Darius
©2005 The Angst Guy
(theangstguy@yahoo.com)
Feedback (good, bad, indifferent,
just want to bother me, whatever) is appreciated. Please write to:
theangstguy@yahoo.com
Synopsis: Imagine “Daria” with a Y
chromosome. What might have happened if the eldest child of Jake and Helen
Morgendorffer had been born a boy? Here is an alternate-history
might-have-been, or a parallel-universe might-yet-be, with all the fallout.
Author’s
Notes: This
story merits an R rating for strong language (f-word, etc.), intense family
conflict, sexual situations, and abuse issues.
This alternate-universe tale parallels events
in the first two episodes of the first season of “Daria” (“Esteemsters” and
“The Invitation”) under the assumption that Daria was born a boy instead of a
girl. No other initial changes were used, though chains of predictable
consequences have been worked into the story so that it has a flavor entirely
different from the known series. Cadet Michael Ellenbogen and Colonel Armstrong
of Buxton Ridge Military Academy (and the plot thread connecting them) are my
own inventions, but they elaborate on established themes from the original
“Daria” series.
This idea bounced around inside my
head for many months, and the chance to explore the effects of a single gender
change could not be missed. The story forced me to think a lot about what it
means to be a certain gender, and what it means in particular to be a man—a good
man.
While writing chapter three, it suddenly struck me that I
was listening to music that perfectly fit Darius and Jane as a couple:
“Rachel’s Song,” from the Vangelis soundtrack for the movie, Blade Runner.
If you have a chance to listen to this music, at least you will hear what I
hear when I think of the two of them. For Darius himself, a theme song is more
difficult to come by. The best fit, perhaps, is “Movement I,” from Vangelis’s El
Greco. I also listened to Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia”
about a million times to get into a really angsty mood for writing, but that’s
another story. “Going Under,” by Evanescence, also helped.
Acknowledgements: This story was originally
posted as two serial tales to the Sh33p’s
I wish to thank the following beta-readers,
in no particular order: Brandon League, Kristen Bealer, Thea Zara, Renfield,
MMan, Ray, James “CINCGREEN” Bowman, Renfield, Steven Galloway, Brother
Grimace, TerraEsperZ, Galen “Lawndale Stalker” Hardesty, Beth Ann, and Ranger
Thorne. They made the story much better than it was, and I am in their debt.
Thanks specifically to Thea Zara for
the “frog thing” with Brittany, to Brother Grimace for suggesting the gazebo
scenario in another story he wrote (the idea for which I stole without shame),
to Renfield for his invaluable suggestions on the Grand Canyon back story, and
Galen Hardesty for his epilogue ideas. Thanks, too, to everyone who asked for
more. It kept me going when things got hard, as they often did in writing this
very long tale.
*
Did I request thee, Maker,
from my clay
to mould me man? Did I
solicit thee
from darkness to promote
me?—
John Milton,
quoted by Mary Shelly at the beginning of
her novel, Frankenstein
“Now, listen,” said the businessman
as he drove his blue Lexus through morning suburban traffic, “I want you to
know your mother and I realize it’s not easy moving to a whole new
town—especially since we’re also adjusting to being a family again, right?”
The youth slouching in the back seat
of the Lexus knew his father was talking directly to him. The brown-haired
teenager wore black, from his short-sleeved shirt to his trousers to his dull
leather boots. He adjusted his glasses and continued to look out the window,
saying nothing.
“Darius?” said his father, glancing
in the rear-view mirror.
“Weren’t we always a family?” asked
the teenager, still looking out the window. “In theory, I mean.”
His father glared in the mirror, but
the boy missed it. “That’s not what I meant!” he snapped. “Listen up! What I’m
saying is, we’re going to give this togetherness thing another try. Darius, I’m
counting on you to show some respect and—Quinn, damn it, turn the radio down!”
“Please, let’s don’t talk! Okay, Daddy?” said the red-haired girl in the front passenger seat. “Let’s not fight right before school.” She looked back to include her older brother in her plea. Darius glanced at her and shrugged agreement.
“We’re not going to fight!” said her
father angrily. “I’m not, anyway! Any fighting that happens is up to him!” He
nodded toward the back seat. “I’m being reasonable. But we need to talk a
little, honey. It’s the first day of school for the two of you, together, in
almost three years. And we want to make it a great day, don’t we?”
Darius looked out the window with an
impassive face. Quinn gripped the book bag between her knees, her face tight.
She crossed her arms over her stomach and hunched forward as if holding it in.
“Darius?” said their father in a
loud voice, looking in the rear-view mirror.
“Sure,” said the brown-haired boy.
