Daria Gender Flip From Not So Different JTL Version

66. 'When The Bummers Bum …'

Sonny explained to Jane that Stacy and her father were going away for a week to 'the cove' for a wedding, 'so more time for you and me to hang out', he concluded.

'Haven't we had this conversation before?' said Jane. 'Only I said what you're saying and you said what I'm saying?'

'No, not all of it. That part about how her family must be training a secret militia at "the cove" has the unmistakable mark of Jane Lane on it, although now that you've given me the idea I may appropriate it for a story. It would make some kind of sense', Sonny said. 'More sense than Onepu, whom I detect approaching us from seven o'clock.'

'Sonny! Jane! I hope I'm not interrupting anything. I would very much like to talk to you about something, but I wouldn't want to take up your time if you're too busy to listen.'

'For you, Ms Onepu', Sonny said, 'always.'

'Oh! Well … I'm not sure I follow your meaning.'

'That's right.'

Onepu blinked and shuddered slightly like a dog shaking off water. 'I do think this is a marvelous opportunity for you, as well as being the chance to offer an important benefit to the children who will be coming here next year. We're looking for leaders for the tours we give them so that they can learn what to expect from high school. Sonny and Jane, this would be a wonderful chance for you to develop your abilities through new experiences, and I know you have so much to offer to the next intake of new students.'

Jane said, 'I'll do it.'

Sonny stared at her.

Jane shrugged. 'Hey, if I'm giving a tour then I can't be in class. Simple physics.'

'Thank you, Jane. I know next year's students will benefit from your unique perspective. And Sonny, you have a unique perspective too! I'm sure you'll consider it and make the right decision. I won't take up any more of your valuable time. I must hurry to tell Principal Taylor who's volunteered. I know he's particularly keen to have you involved.' Onepu scurried.

Sonny kept staring at Jane, who said, 'Well?'

'Taylor's keen. Don't you feel any misgivings?'

'I leave the job of figuring out what's going on in the dungeon dimensions of the principal's mind to the appropriately qualified person, meaning you. What's going on in your mind, and in Stacy's? Has she asked you out to "the cove"? Not that I'm not looking forward to the opportunity for us to hang out, but, you know, your girlfriend is going to be away for a week.'

'She said he'd check with her dad, …'

Jane interjected, 'He'll probably say yes, you know.'

'His whole family's going to be there. Just because they wouldn't have a problem with Stacy's boyfriend doesn't mean …'

'If she wants a date to a wedding I doubt they would do any thing to you. If she likes you then she likes you and that should be good enough for her family.'

'Yeah, I guess', Sonny admitted, 'but at the cove it'd still be a case of too many people, not enough escape routes.'


The Morgendorffers had taken delivery of a new refrigerator. Oddly, although the old refrigerator had been carted away, the big cardboard box in which the new one had been delivered had been left in the back yard. Helen asked Sonny and Quinn to put it out on the kerb in front of the house for collection.

Sonny said, 'Isn't that sort of brute donkey work the reason they made fathers?'

Helen was a little surprised. 'I wouldn't have expected you to champion traditional roles like that, Sonny, but if that's the way you're thinking, you're well past the age when the oldest son starts taking on the role of the man of the house when the father is absent.'

'I wasn't being traditional, I was being lazy. Where is Dad, anyway?'

'He heard about a last-minute opening at a marketing conference, so he took it.'

'He didn't say anything about a last-minute trip.'

Helen looked at Sonny. He'd been getting an odd expression on his face since he noticed the refrigerator box, which was all the stranger because it was unusual to detect any expression at all on his face, and the news of his father's absence seemed to be adding to the effect. She explained to him carefully that Jake hadn't said anything about the trip because it was last-minute. Across her mind flashed the words 'That's what last-minute means'. It was the sort of thing Sonny himself might have said, but it wouldn't be helpful from her in this situation.

Sonny's face returned to its usual deadpan for a moment, and then another odd expression came over it as he asked Helen whether they'd had a refrigerator box, like the one in the yard, when he'd been younger. He said he remembered spending a lot of time playing in one.

'Oh, I doubt that, Sonny', she said. 'I don't remember you doing much playing at all.'

When she saw the look on his face she thought, And I was doing so well!


Sonny was being weirder than usual. First he wanted to talk about a refrigerator box, like the one they were dragging out to the kerb, which he said they'd had when they were kids. A refrigerator box? Really, who cared? Only somebody weird like Sonny. Who else would want to talk about something like that?

