"Uh, hi, dad," I said, unsure of what I should actually say. "What are you doing home early for?"
He shrugged. "Came home early," he said. "How was school?"
I contemplated telling him the truth. "My friend carved my name into her stomach."
He nodded. I didn't think he would believe me.
I eyed the kitchen table, at which he sat. There were three empty beer bottles surrounding him already, with a fourth in his hand. "Well, talk to you later," I said lamely, not bothering to wait for a response.
My father doesn't talk very much at all. Not to me, at any rate. One time, when I was much younger, I found some old pictures of him from when he was in (presumably) the army. I tried asking him about it once, but he just turned away from me, and wouldn't look me in the eyes for nearly a month afterward.
He does the same thing whenever I ask about mom.
XXXX
One day I suggested to Jane that we get out of going to the self-esteem class. She had naturally picked up all the answers from the final exam after passing through six times, but was dubious as to actually getting out of class.
"How would I spend my afternoons?" she asked me, subtly reminding me that any time not at school would be spent at home, with her brother.
I glanced at the TV, tuned to Sick, Sad World, where a reporter was interviewing an alleged alien abductee. "UFO conventions," I said, not wanting to spend any more time at my home than Jane did at hers.
We waited until the end of next class to spring our early exit strategy onto Mr. O'Neill. He seemed reluctant at first, but once we parroted back enough of the answers (even on material he hadn't covered yet), he beamed with joy and decided to hold an assembly in our honor.
And the assembly went flawlessly, too. Except for the part where he confused brake fluid and transmission fluid, gave me Jane's self-esteem certificate to me (and vice-versa), and Jane broke down crying in the middle of her speech, being chased off-stage by that blithering idiot.
I blew off my own acceptance speech and chased after him, finding him anxiously standing in front of the entrance to one of the school's women's restrooms. I brushed past him and found Jane staring at herself in the mirror. She was still crying, but her sobs had become hiccups.
I put my hand on her shoulder. "Jane, you're hiccupping."
"Yeah, *hic* I can *hic* tell, am*hic*iga," she said.
"I'll go bring Mr. O'Neill in here and ask him about menstruation."
"WHAT? NO!" Jane shouted. Then enlightenment dawned on her face. "Oh, you were just trying to cure my hiccups." Then enlightenment dawned on her face again. "Hey, it worked!" She had also (mostly) stopped crying, so that was another bonus. I led her out of the bathroom, gave Mr. O'Neill a mention of 'womanly troubles' (causing him to faint), and Jane and I went to an arcade and shot mutants for several hours.
XXXX
"Brittany invited me to her party."
I didn't expect Jane's eyes to practically bulge out of her head. "Are you going?" she asked me in a quiet voice.
"Sure. And after that, I think I'll swallow glass," I said to reassure her.
I thought about it for a few minutes, though, and wondered why Jane had reacted so peculiarly. Instead of asking her about it, I decided to be subtle and manipulative, because God forbid I actually be up front with Jane about any of her or my issues.
"You know," I said off-handedly. "If we go to that party, we won't have to stay at home."
I could see the war waging itself across Jane's face, as her lip trembled and her eyes darted around for an escape. Finally, she nodded, a very short gesture I would have missed had I blinked. "Okay then. It's party time."
Jane got more on-edge the closer the date of the party approached, until we were standing in front of Brittany's door and she was practically hyperventilating.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked her, torn between my burning curiosity and Jane's well-being. "If you want, we can go..."
"No..." Jane suddenly hauled back and slapped herself - HARD - across her face, flipping her mood from tense to perky like a switch. "Just because these people are cliquey and snotty is no reason not to like them," she smiled, a little too widely. The red mark on her cheek was already well-defined.
I stared at this sudden change with what must have been a look of horror, but I found myself nodding in agreement. "Or hate them," I added.
We rang the doorbell and were greeted by Brittany.
"Daria, you're here. I'm so glad. Now we're even!" Then, she turned to Jane. "Oh," she said, her voice much more downbeat. "I didn't know you were bringing her," she said, referring to Jane with the same tone of voice as one refers to Hitler.
"I'm sorry, I didn't know I wasn't allowed to bring guests, or best friends, or both." Jane looked startled as I admitted that, but her manic smile melted into a more natural one. I was glad.
"Hmm." Brittany frowned, clearly uncomfortable with the situation. "What do you know about geometry?" she asked Jane out of the blue.
"Lots of circles, squares, and triangles."
"Wow! Come on in!" I chose to pretend the exchange had never happened, and followed Jane into the house.
