her attention to the fallen photos. One of them caught her eye. It was a picture of a two-year-old running down a hallway without any clothes on. The child was facing away from the camera, but Daria knew that it was she. She sat on the bed and opened he box. Another photo caught her eye. She was in the bathtub, smiling up at the photographer, holding a bathcloth. It had been a long time since she'd seen these, but Daria remembered that there were several photos in this sequence. One of them was... she dug around a little. There it was. She was standing in the hallway facing the photographer, still naked, probably laughing, apparently enjoying the attention she was getting. Full frontal nudity. And Helen had taken the pictures. And shown them to the relatives.
Daria picked out the rest of the photos in the sequence, closed the cigar box, and put it back on the shelf, making sure it wouldn't slide off again. She closed the closet door, then the bedroom door, and proceeded down the hall to her room. Spreading the photos out on her desk, she pondered them for a few minutes. Then she flopped onto her bed and stared up at the ceiling.
Several minutes later, Daria reached out, picked her phone up off the floor and dialed a number. After three rings, Jane answered. "Yo."
"Hey, Jane. Whatcha doin'?"
"Getting ready to start a painting. Or rather, to stare at a blank canvas till tiny drops of blood form on my forehead. What are you doing?"
"I'm taking off my boots."
"Uh-huh. And after you take off your boots, what are you going to do?"
"Take off my socks."
"I see. And after you take off your socks, what are you going to do?"
"Take off my jacket."
"Very interesting. Then what?"
"I'm going to take off the rest of my clothes, and then I thought I might lie on my bed and read a book or something. Grab your art supplies and come on over. The door's unlocked."
There was a silence on the line for several seconds. Then Jane said, in a low, hesitant tone, "Daria, are you jerking my chain?"
"Nope."
"Then I'm halfway there." There was a click, followed by a dial tone.
End of Part Two.
~*~
Part Three coming soon. If you got this far, please review and tell me what you think, good, bad, or so-so. You know, reviews are the closest thing to pay we poor fanfic writers get. Thanks.
Those of you new to FanFiction.net, you can check out my other works by clicking on Lawndale Stalker. That'll take you to my author page, where my other fics are listed. Pick one and click on it.
Galen Hardesty [gehardesty@yahoo.com]
Disclaimer
"Daria" and all related characters are trademarks of MTV Networks, a division of Viacom International, inc. The author does not claim copyright to these characters or to anything else in the "Daria" milieu; he does, however, claim copyright to all those parts of this work of fiction which are original to him and not to MTV or to other fanfic authors. This fanfic may be freely copied and distributed provided its contents remain unchanged, provided the author's name and email address are included, and provided that the distributor does not use it for monetary profit. (as if.)
That evening after dinner, Daria wound up back in her room. Removing her jacket and boots, she fired up her computer, checked her email, and visited her usual list of web sites. After answering an email from Amy and posting a few messages, she disconnected from the Internet and loaded her word processor.
Opening her Works in Progress file, Daria scanned the titles, looking for something to work on until bedtime. After browsing for several minutes and only managing to discard or refile a few stories that were no longer 'in progress,' she turned to her Writing Ideas file. Its contents also failed to spark her imagination or interest.
Sighing, Daria moped over and fell onto her bed, staring up at the network of cracks in the ceiling. Jane and her problem were still on her mind. If Jane didn't come up with at least two thousand bucks somewhere soon, Daria would be spending her first semester in Boston alone.
It was possible that Jane would manage to come up with a painting that would win that thousand dollar purchase prize, or that some art lover would buy it, but Daria was less than optimistic. Jane's artistic vision hadn't shown any signs yet of catching on with Lawndale art lovers.
Being a gallery owner, Gary knew what would sell. Jane was very good at drawing and painting people, clothed or not, Daria knew. She remembered the poster Jane had done for that school contest, and all the sketches Jane was always doing of her and other students. Jane could paint a nude that would sell for big bucks, if she had a model. Daria thought about who Jane might get to model for her, and reached the same conclusion that Jane had earlier in the day, unbeknownst to her. She scanned the cracks for an answer. She didn't like the one that kept coming up.