“Sure what?”
The boy sighed. “Sure, it’ll be a
great day.”
His father nodded in dark
satisfaction. “Damn right it will,” he said. “Don’t screw it up for everyone
this time, okay?” He turned the car into the broad half-circle leading to
Darius opened the side door and got
out, taking his time. He slung his backpack over one shoulder, shut the door,
and walked into the school without a word.
The day went quickly.
“Public school might take some
getting used to,” his mother had warned the night before. “You’re in with every
kind of student there is.” She was dead on about that. When he could, Darius
sat in the back of each class so he could see what sort of students he’d be
with for the next three years. He watched the girls in particular. Years had
passed since he’d been to a school with girls around. It surprised him to find
that he liked it. It was hard to concentrate on class work, having girls
around, but that was okay. He was smart enough to get by. The guys at Buxton
Ridge military school had talked about nothing else but girls when they had the
time. You want a wild time, said the guys, find yourself a wild chick. Party
girls were the best, the girls who drank a lot. They’d do anything and never
remember it. Some of the guys at the academy knew that for a fact.
Darius shook his head when he
thought of that. He was of a better cut than his former classmates. He didn’t
know if he had any appeal to the girls here, but if not, it wasn’t the end of
the world. Public school was different, but it wasn’t bad. It beat the hell out
of Buxton Ridge, also his dad’s alma mater. Darius could live out three more
years at Lawndale High easy. He’d have to watch himself, though; he didn’t want
to be jerked out of Lawndale High the same way he was jerked out of Highland
Middle School, back in Texas, and sent out of state to a military academy. It
was his only real fear.
Darius went home after his first day
of school thinking it would be far better than livable. Home early from his
consulting business, his father tried to pick a fight with him over finishing
his homework, but Darius wasn’t in the mood to yell back the way he once did. Maybe
that was why I was packed off to Buxton Ridge, he thought, because of
all the yelling. Dad couldn’t handle it and he flipped out big time. Who knows?
He’s always flipping out. After a moment, though, he remembered what had
happened at the
He shrugged and went to his room like his father told him, did his homework, and then checked out the local television channels while his parents screamed at each other downstairs. Unlike his sister, he kept the door to his room open, so he could hear the goings-on. It was important to know his parents were suffering. He didn’t want to miss it.
On the second day of school, a girl
caught his eye in history class—a slim, leggy chick dressed in black, with a
red jacket, old Army boots, and a vague air of hostility. She sat near the
middle of the room and drew in a sketchpad during every class in which he saw
her. Her short black bangs covered her face as she worked on her drawings with
single-minded intensity. Darius got the impression she was just making time,
waiting for graduation like he was. He liked that. He wondered what her name
was.
The girl glanced back at him once or
twice. Her eyes were the deepest blue Darius had ever seen. The second time she
looked back, he smiled at her. She smiled back but turned away and kept
drawing. He wondered if she was interested in him. He was certainly getting
interested in her. She wasn’t beautiful like so many other girls were, but she
had character and attitude, and it grabbed him. She was an undiscovered
continent, a whole world on two long legs. Darius wondered how it would feel to
run his hands through her jet-black bangs, whether that fire-engine red
lipstick would come off if he kissed her hard.
It wasn’t likely that he would find
out, he knew. She was a cool chick and undoubtedly seeing someone else.
During Phys Ed, Darius asked the
football coach if he could run a few laps around the track after school. The
coach didn’t mind. When the last bell rang, he waded through the flood of
students fleeing the campus, changed into his running clothes in the boys’
locker room, and carried his belongings out to the track. The air was warm as
he jogged. He was sweating in moments, but it felt good. He was not a fast
runner; endurance interested him most. Running gave him time to be alone.
Buxton Ridge had taught him that, among other things. He had no homework today
and didn’t have to be home with his parents again until five. His sister would
manage without him for a little while.
He began thinking about the leggy
chick. He’d never dated before, but he wanted to try it. The bad thing was, he
did not think he could stand the embarrassment if anything went wrong. It was
safer to keep people away and stay alone. His feet thumped against the track in
rhythm as he thought about it. He was safe—but missing out on life. Was that
what he wanted? He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything anymore, except for one
thing:
But he couldn’t go back there. Not
after everything that had happened. And he had Quinn to think of, too.
On his twelfth pass around the long
track, Darius saw the leggy chick in the red jacket walk out of a side door of
the school building. She glanced back and saw him. She stopped. He looked at
her, and she looked at him, and he knew it was time.
Breaking his jog, he walked off the
track in the leggy girl’s direction, picking up his backpack on the way. He had
no plan, no clear idea what he was doing. It didn’t matter. Meeting the girl in
the red jacket was all that counted.
