Archive of Our Own

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Her parents used to live on a commune in the late 60s. Then the infighting got bad and the art started to suffer, so they dropped out, went up to Canada for a while–knowing them, without papers. Her oldest sister was already born by this time. He’s not really sure on the timeline there, which she keeps vague maybe on purpose, maybe because it doesn’t matter, maybe because it all predates her anyway. Later she’ll show him photographs of a level, hushed, white snowscape, sharp-peaked mounts in the distance, breath-catching and still, interspersed with shots of the sister as a toddler and work-in-progress pics of several art pieces, paintings, pottery. And he sees for a moment her whole history, collapsing down to these moments, everywhere she’s come from, everything that made her.The first time he sees her house, he’s just dropping her off. It’s late. They’ve been across town, out to eat–she devours burgers in a way that would make the dress-size-obsessed girls at his school want to fall on a sharp sword–back to the club. But her friend’s ditched the place and she says her brother won’t care if she stays, so they end up bumming around some more. (We’re just a family of bums, she’ll tell him at one point, like this is just the truth of it but maybe she’s a little proud, compensating a little much for some insecurity he can’t yet see.) She pretends to be a tour guide, showing him the sights. But when the joke fades out it’s just them and his tape deck and the yellow sheen of the streetlamps across darkness. Conversation about music ebbs and flows, wild animation back to silence.She kisses him before she gets out of the car. Or they kiss each other. Like they both had the idea at the same time.The second time, he stops over in the afternoon, as if he was just in the neighborhood. Her place isn’t anywhere near his–he just wants to see her. He’s in the entranceway for about three minutes. Her hair’s still mussed from sleep like she just woke up and it gives him these stupid visions he can’t afford yet like what waking up with her might be like.Except her brother’s around and so is her friend with the strong judgmental energy like armor, so he’s in and out in a handful of moments. She kisses him again pressed back against the passenger side door of his car. The grass of her front yard is overgrown, still a pale white-green from winter, and he’s skimming the palm of one hand across her waist.The third time it’s just them, Saturday twilight, a cool snap to the air that makes her shiver as she leads the way up the front walk. What an excuse to put his arm around her. They sit on her couch, surrounded by half-dead plants and an overflow of vinyl and somebody’s t-shirt inside-out on the floor. He asks where her family is and she says Trent’s at rehearsal, probably, and her parents are smoking peyote and creating automatic art somewhere in Arizona. He thinks she’s joking, at least about the peyote. But if she is, her poker face is uncrackable.She slides a little closer, his arm still looped around her.She tells him about this art piece she’s working on, name drops a half dozen artists in twenty minutes, but not in a self-conscious or self-important way.She’s probably the coolest person he’s ever met. He keeps her close. He doesn’t want to let go.

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Two weeks into the new semester, a cold Monday in January, she accidentally falls asleep in Tom’s dorm–which has happened before, but not like this. The first time, she’d woken up disoriented, quickly figured out where she was, and then lain quietly and thought about how funny it was. How funny, that her first real, solid, true friend in the world was a guy, and if they’d met in high school, and then dozed off in the same bed while reading, her mother would have thrown the worst of all fits. Lectures about responsibility, allusions to birth control and also Armageddon. Shift the plot a few months and Daria’s in college a half day’s drive away from home and she can do whatever she wants. Fall asleep with her head squashed between a pillow and the neutral white wall of the dorm and Tom’s arm in her immediate field of vision, her leg asleep, the pages of her book creased under her, and it’s fine. Like some sort of secret only the two of them and their roommates will ever know.This time.She has this sense that it’s snowing outside, something about the way the single light reflects off the window or the way the streetlights outside shine in. Or just something in the air, how cold it’s been. There aren’t any books around her. They’d been reading first, felt themselves growing sleepy, and then Tom had taken anything that counted as schoolwork, swept it up and threw it down in the direction of his desk. And after that it was just the two of them.In his dorm, unlike hers, the rooms are very small: his double is so tiny that the beds have to be lofted above the dressers, which means she’s up high on a top bunk, and even before she remembers where she is, she feels that too. That and the snow. And the confusion of the lights, most of which are off, except for the desk lamp down below them. She fell asleep with them on. She’s pretty sure. That means his roommate must have come back, and now he’s asleep on the other side of the room. She puzzles it out neatly, simply, doesn’t move except to open her eyes and then close them again.After they gave up the charade of studying, and she yawned again so hard that her jaw popped, she started talking about going home, even though she didn’t want to move. And he talked about that being a good idea, but he didn’t move either. He lay down on his side and she stretched out longer and easier, in the narrow space between his body and the wall. And that felt safe somehow and good. He wrapped his arm around her and bent his legs like her legs, so they were slotted together, but they didn’t get under the blanket, because that would have been admitting too much. She’d get up any minute. Any minute. Five more minutes.When her glasses started to dig into her temple and the side of her nose, she took them off, but kept them near her, safe enough between her body and her arm.What’s different about it now is that he holds her close on purpose and sometimes she can feel his nose in her hair. What’s different is that a week and a half ago they said they’d try this dating thing. Because when he kissed her in December, on the night after her last paper of the semester was due, she’d kissed back, and absolutely everything about it had felt like the greatest relief.The first, real, best friend she’s ever had.If she screws this up. If she screws it up.There’s nowhere safer to put her glasses. She checks that she still knows where they are. Then she curls her hand around his hand, like she’s making sure he won’t leave, ignores the light still on down below them on the desk, and closes her eyes again and listens to the silence of the snow.

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The forecast says snow flurries but the air feels like incipient heavy snow, as bitter-cold as it is when Daria opens the door and steps outside. These are the last flickering days of the year, the in-between time, the neighborhood dark by 5pm and illuminated only by streetlights. She stands in the cone of light from the Morgendorffer’s front-door light and shrugs her shoulders up toward her ears, crosses her arms against her chest, and Jane pulls the sleeves of her red BFAC sweatshirt all the way over her hands.She’d volunteered to walk Jane out but not all the way home, so there’s no reason now to linger out here in the cold, breathing out faint misting gray breaths, thinking about how it won’t really snow, not in Lawndale in December. It never has.But Jane just shifts her weight from one foot to the other, glances out in the direction of the sidewalk and then back. “Hey–so.” She mimics Daria’s posture, crossed arms to hold in body heat. “Thanks for letting me hang out all night and avoid my house.”“Thank you for distracting me from having to spend time alone with my family.” A half-joke, and Jane half-smiles at it. They’re not so bad, really. She’s just not so used to being home, as if she’d traveled back from Boston in a time machine and now she’s in high school again, Quinn telling stories about the same teachers, the same gossip, the same football team. As if Daria’s four months at Raft never happened. As if time had shifted in some jarring, abrupt way, but only for her. Only somewhere in her body, in her consciousness.“Could be worse,” Jane answers. Could be her place. Wind’s moved back in, half-taken over. Trent won’t last the year with him, though he hasn’t admitted it yet. And Jane’s mom has been away for six months now, the sort of absence that must make even Jane wonder if she’ll ever come back, and as far as Daria has ever been tell, Mr. Lane has never really lived there at all.Maybe familiarity is better. At least she has somewhere to come home to.“What are you doing tomorrow?” she asks. She means it as a lifeline but selfishly, too.Jane shrugs. “Sleeping. Painting.”“Busy schedule. Do you think you can find time for pizza?”“I might be able to pencil that in.” The corner of one side of her mouth lifts up again, a smirk but, because it’s just them alone, there’s softness to it. “I should go.”“Yeah.”For a while now, maybe a couple of months, Jane’s been in the habit of kissing Daria on the cheek when they part ways. The reason why has never been obvious, and Daria has stopped trying to remember quite when it started, or what she thought of it then. Maybe Jane does it because separating always feels so much more weighty now, when they won’t see each other for days or possibly weeks, instead of hours. Maybe the gesture comes from how much more often they touch, now: jostled together on the subway; falling asleep in each other’s dorms; leaning on each other sometimes, when they study side by side in the same bed. Or maybe it’s an art school thing, or just part of Jane changing and growing, in some more abrupt or sudden or meaningful way than she did in high school–some change in her that somehow Daria can’t see in its entirety or fully understand.She likes it, though, this new sort of ritual. Never knows how to respond, never initiates, but likes it. When Jane doesn’t do it, she always thinks, well that’s over now, and then is pleasantly surprised when the habit picks itself up again. Last time, she reached out after and squeezed Jane’s arm, just before they parted at the train station in Boston, which was her attempt at speaking the same language back.But this is Lawndale and it’s different here. They’re nineteen; they’re fifteen; the world is very small, the neighborhood familiar even in the darkness. Flakes of snow too light to even count as flurries are getting caught in Jane’s hair.Somewhere in the direction of the neighbor’s lawn, some sound like the movements of an aggressive squirrel rattles through the stillness. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Jane says, and Daria turns away from the noise just as Jane leans in to kiss her cheek, and the kiss lands on the side of Daria’s mouth instead.She turns very slightly to her left, like a correction, but doesn’t otherwise move. Doesn’t pull back, doesn’t press forward.Interesting.Jane steps back again, blinks a few times; her eyes are unusually wide. “Sorry about that,” she says.Daria shakes her head. “Don’t be.”And then Jane’s shoulders fall back down, and she laughs like she’s letting out some coiled-up nerves. “All right. Tomorrow, then.”“I’ll stop by.”Maybe she should be doing something else now, saying something else. Jane leans in one more time and this time kisses her cheek, like she’d meant to, and then she sticks her hands in the front pocket of her hoodie and starts off down the front walk. Daria stays outside and watches her, moving in and out of the brightest lights, until she disappears at last down the street.