"Should I model nude to help Jane pay for college?" she thought. "Would I really be doing it for Jane, or for me? Isn't the real reason I'm even considering it that I don't want to be all alone in Boston? Does the fact that I have a selfish reason invalidate the unselfish reason?
"If I were to do it, what kind of person would that make me? The kind who has high moral standards as long as it's convenient, then chucks them when it's not? The kind who takes off her clothes so she can have company? Would I be any better than a slut? Or those girls who have webcams in their dorm rooms? If indeed there actually are such girls.
"What if I don't do it, and Jane can't raise the money? Or what if she takes on a huge student loan and can't pay it back? Or what if paying it back keeps her from getting a studio and becoming a successful artist? What if it forces her to take a job she hates? What if it ruins her life?
"But what will doing it do to my life? Isn't abandoning your principles a bad thing? What principle is it, anyway? Public nudity bad? I'm practically nude whenever I wear that bikini, and Mom bribed me heavily to get it and wear it. Well, I never really considered Mom a final arbiter of morality.
"I really wouldn't be naked in public, though. Only Jane would actually see me naked. Everyone else would only see some pigments smeared on a piece of canvas. Or is that a colossal rationalization, even though it's true?
"Does it matter how many people I'm naked in front of? The more people, the more degraded I am? If that's the case, I'm already degraded way past modeling nude. I had to shower nude with about fifty people I hardly knew every day in gym class, for the last six years. That's government and parent approved.
"But just because a thing is commonly accepted doesn't mean it's right. Every major religion I know of is against being seen naked. Doesn't that count for something? If so, how much?
"Am I even worrying about the right principle? Maybe the real principle is: Don't do something you think is wrong to get something you want. No, that's not quite right. It should be: Don't do something you know is wrong to get something you want. I need to know whether it's wrong to model nude, and why.
"But what if I decide that it isn't wrong, or that it isn't as wrong as not helping Jane get to BFAC? I don't want to. I don't want to take off all my clothes in front of Jane and sit still, or lie still, for hours and hours while she peers intently at every inch of my scrawny little body and paints my likeness. And I don't want innumerable strangers looking at a picture of me naked and thinking unimaginable thoughts, or all-too- imaginable thoughts either, for years and years, maybe long after I'm dead. And what would it feel like to walk down the street knowing that any stranger I passed might have seen that picture? How much weight, if any, should I give to my personal feelings?"
As she lay pondering these imponderables, Daria's eyes gradually closed, and her thoughts became less focussed and incisive. She fell asleep with her light on and her door open. Sometime later Helen looked in on her, smiled, turned out the light, and closed the door to the five-inch opening Daria favored.
~*~
Daria awoke with morning sunshine penetrating her eyelids. She turned away from the window and tried to pull the sheet over her head, but found that she was lying on top of it. Her legs were cold between her skirt and her socks, as were her arms. She had fallen asleep in her street clothes. Surrendering to the inevitable, she sat up and squinted grumpily at her cheerily sunlit room.
Ugly carpet with uglier throw rug, ugly gray padding on the walls, ugly nonfunctional TV hanging from the ceiling on an ugly bracket, ugly posters on the walls, ugly blanket on the bed, books and bones on the floor. Yep, this was her room, all right.
Daria rose and shuffled off to the bathroom. Turning on the hot water tap and removing her clothes, she looked at her reflection in the mirror. A short, slender teenager stared back. Her head was too big for her body, she thought, an appearance that was heightened by her thick head of hair. Dark auburn in this light, it appeared plain dull brown under fluorescent light. Afternoon sunlight brought out its coppery highlights best, she thought.
Daria looked down to the other visible tuft of hair. Not kinky, just barely curly, the hairs grew inward toward the centerline of her body and then turned downward. In shape it was like one of those early eighteenth- century style eagles with its short wings spread and its head in right profile, although missing the legs. The direction of hair growth gave the impression of feathers. In color it was slightly lighter and redder than the hair on her head. Daria smiled a bit. She thought it was one of her nicer physical features. No male had ever seen it.