“Hey,” Darius said as he walked up
to the leggy chick. He was soaked with sweat and knew he smelled of it.
She didn’t seem to care. “Yo,” she
said. “Did you mind if I watched?”
“Huh? Oh, it wasn’t that. I was done,
that’s all.” He gave her a nervous smile. “I’m Darius Morgendorffer. Weird
name, I know. I’m new here.” He glanced behind him. “Just running a few laps.”
“Darius,” said the girl, trying out
the name. “Sounds Roman.”
“It’s Greek,” he said. “My parents liked
history at one time, I think. Maybe they named me after Darius the Great of
Persia. I never thought to ask.”
What the girl did next—rather, what
she didn’t do—was important. She didn’t say, “Darius who?” or “Where’s
“Nah. Just like to run. Helps me
think, clears my head out.”
“I run for the same reasons,” said
Jane, “but I tell myself it makes me more creative, too. Don’t know if it
works, but it gets me out of the house.”
“You like being creative?” said
Darius.
“Yeah. I paint, sculpt, stuff like
that.”
“You’re an artist.”
“Or a bum. Hard to tell some days.”
“That’s cool.” Darius looked around.
They were alone. “Where you heading?”
“Home.” Jane waited.
“Mind some company?”
Jane smiled broadly, her wait over.
“If you don’t mind my company, sure.”
Darius looked into her blue eyes. It
was hard to think. “I’m all sweaty,” he said.
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I get
sweaty, too. We have something in common.”
They set off together at an
unhurried pace. “You live close by?” asked Darius.
“A few blocks that-a-way, on
Howard,” said Jane. “I don’t have my license yet, and walking’s nice. Also, my
brother’s car tends to catch fire now and then. When it does, he borrows a van
from a friend of his and drives it a couple blocks until it breaks down.”
“Not much use for seat belts, I
see.” He pointed. “We moved in a few days ago over on Glen Oaks. Red brick
house.”
“Hmm, then we’ll pass your place on
the way to mine.”
Darius looked up at the blue sky,
then back at Jane. “Good day for a walk. Mind if I see you all the way to your
place?”
“You can come in if you want,” she
said, looking at the sidewalk instead of at him. “My brother’s home, but he’s
probably sleeping.”
“Big brother?”
“He’s twenty-one. Plays in a local
rock band, Mystik Spiral.”
“Haven’t heard of it.”
“Join the club.”
“I’m a big brother, too. My sister’s
Quinn. She’s fourteen. Long red hair, sorta cute. You may have seen her.”
“Yeah, in fact I think I did. She
had quite an entourage following her around.”
She said “entourage,” he
thought. A smart one. Smart girls
turned him on. “That’s Quinn, the popularity queen.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
Darius shrugged. “Eh, it’s okay.
Whatever floats her boat.”
Jane nodded. “So, what floats your
boat?”
He adjusted his glasses. “I goof
off. I read, run a little, watch TV, write.”
“Poems, novels, short stories,
plays?”
“Stories. I gave up on poetry. Don’t
have any ideas for a novel or a play yet.”
“You watch TV a lot?”
“No. Just ‘Sick, Sad World.’ I think
it’s on here—”
Jane caught his arm and pulled him
close as they walked. “I love that show,” she said in a deeper voice. “I never
thought I’d meet someone who liked it as much as I do.”
Her touch was electric. He could
smell her, too. She had a sweet flowery scent he couldn’t identify. A woman’s
soap, he guessed. His brain began to shut down.
With the few neurons he had left, he
checked his watch. “The show’ll be on in twenty minutes,” he said, and he
almost added, You want to come over to my house to watch it? He
remembered just in time that his father and mother might be home together this
afternoon. That would be bad.
“Come over and watch it with me?”
asked Jane. She still had a grip on his upper arm, just above the elbow. “
“
“Yeah. I’m the youngest of five. The
others grew up and ran off. Just me and Trent now, and sometimes Mom and Dad.
You wanna come over?”
“Sure,” he said, unsure if this was
a good idea. “That would be great.”
“Don’t eat anything out of the
refrigerator unless I clear it first,” Jane added. “Some of the food’s gone
bad, and some of it’s not really food.” She squeezed his bicep. “You work out,
right?”
“A little. Got in the habit at my
last school.”
“Where was that?”
He grimaced. “
“So you kind of dig the Army life,
is that it?”
“No,” he said. He forced the pain down.
“I was sent there.” He shrugged, uneasy now. “Tell me about yourself.”
“Don’t want me to ask about it,
right?”