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The Pizza King is full of high schoolers–a prime example of how they have changed, even though the world, or at least Lawndale, has stayed the same–so they agree that next time, they’ll find somewhere else to eat. Over mushrooms and jalapenos, they reminisce about when they were that age, as if they were ages older. They don’t talk about how, the night before, they’d accidentally kissed or what that means, and maybe if they don’t discuss it, that means it isn’t important at all.If this had happened with anyone else, Jane would be the first person she’d tell.They spend the afternoon together, stopping by all of the old haunts, feeling old. She notices all the new ways that Jane touches her now, things she’d taken for granted in a new location and feeling like a new self: how often Jane grabs her arm or nudges their shoulders together or even sometimes takes Daria’s hand and squeezes it, if she wants to get her attention.By the time they’re back in their own neighborhood, early winter-dusk is starting to fall. The grass is cracked with frost that never melted. Daria has her hands deep in her pockets, her fingers much too cold. Jane seems reluctant to go back to her own place, but still declines an invitation to dinner. “But I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says. It’s not even a question.When she leans in, she doesn’t press a kiss to Daria’s cheek, like she usually does, but aims right for her mouth and doesn’t miss. Daria kisses back. But it’s only a moment. Feels not unlike the other kisses did: like just something they do now, an extension of three and a half years of friendship, of whatever this bond is between them she’s long stopped trying to name. The gesture is affectionate, warm. Jane smiles at her after, before she turns around and walks down the drive again.The next day is frigid by Lawndale standards and the snow flurries look like something that might almost stick. They hang out in Jane’s old bedroom because it’s where her easel is. But the house feels different now–emptier–even some of Jane’s art is gone from the walls, because she took her favorite stuff with her, and it’s up in her dorm room in Boston making that place look like home.They talk about the Trent situation and Daria watches Jane paint and doesn’t pretend to do anything else, because it’s winter break and she’s tired and lazy and this is the only thing she wants to do in the world. When Jane hits a snag, needs a break, she lies down too, on the other side of the bed. They’re face to face and staring at each other.“Jesse would probably move up to Boston with him,” Jane says, very quiet and serious, grinding down the unsaid into actual words. “Max would say he would, then chicken out. Nick won’t leave his kid.”“So no more Mystik Spiral.” It feels heady to say, like vertigo. “Or they could take the whole family.”“Nick and his kid and his ex?” Jane raises an eyebrow.“Mass exodus.”“I guess anything’s possible.”Or it’s just the end of an era. Or change is good for people, sometimes.Jane reaches out and tugs on the lapel of Daria’s jacket, like she’s trying to straighten it. She doesn’t wear it as often up at school–sometimes, but she doesn’t need it like she used to. Jane shifts a little closer, and Daria twists the cords hanging down from the hoodie of Jane’s sweatshirt idly around her fingers. Her heart’s pounding maybe a little too hard, but it’s just Jane, so she knows the feeling in her chest isn’t nerves.Jane shifts closer then and somehow they end up curled together, Daria holding her, until fairly soon Jane has fallen asleep. This has happened before, more than once, up in Boston. A part of her wonders why it never happened when they were still in high school.Daria leaves not long before dinner, and only because her parents are expecting her. At the door to Jane’s room, they both linger a long moment; Daria is thinking idly about how their fingers are entwined. Jane’s goodbye kiss is on the mouth again. Maybe it lingers. And afterward, she squeezes Daria’s hand before she lets go.

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Jane starts trying out the g-word tentatively, after they get back to Boston. She doesn’t use it in its specific sense, and not about them: not I am your– or we are– but more hypothetical, general. What girlfriends do, how girlfriends are. When she phones up and asks if they’re on for the Bean Queen on Saturday, the first Saturday of the semester, before they re-establish their routine, she calls it a date. Daria goes silent on the other half of the line, but only for a half-moment too long. Jane discerns it, then tells herself not to read into it too much.“Yes,” she answers then. “This Saturday. A date.”They don’t kiss when they meet or hold hands or anything, partly because it’s impossible to tell who’s watching and what they might think, mostly because they’re just not that type. Daria isn’t, especially. Not the PDA or quiet, constant affection type. They sit across from each other in the booth like they did in the fall, and catch up, and talk easily about a million things she’ll later forget, and in the quiet sometimes between topics, Jane just looks over at her and thinks, she’s lucky, how this is turning out. So damn lucky, really.But when they’re alone behind the closed door of Jane’s dorm at BFAC, her roommate out until the evening, Daria steps up close and takes Jane’s face between her hands, like she’s measuring it, and pulls her forward, and kisses her. They have not been able to kiss in nine long days. Makes her more aware of what Lawndale does have going for it: that they get to see each other every day and their houses are within walking distance and, in the long, chill, break between semesters, they had nothing better to do some days than just lie around in bed and kiss until they got tired, and then sometimes Daria would stick her nose in against Jane’s neck and drowse like she was falling asleep. That’s indulgence. That’s how a queen might live, there.Nine interminable days since she’s had this. Daria’s fingers pushing through her hair, pushing it back, Daria kissing her like she’s gone all the way deep underwater and she’s okay with never coming up again to breathe.

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Daria pops her locker door open, and it reverberates with a clang as she slips her backpack off her shoulder. A few lockers down, Jane’s doing the same thing. “What are you doing this weekend?” Daria asks. The question is wholly innocuous, but seems to catch Jane off guard.“Huh? Oh, nothing really. Why? Are you sending me on a secret mission?”“If you choose to accept it. Or we could just go see a movie.”Jane hums. “Not tonight, though. Spiral’s playing at the Zon.” She pauses, hesitating with her hand around one of the notebooks in her locker. “But you probably have a date, right?”Friday is usually her night with Tom. Not always. But it’s an unspoken rule in the custody arrangement among them, just like it had been when Jane was dating him. After last night, she’s sure he’ll want to see her. Everything she wants herself is pooling out like the guts of a disemboweled body on the floor.She stuffs two additional books in her bag, hopes they’re the right ones. “I know the list is pretty exclusive, but do you think Trent could get me in?” She adds fast, not wanting to think about the narrow-eyed way Jane is looking at her, “Me and Tom?”Jane hesitates, then shuts her locker again with that same metallic shiver. “Tom won’t want to see me,” she answers. “We sort of got into it the last time we saw each other.”“Got into it?” She doesn’t need the clarification. She just needs the time to roll it over in her head, while she zips her bag again and closes her locker, too. Fought. Last Saturday after the magic show. Probably over her, the thought of which feels like looking at her own clone: surreal and off-putting, a weird reminder that she exists to other people even in her own absence. “You didn’t mention that.”“I didn’t want to put you in the middle. It wasn’t a big deal, but I don’t think his ideal Friday night includes me.”
Mine does.
They fall into step beside each other, heading toward the main entrance of the school. If she’s alone again with Tom, in her house, in her room, they’ll pick up where they left off and–now that metallic clang is in her stomach. She’s been thinking about him all goddamn day. And she doesn’t want to use Jane as a buffer, or a chaperone–she’d be the worst one–but.But the last time they were all together. She tries to remember the expression on Jane’s face then but it’s hard to square with the neutral-distant look on it now, how she doesn’t seem to want to look Daria’s way. If she were considering anyone but Jane and anyone but Tom, Daria would say this is an experiment she could easily run again: people aren’t so difficult to move around and set in place as they like to think they are. But she doesn’t think of them as subjects and this isn’t science. Maybe it’s something like art.The incoherence of wanting so much. She’s not used to it. She thinks about Jane wanting to watch them and wonders if she still thinks about watching, if she could ever exist in the real world like the confident, appraising, in-control Jane Lane in her head.“I can still ask him,” Daria says. Outside, the afternoon is warm and sunny without any breeze, and she can hear the sharp sounds of whistles and yelling from football practice out on the field. “I don’t think he’s still caught up on something that happened a week ago.”Jane shrugs. “If you say so. Look, I’ll be there either way, and if you guys want to come too, I’ll see you there.”“A solid plan.”“I am a strategic mastermind.”

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Jane presses a line of kisses down the center of her body, over her shirt, pushes it up to reach the bare skin stretched over the last of her ribs and the soft middle of her belly. Daria glances down at her lazily, watches her. They’ve been making out for a while now over the course of the longest Sunday afternoon Raft has ever seen. Her mouth is still buzzing with the memory of Jane’s mouth.When Jane reaches her stomach, she presses her face against it, half-kisses and half-nuzzles, like she just can’t figure out what to do with herself, she has such affection to show. Daria’s still getting used to seeing her this way. But she’d watch her all day, not just for the sensation of it, the sweetness, but the low intensity of wanting that is attempting to go nowhere, be no more desperate than it is. Jane reaches her hip and kisses there too, her breath warm as it exhales against the skin above the waistband of Daria’s skirt.She kisses a line to Daria’s navel then, and then swipes her tongue around it in a circle. With her free hand, she reaches up and tangles up her fingers with Daria’s fingers.“Do you think,” Jane asks, flicking her eyes up a moment, the question not mumbled or whispered but still spoken directly against skin, “that I should get another piercing?”The words take a moment to register. “In your other ear?” Daria asks.“Nah, I’ve done the ears. Somewhere fun.”“The uvula?”Jane raises an eyebrow at her. “I don’t think you can pierce that. What about here?” She kisses Daria’s belly button again.Daria arches up, stretches, groans at the suggestion and the memory she knows Jane is purposefully bringing up. “Are you talking about me or you?”“Me.” She pauses a moment, tugs on Daria’s hand a little. “Or you.”“Oh, no, this conversation is about you.”“What conversation? We’re not conversing. I’m just saying. It was hot.”Daria sighs, but it’s exaggerated, needlessly deep. Jane rolls with it, and bites her hip afterward and nuzzles once more against her side.“I thought so then, too,” she adds, and this is quieter, actually a whisper or confession–very soft against skin. Daria looks down at her. Jane is kissing her rib like it’s her favorite spot on this body, this body she says all the time that she loves. So Daria doesn’t say anything more for a long time.“Too bad I let it close up,” she says finally, and Jane answers:“Too bad, too bad,” and pushes her shirt up more, and kisses the spot in the center of her torso where her rib cage divides.