When Quinn told him she wasn't interested in his stroll down memory road, Sonny asked her what she thought was 'really' the reason their Dad had gone away. Quinn got so fed up that she took Sonny at his word when he said he could manage the job by himself. But that turned out to be one of Sonny's tricks, or something, because somehow she was the one who got blamed by their Mom the next morning when the box was still in the back yard, and she ended up being the one who had to drag it out to the kerb by herself. How much could one freakin' girl take? Even an enormously freakin' popular one!


'Morgendorffer.' Principal Taylor's head swiveled like a gun turret. 'Lane', he said more dismissively before returning his sights to his first target. 'Perhaps you feel that you don't know enough about your old high school to be an effective tour guide for a new intake of students. But then, perhaps if you don't graduate on schedule you'll have an opportunity to fill the gaps in your knowledge.'

'I know you're not suggesting that a student could be prevented from graduating for electing not to participate in a purely voluntary activity. So what are you suggesting?'

Taylor smiled with compressed lips. 'I know, Morgendorffer, that you are well aware that gym class is not a purely voluntary activity, and that a student who was found not to have completed the minimum compulsory number of gym classes might very well be prevented from graduating.'

'Unless that student was found to have been excused from the requirements.'

'You mean', Taylor said, 'if that student was found to have been validly excused from the requirements. Are you aware that our former school nurse, the one who by an odd coincidence happened to come from the same little home village as former Principal Li, has been replaced? If the new school nurse should happen to find, while familiarizing herself with the records, that there was some doubt about the circumstances in which you were excused from gym class, then, as a conscientious administrator, I would have no choice', Taylor said, 'but to enforce the school district's rules. But I'm sure that the two of us being obliged to coexist in the same school for another year is an outcome that you desire'—he paused to lick his lips—'even less than I do.'

Sonny looked to Jane. She raised her eyebrows and shrugged. He looked back at Taylor. 'We'll do the tours.'

'Ah', he said. 'Not together. If you work separately it will double the size of the cadre of new students who will have had a special opportunity to hear about exactly what sort of principal Lawndale High has and how they should plan on adjusting their behavior accordingly. Lane, if you're not sure what I'm talking about, Morgendorffer can explain to you.' He turned and left them.

Sonny looked at Jane again. 'You gotta know when to hold 'em', he said in explanation, 'know when to fold 'em.'

'Next year he'll still be Principal Taylor of Lawndale High', Jane said. 'Do we really need more revenge than that?'


When the refrigerator box was still in the back yard, Helen figured that Sonny rather than Quinn must be responsible. He'd certainly had a strange reaction to it, and when she raised the subject with him again, he still did, accusing her of 'refusing to acknowledge' that they'd had a box like it when he was younger. He was still unaccountably suspicious about his father's absence, too. Helen was driven by his doubt to challenge him to call Jake for confirmation.

'Why?' Sonny said. 'So he can lie to me too? Where is he really?'

Now Helen was not just disturbed for herself about the attitude Sonny was taking, but seriously concerned about his well-being. But when she expressed that concern, all he wanted to talk about was a huge fight which he was imagining, between her and Jake, about himself, when he was little. She was flummoxed, but when she couldn't recall anything of the kind, he stood up, accused her flatly of lying (again), and walked out of the room. She watched him go. Not for the first time, she wished she'd found better ways of communicating with him.


Much later, Stacy figured out that Sonny had actually called her on what must have been 'The Night Of The Refrigerator Box'. Stacy hadn't been home, and the only message Sonny had left with Stacy's father was just that he'd called, not even asking Stacy to call back. So she'd thought nothing of it at the time. After all, when Sonny had declined her invitation to come to the cove for a couple of nights, Stacy had joked about being worried that Sonny couldn't cope without her, and Sonny had just joked back that after a week without Stacy cramping his style he might want to make it permanent. Of course Stacy hadn't worried about that. But when Stacy took the call from Sonny at the cove it didn't sound as if Sonny was joking. At first Stacy had thought he was, Sonny being so hard to read, but it quickly became clear that he really did want Stacy to come back early if he could. Then he asked whether Stacy still wanted him to come to the cove.

'Well, you could, but it's even duller than I thought', Stacy said. 'I mean, it would be great for me if you came up, but I think you'd have a horrible time.'