He nodded. “Maybe another time.”
“Okay.” Jane’s hand squeezed the
muscles of his arm again. “Military school. I can’t complain about the results.”
“Were you helping some teachers
after school?” he asked.
“Me? Oh, no. I’m in a special class to build up self-esteem. I have to go for a few weeks.”
Darius almost stopped. “That
‘Self-Esteem for Teens’ workshop they were telling me about?” he said. “You’re
in that class?”
“Yup.”
“What, are you teaching it?”
Jane laughed. It was the most
beautiful sound he had ever heard. “Oh, no! I’m in it. I don’t pay enough attention in class, so the school shrink
thought I had problems.”
Darius gave Jane a long look. “The
school’s got its problems,” he said at last, “but you don’t.”
“Mmm,” said Jane, pulling him even
closer. “I can feel my self-esteem rising already. There it goes! Off like a
balloon!”
He smiled. They weren’t talking
about anything important, but every word she said was changing the world. “You
like to draw?” he said.
“I said I’m an artist. Wanna come up
and see my etchings?”
Darius felt a hot prickling on the
back of his neck. There were several ways to interpret her offer. “Sure,” he
said. “Catch some ‘Sick, Sad’ and check you out. Your drawings, I mean,” he
added quickly, turning red. “I can check out your drawings.”
Jane smiled as she walked, humming a
familiar tune.
He thought quickly. “That’s from
that movie about the ship, um, The Poseidon Adventure, isn’t it?”
“Yup. My favorite song.”
“I like it.” If she had hummed the
“Barney” song, he would have liked it.
He told her a little about his
family, Buxton Ridge, and his former home in
Darius heard the fighting half a
block away. He stopped to listen. Jane stopped as well. “Is that your folks?”
she asked softly.
“I’d better go,” he said, his face
lined with anxiety. “I should check on Quinn. She doesn’t handle this real
well.”
“I’ll wait for you.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be back out
for a while,” he said. “See you.” He hurried into the house and shut the door
behind him to keep the neighbors from hearing.
“What you think about it just isn’t
that Gah-damn important!” he heard his father shout as he came in the living
room.
“Where’s Quinn?” Darius called. “Is
Quinn here?”
His parents paused in their argument
to look guiltily at him. They had been fighting about him. He could tell.
“She’s gone over to a friend’s
house, Sandi someone,” said his mother. “She’s in some kind of fashion club.
She’ll be back at six. Why don’t you go out for a while, okay? Come back for
supper.”
“I’ll be back at six,” he said.
“You’ll be back when I tell you to
come back!” roared his father. “Gah damn it, you’ll show me a little respect,
or else!”
Darius fell silent and waited. He
wanted so much to give his father a taste of what he’d been dishing out for
nearly sixteen years—but I can’t be sent to Buxton Ridge again, Darius
thought, forcing himself to do nothing, I just can’t. Hold it in, hold it in
just a little while longer—
His father wiped his face with a red
hand. “Come back at five-thirty, and not a second later,” he said at last.
“Okay,” said Darius. “I will.” He
waved and left at a careful walk. He could hear his parents start up on each
other a moment before the front door closed behind him.
He walked back to Jane as if nothing
had happened, except that he couldn’t look her in the eyes. They walked in
silence until Jane began to tell a story about a local house where no kid ever
passed a test to graduate from high school and escape Lawndale, because of a
ghost that lived there. Her voice quavered, but it was a good story, and he was
grateful.
“You should be the writer, not me,”
he told her. She smiled and colored a bit. She bumped into him as they walked.
He put his arm around her waist to steady her. Violets, he thought—she
smells like violets. They walked like that all the way to her place.
Jane’s home was a pale yellow
two-story, obviously one of the older houses in the subdivision, with a
scraggly, overgrown lawn and a large, weird metal sculpture near the front
door. The mailbox said LAZE, the N having fallen over on its side. The front
door was slightly ajar. Random guitar chords drifted out. Jane went inside
first. “
“Kitchen, Janey,” came a deep, slow
voice. Jane motioned for Darius to follow her in. He shut the door behind him.
The house was moderately unkempt. The living room was dusty; pizza crusts and
used tissues littered the floor. The unplugged TV set was being used as an
extra table to hold a collection of small kiln-fired pots. All the furniture
fabric was threadbare, and the couch had holes in two cushions. A burnt spot on
the living room carpet showed where someone had tried to build a campfire years
earlier. A child had drawn on all the walls with crayons. The brilliant
drawings were still intact, though the wall paint was cracked and yellowed.