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Jane pushes in the door of every stall she passes, proving each one is empty, one after the next. Before Daria can ask what she’s doing, she reaches the end of the line, takes Daria’s face between her hands, pulls her in and kisses her.It’s surprising for a moment, and then simply good.She wraps her arms around Jane’s waist and pulls her very slightly closer, so that the toes of their boots hit against each other, and Jane tangles the fingers of one hand in Daria’s hair.“So this is why you’re suddenly interested in going to the bathroom in groups,” Daria murmurs, too many words to say all at once so the sentence comes out broken between kisses.Jane smirks. “We’re really more like a pair.”“Hair splitter.”Jane kisses her cheek, her mouth again, walks her back one step and to the side but not yet up against the sinks. She’s holding back, Daria knows. Closed-mouth kisses and frequent breaks for air and space between their bodies, still. That’s got to be all for the best because they’re at school, and the girls’ room by the science lab doesn’t get the sort of traffic that the one by their lockers does, but still any one of 700 female students could come in at any time. When she thinks about that, she feels reckless in a scared way and her pulse point jumps but she still doesn’t want to stop for anything. The kind of looks they’ve been passing to each other all day, they’re different now.She tries again: “Thought you wanted to check your makeup.”“After,” Jane answers. She sounds a little hoarse now. Daria has made her that way. “Need to,” she clarifies, “after this.”Daria has a vision of herself showing up to history with lipstick marks on her face. They haven’t talked about being a secret or not but—She takes another step back, so that her hip hits the hard edge of one of the sinks, and she makes a small noise against Jane’s mouth. Jane pulls back enough to look at her. That sort of appraising look, curious and a little bit sly, she still doesn’t know what to do with, most of the time.“What? Do I have—?”“You look very well-kissed,” Jane says, and pushes her hair all the way back from her face.“That’s not a very subtle compliment to yourself,” Daria tries to answer, but the last words are cut off by the sound of footsteps, heavy heels against tile. Jane pulls back fast, pivots, then leans back against the side of the nearest stall with her arms crossed. But she doesn’t say anything, and suddenly Daria has never had a thought in her head that isn’t kissing Jane Lane. And they’re both looking too obviously down the side of the room toward the door.Andrea pauses, looking at them.“Yo,” Jane says, and tilts her chin up in greeting.Andrea stares back at her, at Daria, back to Jane.“Hey,” she answers, and then disappears into the second stall.Daria’s held breath releases, and she collapses forward against Jane’s shoulder, feels an arm loosely around her and Jane’s shoulders shaking like with silent laughter. She groans under her breath. They’ve definitely been caught, and there’s a loopy feeling in the aftermath of that rush of adrenaline, but underneath that she feels only relief.

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The storm is still just black clouds on the horizon but the rain has already begun, so steady and quiet that Jane can barely hear it over the music from her stereo, when the phone starts ringing. No one else picks up. So she scrambles around on the floor until she finds the cordless, which she dropped down there last night, late, after the longest conversation she’s ever had about nothing at all.“Yo.”“You’ve got to get me out of here.”Her sketchbook’s propped open on her knees, and she smiles down at it, just halfway. The words are dire, the voice that says them even and emotionless.“Who is it this time? Sister? Mother? Father? D, all of the above?”“Aunt,” Daria answers. “Rita’s boyfriend dumped her and her house is being fumigated.”Jane raises an eyebrow. “Is the boyfriend a giant cockroach?”“Yes.”“Mmm.” She’s been playing Radiohead on repeat all day; it’s that kind of weather, that kind of mood. She reaches back to turn the volume down just a little. “You can always hide out here.” A moment’s pause, uncertain, the corner of her lip pulled in hard between her teeth. “We could do that thing again.” Coward’s move, not being able to say it. But it’s more than Daria has managed in almost forty-eight hours now.A long silence stretches out over the line. “We could,” she answers.“We don’t have to,” Jane adds, quick, and too bright, because she can’t read in those two syllables—so carefully formed, not a single crack or hint of emotion in them—what her best friend might be thinking, and that’s so odd for her it makes her stomach feel like it’s flipping right over in the middle of her.
But I’d like to.
“I can be over in a few minutes,” Daria says, and hangs up.Jane hides her sketchbook in the drawer next to her bed and stands up and tells herself they’ll watch whatever’s on TV and maybe talk about Rita and Barksdale sisters’ drama and whatever was up with that cockroach guy, he sounds like a real prize. And that the rest was an aberration. And that she has to stop thinking about it, and thinking about it, and thinking about it.She doesn’t put on her boots, just walks downstairs in her sockfeet. Already she can hear the rain picking up, a distant rumble of thunder that crashes overhead for a long, long time. She glances out and up through the window, sees heavy storm clouds scudding in closer over the trees.When the doorbell rings, she opens the door right away.Daria’s standing on the other side, drenched beneath a heavy downpour of rain. Her hair is flat and dripping, her clothes waterlogged, her eyes invisible behind her rain-splattered glasses. Behind her, a crack of lightning breaks up the clouds, sizzles through them with a flash of electric-light.“It was just drizzling when I left,” she says, as if this were any sort of excuse at all.Jane laughs. “You look like a wet rat.”Daria’s brows furrow, that sharp, angry V between them that Jane’s always thought is more cute than anything, and she answers, “Thank you for that helpful commentary. Aren’t you going to let me in?”“Oh, no, I changed my mind, I think you should—”She can’t get the last words out. Daria grabs her by the wrist and yanks her over the threshold. The rain’s coming down so hard, needle sharp and cold and she shivers through her socks from the chill of the pavement and the near-winter shock of it, that she’s half as drenched as Daria in about three seconds. And dammit if she doesn’t even care.Because Daria hasn’t let go of her wrist. They’re standing almost nose to nose out here.The first, last, and only time they’ve been this close was right before they kissed, right before Jane kissed her, standing upstairs in the middle of her bedroom after school. It’s Daria who leans in first this time, so fast she misses on her first try, and gets the side of Jane’s mouth instead. The second one lands right, lands perfect, and Jane’s fingers tangle up in her wet hair, thumbs sliding along the wet skin of her cheeks. She’s so out of breath from the cold of the rain and the unexpected insistence of this girl, pressing forward, her hands at Jane’s waist, that it’s all she can do to just hold on. Just hold on.“You know we could be doing this inside,” Jane mumbles, right up against Daria’s mouth. She almost can’t hear herself over the sound of heavy rain against pavement, the constant white-noise sheen of it pouring down.“Too late now,” Daria whispers back—which strikes Jane as so funny that nervous, manic laughter starts bubbling up in her. Too late now. They’re already soaked so what else could happen? Only a lightning strike right where they’re standing. Which is what this already feels like. Like lighting that has somehow struck twice.

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Tom has a light above his headboard, which shines brightly in a thin rectangle over his pillows once turned on by a pull cord made up of small, metal beads. It’s probably intended as a reading lamp but it works great for sketching, too. Daria would love it. Not that she doesn’t already read under any conditions; for someone whose visibility is all of six inches in front of her face without her glasses, she’ll take out her book in any sort of dim light and just tilt it toward her best light source or squint at it through the gloom. She doesn’t have a reading light by her bed, doesn’t even have a bedside table: just a pile of books with her alarm clock and her glasses balanced on top. When Jane first saw her room, she thought maybe the books were just decorative. She’s noticed though that every time she’s up there, the collection has changed, and sometimes books from the pile end up in Daria’s locker or her backpack, replaced with other books, and yet the stack always stays the same height.Tom keeps books by his bed too, but arranged neatly on the shelf below his bedside table. Most things in his room are neat. Maybe it’s because the Sloanes have a maid. Or maybe he’s just like that, although the state of his car would say otherwise.He’s sitting next to her now, reading, while Jane works on this drawing that won’t exactly gel. Portrait of her boyfriend. At least he’s staying still for her, so engrossed he’s not moving at all except for his eyes flicking back and forth, and sometimes his thumb flipping over a page. Daria does this, too, sits very quiet and statue-like when she’s in it. But when Jane sketches her, she always has to lie about it, ever since that first time Daria got all self-conscious about it. She’s just not someone who’s used to being looked at.She’s never been in Tom’s room because of the whole hating-him thing. Recently that’s been feeling more rote than anything, though. She still makes smart-ass comments all the time but without any bite, so it’s like an inside joke they have or like a habit they can’t break. A few times they’ve even gone out for pizza together, all three of them, on purpose. The downside is that if Tom’s read what Daria’s reading, or vice versa, they’ll want to chat about it, which gets dull. The upside is that hanging out with them together means Jane doesn’t have to split her time between them like she’s a child of divorce in charge of her own visitation schedule. Boyfriend time, best friend time. Friday nights, after school, every other Saturday, most Sundays. She usually misses whichever one’s not there.Plus when she and Tom are alone they either fall into silence, after they’ve wrung dry the topics of trash TV and what stupid thing happened to you at school today, and then it’s either awkward or they end up making out. He doesn’t really care that much about Lawndale High—who would though; can’t blame him—and she can’t keep straight all this stuff he says about his prep school friends. She tried hanging out with them one or two times but that’s fizzled. Their taste in art is terrible, and they don’t get her jokes, and they’re always sort of looking at her like they don’t get what Tom’s doing with someone like her, which maybe sometimes she doesn’t get either, if she’s honest.The truth is that there are only three people in this world she really cares about or who have ever consistently given a damn about her: Trent and Daria and Tom. Those are her people. But she can’t see them ever getting together in a group to go bowling.…Actually, she’d love to see Daria go bowling.“What are you smiling about?” Tom asks. Like an expert model, he still hasn’t lifted his head, only shifted his gaze up to her.“Nothing. What do you think?” She turns the sketchbook around so he can see. She isn’t really done, but about as done as she’s ever going to be.His eyes widen a little, as they often do when looking at her work, like he’s always equally impressed, and he answers, “It looks just like me. I can’t believe you did that just now.”“Well it has been an hour.” She glances down at it again. Not bad. Teenage Boy with Book at the Start of the Century.“Really?” He shrugs, takes his finger out of his book where he’s been marking his place and just lets it close. Looks up at her, steady, like it’s his turn to catalogue the details of her. Then he leans up on his elbow, frames her face with one hand against her cheek and pulls her down into a kiss.Jane reaches out blindly with one hand to close her sketchbook again, and then holds it out over the floor and lets it fall.