Daria's eyes traveled upwards over her abdomen. It was flat without her needing to suck in her gut. She didn't have washboard abs, but the muscles were there, and showed up in an angling light. Her navel was- well, okay, she supposed. There wasn't anything unusual or gross about it, nor was there a scar from that embarrassing incident when her hormones had overwhelmed her common sense and she'd gotten it pierced for Trent. She never had figured out why he'd wanted her to do that, and she'd be damned if she'd ask him now.
Her gaze continued upward to her bustline. It was getting hard to conceal the fact that she had a bust, but she really didn't need to anymore. She seldom ran into her male former classmates now that high school was over, and soon she'd be at Raft where, as far as she knew, she wouldn't be seeing a single one of them. In size and shape, her breasts were about like the two halves of a grapefruit. They didn't stand out very far from her chest, which was fine with Daria. She didn't want to have to deal with the sort of guy a rack like Brittany's attracted. Also, she noted with a bit of pride that they didn't visibly sag, even a millimeter, from the front view or the side. The nipples were a pale pink, with even a hint of lilac, an indication of northern European ancestry. A small compensation for pale, easily sunburned skin. The tiny smile returned to Daria's lips as she remembered a scene from an old movie she'd once rented for a Bad Movie Night. They were exactly the same size and color as Julie Andrews' nipples.
Her hips were not wide, but they had a feminine shape, and they narrowed to a slender waist, although not as slender as Quinn's. Daria turned and looked over her shoulder. Her butt was... well, okay, she supposed. There wasn't much of it, but she definitely had one now. Up until about eighth grade, she'd had the classic stick figure. No hips, no butt, no waist. And no bust till ninth grade. Except for her eyes, she'd spent her early teens looking like Quinn's younger sister. Helen used to say she'd had adult eyes from the day she opened them.
Now her butt and legs were slender but not quite skinny. Daria didn't know what characteristics boys looked for in a butt, but her legs were as good as any fashion club member's, except for being short. She and Jane could sit side by side on a bench, and Daria would be over an inch taller. Standing, Jane was taller by nearly two inches. Daria still hoped for a late growth spurt in her legs, but it didn't look promising. Oh, well, she thought, they're long enough to reach the floor.
The mirror was beginning to fog up. Slightly annoyed at herself for incipient narcissism, she turned away and adjusted the water temperature, then entered the shower. Modest, unremarkable figure or no, Jane still wanted to paint her. Well, the model didn't need to be beautiful, she thought. The artist could expand things a little here, shrink a little there, stretch this, recontour that, as long as she had a model willing to hold a pose, and not covered with so much fat that the basic body shapes were hidden. Would it help Jane if I were to pose in a swimsuit, she wondered. And maybe Jane could change her face enough to be unrecognizable. Her thoughts gave way to the memorized motions of bathing, and the tactile sensations of the warm, wet pulsation of the shower spray, and of the soapy sponge and her hand gliding over her skin.
Reaching the end of the bathing sequence, Daria turned off the water, got out of the shower, and went through the drying-off sequence, still not thinking much. Even though she knew she was the only one in the house, she put on her bathrobe and tied the sash snugly for the short trip back down the hallway to her room.
Daria knew she was going to miss this room when she left for college. She didn't actually like the awful color scheme, or the small bed with the cheap mattress, but she was really fond the padded walls and she liked how the lunatic's-cell look tended to keep casual visits to a minimum. She knew it would hurt when she heard that Helen was remodeling it, and she dreaded coming home and finding a bright, cheery room with beige carpet, white trim, white ceiling with little blown-on sparkles, and freshly- painted yellow or sky-blue walls where her beloved padding now hung.
But that hadn't happened yet. She had better things to look forward to. Daria began dressing. A new and exciting phase of her life was about to begin, a phase she'd been looking forward to for many years. Finally, as a reward for all her hard work and perseverance, she would be living in a community whose members had been selected for intelligence. There would be no room temperature IQs there. According to Daria's research, students with IQs below 120 were exceptions at Raft. Which meant that the chance of seeing anyone from the Lawndale High class of 2000 there was small indeed, and that Daria had a good chance of finding people of similar intelligence to talk to.