The kitchen wasn’t much better. It
had an off-white and stainless-steel décor popular in the 1960s and was more
littered than the living room. Flies buzzed around the dish-filled sink. At the
kitchen table sat a tall, lanky man in his early twenties, with calm dark eyes,
uncombed black hair, and a goatee. He stopped playing his guitar when Jane came
in, but his noncommittal gaze jumped to Darius.
“Yo,” said
“Darius. I’m her new parole
officer,” said Darius with a straight face.
“Didn’t know she had an old one,”
said
“That was two weeks ago,” said Jane.
She opened the refrigerator, took out the carton of Chinese food, and put it on
top of an overflowing garbage can. After pushing some of the refrigerator’s
contents aside, she took out a fast-food box of fried chicken and set it on the
table. “We can eat this while we watch the show,” she said.
“Dead on,” Darius said as he looked
around the room. “Cold fried chicken, the food of the gods.” The kitchen was
filled with homemade crafts—pots, wall hangings, painted pictures, landscape
and animal photographs, and small clay sculptures of monsters. The curtains
appeared to be handmade, too.
“
“Came in the mail,” said Trent, who
was playing his guitar again. “Forget when. Found it when I woke up a while
ago, and I didn’t know if it was impor—”
“Oh, bloody hell!” Jane
thrust the letter at
Jane threw the letter down. “They
sent this letter two weeks ago!” she shouted. “Didn’t you call Mom or Dad?”
“I don’t know where they are,”
“
“Lock up the house,” said Darius in
a flat voice. He was already on his way out of the kitchen, heading for the
front door. He checked the locks and found that only the knob lock worked—but
the knob was loose. He looked around as Jane came into the living room. “Grab
that wooden chair,” he said, pointing. “I can jam it under the knob and brace
the door shut.”
Jane did as he asked. “I can lock
the windows,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Lock everything
and pull the shades and blinds down, too.” He remembered entombing himself in
utility closets and his barracks room at Buxton Ridge, avoiding late-night
raids by drunken older cadets bent on tormenting the underclassmen. “They can’t
foreclose in this state if there’s no one here they can serve papers on. Weird
loophole. They have to go back and mail a certified letter, and if no one
answers in five business days, the foreclosure goes through. My mom’s a
corporate lawyer. She yells about this stuff all the time.” He laughed.
“Usually, she’s on the side of the people trying to foreclose.”
In minutes, Darius and Jane had
barricaded the entire first story of the house, even the kitchen and garage.
“That’s just what the bank people
will need,” she said firmly. “The house looks like no one’s home, but someone’s
upstairs playing ‘Come As You Are’ with the windows open. It gives the whole
thing away, all right?”
“Oh, man,” said
“Come watch TV with us in my room,”
said Jane. “We’ll keep the volume down.”
“Nah,” said
“Sure,” said Darius, waving. “We’ll
let you know if there’s been a hull breech and we have to send out a distress
beacon.”
“Hmmm,” said
Jane’s bedroom was that of a
tireless and devoted artist—not a dabbler, but the real thing. Paintings hung
from every wall, and an easel with a half-finished abstract work in oils was
set up next to her queen-size bed across the room. Dark blankets hung on nails
covered the far windows in place of shades. Sculptures in every medium lined
the shelves. Jane turned on the TV set at the foot of her bed as Darius walked
around, taking in the room and its myriad artistic contents.
He bent down and studied a
sheet-metal sculpture of a human reaching upward, jumping from a mountaintop.
“Damn,” he said, “this is really good.”
“You can stop working on my
self-esteem now,” she said, punching the channel-changing button. “School’s out
for the day.”
“I’m not kidding,” he said. He
crouched to look at the sculpture more closely. “I can’t believe this. Did you
weld this yourself?”
“Yeah.” Jane sat on the edge of her
bed, watching the tube. “You’re not saying that to get into my pants, are you?
‘Cause it’s working.”
He turned to her and waited until
she looked at him. “No,” he said. “I mean it. This is brilliant.”
She was the one who looked away
first. “Just a joke,” she said in a low voice. “I don’t go that fast, anyway.”
He looked at the sculpture, aching
to touch it. “It looks like this guy’s jumping, hands out, reaching for
something maybe he can’t see. I can feel the jump, the effort to get that
invisible thing.” He stood. “I wish I could do things like this.”
Jane swallowed. “Thank you,” she
said.
Someone knocked on the front door
downstairs. The sound echoed up from the staircase. Darius and Jane both froze.
After a moment, Darius glanced at his watch. It was four o’clock.
Jane got up from the bed and turned
the television set off. The knocking came again, much louder this time. Darius
went to Jane’s door and peeked out to make sure that
When Darius came back in the room,
Jane was near the door. They looked at each other and waited.