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She’ll catch a cold from being outside in the rain in just a t-shirt and shorts and she does not care. The door slams behind them, shuts out the storm with a heavy sound, and then it’s just a loud white sheen of noise just outside and lighting through the window and the electricity briefly flickering. Jane has Daria up against the door, kissing her again, hands at her waist so that when Daria breathes in deep and shaky, Jane feels her whole body lengthen with it and her lungs expand, and then the outtake of that breath against her lips.Daria’s glasses are so fogged over that her eyes are invisible, which is almost funny, except for the circumstances. Even then, when she pulls back a little to look at her, she has to laugh.Daria frowns but like she doesn’t really mean it. Her hands are clenching and unclenching at Jane’s shoulders, gathering up the wet fabric of her shirt, picking out the real, solid nature of her. “I can’t see a thing and you’re laughing at me.”“That’s why I’m laughing.” She takes off Daria’s glasses, with this idea she’ll wipe them off on her own shirt but that’s no good. Without them, she can see that Daria is looking at her steady, doesn’t have to squint because they’re so close. “That’s better at least,” she says, about the no-glasses look, but her voice is low and serious like she’s saying you’re beautiful instead.Daria’s gaze dips down. “These clothes are really heavy,” she answers.“Mmm, right, that jacket.” Jane nods sagely; she feels so damn lighthearted and giddy that she just can’t keep a straight face about it–something like relief and wonder keeps bubbling up. She hands Daria her glasses and then carefully unzips the jacket, watching her own hands the whole time. Pushes it off Daria’s shoulders until it lands on the floor with a heavy, wet splat. God, they’re both so drenched. The shivers are getting to her now, and she’s mostly caught her breath, from that breath-catching kiss.Instead of warming herself up, she reaches out and rubs Daria’s arms, feels the wet-cold chill of her skin and the goosebumps there. Her t-shirt is sticking to her. She’d been soaked right through. Her hair is still dripping, and except for the rose-pink of her cheeks, she’s so pale.“Maybe we should take a shower,” Jane suggests.“Don’t you mean showers?” Daria answers.Jane shakes her head. “There’s only one good one, anyway. Come on, drowned rat girl.” She slides her hand all the way down, takes Daria’s hand. “Let’s go.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Trying to date in Lawndale had been weird. Like if she were meant to go out to dinner at Tom’s family’s club, she would have met him in high school and dated him then. But she didn’t because they’d lived in completely different worlds, like their two neighborhoods and two schools were on opposite planes of existence, and maybe it was better that way because she feels so grossly out of place eating out somewhere that doesn’t even have cheesy fries on the menu.They went out for pizza once too, and ran into Brittany and Jodie also home for the semester break, and that had felt even weirder. She hadn’t known how to describe him so she called him my friend Tom from school. Which led to more questions than she wanted to answer. Like then why is he here and why was he holding your hand before, but at least Jodie had been tactful about it and eventually the torture of it all had come to an end.Dating at Raft mostly means hanging out like they did before and holding hands a lot. His gloved hand in her gloved hand as it snows yet again over the quad: this feels like something other people do but it has a certain warmth about it that maybe she’ll allow. Another part of it is that they make out a lot now, usually in his room because his roommate is always out. She gets vertigo about it sometimes, which she blames on how his bed is lofted up above his desk, to save space, how close they are to the ceiling. Also on the way he whispers her name sometimes, Daria, against her lips, like he’s making sure she’s still there.He touches her a lot more than she touches him and someday he’ll probably notice that: that she doesn’t know what she’s doing, that she doesn’t know how to touch him. And sometimes afterward, after they trail off and she’s just lying on him, squashed in against the wall, he asks her what she’s thinking and she doesn’t know what to say. What she’s supposed to be saying. He’ll notice that too and then this whole thing will implode. She’s never had a friend as good as him in her life and when that gets obliterated too, she’ll really be screwed. This whole thing’s a tight rope, falling from it an impending disaster.She can’t get used to this physical closeness and warmth. How new it is. How nice it feels sometimes to rest her head on his heart and feel his hand running through her hair as they talk about the books they’re reading and the vibrations of his voice echo through her. If this were all dating was, she’d be a straight A student at it, valedictorian of it.He asks her if she’s okay because she’s been quiet a while and she says yes, she’s fine. He sighs deep and she feels on the exhale how he doesn’t believe her.

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Jane keeps herself still for a moment, until she feels Daria’s body relax against the pillows, relax around her fingers. Then she draws them out slowly. She stares up, up at this rare angle of Daria’s body, as viewed from between her legs: all unexpected lines, softness and curves. Fuck. It never gets old. When she feels a bit steadier herself, she drags her own body up to the top of the bed again, squashes in that narrow bit of mattress that’s left to her, feels how deep her own lungs are working.Daria rolls her head to the side, looks at her bleary-eyed. Her skin blushes pink so easily. Because she’s not wearing her glasses, it’s easier to see the slight ticking movements of her gaze back and forth, and that’s so interesting, so endlessly fascinating, that Jane only breaks a couple of times and stares down at her breasts as she takes in those deep breaths of air.“You okay?” she asks. She’d really meant it the first time but now it’s just habit. Daria’s so quiet after that sometimes it’s hard to tell.At first, Jane had thought the quiet was regret or maybe even embarrassment or shame, but now she knows it’s just a gentle sort of sleepiness she’s so damned lucky to get to see.“Mmmm,” Daria answers, and nods. She takes in another deep gulp of air, less shaky this time, more like the sort of breath that steadies and calms once and for all, and then she rolls over onto her side, toward Jane. Lands with her head on the part of Jane’s chest just below her shoulder.Jane puts an arm around her.Another thing that surprised her the first time was how damn fast Daria fell asleep, and then she’d stayed awake awhile herself trying to count all the times they’d slept together in the same room. Barely ever before college. But the moment reminded her less of the nights they’d stayed over in each other’s dorm rooms and more of that night their junior year when they’d conked out in the Morgendorffers’ living room during a Sick Sad World marathon. She’d woken up abruptly at four in the morning, when her chin fell too far down and the ache in her neck had jolted her back to the land of the living. Daria had been slumped over on her side of the couch, her glasses sliding down her nose. And maybe Jane had never seen her face so… quiet before. The vulnerability of sleep upon her. And that was why the moment lived in her head so long. On the television, otters stealing surf boards, an interview with a dazed looking man at the beach, and afterwards a commercial for toothpaste—she remembers just listening and listening and listening, and not seeing a thing.Now with her free hand, she traces stray lines with her fingertips across Daria’s breast. Just idle movements. For a second, Jane thinks she’s about to wake up, but she only moves a little closer in her sleep and makes an unintelligible noise, as if she were dreaming.

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I think I’m in love with my best friend.

