On the fourth day, as I walked home from school, the Tank pulled up next to me and I almost lost control of my bladder as Trent leaned out the window. "Hey, Daria," he said, a shark's grin on his face. "Janey and I are heading up to Swedesville for Alternapalooza, and she's just dying to have you come." He roared with laughter at his attempt at witty banter.
I was about to make a break for it when I saw Jane's head peeking out from between the van's front seats. She was shaking her head vigorously back and forth, mouthing 'No' over and over again.
Trent backhanded her, sending her out of view. "What do you say, Daria? Want to go for a ride with us?"
"Thanks, but no thanks. I have a lot of homework to do." My voice was steady, but I was gripping my book hard enough to leave indentations in the cover.
"I insist, Daria. Janey would be just so fucking disappointed if you didn't come along. It'd break her little fucking heart." All the humor had left his voice now, and I could just imagine Adolf Hitler referring to Jews in the same tone.
I looked away for a moment, to the safety of my house several blocks away. I considered that I could probably make it there easily, and if necessary I could scream as loud as I could if it looked like he was going to get me.
I thought of the casual way he had backhanded Jane without even looking at her, and approached the van.
Trent was all smiles again. "Good girl, good girl," he praised as he reached over and opened the passenger side door. I slid in and closed the door.
As Trent drove us, I looked back at Jane. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and I noticed she had a really awful black eye, as well as a swollen, discolored nose. The last thing I saw was her tongue, clamped so firmly between her teeth that she was drawing blood. I realized that her body was heaving with sobs, and she had bitten down on her tongue to prevent herself from making any noise. I tried to slip into the back, but Trent reached out and grabbed me by the throat. He shook his head and 'guided' me back to the seat.
"So! Daria!" he said, once I had buckled my seatbelt. "You and Janey go to the same school. What kind of grades do you get?"
I stared at him, too frightened to actually glare.
"I SAID WHAT KIND OF FUCKING GRADES DO YOU GET?"
"Mostly As," I spat out as fast as I could.
"Ah, a smarty-pants. Janey's a retard, she keeps getting Cs and Ds."
My courage got the better of me. "Why do you treat her-"
"Why do I treat her the way I do? What the fuck kind of question is that? Who else is going to fucking look after her? I'm all she's fucking got! Who the fuck are YOU to judge ME?" While Trent ranted, he focused solely on me, while the Tank gradually drifted to the right. Trent turned his attention back to the road just in time to prevent wrapping the van around a utility pole.
"Holy fuck," I muttered.
"Holy fuck is right." He turned back towards me again, though keeping an eye on the road this time. "Janey is MY fucking sister, not yours, so don't you fucking dare lecture me how I treat her. Not after mom and dad abandoned us." He grinned and looked at Jane in the rear-view mirror. "Who loves ya, Janey?" he asked.
"You do, Trent," she replied. If her tone were any flatter, I would have mistaken her voice box for a steamroller victim.
"That's right, and don't you ever fucking forget it."
The drive was surprisingly quiet for a while after that (save for Jane's occasional whimpering). I occasionally looked back at her and wished I could do something, but Trent just shook his head whenever he thought I was going to make a leap back there.
I felt a warm presence on my thigh. I looked down in horror to see Trent's hand just below the hemline of my skirt. I slapped it away, recoiling from his touch. "What the FUCK?" I shouted.
Instead of exploding in rage, though, Trent merely laughed. "Oh, I love it when they fight. Tell you what, Daria. Go back and play doctor with Janey." I nodded curtly and slipped into the back of the van as fast as I could, almost missing him make a very rude gesture to drive home the double entendre.
Jane looked at me through her one good eye, miserable. "Why did you come?" she whispered, tearing up again.
"I'm not going to let you face him alone," I answered, fighting my own tears.
"Damnit, amiga." I sat next to her, and she wrapped her arms around me, and we began to weep together.
Until I realized I had sat on something.
"What am I sitting on?" I asked aloud. I stood up, allowing Jane to peel whatever it was off.
"Looks like a sandwich," she said.
Trent looked at us from the rear view mirror. "Eat it, Janey."
"I'm not really hungry, Trent..."
Trent glared at her, then swerved off the road and slammed on the brakes, nearly causing Jane and I to fly off the 'seat' (which was just an old trunk).
"I said eat it, Janey, or you can walk home."
I knew by now that this was no idle threat, and Jane sure as hell knew it wasn't an idle threat. She gulped, then tentatively took a bite of the sandwich. She made a revolted face as she chewed the stale bread, gritty with dirt, and tasted the awful warm, congealed jelly and fought against the nearly petrified peanut butter. Trent watched with a grin on his face as Jane suffered through bite after excruciating bite. All I could do was hold her hand.
Finally, she gulped the last of it down. "Attagirl," Trent said, and we continued on our journey.
As we came closer and closer to Swedesville, I kept running all the revenge fantasies through my head which I had written when all I had to deal with were moronic classmates. Absolutely none of them (at least, none of the ones that didn't require explosives) would have been effective against Trent. And anyway, I wouldn't have been able to do most of those plans regardless, since I'm just a 16-year-old girl and not an international superspy.
I hated being so helpless. I felt that when the van finally stopped, something very unpleasant would very likely happen to Jane, and myself as well. The only plan I could come up with which had the barest chance of succeeding involved rushing up behind his seat, reaching around, and clawing his eyes out with my fingernails, and that relied on him not being faster than me, and also the van not getting into a major wreck while he flailed about blinded.
For the first time in my life, I prayed. Dad was never a religious man - spending most of his Sundays drinking himself into a stupor - so I didn't have any framework, but I still tried, damnit. Jane saw my head bowed and hands clasped together, and she followed my lead. We stayed like that until we finally arrived at Swedesville.
"Okay, time to get the hell out," Trent said, sliding out of the van. Jane and I exchanged a worried look, but we opened the side door and bravely stepped out.
The parking lot looked very un-Alternapalooza-ish.
Trent pressed a few hundred dollar bills into Jane's hand. "Go get your thing done, Janey. I'll be back whenever."
He drove off without us. I was a little stunned. "What's going on, Jane?" I finally asked.
She refused to answer me, instead walking towards the building at the far end of the parking lot. "Jane? Hey, Jane?" I followed along after her, becoming worried that she wasn't answering me.
It was only a minute or two until I realized what the building was, and what was happening, and put my arm around her to comfort her. We made our way through the ring of picketers; one older man leaned in towards Jane's face and screamed "MURDERING WHORE!" before we passed him and broke through the other side of the ring.
The receptionist was shocked to see Jane in her beaten state, and called the doctor immediately. The doctor was very nice, cleaning Jane's wounds as she asked what had happened. When Jane refused to answer, she didn't press the issue.
She allowed me to stay in the room while she performed the procedure.
Afterwards, Jane and I waited inside the clinic until the sun had lowered considerably in the sky and the protesters had mostly dispersed. We waited out in the parking lot after that, waiting until well after the sun had fully set, but Trent never returned to pick us up.
We ended up having to hitchhike home, arriving at my place just before 5 AM. We decided we wouldn't be going to school that day.
We decided to share beds, and amazingly enough I didn't fall asleep the instant my head hit the pillow. "Hey, Jane?" I asked in a gentle whisper. "Why don't you stay here for...for the rest of the...forever." I finally spat it out.
Jane sighed, and I could hear the longing in it. "He always finds me, Daria. He always finds me and brings me back home."