A minute passed. The knocking came
from the kitchen door next. Jane moved next to Darius. He put his arm around
her and pulled her close. Her head pressed against his shoulder, her mouth next
to his neck. “Don’t get in,” she whispered. “Don’t get in.”
The knocking came once more from the
front door, then did not return. Ten minutes had passed since the knocking had
started. It felt like hours had gone by.
“They’re gone,” said Darius softly.
“They can’t do anything for a week. Can you get your parents to get the
mortgage in?”
“I can forge a check,” Jane
whispered. “I’ll have it in the mail tomorrow.”
“That’ll do it. We won.”
“You won,” she said. “Thank you.”
And she kissed his neck.
He turned his head so his mouth met
hers.
Her hair was fine black silk and
smelled of violets. Her fire-engine red lipstick came off everywhere.
Quinn got home at five-forty that evening. Darius heard
her open the front door quietly, shut it almost as quietly, then run upstairs.
He sighed and turned off his computer monitor to hide what he’d been writing.
Sure enough, she opened his door and peeked into his bedroom before going to
her room. She wore her pink, midriff-revealing butterfly tee, too-tight jeans,
and sandals.
“Hi,” said Quinn. She looked pale. “How did—oh!”
“What?” said Darius, frowning at her.
All business, Quinn walked in and took Darius’s chin in
one hand, turning his face from left to right.
“Looking for my good side?” he asked in annoyance.
“Yeah, but it’s not good enough,” said Quinn. She rubbed
her thumb over a spot on his cheek. “Did Mom or Dad see that?”
“What?” Darius moved her hand away and got up, heading
out into the hall for the bathroom they shared. “It’s nothing.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” said Quinn under her breath. She
followed Darius into the bathroom and closed the door behind them, snapping on
the lights. She pointed to a lipstick mark on his cheek. Darius could see
Jane’s mouth perfectly. He groaned aloud. He knew better than to hide anything
from Quinn, but it still drove him crazy. She had a sixth sense about him that
he could not fathom. It wasn’t fair.
“You’ve got to be more careful,” said Quinn. She got a
washcloth and wet it under the faucet. “Dad would blow a fuse if he saw that.
Mom might blow one, too.”
“I can do this,” Darius grumbled, reaching for the
washcloth.
“Shut up,” said Quinn, pushing his hand away. “Hold
still.” As she wiped off his cheek, she said, “Who is she, Dari?” Her childhood
nickname for him was pronounced like “dairy.”
He looked angry and didn’t answer.
“Well, whoever she is, watch yourself,” said Quinn. “You
can’t go off and jump the first girl who looks at you. Use your head, okay? You
think everything else out. You’d darn better think this stuff out, too.”
“Christ, don’t lecture me! I don’t tell you who you go
out with.”
“That’s because you don’t need to,” said Quinn softly.
“Turn around. Come on, turn around! I can’t believe you actually got a
girlfriend on your second day in school. I’m going to have to change my opinion
of you.” She squinted at his face and neck, then nodded. “Okay, you’re good.
Make her clean you up next time. Or tell her to wipe the lipstick off her mouth
beforehand.”
“Cut it out.”
“Look, I know you don’t want to hear me say it, but
you’ve really got to watch it, you know?”
Darius swallowed back his anger. She was absolutely
right, which infuriated him all the more. Why was she always right? Why was he
always so clueless? “Whatever,” he said in defeat.
“I’d like to meet her,” said Quinn. “Not here, though.”
“What? Oh, jeez, Quinn!” Darius rolled his eyes and
opened the bathroom door, walking back to his room. Quinn followed him. He
sighed and sat down at his desk as his sister closed the door behind him. She
wouldn’t leave until she’d had her say. “What is it?” he said in surrender.
“Dari,” said Quinn, “I can’t take the fighting anymore.
This afternoon I went over to the house of a girl I just met yesterday, and I
got so scared thinking about coming home late, I threw up in her bathroom. I
don’t know if she’ll ever have me over again. It’s too much, Dari, and I can’t
take it. Please, if you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me. Don’t fight
with Dad anymore, okay?”
“I didn’t start a fight!” he hissed. “I didn’t
even have a fight with him, remember?”
“Well, don’t do anything to start one! I can’t
take it!” Her voice cracked.
This was the worst. He couldn’t stand to see her cry.
“Shhh! All right!” he said, angrier with himself than with her. “I won’t start
anything, I promise!”
“Good,” said Quinn, wiping her eyes. “Just be careful,
okay? I know how Dad gets when he thinks you’re challenging him, but just let
it go. It isn’t worth it.”