My friend and I met four years ago when we were freshmen and we’ve been basically inseparable ever since. Lately I’ve realized I have romantic feelings for him and they’re just getting more distracting and intense. I have no reason to think he feels the same way but I can’t get the idea of kissing him out of my head…
Jane will truly do anything to avoid studying for her math test during study hall. Even flip through the glossy pages of this teen magazine that must have fallen out from between the textbooks of some girl in the previous class. The advice column is really the only good part, something kind of cathartic or at least distracting about other people’s problems, but then the very first letter puts the word love next to the phrase best friend. Which is probably a sign to put it away and actually take out her notes.But.
I can’t get the idea of kissing her out of my head.
Of course she did kiss Daria once, and if the answer to this lovelorn student involves a suggestion like ‘try it once and see if you like it’ she’ll demand her money back. Metaphorically speaking. Because having the smallest and thinnest of memories of what Daria’s mouth feels like against hers has only made that incoherent wanting scribbled up inside her so much worse. It makes her want to take out that memory again and turn it around and over and try to inhabit it one more time because it’s the best she’ll ever get. Each time it’s like she remembers it a little less well.Then she has to reach for it again, recreate it again. Sometimes she tries to remember the before, too, the moment right before when it just felt right somehow and she just knew that Daria Morgendorffer was going to kiss her, or maybe the other way around. That moment’s why she’s been so bent out of shape about Daria for months. Because it seemed to underscore this inevitability between them, like every school day, afternoon, phone call, shared thought, days when they were separated and she missed her, weeks when she missed her, were all about building something—Not knowing what that something is but only the undeniability of it is what keeps clawing at her.It’s so much worse than I just want to kiss her. Again.There’s really nothing any Val advice columnist could say about a problem like this: Daria and her quiet insistence that they’ll never speak of it again, not even when they’re squashed into Jane’s bed with Tom between them and the only sounds in the room are The Cure and their own heartbeats, and Jane almost thinks it could happen again. Daria and her presence like something that could happen.She has no answer. There is no answer here. But. Jane really doesn’t want to do math. So she skims over the bottom paragraph anyway.
The best thing you can do is approach him and be honest about your feelings. He may not reciprocate, but at least the topic will be out in the open…
Yeah right.Sure.She closes the magazine but keeps her index finger between the pages.Glances around. One of the lesser football players is asleep in the chair next to her. Mr. DeMartino, on babysitting duty this period, is reading a magazine too. Probably not Val.Jane skims over the answer again. Just be honest. Okay, yeah, easy; for other people; for girls whose best friend isn’t a girl, for girls whose best friend didn’t run. Isn’t dating a guy already. Isn’t straight. Then it’s easy. But Jane doesn’t need to be honest and tell her anything because, hey, she’s so smart, she must already know. On some level at least. And she’s still with her boyfriend and she still kisses him like that and Jane can only stand it if she thinks of him as Daria’s boyfriend anyway.She doesn’t need to be honest, she thinks, doesn’t have anything to be honest about, because Daria and Tom have each other and that’s enough.She takes her finger out from between the pages and lets the magazine close.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“Do you know any straight people?” Jane asks abruptly, into a protracted but not unpleasant silence. She’d been lazing out to the sounds of students playing Frisbee down two floors below them on the grass of the quad: loud voices and shouting through the crack of the open window. Just like at BFAC and Raft, the beds at Bromwell are narrow but long. She has nowhere else to rest but half on top of Tom, with her ear against his chest, his arm around her.Another sound, existing on a different plane than that of the voices below, is the steady thumping of his heart. It sounds faster than she imagines hearts should sound. Maybe that’s because he’s still coming down.His breathing stutters at the question: first a deeper breath in, like he’s gathering air for his answer, then a breath out, and a moment later maybe something different than he’d initially meant to say.“I’m the straight person other people know,” he says.Jane smiles. Yeah, that’s right. “The token,” she clarifies.She hears him humming, a vague assent: hears in the normal way one hears and also the vibration of it through his chest. “Yeah.”All of the Bromwell friends he’s introduced her to this weekend are queer, except for his roommate, who seemed all right but not quite like he should be counted among the others. Like her own back at BFAC, just someone else occupying the same room. Jane had joked, when they came back up after lunch, that they should put a sock on the door just in case.Before that, they’d been like old friends with each other. Inside jokes from high school. A mini tour of the campus, during which he’d barely touched her. He’d brought her to the school’s art museum, let her wander at her own pace through it, and afterwards they’d gone to dinner and that night she’d slept in her sleeping bag on his floor. He’d introduced her to all of his friends as another friend, someone he knew from Lawndale. She’d laughed on the inside at how simplistic that was.But when she’d joked about the sock, he’d said, “Yeah, probably,” doing that thing where he takes her all too seriously again. That thing she’d fallen for back in high school, that hook upon which she’d hung their whole relationship. He was staring at her without smiling, except a very little at the corner of his mouth, like he was fond. She stared back at him so long, it took all of the self-control she’d ever had not to kiss him right there in the hall.“So which two of those girls are you going to date next?” she asks, imagines him rolling his eyes without bothering to look up at his face. He slides his arm down, wraps it around her waist and squeezes. His hand feels warm and big against the bare skin of her belly.“Funny.”“I thought so.”The thin breeze through that cracked open window is cooling the sweat still on her skin. The whole train ride from Boston, she’d wondered if they’d end up fucking. Like that was ever any kind of question, really.“Hey, look—” And she does hesitate, though she’d started the sentence sure she wouldn’t have to. She hugs him a little closer. “I’m sorry Daria couldn’t come up, too.”Tom shrugs. “I get it. Midterm deadlines suck. Did, um—”She watches her own hand, splayed across his ribcage.“Did you talk about it with her?”“Is 'it’ the possibility of you and me ending up naked in bed together?” Jane asks."Yes.”Obviously. “Yeah. She said, 'I know it’s going to happen. Just tell me the details later.’” She does her best Daria voice for the quotation, that is makes her tone as deadpan and steady as possible, but she can’t imitate the absolutely unreadable calm and resolve she’d seen in Daria’s stare.“Yeah,” Tom answers. “Sounds like her.”“Don’t worry,” Jane adds brightly. “I’ll leave out the part where you came screaming my name.”“I didn't—”“That’s why I’ll leave it out.” She turns her head briefly, presses her nose against his chest, like she’s muffling a sound there or hiding a kiss. Then very seriously, and very quietly, she says, “She’ll visit soon,” and feels Tom pull her that much closer with the arm curled around her waist.

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Jane wakes up at Raft on the first day of October to the sound of the windowpanes shaking violently behind her head. A heavy gust of wind has blown away any last scraps of dream. She pulls herself up, bleary, and squints outside at the swirl of orange and yellow leaves falling past, most of them still on the trees yet and most of the grass still summer-green and the sky a bright blue, everything shaded in that golden morning light, and thinks it looks like a shot out of a college admissions brochure. Come study at a top liberal arts college in New England. Come give us your money. And experience mornings like this.She’s just visiting—the cheaper option, just as nice.For a moment, she thinks there’s no one else in the room. Daria’s roommate’s bed is empty and Daria herself is not in her bed. They’d slept back to back last night, Jane tucked in against the wall, but when she’d woken just now, she was sprawled along the middle of the mattress with her foot hanging off the side. She remembers the comforting warmth of shared body heat and in its absence, shivers.“Good morning, sunshine,” Daria’s voice deadpans from the direction of the desk. She’s sitting there with a notebook open on the one bit of surface not cluttered with stuff, the very corner, her pen still poised above the page. Her gaze steady on Jane. When Jane doesn’t answer immediately, her eyes narrow very slightly, and she asks, “Are you okay?”“Oh, yeah.” She sits up a little straighter and leans back against the metal bed frame. Outside of the blankets, and with just her old t-shirt on, and the wind just behind her on the other side of the chill glass, she does feel cold, and she warps her arms around herself to ward it off. “How long have you been up?”“Not long.” That’s a lie, probably. She’s brushed her hair, looks fully awake, though still in her pajamas from last night. Last night and their shared bed. Daria’s back pressed against her back. High school would have been so different, she thinks, if her bed had been smaller, or if they’d thought to share it, one of the few times Daria had spent the night.“Here.”She half-registers the word, the sound, and then something soft and gray is arcing through the air toward her. It falls, a pile of crumpled fabric, in her lap. She looks down at it, up at Daria again.“You’re shaking,” Daria says, as if this were the simplest fact. Jane’s hands are wrapped up in her sweatshirt, soft as if washed too many times, well-worn; one of the sleeves is inside out, the lining showing.Jane fixes the sleeve and pulls the shirt over her head. The hood gets caught briefly; the cuffs don’t want to fall down to her wrists. When she’s finally settled, her hands in the front pocket, the warmth of it seeping in, it occurs to her that she’s never worn Daria’s clothes before, that wearing this sweatshirt doesn’t feel like wearing her own. It says RAFT in big, black letters on the front, and it’s too big for her (too big for Daria, too; she’s seen her swimming in it) and most of all, it smells like her.Jane cuddles up inside it, curls down like she’s burrowing in it. “Thanks,” she says, belatedly, and much too sincere.“You know you’ll have to give it back,” Daria says.“No.” Jane shakes her head. She’s smiling, still half-serious. So, so very serious, if she digs far enough down. “It’s mine now.”“All right. Then you owe me a BFAC hoodie.”“Not a chance, Morgendorffer,” she answers, when what she means is, she’d like nothing more.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

For the first hour, Daria simply reads. The storm outside is so severe that the lights occasionally flicker, but it hardly matters: Jane has turned off all but the one closest to her bed, and nothing of the rain or lightning or leaves blowing in the great gusts of wind can be seen beyond the heavy curtains closed over the windows. In the dark, in the white-noise quiet, with no sense of the hour or even the day, time itself seems to stop. Like they have stepped right out of it. Right into a soft, gentle cocoon.Jane even brought over an extra blanket from Wind’s old room, a soft, beige thing, for Daria to wrap around herself. Jane declined the offer to share, at least for now. In the very last scrap of light from the other side of the bed, she’s sitting up against the headboard and sketching.After a while, Daria realizes that the sounds of pencil against paper have stopped. And that she hasn’t turned a page in a while. That she hasn’t been thinking about anything beyond the hiss of the rain and the far-off heavy boom of thunder; her mind is so peacefully, quietly blank. She sets the book down on the floor and offers Jane half the blanket again.“Thanks,” she answers, sets her sketchbook aside, and this time accepts.Now they are wrapped up together, and starting to sink against the pillow. Any moment, Jane will say something about how sappy this is. Any moment, as they stare at each other quietly.Jane’s arm loops around her, hand at the small of Daria’s back, thumb tracing circles. Her eyes are scanning back and forth, jumping across Daria’s features, taking in the details of her face. Daria fists her hand in the fabric of the blanket, the soft inner layer of it, breathes in deep and hooks her leg around Jane’s leg. Sometimes she still feels like she has to drag them closer, painstakingly, by degrees, before she can gain the nerve to kiss her.“That’s cute,” Jane murmurs.Daria’s brow furrows. “What’s cute?”“That.” She points her chin up, in the direction of Daria’s chin. “How you tilt your face up when you want someone to kiss you.”“I don’t do that.”“Yeah, you do.” She snakes her arm between them and traces the line of Daria’s jaw, carefully with the tips of two fingers. When she gets to Daria’s chin, she urges it up gently. “Like that. You do it with Tom, too.” She smiles, almost sharp enough to be a grin. “It’s like your please kiss me gesture.”“Why do you think any of my gestures are so polite?”“Okay, your I demand kisses now gesture.”Daria groans, embarrassed and guttural, under her breath, tries to look down and hide her face but Jane forces it up again. Somehow that is even worse, to be demanding. And she wants to argue about it, but Jane isn’t even wrong: she was thinking about kissing her just then.Looking up again, she sees they’re even closer, that her nose is almost bumping up against Jane’s nose.“I’m not demanding anything,” she murmurs and Jane shakes her head so that their noses rub together, and breathes out a sound just shy of a laugh.The kiss is just as slow as their first one was, as gentle, as sweet.