Before putting on her socks, boots, and jacket, Daria did a few limbering- up exercises, then went through a Jeet Kune Do form, as much to get her blood circulating as for the practice. She made a mental note to ask her instructor if he could recommend a Jeet Kune Do school in Boston for the fall. It would be great if it was taught at Raft, but Daria knew she couldn't expect to be that lucky.
After a leisurely breakfast, Daria headed back upstairs to her room. She thought about just lying down somewhere and soaking up the solitude for a while, but there were several books she'd been wanting to read, and she'd had an idea for one of the stories she was currently working on. Daria was aware that her free time as a sheltered dependent was rapidly running out, and she wanted to make good use of it.
Daria pushed open her room door and walked to her desk, and noticed her mother's camera and camera bag sitting there where she'd put them yesterday evening. Never one to be late to return borrowed items, she picked them up and headed back out into the hall.
She entered her parents' bedroom and slid open the appropriate closet door. As she placed the camera bag on the shelf, a small cigar box was dislodged. Daria managed to catch it just as it slid off. A few photographs fell out onto the floor. Checking to make sure the camera bag was stable, Daria turned her attention to the fallen photos. One of them caught her eye. It was a picture of a two-year-old running down a hallway without any clothes on. The child was facing away from the camera, but Daria knew that it was she. She sat on the bed and opened he box. Another photo caught her eye. She was in the bathtub, smiling up at the photographer, holding a bathcloth. It had been a long time since she'd seen these, but Daria remembered that there were several photos in this sequence. One of them was... she dug around a little. There it was. She was standing in the hallway facing the photographer, still naked, probably laughing, apparently enjoying the attention she was getting. Full frontal nudity. And Helen had taken the pictures. And shown them to the relatives.
Daria picked out the rest of the photos in the sequence, closed the cigar box, and put it back on the shelf, making sure it wouldn't slide off again. She closed the closet door, then the bedroom door, and proceeded down the hall to her room. Spreading the photos out on her desk, she pondered them for a few minutes. Then she flopped onto her bed and stared up at the ceiling.
Several minutes later, Daria reached out, picked her phone up off the floor and dialed a number. After three rings, Jane answered. "Yo."
"Hey, Jane. Whatcha doin'?"
"Getting ready to start a painting. Or rather, to stare at a blank canvas till tiny drops of blood form on my forehead. What are you doing?"
"I'm taking off my boots."
"Uh-huh. And after you take off your boots, what are you going to do?"
"Take off my socks."
"I see. And after you take off your socks, what are you going to do?"
"Take off my jacket."
"Very interesting. Then what?"
"I'm going to take off the rest of my clothes, and then I thought I might lie on my bed and read a book or something. Grab your art supplies and come on over. The door's unlocked."
There was a silence on the line for several seconds. Then Jane said, in a low, hesitant tone, "Daria, are you jerking my chain?"
"Nope."
"Then I'm halfway there." There was a click, followed by a dial tone.
End of Part Two.
~*~
Part Three coming soon. If you got this far, please review and tell me what you think, good, bad, or so-so. You know, reviews are the closest thing to pay we poor fanfic writers get. Thanks.
Those of you new to FanFiction.net, you can check out my other works by clicking on Lawndale Stalker. That'll take you to my author page, where my other fics are listed. Pick one and click on it.
Galen Hardesty [gehardesty@yahoo.com]
Disclaimer
"Daria" and all related characters are trademarks of MTV Networks, a division of Viacom International, inc. The author does not claim copyright to these characters or to anything else in the "Daria" milieu; he does, however, claim copyright to all those parts of this work of fiction which are original to him and not to MTV or to other fanfic authors. This fanfic may be freely copied and distributed provided its contents remain unchanged, provided the author's name and email address are included, and provided that the distributor does not use it for monetary profit. (as if.)