'So you lied to me, too', Sonny said. Stacy had never heard him sound this way. Sonny misinterpreted was common enough, but Sonny misinterpreting worried her. Even if Stacy had changed her mind, that wouldn't be the same thing as a lie, but she hadn't changed her mind. What she'd said was just the objective truth, and normally Sonny would have grasped it without trouble. Stacy tried to reassure Sonny with a more emphatic and unqualified repetition of the invitation, but now Sonny had changed his mind. At least he wanted Stacy to call him the next day. She had the idea that if she could keep the conversation going she might find out something about what was bugging Sonny, but Sonny broke the connection.


Jane figured that if Sonny could cope with being boxed into the freshman tours by Taylor, he should be able to cope with a refrigerator box. She couldn't understand why he kept insisting that it meant something more. She tried joking about it, but that didn't help. She absolutely couldn't understand why he'd crawled inside it. He insisted that sitting in there 'felt right'. She was ashamed that the only reason she could give him for getting out was that the neighbors might talk.

'Um … good', he replied. 'Soon they'll progress to cave drawings, and civilization will be on its way.'

That was a more routine response. In fact, a little to her surprise she seemed to have done the trick. Sonny came crawling out again.


Suddenly Quinn remembered! All Sonny's nagging and all that fussing with the refrigerator box was really stupid, but he had been right about something happening when they were kids in the old house. She'd been three or four years old and she'd been woken by the sounds of a fight: parents yelling, a door slamming, and a car driving away.

She still didn't see how the refrigerator box was important, but it was important to Sonny. She ran outside and found him in the back yard with the refrigerator box. He'd just crawled out of it. His friend Jane was there too.

Quinn told Sonny what she remembered.

'Thank you', Sonny said. 'I knew I wasn't imagining it. Do you remember what they were fighting about?'

'Um … yeah … they were fighting about you.'

After a moment, Sonny got down again and crawled back into the box. Quinn looked at Jane and Jane looked back. Even Jane must think Sonny was being weird. What could be so important about a refrigerator box?


Ever since he first saw the refrigerator box Sonny had been having fragmentary flashbacks to his childhood, but now, with Quinn's confirmation, the whole sequence was clear in his mind. First there was the scene with his parents accompanying him to a talk with the school counsellor. She'd tried some variation of the Rorschach test on him, suggesting that a black splotch might be seen as a fire truck, a house, or a knight in shining armour rescuing a beautiful princess from a dragon, but he'd resisted that idea. So instead she'd tried just talking with him about playing games with the other children at school. He'd told her that the other children never understood what he was talking about and made fun of him. 'I like to read', he'd said.

Then there was the ride home from school with his parents trying to encourage him to at least try to socialize with the other children. They'd almost been imploring him. But he'd just been tired of everything. Tired of the other children, dullards who called him 'egghead'; tired of his parents siding with the rest of the adult world, always pushing him in directions he didn't want to go when all he wanted was to be left alone; tired of the bouncy bouncy bouncing of Quinn, who was never tired of other children or of anything else. His problems hadn't come from himself, they had come from other people. Why had his parents not been able to see that?

And then that same night he had lain in bed listening to his parents fight. Neither of them had known how to deal with the stress of Sonny's problems and their own helplessness in face of them.

'He doesn't want to fit in, damn it!' Sonny's father had ended by shouting. 'Why can't you admit that?'

'Jake, he's a child, he doesn't know any better!'

'That's what he wants you to believe!'

'Where are you going?'

There'd been no answer to that in words. He'd heard the sounds of doors being slammed, first on the house and then on a car, which drove away. He'd pulled the bed covers around him as he winced at the noise; then, as it faded away, he'd crept out of bed and into—a large refrigerator box! It had been decorated with crayons as a sort of cubby house. He'd sat there, reading, feeling safe in his box …


Jake arrived home from his conference to find his son sitting in the back yard in a cardboard box, absorbed in his own thoughts. The absorption was a familiar thing, but the sitting in the box he didn't understand.

Helen, when he asked her, didn't understand either. She said that Sonny had been acting so strangely that she would have called Jake if his return flight hadn't already been in the air. He knew that if his wife was perturbed enough to think of actively seeking out his own involvement, something really unusual must be happening. But he had no more idea what was going on than she did.

It was Quinn who held the clue. She reminded them of a quarrel he and Helen had had many years ago. For some reason it was on Sonny's mind again, and bothering him, and that's why he was hiding in the box. Quinn made out that she'd been traumatized for life as well. Jake might not always understand his kids, but he knew better than to believe something like that. Quinn wasn't hiding in a refrigerator box.