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It’s not as weird as she thought it would be, to hold Jane’s hand all the time. The weirdest part is wishing they could do it more often: in class, perhaps, writing down thoughts that have nothing to do with the subject with one hand while the other reaches across the aisle and holds Jane’s hand. Like she just wants to touch her all the time, like some sort of dam has broken after two whole years of friendship where they barely touched at all.At first, it was Jane reaching for her while they walked to school and then back home, twining up their fingers together without breaking her stride. Or lying shoulder to shoulder on Jane’s bed and watching TV, on the afternoons she wasn’t painting, nowhere else to put their hands but safely together in Daria’s lap.When they’re at school, they’re stealthier. Daria’s not entirely sure if this is because Jane’s nervous about it or thinks she herself is, guesses probably the latter, since Jane is just so damn comfortable with them and this sometimes-kissing thing they’re doing. Dating thing they’re doing. And no, she’d rather not be the hypocrite caught making out against someone else’s locker, would rather not be caught out in public with these painful-big feelings that are no one else’s business but the two of theirs alone, but—The second half of lunch, they head outside and sit together on the grass out behind the library. The still, cool morning, with its thin sunlight and hint of frost, has not warmed with time, not really; instead the wind has picked up and blown a deeper chill in with it, and the multi-colored leaves on all the trees are shivering and rustling with the changing of the season. Daria shivers too as she sits down. They’ve been talking about Mr. O'Neill’s latest assignment and its tenuous connection to the concept of Language Arts, and she doesn’t break a stride in the banter but a part of is aware of nothing else but how crisp the air is, like what was once summer has been cut through with cold.Texas didn’t have Octobers like this. Even Lawndale last fall had a sort of mildness to it, a softness to the air.Jane’s sitting very close to her, much closer than she would have a year ago. She pulls her knees up to her chest and loops one arm around them. The other reaches out and finds Daria’s hand.Daria curls her fingers around Jane’s hand and tucks it in against her side, like maybe she’s trying to keep it warm. The conversation doesn’t falter for this either. She doesn’t know if anyone else can see or can tell, or would care, but the gesture feels right, and that same part of her that feels the new season like some kind of renewal is telling her to pass her thumb back and forth against the skin on the side of Jane’s hand. So she does.

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Jane wakes up early for her usual morning run. She follows the trail that starts just out behind their cabin, takes her on a two-mile loop through the woods, and eventually brings her back where she started, by then a faint sheen of sweat cooling along her skin and that pleasant muscle-burn through her legs, the crest and crash of her runner’s high. The woods are golden at the height of autumn. The hard-packed dirt beneath her feet leads her twisting up gentle rises and tripping down inclines, and the air is so perfectly clear she wants to breathe it in deep until her lungs burst. Out of the corner of her eye are always leaves twitching in the breeze or branches arcing down from the weight of small animals running along them. She hears the trill of birdsong high above. She smells the dirt and moss and the leaves that have already fallen starting to decompose. She feels every uncertainty in the ground beneath her feet, feels potential hazards before she can trip or fall, like she’s got some sort of extra sense or like she’s halfway to flying.When she gets closer to the cabin again, she discerns, very high up and very faint, the smell of wood smoke cutting through the other forest scents. It slams her back again to being ten years old, in Girl Scouts, going on that all day hike and when they reached the top of the mountain, stopping to build a fire and warm up and make s'mores. That fire smell, sooty and dusky, crinkling her nose. The marching and singing’s what she remembers most but the smell is what makes her feel like a kid again, in a way that isn’t all bad, like she takes some sort of pleasure just from the clarity of the memory. The knowledge that some old version of her is still close by and knowable.She slows down, finally lopes to a stop by the back door. A thin column of smoke is rising up from the cabin’s chimney. She shakes her limbs free, jumps a few times, brings herself slowly back to earth, watching that wavering, shimmering gray waft among the branches of the trees.The fire is coming from the fireplace in the bedroom, which was burned down to embers not so long before. It’s raging now, though but for that, she’d never have guessed anyone in the room had stirred. Daria and Tom are still in bed, as lazy and sleepy as she’d left them. She damn sure needed that run, but even so, at this exact moment she envies them.“Still not up?” she asks, as she kicks her shoes off and sends the first one flying across the room.Tom’s lying with his head on Daria’s chest. He glances over to her, not a bit guilty. “Someone left without waking us up.”“Does that mean you want to come out with me tomorrow on my run?”“No,” Daria answers, before Tom can, and without even opening her eyes. Jane knew she was awake because her fingers have been tracing patterns on the bare skin of Tom’s back.“Mmmm, no, much better to be lazy.” She jumps up on the edge of the bed, knees first. It’s a king, more than enough space for the three of them, covered in several layers of blankets with a patchwork quilt on top. The mattress jostles slightly beneath her, but Daria only stirs to stretch out her arm in Jane’s direction.“It’s our vacation,” she mumbles. Curls her arm around Jane as soon as she’s close enough, doesn’t even give her time to slide properly under the covers.“Right, right.” She hadn’t even been sarcastic because damn there’s absolutely nothing better than lounging around with the two of them, whatever they are to her—her people, if she had to say. Any day, holiday or no. She kicks at the blanket until she can hide her legs under it. Tom reaches across and lets his hand rest just above her hip; Daria’s fingers trail along the column of her spine.In the fireplace, the red-orange flames continue to crack and to hiss. Jane’s not sleepy, much too high for that, much too up, so she just lies there and listens to them for a long time.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The rain starts coming down, needle-thin and cold, as they turn onto Howard, has grown to almost a downpour by the time they reach Jane’s door. A distant but ominous roll of thunder sounds, just as they step inside, like some sort of sign that they’ve crossed the threshold at just the right moment. Daria’s hair is dripping and her glasses are rain-streaked and her jacket feels water-logged and heavy. She unzips it first and peels her way out of it, then dries her lenses on her shirt. When she looks up, Jane is staring at her with her lips slightly parted, like maybe she’s lost some train of thought.Her own hair is wavy and wet and beads of water are falling onto her shoulders, down to the floor.Daria opens her mouth to say something, question something, ends up sneezing instead.Jane smiles. She reaches out and rubs her hands up and down Daria’s arms, over the goosebumps that are forming there. And after a few moments, lets her palms slide all the way down and take Daria’s hands in hers and squeeze. “You want to take a shower?” she asks. “To warm up?”“I’m not that cold.”“You look a little blue.”“I’m always this color. You just haven’t noticed before.”“Come on. You can use the bathroom near Wind’s room.” Jane wiggles her eyebrows suggestively. “The one with the good water pressure.”Daria sighs. Taking a shower at the Lanes’ when her own house is just a couple streets over, when she’s perfectly capable of drying a little and then making a break for it, seems somehow too indulgent, too much like some favor she’s cashing in. Like now that she and Jane are being so tentative with each other, she has to be extra careful where she steps and what she says and what she does. But Jane insists, especially after Daria sneezes again. So she finds herself in the second bathroom with a clean towel and clothes from Jane’s dresser, all insistently shoved into her arms.This time it’s like Jane’s purposefully not looking at her.Alone, when she looks in the mirror, she realizes how much the rain went right through her jacket, that her clothes are clinging to her, just as much as Jane’s were.The shower is warm and beneath the spray of it, she feels herself becoming a little more human again.Jane’s not in her room when Daria returns there, more pink this time than blue, and her hair still ragged and wet and the very ends of it still beading up with water that seeps into Jane’s shirt. Outside, the storm rages even louder than before. She imagines herself camping out here the rest of the night, unable to get home, sleeping next to Jane in her bed.The bed that creaks a little under her weight, as she perches on the edge of it and waits.When Jane returns, it’s with two oversized mugs, wafting steam. She has to push open the door with her shoulder, enter backwards, but once she’s in she kicks the door shut behind her, and then it’s just the two of them and her cozy and familiar room, her half-finished projects, the heavy sound of rain. She’s changed her clothes too, to a soft pair of sweatpants and t-shirt that’s probably Penny’s: CraftFest ‘94 in big letters on the back.Jane hands over one of the mugs, pulls up a chair for herself next to the bed. “You look more human now,” she says.“How much more?”“Maybe sixty, seventy percent there.”The corner of Daria’s mouth curls. The mug, too hot to hold except by the handle, smells deep of some earthy underground scent.“I found it in the back of one of the cupboards,” Jane says, as she watches Daria breathe in experimentally of the steam. “Green tea doesn’t go bad, does it?”Daria shrugs. “I guess we’ll find out.”But it tastes okay. Almost burns her tongue, suffuses her with warmth from the middle out as she takes a few tentative sips.When she looks up, she sees that Jane is watching her again, that same look from the doorway: just as steady, appraising but in a, perhaps, admiring way. This time she doesn’t look away when she’s caught.“Do you regret anything?” she asks.“Most things. But, um.” Not kissing you, or kissing back, or whatever that was. “Not that.”Jane grins. “Me neither,” she says, and hides that smile that just won’t fade behind another sip. She reaches out her free hand lets it rest on Daria’s knee. Daria covers it with her own, and feels another wave of warmth pass through her.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