“All right, already!”
“Okay.” Quinn became more composed. “Oh,” she added in
her normal tone, “I meant it when I said I want to meet her. If she means
something to you, and I’d guess she does, then let’s get together.”
“Sure, whatever,” he mumbled, not sure if he meant what he
said. “Sometime, yeah.” He hesitated. “She’s all right. She’s cool.”
“Of course she is,” said Quinn. Footsteps sounded from
downstairs. Quinn turned, startled, and vanished from his room in a second.
Darius heard her door shut and the lock click only one second later.
“Quinn?” called their mother from the bottom of the
stairs.
“She’s in her room,” Darius called back. He raised a
finger and held it by the computer’s power button in case his mother came
upstairs. Better to make the system reboot than to let anyone read a story he
was working on. He hated that.
“When did she get home?” his mother called. “I was in the
bathroom.”
Darius glanced at his desktop clock, did some quick math,
and lied. “She got in early, fifteen or twenty minutes ago. She said she had a
good time.”
“I have to go back to the office for an hour or two to
clear up some paperwork about a case,” said his mother. “Your father’s meeting
with a client downtown. He won’t be back until late. I want the two of you to
stay home and be in bed by ten. There’s some frozen lasagna in the
refrigerator, or you can order pizza out. You hear me?”
Heavy sigh. “Sure, Mom.” He wanted to give a biting,
sarcastic answer, but any smart remark could set his parents off.
“Don’t call me unless it’s important. And call me, not
your father. He’s very busy.” His mother hesitated as if there were something
more she wanted to say, but she then opened the front door. It thumped shut
behind her a second later.
Darius waited a few moments longer, listening to the
silence that filled the house. He then got up and went across the hall to knock
on Quinn’s door.
“What?” she called after a pause.
“Mom and Dad are both gone,” he said. “Don’t call them.”
“Oh, right, as if. Can we have pizza?”
“I’ll call in the usual at seven.”
“Okay. Can you get me the cordless phone?”
Darius started to say no, but then thought of Jane. He
had her number now. “Can I call out for a few minutes first?” he said. “You can
have it after that.”
“Okay,” she said. “Don’t . . . oh, are you calling her?”
Darius went downstairs without a reply. Duh, he
thought, like that was a real brain-strainer. He got the portable phone
in the kitchen and brought it upstairs to his room. Quinn’s door was open. As
he walked into his room, she left her room and went into his again.
Darius looked at her in agonized frustration. “Quinn, can
I have a little privacy here?”
She seemed undecided. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll go do my
homework, but see if I can meet her at school tomorrow.”
“Why? Why in the hell do you need to meet her?”
Quinn stared at him and didn’t look away. The
irresistible force.
“Fine!” he said, giving up. “Whatever! Just give me a few
minutes, then you can have the phone.”
“Okay,” she said. She walked slowly back to her room,
leaving her door open. Darius shut the door to his room and took the phone to
his bed. He dialed the number he had memorized and waited.
The phone rang seven times before someone answered it.
“Yo,” said a low, feminine voice.
“Jane?”
“Oh, hey. Darius?”
“Yeah. How are you doing?”
She laughed. “Fine since you left here an hour ago. Are
you home?”
“Yeah. The two wardens are out for the evening, and I’m
watching Quinn.”
“She needs a sitter?”
“It’s not that. I’m just here with her. It’s not like I’m
really babysitting or anything.”
“Do you and your sister get along? I wasn’t sure from
what you said about her.”
He sighed. “We don’t hit each other with bats most days.
We’re doing okay. Probably nothing worth writing about in a tell-all book
later.”
Jane’s slow breathing rose and fell on the other end of
the phone. “I’m really glad you came over today,” she said. “I think you saved
our house. I don’t know what I’d have done if we’d had to move out.”
He was pleased and relieved to hear this, but he shrugged
it off. “No problem. It was nothing. Hey, if you did get thrown out, you could
move in with us and share Quinn’s room. You’re an artist. You could do her
makeup.”
“Yeah, and
“On the other hand,” he said, his sense of humor fading,
“I doubt you’d like it.” He was instantly sorry he’d said that, but there was
no going back.
“What do you mean?” said Jane. “What’s it like there?”
He hadn’t expected she would ask, though in a way he had
hoped she would. He thought over his answer. “Sort of like one of those bad
disaster movies,” he said at last. “My parents fight a lot. We try to stay out
of the radioactive areas.”
“Oh.” A silence followed. “Can you get out much?”
