Daria Gender Flip From Not So Different JTL Version

60. False Impressions

Stacy looked up and down the hallway as she approached Sonny, verifying that they were alone and unobserved, something he had satisfied himself of more promptly with the benefit of more experienced technique.

'Um … Sonny—'

Sonny just nodded.

She gave him a quick kiss. 'I was wondering—can I ask you something?'

Sonny didn't even nod. He just waited.

'Um … well, do you remember when they had that "Art In The Park"?'

Sonny remembered 'Art In The Park'. That had been the real beginning of Jane's latest art adventure. But there had been a prologue …


Sonny had gone round to the Lanes' to witness Jane filming a music video for Mystik Spiral. The project had been derailed when the fog machine exploded, triggering the collapse of the gazebo they'd been using as a set. Trent, Jane, and Sonny had gone back into the house (the rest of the band had gone off together, allegedly traumatized) and Sonny and Jane had been looking out the kitchen window at the ruins when a tall, vague, blond man had come into the room. He'd greeted Trent and Jane, with hugs, and then come to a puzzled halt in front of Sonny. From the apparent intimacy of his acquaintance with Lane siblings, Sonny had deduced he must be one, presumably Wind, since that was the only other brother—which could also be why Wind (if that's who it was) had been puzzled by Sonny's own presence. Sonny had experienced a horrible feeling that Wind was about to mistake him, by default, for Summer or Penny, and had decided to give him another option.

Thinking at first to give his real name, he thought against it. Trent was ok with him hanging out with Jane. He knew Sonny was, seeing, Stacy. Wasn't interested in Jane that way. Wind might not pick up on that and since Sonny wanted to avoid any future misunderstandings that would result in beatings, he came up with a new name. 'I'm Twinkle. But you can call me "Twink".'

'Hey, Wind', Trent had said, confirming Sonny's guess and breaking up the awkwardness, and then Jane had asked Wind what he was doing there. Wind's latest wife had, it emerged, locked him out of the kitchen, and Wind had taken advice from somebody or something called a 'life consultant' not to interfere. So he'd returned to the family home to get something to eat. He'd been diverted from that goal, however, by horror at the destruction of the gazebo where, or so he had told them, the Lane parents took their children at birth to decide names. He'd wanted it fixed.

'Um … Wind', Jane had said, 'I don't know how to break this to you, but I don't think Mommy and Daddy will be bringing us home any new brothers or sisters.'

'What about Twink?' Wind had said, flinging out an arm in Sonny's direction.

'It's been quite a while now since I was born. Jane's right.'

'No!' Wind had been ready to collapse into tears at the loss of the 'Naming Gazebo', and insistent on its restoration. To raise the necessary funds (the Lane parents being once again out of the country for artistic purposes)—and because, she said, she liked the idea of 'the harvest of my inner torment on display right next to the falafel cart'—Jane had adopted Trent's suggestion of selling some of her paintings at 'Art In The Park'.


Mailbox decorations, T-shirts with the faces of dogs, mice made out of clam-shells, caricatures drawn in five minutes, children's fashion, pinwheels, weeping clowns—'Well, we are in the park, but I'm failing to see the art portion' had been Sonny's remark to Stacy as they strolled through. When Jane had hailed them from the booth where she'd been displaying her paintings, Sonny had said, 'One of these things is not like the others.'

Jane hadn't managed to sell anything before their arrival. It hadn't helped that the first thing everybody noticed when they came up was the fact that Jane had chosen to hang upside down her centrepiece, a copy of The Starry Night. Even Jane's biggest fan, Ms Defoe, had said the same thing. Sonny and Stacy had hung around the booth to create an appearance of interest and activity. Despite that, or just as likely because of that, Jane had managed only one sale, to Ms Onepu, who'd come by with Mr DeMartino. She'd explained that with the extra income she now had thanks to the 'brilliant leadership' of 'Anthony', she could afford to give the material encouragement that an exceptional student like Jane deserved. 'Oh, and I hope you don't mind my mentioning it—but I'm sure you'd want to know—you're so dedicated to your art—you've accidentally hung the Van Gogh copy upside down.'

'No, I painted it upside down. I hung it right side up.'

There had been five painful minutes of Onepu's apologies before DeMartino, surreptitiously signaled by Sonny, had managed to get her out of there. But the really important sale, the one that led to all the subsequent developments, had been heralded by the next onlooker's words.

'Hey, did you paint this?'

'I know, I know, it's upside down.'

'Of course it is. Hanging a famous masterpiece upside down allows the viewer to see its beauty totally independent of its content. I love it.'