They’re not living together yet but the girlfriend is out of the picture. Everything is about to fall very quickly into some sort of place.Daria’s up late almost every night wondering if she should write the next great American novel, actually. If she should try to write fiction again. If she should try to submit it somewhere—or her essays, or something, fuck, the night’s so claustrophobic in her little shoebox apartment, so stuffy on the sixth floor, so she still has the window open even in October. She sits right next to it and she calls Tom up. He’s awake, which is somewhat of a surprise. They talk for almost two hours and only some of it is about Bromwell—none of it’s about them.She gets in the habit of it. She starts telling him about her ideas. Late at night, it’s fine, it’s not real.He invites her over. That’s not real, either. She passes out in his bed from sheer exhaustion, likes how the desk in the corner has all of his books on it and none of hers, none of that heavy, oppressive weight at the edge of her vision.He keeps his window open too because she’s gotten so dependent on that cold breeze to help her sleep.On Thursday, she calls him up as soon as she gets home, right after her last class of the day. He answers on the second ring like he was waiting for her. She tells him that this all fucking sucks.He doesn’t answer for a long while, like maybe he’s turning around the profanity in his head. That sneaky voice that’s been waiting for something to go wrong—for him to lose his interest, now that he’s learned too much of her or even just because she’s not forbidden anymore, or for her to wake up—that low-down voice that likes to whisper evil things like you’re going to get hurt so bad, you’re going to feel the worst pain of your life, it’s talking to her again.“You want to come over and not talk about it?” Tom asks.She furrows her brows, only briefly. “Do you have any other suggestions?”When they made out in the stacks, he took all of a minute before sliding his leg between her legs. Tease that long and something’s gotta break all at once. Wanted you from the moment I met you, he’d whispered.She still hasn’t gotten around to asking him, Do you know what that did to me?Now she imagines him shrugging on the other end of the line. “I don’t know. My bed. Some blankets…”“All right.”Her hand’s shaking a little as she sets down the phone. Not from nerves, not at all—rather, she sees it now, from a sort of relief. She already knows that as soon as she crosses the threshold, she’ll be sinking into him.In his bedroom, all the lights are off except for the desk lamp on the far side of the room, just enough to see by as she stumbles out of her boots and pulls her jacket off. Sets her glasses on his bedside table and rubs at her eyes. The air is cool just as she likes it, with that bitter outside chill that only comes on after dark. He takes off his shirt before he slides under the blankets with her, and his skin is so very warm, like maybe she’s forgotten what skin feels like, or like maybe they don’t make many humans just as warm as him.She wraps her arms around him and her legs through his and she feels him breathe deep like he wants to go boneless against her, too.His hand feels big, but gentle, when his fingers card through her hair.“You okay?” he whispers, probably because she’s shaking again. Goddamn. She says she is; it’s only half the truth; the rest of it is that he feels right and she doesn’t understand why.He wraps the blankets closer around them both. She thinks about nothing but every detail she can catalogue of him. Maybe she’ll write it all down later. It won’t be anything like this, so warm and real.“Yeah, you’re okay,” he answers for her, translates for her, promises her. “You’re really okay. You’re all right.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

After breakfast, Daria settles into the armchair by the window with her book. She doubts she’ll get very far, warm from the fire still crackling and the two separate blankets she’s got draped over her, distracted by the constant light movement of the wind through the red and orange leaves on the trees just outside. But the cabin is quiet, the flames in the fireplace like a white noise. And she honed long ago her ability to read just about anything just about anywhere.Four chapters and some unknown amount of time later, she’s startled by a very light touch to her arm.“Eep!”Jane laughs and kneels down next to her. “It’s just me. Brought you this.” She’s holding a large ceramic mug, one of the green ones from the set in the kitchen cabinets, from which a curling gray steam rises steadily.Daria tucks her book in between her leg and the side of the chair and tentatively takes the mug into her hands. “Thanks.” She fully expects it will be coffee, very possibly some variety of black tea if that’s what Jane could scrounge up from the cupboards. When she takes a sip and it’s a sweet apple taste in her mouth, she makes a face.“No good?” Jane asks, frowning.“Terrible as a cup of coffee.”“Mmm, true. But good as a mug of apple cider.”Daria takes another tentative sip, takes a moment this time to use her other senses—the smell of the steam, the gold-orange color of the liquid rippled by her own breath—appreciates it this time for what it is. Yes. Good as a mug of apple cider.“Where did you get this? I thought you and Tom were taking a hike.”“We decided to talk into town instead. It’s not that far. Pretty nice if you’re into that quaint little village thing.”Which Jane isn’t usually. But they said they were going to do the cliche, cute vacation experience. In their own way.“And what other treasures did you discover in this ‘village’?”Jane shrugs. She counts off on her fingers: “This, some apple cider donuts, the Holy Grail. Oh and those little melty maple candies.”“What was that third one?”“The maple candies?”Daria narrows her eyes, takes another slow drink. It tastes different somehow, than apple cider from the stores back home.Jane leans her arm on the side of the chair and her head against her arm, looks up at Daria with a patient, quiet, appreciative gaze. “How was your alone time?” she asks, quieter this time.“Good.”Jane nods. She’s still kneeling there on the floor, still looking up at her. “Ready for company?”Daria breathes in deep, the scent of warm apples drifting up, so obvious now, to her nose. With her free hand, she covers Jane’s hand with her hand. “Yes. I am.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