Jake and Helen went outside again to try to coax Sonny out so that they could all have a nice talk. When he remained resistant, Helen told him he couldn't spend the rest of his life there. Jake might not have many ideas about parenting but he knew there was no chance of that sort of cliché working on Sonny.

'Sonny', he said instead, '… please come out?'

A little to his surprise, he got through to his son.


Sonny agreed to come out of the box in exchange for promises of complete honesty. His parents gave them reluctantly, but he was watching them closely and their reluctance made him more confident of their sincerity.

Sitting in the living room, they finally acknowledged the fight they'd had when he was six. Maybe they really had forgotten. It had taken the refrigerator box to remind him, so maybe it was true that it had taken Quinn to remind them.

They started trying to explain the context to him. As he listened to their side of the story, it did start to feel real to him. He understood a lot more now than he did then about the stress from their jobs. Back then, they told him, his father was being slave-driven by a tyrant in a job he hated and his mother was coping with resuming a full-time workload while still raising two small children. He knew a lot more now than he did then about the pressure schools could put on families, parents as well as offspring. They kept getting called into school because of him, and it wasn't the best time for them to be leaving work for conferences with teachers and counselors. He remembered how tense he had felt, but he hadn't realized how tense a time it had been for the family.

They ended up by telling him about the fight he remembered, and how they'd made up afterwards and carried on. 'You happened to be the topic, not the cause', they said, but what could that mean? how could he be the topic of the fight but not the cause? He needed more time to work through all the implications in his mind. More time, and a place. Not in a refrigerator box, but somewhere. Like his father on that long-ago evening, he walked out of the house and got in the car.

On the road, he tried to phone Stacy but could only get Mr. Rowe. Stacy wasn't available to come to the phone, but Mr. Rowe was happy to confirm that the invitation for Sonny to visit 'the cove' was still open. As Sonny thanked him and hung up, it started to rain. As the rain got heavier and road conditions worse, he drove more and more defensively, but he felt committed now and didn't want to turn back.

It was another car, ahead of him, that spun out, triggering a multi-vehicle pile-up. Sonny managed enough control to swerve onto the shoulder and skid more or less safely to a halt.


Jane pulled up outside a diner called 'Mom's', the place where Sonny had asked her to meet him. Trent had insisted she take his car.

When she walked through the door, Sonny up-ended her perspective by rushing to her from his booth and throwing his arms tightly around her. Being a little shorter than her, his head nestled comfortably in the hollow above her collar bone.

After a moment, she put her arms around him and squeezed back.

He was still damp from the rain that had been falling earlier. Hot coffee sounded a good idea. As they sat in his booth drinking it, she listened to his story. Being reminded of events from eleven years ago had prompted him to re-examine the whole history of his interaction with his parents and focus on his own responsibility for it rather than theirs. From Jane's perspective Sonny and his parents shared the responsibility for giving each other a hard time. But what Sonny had realized was that he hadn't just given his parents a hard time deliberately—he knew about that better than Jane did—but that he'd given them a hard time just by being Sonny Morgendorffer. He explained, so that Jane could understand, going over details of the childhood history she hadn't heard before.

'At age six, I decide I don't need to talk to other kids ever again; my parents are the ones who get called into school. At twelve, I decide to try out some Shakespearean insults on my teachers; my parents are the ones who get called into school. At fifteen, I start writing violent revenge fantasies just to get a reaction …'

For Jane, Sonny didn't need to paint a whole picture. 'Your parents, et cetera, et cetera. Gotcha. But I never got the idea that they minded that much.'

This insight of Jane's, it emerged, was not news to Sonny. He'd already figured out as much, and it just made him feel worse. She wasn't sure what else she could offer him, except to say, 'You really need to discuss this with them.'

'I know, but first I had to talk to somebody I could trust.'

'Yeah, I'm sorry you didn't make it to the cove.'

'I'm not', Sonny said. 'It would have been good to see Stacy, but this way, I got to talk to the person I trust most.'

Should Sonny trust me so much? Jane thought.

'Should you trust me so much?' she said.

'You earned it', he said without inflection, but when he spoke like that she knew he meant it.

'Listen, Sonny—you know when I came in here and you ran at me? Well, I …'

'That? Do you imagine I didn't think about that? I trust you even if you did get a little tingling rush of blood from that.' As he spoke, he reached out and let his hand rest on her wrist for a moment before he took it away again. 'And if you did, you earned that too.'

"What about you?"

"I..." He sipped at his coffee.

They finished their coffee without further speech. It wasn't bad coffee.