The man had turned out to be a gallery owner who hired artists to paint copies of Old Masters. He hadn't just wanted to buy one of Jane's works, he had made a deal to sell as many Van Goghs as she could paint, taking 'only' a sixty percent commission.

Sonny had been able to understand Jane's wanting the money, even forty percent of it. Money had been the point of the whole 'Art In The Park' enterprise in the first place. And it had been nice when Jane had paid for pizza and the slices had two toppings. But then she'd accumulated sufficient earnings to pay for the gazebo reconstruction. Her first instinct had been to tender her resignation but Gary, the gallery owner, had persuaded her to withdraw it by the offer of an increase in her cut to sixty percent. She said she could use the money to finance her own work. But she wasn't painting her own work, even in art class.

Stacy had seen the Fashion Club soon after and broke off to hang out with them. Sonny didn't know what happened after that.

'There was this guy there drawing caricatures'—Sonny noticed that Stacy did not stumble over the word—'and the four of us, I mean the Fashion Club, decided we'd get a group portrait done. But when it was finished it was … I mean, it wasn't … exactly what … everybody expected. So we held a meeting and the Club voted that we'd been slandered by the way the picture had been drawn, because it looked bad, and that we needed to do something for justice against the guy, I mean the one who drew it. So Quinn and Sandi talked to your Mom, because she's a lawyer, but she kept telling them there wasn't anything that could be done legally. Now Tiffany's started saying we should ask her to help us find somebody to break his fingers, like in that show about those guys. But …'

When Stacy paused, Sonny prompted her by repeating her last word interrogatively.

Stacy looked down at her shoes. 'I know maybe the way the drawing made Sandi and Quinn and Tiffany look was a bit mean, but I think I looked really pretty in it and I liked it. So—I kept it, and I've hidden it, and none of the others know, but I want to keep it because I like it and I don't want them to find out and I don't really want anything to happen to the guy either, although I don't want the others to know that. But if your Mom can't help them, then maybe Sandi or Quinn will think of asking you for help because everybody knows how good you are at thinking up plans for getting the better of people'—Stacy was on the verge of hyperventilating now—'and I was worried about what kind of plan you might come up with and what kind of things you might find out and—'

Sonny held up a hand to check her. 'Does Quinn look really bad in this picture?'

'Well—um—I guess so—I mean, I don't know—Quinn said it made her face look like one big freckle and—'

Sonny held up his hand again. 'Your secret and your picture are safe from me. On the condition I get the chance to look at it some time.'

Stacy nodded breathlessly before checking to make sure they were alone again and giving him a quick kiss on the cheek.


Dealing with Stacy's worries had been easy enough for Sonny. Dealing with Jane's, not so much so. She'd dreamed up a theory, which she started expounding to Sonny as they went for a walk, that Gary was selling her copies as the originals, making millions selling counterfeits.

Sonny said, 'To finance his secret robot army, no doubt.'

'I'm serious. We're going to head over there right now and enact a sting operation.'

'A sting operation? He knows who we are, how do you figure we're going to be able to pull off a sting?'

'We'll think of something.'

Sonny looked at Jane quizzically. 'You don't know what a sting operation is, do you?'

'Don't try any of your rhetorical gymnastics on me, Morgendorffer. Do you want to help me expose Gary or don't you?'

Sonny permitted himself the luxury of a sigh. 'Listen, the way a sting operation would work would be if we got somebody to go into the gallery, like an undercover cop, and express an interest in a Van Gogh, or some other Old Master. Then, if Gary commissioned you to paint the thing the undercover agent asked for, we'd wait until Gary delivered it for payment as the genuine article and then bust him. Now do you see? It's not going to work if I go in there and it's absolutely not going to work if you do.'

'Then you'll just have to come up with some other plan for us, aren't you? It's what you do.'

Sonny added an eye roll to a sigh. 'Fine, but you have to wear the moustache.'

Jane looked at him quizzically. 'And what's the logic behind that?'

'I'm the one who's going to have to put up with taking care of facial hair or shaving it off for the rest of my life. This is your turn. Besides, my smaller size better fits me to the other role of hiding in the ceiling vent.'

This conversation had carried them as far as Gary's gallery, Gary's Gallery. (Did that name suggest a man with the imagination to run a counterfeiting ring?)

'Well, I've got a plan', said Jane. 'I'll grab Gary's invoice book from behind the counter to see who bought my last painting. All you have to do is distract him.'

'And just how am I supposed to do that, Mr Phelps?'

'Hey, you're the one who dreams plots for Mission: Impossible. You'll think of something.' She opened the door and they went in.

Gary greeted Jane and inquired after the painting she was working on for him. Jane introduced Sonny as a friend interested in 'art recreations'.