Once inside, we hovered mainly near the snack table. A creepy redhead tried to pester us, but Jane simply made a scissors snipping gesture with one of her hands, and he backed away so quickly he knocked over a bowl of pretzels. I noticed people looking at us and talking, with the occasional hand gesture in our direction to drive home the point that we were being talked about. Jane's manic grin was back in full force, so many of her pearly whites exposed I kept expecting her to sink them into a hapless swimmer to the tune of a suspenseful orchestral soundtrack.
Finally, I got tired of all the attention (people usually don't point at me and talk until I've actually done something offensive enough to their sensibilities) and turned to Jane. "Do you have any idea why people are pointing at us and talking?"
"Oh, Daria, don't be so paranoid. Well, those two guys over there are looking at us, for sure," she said, gesturing to two men approaching.
"Hey. Partying hard, or hardly partying?" one of the jackasses said.
"Hardly interested," I muttered back. His friend tried another awful pickup line, which I shot down just as easily.
"Hey...aren't you Jane Lane?" the first guy said.
"Yeah, that's her, that's her, dude! I told you!" his friend said.
The two suddenly moved a lot closer to Jane, asshole #2 actually sliding directly between me and her. "So, Jane, you wanna go...ah, check out the laundry room, with both of us?" one of them said, about as smooth as sandpaper.
"If you want the last thing you see to be my thumbnails, you'll keep standing this close, you fucking assholes," she replied in the exact same tone, her smile stretching even wider than I had imagined it.
"Hey, fuck you, bitch," one of them said before the duo stormed off.
"Jane, what was -"
"Hey, babe! Haven't seen you outside of school in a while." Kevin Thompson. Just great.
"I'm not your babe." She was suddenly sullen - head hung, smile gone, mumbling the words she spoke.
"Huh? Oh, don't worry about Brittany, babe - she's my cheerleader babe, but you're my first babe...Hey! Where are you going?"
Jane had vanished from my side like a shot, and it wasn't until I heard several people shout in alarm that I realized she had ran straight for the doors, bowling over any guest in her way.
I followed, of course. I never expected to catch her at the speed she was going, but I found her standing just a few feet outside, her teeth bared and clenched together, fists balled tightly enough for the veins on her forearms to all stand out.
"What's the matter, Jane?" I asked her as tenderly as I could.
She spared me a glance - I recoiled a little, seeing the fury in her eyes. "That piece of shit."
"Yeah, I had gathered Kevin had done something to displease you -"
"DISPLEASE ME? DISPLEASE ME?" she roared, whipping her head around as if trying to scream in a 360-degree angle. "Displeasure is the most pleasant FUCKING THING he's ever made me feel." I suddenly noticed that a vein just under one of her eyelids was throbbing, and I was uncomfortably reminded of Mr. DeMartino.
In whipping her head around, something caught her eye, and she stormed off into the darkness. I swallowed my courage and followed her.
She stood in front of a Jeep parked in front of the Taylors' garage. The license plate read '#1QB', so it wasn't very hard to deduce whose vehicle it was. Jane gazed at it for a minute, then marched to the garage and tried one of the doors. With a grunt of triumph, she opened the unlocked door, slipped inside, and emerged a few minutes later with a large sledgehammer.
"Jane, I'm not sure that's such a good-"
WHAM!
Jane left an impressive dent in the middle of the hood.
CRASH!
There went the windshield.
SMASH! SMASH!
Hope he didn't want to drive during the night.
WHUD!
Or get in through the driver's side door.
Jane's assault on the vehicle continued for a few more minutes until her face and arms were drenched with sweat. Exhausted, she let the sledgehammer fall and staggered back towards me. She half-fell on me, and I gently took her the rest of the way down to the lawn, to rest. As we sat, I reflected how fortunate the music inside the house was turned up loud enough to damage the hearing of anybody within a half-mile radius, so nobody had heard the destruction.
"What did Kevin do to you?" I tried again, hoping that she wouldn't take the sledge back up and go after me.
"He was once my best friend," she said between panting. "When we were little, up until middle school."
"What happened?"
"He joined the Cubs - Lawndale Middle School's football team." She spat. "Everything changed then."
"Everything?"
Jane nodded. There was quite clearly a lot more she wasn't telling me, but she wasn't yet content to spill those beans.
"Am I really your best friend?" she asked me.
I nodded. "You're the only person who's ever bothered to give me more than the time of day - and even the people who would give me the time would lie on purpose."
Jane nodded, as if this did not surprise her. "If you ever betrayed me, I think I'd kill myself." With that, she pushed herself back up to her feet and back to Kevin's Jeep. For a moment I wondered what else she could possibly do to the wreck, but then she pulled down her pants and I could hear the sound of liquid splashing against the Jeep's leather seats.
I considered this for a minute, then climbed up on the Jeep, hiked my skirt up, moved aside my panties, and aided in the car wash.