The pretty red-headed girl crept silently past her parents' bedroom as she made her nightly foray to what had become known as the shrine: the room had been left almost exactly as it had appeared a year ago to the day that its former resident had so spectacularly taken her own life; while the cleaners had done a truly superb job in getting the gristle out of the carpet and walls, if you were to look closely, you would see smears of brown and red that hadn't quite faded. Mute testimony to a life that had been so tragically cut short.
Quinn knew that her parents would object strongly to her being here; it was possible that they knew, despite the precautions she took in ensuring that she did not disturb anything, but if they did, then they weren't saying anything. Perhaps they understood her need?
Since the death of their eldest daughter, Helen and Jake Morgendorffer had become rather insular; they barely spoke to each other now, or to Quinn, and their lives mainly consisted of getting through the days as painlessly as possible until they could retreat to their room and blanket out the world for another few hours until the whole benighted process restarted itself the following dawn. After a fashion, they had come to accept Daria's death; you think it's the end of the world, but it isn't, and while there's a person-shaped void in your life that you can never fill, it's easier than you might think to bypass it like a pothole in the road.
Grief has a way of emptying your soul; months go by, wounds scab over, and you learn to contemplate your losses in an analytical rather than emotive manner. They recognised now that their daughter had been different; ill-at-ease, at odds, with normal society and they'd never truly appreciated the depths of her peculiarity until they'd stumbled upon her cold corpse one morning after she'd failed to turn up to breakfast on time.
Right now, Quinn knew that her parents were probably in their bedroom, talking – using the television to mask their words from their remaining daughter's fragile ears – about Daria. She'd saw them weeping, driven to madness by their despair, but if you were to see them now, you could almost think that they were over it. That they were able to put so traumatic an event behind them was a source of unrelenting fury to Quinn; that they weren't still in the throes of denial, raging against a cruel, pitiless world that allowed such things to happen, brought forth reserves of umbrage that she hadn't thought herself capable.
Their eldest daughter, her only sister, was lying in a casket somewhere, her earthly remnants being mauled at by worms, and the best they could do was linger an extra half-second whenever they passed by her door and wonder: what if? To Quinn's mind, that was not an acceptable memorial for someone with so much potential. So much to offer the world. It wasn't good enough, and she could never find the words to explain it to them.
Still, while her parents had been able to make their peace with Daria's death, there were those out there couldn't, and Quinn was more grateful to them than she could ever say. Jane Lane, Daria's only true friend in this life, had rigorously assessed every moment she'd ever spent with her, trying to find something, anything, that might've prompted so violent an act. Even up to a few hours before the event, Jane couldn't find anything; she'd actually seemed relatively upbeat for a change, and in hindsight, that was more worrying than her usual disaffected persona.
In his own quiet way, Jane's older brother, Trent, mourned; bitter regrets, missed opportunities, if only circumstances had been different. Should he have acted on his feelings? Would it have made a difference if there had been someone in her life who could've reached out to her in the most private and intimate of ways? Maybe not, but it didn't stop him from torturing himself, anyway. Trent had written a song about his anguish, and despite being technically deficient in many areas, that it was so moving and heartfelt resonated with a lot of people, and it had become something of a minor hit around Lawndale.
Success had come at quite a price for Trent's band, however, and he was pained at being known as the one who'd written that catchy song about the dead misery chick.
The reason that Quinn couldn't accept Daria's death and begin putting the shattered pieces of her life back into some kind of order was because she felt partially responsible; not directly, and maybe not even in a way that Daria would've consciously been aware of, but she felt that a measure of the blame must be placed in her lap. Because I could've prevented it. With just a few, simple words to the right people, things could've worked out in another way. She'd screwed it up in favour of popularity and prestige, of course, and it was a bitter pill for her to swallow.
If I'd just been a good, hell, if I'd been any kind of sister to her, she wouldn't have had to suffer alone all this time.
Daria's ostracisation had begun from virtually the first moment they'd arrived in Lawndale; while her good looks and bubbly personality had quickly saw Quinn become the school's darling, her sister had gone … unnoticed, except as the butt of the joke. Berated in class for being a smart-arse, picked-on and teased for her horrible clothes, her thick-rimmed glasses, her plain face, and miserable demeanour. For a while, Daria had tolerated, even perversely enjoyed, her low-class status, but after a while, the grating, agonising emptiness of her existence had finally taken its toll. Loneliness abated by a solitary individual who couldn't possibly hope to be with her every moment of every day. Events had simply weighed on her mind until the scales had tipped.
And like the idiot that I am, I missed all the signs, Quinn had found herself, not for the first time, thinking. She had played a part in Daria's downfall and eventual spiral into suicide: denouncing her first as some weird girl who happened to live with them, and then as a distantly-related cousin who had little to do with her. All she'd had to do to avert disaster was admit that Daria was her sister; she would've had to sacrifice her own credibility in order to do it, but when she sat in the cold, dark room, a monument to wasted capability and half-realised ambition, it was a price she would've paid a thousand times over, and more besides, simply to have her sister back.
To have that ineffable girl in the dull green jacket back in her life once more, there was nothing that Quinn wouldn't have given.
It was then that she'd made her decision; she hadn't been a good sister to Daria in life, so she would make up for that in death; by not forgetting her, by staying angry, by stubbornly refusing to move on and holding to the pain, the soul-consuming devastation, Quinn intended to honour her sister thus. She would keep her spirit alive. It was a penance of sorts; everyone, her parents, her friends, would likely call her crazy, driven mad by the heartbreak and loss, but Quinn actually found that she was thinking more clearly than ever, as if a fog had been driven from her mind and she was seeing things properly for the first time.
Daria's death had taught her a very important lesson: other people's opinions didn't matter. And if they could just blithely go about their pointless lives as if nothing had happened, well, they weren't even worth bothering with. She knew that she was being harsh, unduly judgemental and cynical, but she felt – however irrationally – that hers was the right way. Her parents' hearts ached every bit as much, perhaps more, but they were at least trying to get on with their lives, and that sickened her. Losing a child was meant to be the worst thing that could happen to a parent. How do you deal with that? Sit in front of a TV, eat bad food and wait for your own demise?
Quinn heaved a sigh as she looked around the long-abandoned room, preserved down to the minutest detail, even down to the freshly-laundered orange t-shirt, black skirt and green jacket folded neatly over the chair. It was a sad irony that she felt closer to her sister now in death than she'd ever done during her life, and Quinn was grateful to have that thought gnawing on her until her own death; if it ever stopped hurting, if it ever became just a dull ache in the pit of her stomach, she would know that she'd failed her elder sister's memory.
She wished that there was someone that she could talk to; whether it was her friends, her parents, or some detached, clinical psychologist, they would all tell her to do the one thing that she was simply incapable of: bury the past and live her own life. They would layer on a fresh burden of guilt, saying that it would be what Daria would want for her, but they were wrong; what she'd want is someone to be miserable on her behalf, a representative that could say and do all those things that she would now never have the chance to do.