'Um, yes', Sonny said. 'I am very interested in art recreations.' Could this sound any more as if came out of a can? he thought. Luckily, Gary turned out to be devoted enough to the subject to be drawn into an exposition by the most unconvincing pretense of interest. He showed Sonny around, discoursing freely, until Jane, presumably having obtained what she wanted from the invoice book, came up to them and interrupted Gary to tell him that she and Sonny needed to leave.

'Oh, I know what I wanted to ask you', Gary said. 'Can you do O'Keeffe? The guy who bought your last painting, Steve Taylor, wants one for his wife's birthday.'

'Steve Taylor?' said Sonny, with a significant look at Jane as Brittany's father was named, and softly hummed a little of the Mission: Impossible theme to underline the point.

'Steve Taylor bought my last painting?' said Jane.

'He's a regular customer', Gary said. 'Do you know him?'

After that, of course, nothing would satisfy Jane short of an investigatory visit to the Taylors'. Sonny excused himself from accompanying her. He had visions of Kevin Thompson asking him 'If you're so gay, why are you hanging around Britt's place?' and the prospect bored and depressed him, as the prospect of any interaction with Kevin did. He agreed to meet Jane afterwards for a debrief.

When Sonny did meet Jane, she was the one who seemed depressed.

'You would have enjoyed the anti-climax', she said.

'Well, go on, share with me.'

'The first joke was when Brittany answered the door. She was comfortable enough with having me there once she found out that I wasn't expecting to hang out with her. She even started telling me about her dad's art collection, most of which seemed to be either about or made from dead animals.'

Sonny nodded. 'I've been in that house, remember.'

Jane nodded back. 'Well, after that she showed me the Van Gogh copy that I painted, but she thought it was an original. Then her father came in and laughed at the idea. He knows he could never afford an original Van Gogh.' Her shoulders slumped. 'He told me he found a great gallery that's got a bunch of "hacks" churning out copies. He even told me they were "decent" for the price, and then he showed me one spot where the brushwork was kind of lazy.' She heaved a huge sigh. 'Even a cheeseball like Mr Taylor could tell I'm a hack.'

'Coming from a guy whose home is decorated in early petting zoo? I wouldn't worry about it.'

Jane wasn't comforted, and Sonny's next effort, pointing out that with the number of copies she'd been doing for Gary they couldn't all be her best work, didn't help either. She admitted that the copying work had given her creative block, which she'd never had before.

'Your creativity has been channelled into other areas, like inventing paranoid delusions centred around non-existent art counterfeiting rings.'

'Yeah, my ego couldn't take just being a hack. I had to be a super-hack. Or maybe I just wanted Gary to be a con-man so I could quit without remorse.'

'Sure, because it's not like you'll have any remorse if you stay.'

Sonny was rewarded by the signs of spirit returning to Jane's face.

'Look, I got into this in the first place to get that damn gazebo rebuilt. Those slouches of workmen Trent found have been lollygagging around while I've nearly gone nuts. Trent's supposed to be supervising them—'

'Trent?'

'—right, my mistake. So if he can't provide supervision, he can provide labor, but that gazebo's going to be finished today. And once I've taken care of that, I'll go tell Gary I'm quitting for good.'

Sonny was relieved. 'Good. Mind if I drop by your place later on to see the finished product?'

'Sure', said Jane. 'And thanks for helping me sort this out.'

'Me?' said Sonny. 'I didn't even hide in a ceiling vent.'

On that amicable note they parted. When Sonny showed up at the Lanes', the new gazebo was finished, Jane had Gary's gracious acceptance of her resignation to report (he'd told her she could come back any time), and Trent was groaning after unaccustomed effort, too sore to play his guitar.

'You know', Jane said, 'maybe I will do a painting of the gazebo. I can call it Descent Into Madness.'

Sonny said, 'Or Gazebo.'

A moment later the Lane parents walked into the yard, back from their latest expedition in search of artistic inspiration, and noticed three people sitting around the gazebo. That set them to reminiscing about it—not knowing, naturally, that it was only a replacement for the one they remembered. Their reminiscences were different from Wind's. They'd only invented the story about its being a 'Naming Gazebo' because they wanted him to appreciate the name they'd given him and abandon his idea of changing it to 'Ronald'. Really they regarded it as the sort of ugly thing fit only for country-house phonies. In fact, their suggestion was to get some axes and tear it down as soon as possible.

'Twinkle', Jane said, 'I'm going to kill your big brother.'

Jane's parents looked at each other, puzzled. They wanted to know who 'Twinkle' was.

Sonny said, 'It's a gazebo name.'


Some dialogue from 'Fizz Ed' by Glenn Eichler and 'Art Burn' by Dan Vebber