According to the morning news, the population of New Hampshire is expected to triple this month with the invasion of hordes of so-called “leaf peepers,” looking to observe the brilliant colors of New England fall. Daria watches the story idly from the end of the motel bed, while she eats the last apple cider donut, and Jane spreads their map out over the table and plans the day’s route. Or pretends to. Daria will be doing most of the navigating the rest of the way up, Jane most of the driving. But she gets something out of examining the uneven bumps of mountains and valleys and the vein-like twisting highways. Maybe the same thing she got out of sweeping all of the clutter off her desk and then awkwardly nudging Daria on top of it, just to have an uncomfortable surface on which to kiss her—the pleasure of cliche, of “I’ve always wanted to do that.”Outside, the sky is clouded a pale gray. The wind that cuts across the parking lot sends a batch of leaves shivering from the branches of the trees that line the property edge, slants them down swirling onto the asphalt. The air it brings is sharp and cool. The blacktop stretches half-deserted between the low, gray motel building and the main road, where cars and trucks are already zooming by at too-great highway speeds, destroying any sense of early morning stillness.Not so picturesque here. But Daria stops for a moment anyway, just outside the passenger side door of Jane’s car, and stares out at the highway, and then up at the sky.Jane is searching for her keys in the pocket of her sweatshirt. “I hope we don’t get mobbed by leaf people,” she says.“What was that?” She’d only been half-listening, until the last words jolted her. “Are you seeing things again?”“Again, still, what’s the difference? I mean when we get up there. The leaf stalkers. Vermont’s like the overflow parking for New Hampshire.”“Don’t they have leaves in Vermont too?”“They do, dammit.” She pulls her keys out, finally triumphant, and unlocks the doors. In Daria’s pockets, which she’d been checking too as if she were some sort of mirror, are a stick of gum, three pennies, and the ticket stub to a movie they saw together last summer. She wraps the hoodie tighter around herself. It’s Jane’s, too, and still smells of her.“I guess we can always run them over,” she says. “If they get in our way.”“Come on, Daria, don’t be unreasonable. We can’t run them all over.” Jane slides in behind the steering wheel. “Just two or three. Tops.”Daria takes a moment, another breath of that sharp air, which smells of almost-frost and something on the edge, something that almost is or soon might be.Then she gets in the car, slams the door shut after her. Jane hands her the map, only half re-folded. Then she braces herself on Daria’s shoulder, leans in, and kisses her. Her cheeks are pink and cool from that sharp-slicing wind, her kisses slow and unhurried, as if the road they’ll be driving on all day stretches infinitely in front of them, and to traverse it, they have all the time in the world.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Quinn, dressed up as a witch of the sexy variety—a costume that relies heavily on the black conical hat to make its point—opens the door wide to usher Jane into the house, and then stops. She closes her mouth, and all of a sudden the perky, bubbly aspect she’s put on calcifies down to a narrower and more suspicious gaze.“What are you doing here?”Outside, a gust of wind blows so sharply, twirling in its wake crisp, dried-out leaves, and wafting out the ends of Jane’s scarf, that it sounds a bit like the howling of real ghouls. Appropriate, for Halloween night and all.“Coming to call on the elder Morgendorffer sister.” She stretches her neck forward, tries to get the best glimpse she can of the living room, as if she actually thought Daria were hiding out there somewhere. Even if she were, Jane would never be able to find her. The place is dark, lit up only at the edges with strings of orange and purple bat-shaped lights, and a few candles flickering from the safety of high shelves, and she and Quinn have to raise their voices to be heard over the incoherent bass of pop music turned up way too loud. A few faintly recognizable Lawndale High students are dancing in the space where the couches used to be. Where they are now, one couple, not recognizable, is already making out in the safety of the shadows. A larger group is gathered around the keg, and the coffee table next to it with its bowl of punch and various snacks.“So you really decided to do it,” Jane says. “Throw a Halloween party.”The one rule is no parties, Daria had told her, so obviously Quinn will be hosting one.Quinn shrugs. “Mom and Dad are both out of town and its Halloween night. How could I not?”“So it was pre-ordained. Just as surely as the planets continue to orbit the sun.” Jane steps over the threshold, tired of shivering on the front step, pulls her hat off and shoves it in the front pocket of her hoodie.“What are you supposed to be anyway?” Quinn asks, as she closes the door behind Jane with a decided shove. “A track star?”The hoodie says Lawndale Track & Field on it, in gold letters against a dark Lawndale Blue. Jane glances down at it briefly. “Yeah. Me in another life. Is Daria hiding out upstairs or has she gone AWOL entirely?”“If she had, wouldn’t she be at your place?” Quinn counters.Touche.Without additional comment, she hands Jane two plastic cups of glowing nuclear-waste-colored punch, and says, “I think she’s in her room.”Jane finds her there, behind a door that is difficult to open without also spilling the slime-tinted punch, with her headphones on and her book open and her boots up on the unmade blankets of her bed. “Brought you this,” Jane says, instead of hello, as she kicks the door closed behind her with her heel.Daria pushes her headphones back, tentatively, on one side. “Is it poisoned?”Jane shrugs. “Probably spiked.”She sits down on the edge of the bed, hands one of the cups over, and they both drink anyway.“You could have come over, you know,” Jane tells her, when her own drink’s mostly a thin line of green stuck along the bottom edge of plastic.“I’m making sure Quinn doesn’t burn the house down,” Daria answers. “Or summon any demons.”“Oh, yeah. You’re a real hands-on chaperone.”She sets her cup on the floor, watches Daria mirror her. Outside, the wind picks up again, so much louder and more violent and more present than the faint strains of synth from below. It rattles the windows, seeps in around the edges of the panes. Daria shivers.Slowly, Jane unwinds her scarf, winds it up again but around Daria this time. But she keeps the ends clenched in her palms. Daria watches without protest, and when Jane yanks her forward, until they’re right up nose to nose with each other, she curls her hands around Jane’s hands.“Happy Halloween,” Jane murmurs. She catches Daria on an inhale.And as she breathes out, Jane leans in a little closer and kisses her.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“I’m going
to have to get a new roommate next year. If I can’t get a single.”“Not getting along with this one?”Jane shakes her head slow, the tip of her nose rubbing back and forth against the bare skin of Daria’s shoulder. “You wanna turn on the light?”Through the window, the smudged yellow sun of late afternoon has long faded into blue-gold twilight and recently all the way to black, leaving the dorm mostly shadow and deep gray. Daria reaches her arm up and twists the knob on top of Jane’s bedside lamp. It clicks on loudly and shines a bright pool of light over their heads.
Daria pulls her arm back under the covers, the blanket almost up to her chin.“Sexiled her too many times,” Jane answers.Daria laughs, an unexpected and genuine sound.It’s annoyingly true. Jane got more privacy living in her parents’ house than out on her own at BFAC. And she thought college was supposed to be freeing, or whatever.“Is that a hint that I should go?” Daria asks, doesn’t even pantomime getting up but Jane grabs onto her more tightly anyway, to prevent any escape.“No,” she answers, gruff and quiet, almost petulant, like a whine. Her arm is curled around Daria’s torso just beneath her breasts, her body pressed tight against Daria’s back. So much skin to skin. Warm, soft sensations all through her. She’s not at all ready to give those feelings up.Daria runs her fingers along Jane’s arm, up one way with her fingertips, down the other with the backs of her nails. “You were out of town all last weekend,” she says, now, a little more tentatively. They’ve talked about Jane’s trip to Bromwell, of course, but only the sort of stuff they could share in a crowd: the obvious q&a, how Tom’s doing, what he showed her of the campus, what the pizza situation in Connecticut is like.“Yeah,” Jane says. The word sounds like something more should trail on after it but she doesn’t know what, figures it will come to her in the pause, but it doesn’t.“Did you sleep with him?”“Yeah.”
Suddenly she’s worried that’s the wrong answer. But Daria doesn’t so much as stiffen in her arms, only hums. She shifts a little, like she’s getting more comfortable, and Jane kisses her shoulder and her back and just waits.“Wish I’d been there,” Daria says. Her voice is so even that not even Jane can read the tone of it: joke or confession or idle thought.
Then, after a moment: “Will you tell me what it was like?”Jane exhales, shaky and hot, and edging at the end to something vocal with need. Her hand slides down to Daria’s belly, the tips of her smallest fingers just edging through Daria’s curls. “Yeah,” she answers. Yeah. “I can do that.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Jane has left the curtains parted and the window slightly open so that scatterings of rain flick in across the sill. An occasional uptick of cold, sharp wind whistles in at the same opening, sends the rain in harder. But for a while now it’s mostly been falling steady and the noise it makes is loud but soothing, even, like white noise. The only light is the floor lamp shining over Jane’s drafting table in the far corner of the room. The rest is that degree of shadow that falls over liminal or undefined spaces: gray autumn days without sun, evenings falling too fast as the season settles, hours that have slipped so lightly, so deftly away that the time they’ve led to cannot any longer be defined.Daria follows the subtle changes of the shadows, as the curtains flutter in, as the rain shifts direction. She can’t see in detail without her glasses. She’s being lulled by the steadiness of the sounds, the brown-gray of the light. There is no rush; no hurry has ever existed in this world. She’s stepped out of it. It’s left her, or maybe she has done the leaving.Next to her, Jane has fallen into a deep, limp sleep, her face squashed into her pillow, her breathing so deep and so even that Daria doesn’t need to see her closed eyes to see she’s dreaming. She’s lying partly on her side, partly on her stomach, twisted at the waist. Her blanket has fallen down, with something almost like modesty, just to her hips, leaving the long curve of her back exposed. This is the sort of thing, Daria thinks, that would have driven her mad in high school. The sort of thing she would have come out years earlier for. The sort of beauty she would have ditched the ironic, sarcastic detached attitude for.When she sees Jane lying so trusting and exposed and yet still half-covered, sees just the hint of her breast squashed in against the mattress or just the swell of her hip beneath the almost-falling sheet, all her thoughts and all her hesitations and all her overthinking just vanish and a desperate, sharp, beautiful need rises up into the empty space she’s cleared out there, in her mind, in the cavern of her chest. She could worship.She could kiss every vertebrae, trace the path of her spine, breath in deep from that hollow at the small of her back. Push the blanket back, bite her ass. Wait for Jane to stretch and part her legs and then tease her, so carefully, with fingers tapping and gently exploring just along the lips of her cunt.Oh fuck, oh fuck–she’s in bed with a beautiful woman. This isn’t like being with Tom or with her singular ex-boyfriend; it’s pressure to a different spot, it’s the keycode pressed into a different lock.Her hands still smell of Jane. She probably reeks of sex.She stretches her legs out long and half-turns onto her side, feels the blanket pool a little lower over her too, and the breeze through the barely-open window behind her shiver a thin line down her back. Jane’s still sleeping. Slowly, gently, she curls her palm around Jane’s hip, tip forward and rests her head against Jane’s back and briefly closes her eyes.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

It is, course, possible to fuck around ironically but only if you don’t plan on enjoying it. Pleasure is where all the earnest, personal, potentially soul-bearing stuff comes in, and the more pleasure, roughly, the more soul is required. This is how Jane can hook up with Bobby Bighead and it’s just a joke from the moment he realizes he’s standing in soup suds and she realizes she’s gotten as much as she can out of the vibrations of the washing machine she’s sitting on (plus), mixed with his tongue persistently licking her face (minus). Static cling sock and Daria’s light judgment and that’s basically it, on the other side of the laundry room door.But to actually enjoy another person.To experience something more than some mashing together of bodies, or… some experiment in the human form. Like what she might do with hers, or like what she might get others to do; like an activity to punctuate a sort of solitary wafting through life. To move beyond such things to a higher plane requires being honest without the irony shield, at least a little bit.Not even she and Daria do that, almost ever. What they have is a friendship built on hiding out behind that shield together. There’s not a whole lot Jane wouldn’t say to her, only a couple of topics (like boys, and sex with boys) that she feels she has to tiptoe around. And yet has she ever bared that part of herself that is simple, honest, and private, absolutely sincere in its wants, even in its animal wants, with her best friend in the same way that she did with Tom?He was supposed to be an extremely ironic hookup, the guy who whore khakis to a Spiral show at the Zon. The guy whose whole thing reflected a subtle but undeniable wealth but who still drove around in a car whose roof was about one strong wind from detaching from the rest of the vehicle. A guy of many contradictions, then, who maybe didn’t have the most terrible taste, since he knew every band she name-dropped like it was some sort of test. The contradictions were the first thing that maybe intrigued her. And then he didn’t make a move until she did, which she thought might have been a reflection of some sort of shyness. Or maybe a type of second-guessing. She knew his mind was right where hers was when he invited her out for a drive.When she finally felt his hands on her, it felt so true. He’d stop sometimes and look at her, just look, like looking meant something to him.She’d thought this was reflective of a two-way honesty street. And she’d been absolutely terrified, and turned on to some nth degree, vibrating at some higher frequency that threatened to dislodge something from deep in her chest.It is, course, possible to fuck around ironically but only if you don’t plan on enjoying it. Pleasure is where all the earnest, personal, potentially soul-bearing stuff comes in, and the more pleasure, roughly, the more soul is required. This is how Jane can hook up with Bobby Bighead and it’s just a joke from the moment he realizes he’s standing in soup suds and she realizes she’s gotten as much as she can out of the vibrations of the washing machine she’s sitting on (plus), mixed with his tongue persistently licking her face (minus). Static cling sock and Daria’s light judgment and that’s basically it, on the other side of the laundry room door.But to actually enjoy another person.To experience something more than some mashing together of bodies, or… some experiment in the human form. Like what she might do with hers, or like what she might get others to do; like an activity to punctuate a sort of solitary wafting through life. To move beyond such things to a higher plane requires being honest without the irony shield, at least a little bit.Not even she and Daria do that, almost ever. What they have is a friendship built on hiding out behind that shield together. There’s not a whole lot Jane wouldn’t say to her, only a couple of topics (like boys, and sex with boys) that she feels she has to tiptoe around. And yet has she ever bared that part of herself that is simple, honest, and private, absolutely sincere in its wants, even in its animal wants, with her best friend in the same way that she did with Tom?He was supposed to be an extremely ironic hookup, the guy who whore khakis to a Spiral show at the Zon. The guy whose whole thing reflected a subtle but undeniable wealth but who still drove around in a car whose roof was about one strong wind from detaching from the rest of the vehicle. A guy of many contradictions, then, who maybe didn’t have the most terrible taste, since he knew every band she name-dropped like it was some sort of test. The contradictions were the first thing that maybe intrigued her. And then he didn’t make a move until she did, which she thought might have been a reflection of some sort of shyness. Or maybe a type of second-guessing. She knew his mind was right where hers was when he invited her out for a drive.When she finally felt his hands on her, it felt so true. He’d stop sometimes and look at her, just look, like looking meant something to him.She’d thought this was reflective of a two-way honesty street. And she’d been absolutely terrified, and turned on to some nth degree, vibrating at some higher frequency that threatened to dislodge something from deep in her chest.