Sonny's parents both hugged him when he came back into the house. It was a day for a lot of hugs.

They sat down to talk about why he'd run away. It turned out they did have some insight. Maybe he didn't always give them enough credit.

Maybe his mother didn't always give his father enough credit, either. She kept trying to cut him off as he struggled to say something about the way they were always being called in to school about Sonny, but eventually he managed to articulate his thought: 'It was part of the deal. It was the other side to you being so smart and perceptive.'

Sonny didn't grasp the full implications at once, so his mother took over the explanation: 'Sonny, you can't have a child with your kind of intelligence and expect him to fit in easily with other kids. We weren't happy to be called into school because we knew it meant you weren't happy.'

His father chimed in again to complete the train of thought: 'But we were never unhappy with you.'

When they put it like that, it made an unnerving amount of sense.

'You can fit in when you choose to fit in', his mother said. 'And you will, too.'

'Yeah!' his father said. 'Like volunteering as a guide for those tours for new students!'

'Oh', said Sonny. 'Those.' He found he was relieved that there were still things his parents didn't understand. He stood up and said, 'I've got a big day with those tomorrow, and I'm kinda beat. I'm going to bed.' He started heading upstairs as his parents wished him a good night. He paused and said, 'I just want to say … it occurs to me that maybe I wasn't the easiest child in the world to raise, and, um … perhaps I'm quite lucky to have you for parents.' He hurried on to his bedroom to spare himself any follow-up. And to spare his parents, too.

In the middle of his bedroom was the refrigerator box. There was a note on top of it. It read, 'Didn't know if you'd need this, but just in case. Quinn'.

He didn't think he would need it, but then again, why close off the option?

He got ready for bed, thinking about how he'd see Stacy soon and explain everything to her. Maybe Stacy would walk with him to school. Then he'd have to give those school tours. Anybody could show people the offices, the classrooms, the lunchroom, Purgatory and Hell (otherwise known as the gym and locker rooms)—what was there that he personally was specially equipped to point out to a bunch of eighth-graders? All the places around the school where he'd been beaten up, perhaps. Would that seem self-pitying? At least it would remind them that school sucked.

He got into bed and turned out the light. By the time you reached eighth grade, you shouldn't need reminding that school sucked. The ones who hadn't figured it out by then would be the ones like Jodie Landon, for whom school didn't suck. Or at least they wouldn't admit it.

Taylor had paired him with Jodie as a tour guide. Jodie could take care of the people who didn't believe that school sucks, the Kevin Thompson and Sandi Griffin types. Was there any advice he could give the others? Stand firm for what you believe in, until and unless logic and experience prove you wrong? The truth and a lie are not 'sort of the same thing'? He might sound like a suck-up. Maybe he should advise them not to under-value having a friend to watch your back. Maybe he should just advise them never to pass up the offer of a slice of pizza. That would sound credible, at least.

Maybe he'd get some credibility from telling some version of the whole Barch-O'Neill saga. Or maybe that was too wild to believe. Maybe it would make him sound too much like a grandstanding blowhard. Still, he could make it entertaining if he tried, at least for part of the audience. If he did that, he'd feel better about going on to warn them to be careful of Taylor. And anybody who was going to spend four years at Principal Taylor's high school did deserve a warning.

As he started to drift off to sleep, he imagined himself speaking to a crowd of impressionable eighth-graders and saying, 'I can personally guarantee you that, despite the efforts of our previous principal, who was taken away from the school in a straitjacket, there is one competent and psychologically stable teacher at Lawndale High. So be sure to pay close attention from the time you start here, so you can spot that teacher as soon as possible …'

After his last tour of the day, he saw Stacy, and thought about how he missed her while she was away.

He couldn't stop thinking about her, how he wanted to tell her, show her.

But they were still in school.

He walked over to her and whispered. "Hey, I missed you."

She leaned closer to him. "I missed you too." She looks around, sees other students, and smiles. "Sonny, um," She stops talking and starts kissing him.

Several students stop and stare and soon the talking started.

Stacy didn't care. She proudly held his hand and ignored those around her.

Not even the glare and judgment from Sandi could stop her. "Quinn, I thought your brother was gay."

"He's not." Quinn simply left it at that and went off to class.


Some dialogue from 'Boxing Daria' by Glenn Eichler

A/N Had to happen eventually and figured the end of this episode was perfect. Time away to make him think and miss her. And for her to decide to screw what others say. Anyways, just the movie to go!