“Oh, yeah. They usually want us back about six, but after
we’ve been in town a while, they might stretch that limit. Mom got Dad to—well,
anyway, I can go places after school, as long as they’re still in town. Quinn
wants to stay out after nine when dating, but she has to get past Dad on that
first. He’s been pretty strict—wait a minute.” He took the phone from his ear,
positive he’d heard a floorboard creak outside his door. “What is it, Quinn?”
The door to his room opened and his sister came right in.
“Is she on the phone?” Quinn whispered, pointing to the handset as she walked
over. “Can I talk to her?”
“Wha—no!” Before he could say or do more, Quinn
wrestled the phone from him. “Hello?” she said into the receiver, walking away.
“This is Quinn, Darius’s sister.”
“Hey!” He jumped off the bed, but Quinn bolted into her
room with a giggle and threw the deadbolt when she shut her door. Popping the
doorknob lock with a paperclip would be useless. He pounded on her door. “Quinn! Damn it, give me the phone! Quinn!”
It was hopeless, and he knew it. “Shit,” he said, and he
pressed his forehead against the door, feeling stupid. This was worse than
simple defeat—this was complete personal ruination. God only knew what she
would tell Jane. Since he’d gotten back from Buxton Ridge, Quinn had twisted
him around her little finger. It would be a miracle if he didn’t go insane in a
few more weeks. He pitied any guys she got for boyfriends. Those poor bastards
would be quivering jelly when she got her brightly colored fingernails into
them. Being her brother, he should be above all that.
But he wasn’t. He cared about her, which made him
vulnerable, and thus he was doomed.
He walked away and sat down at the top of the stairs.
Trying to listen in on the conversation in Quinn’s room proved impossible. He
felt more like Quinn’s slave than her brother. It wasn’t her abundant natural
cuteness, to which Darius thought he was immune. It was like she had some kind
of mind control over him. She knew he looked out for her and would never hurt
her, and she walked all over him as a result.
Well, he admitted, she didn’t really walk all over him
most of the time. Maybe. She just knew when to insert herself into Darius’s
life to make sure she wasn’t forgotten. He remembered how excited she had been
to see him when he got out of Buxton Ridge in June. She had been practically
glued to him for weeks after that. Things had settled down over the summer, but
today, she was just . . . since she’d seen that lipstick on his cheek, she was
. . . what was it with her? Was it the lipstick? Was it Jane?
Darius covered his face. He could just imagine Quinn
sabotaging things with Jane so she could make sure Big Brother would always be
there to serve her needs. Or, more likely, to make sure Big Brother didn’t get
into trouble and screw up things in the family. Didn’t she trust him? It wasn’t
fair. Nothing in life anymore was fair.
Quinn had changed a lot since he had been sent away to
Buxton Ridge. When he was shipped off, she was eleven and collecting Barbies
and accessories. When he got back, she was a taller, thinner Quinn with a
fashion model look but a shockingly fragile personality. Life must have been
hell for her without him around to run interference between her and the ‘rents.
If she was throwing up just worrying about getting home late, things were still
pretty bad inside her. Worse, he had no idea what to do about it. It didn’t
excuse her screwing up things with Jane, but if she didn’t get herself
straightened out, this would never stop.
Quinn’s bedroom door opened. She came out with the phone
in her hand. “Here,” she said without apology. “You’re right, she is cool. She
has to go, but she wants to talk to you for a moment first.” Quinn went back in
her room, leaving the door ajar.
Darius put the phone to his ear. “Jane?”
“Hey.” Jane’s voice was light and easy. “I had a great
talk with your sister.”
“Yes, she is quite the evil gremlin, isn’t she?”
“Nah. You know, she’s not at all what I thought she’d be
like. We’re going to meet tomorrow at school at lunch, about twelve-fifteen,
you and me and her. If you don’t mind, I mean.”
“Jesus.”
“Oh, come on, it’ll be fun. I really want to meet her.”
Jane laughed. “She’s really lucky to have you around, you know.”
He wasn’t sure if he was angry to hear that or, secretly,
a little pleased. “I can’t imagine why. Look, I just wanted to talk to you for
a little while. Do you have to go?”
“Unfortunately, I do,” said Jane. “
“Fine,” he said in a sullen tone. “Don’t call after . . .
ten thirty. My parents might be home. Best not to get them started.”
“No problemo. And I promised Quinn I’d wipe you off next
time.” She snickered.
Darius reddened. “Jane,” he said, and he paused to think
of the one thing he really wanted to say to her. “I want to see you again.
Before the next Ice Age. After school tomorrow, if you have time.”
“Hey, you can walk me home from school anytime you want,”
she said. “And maybe next time, we’ll actually watch ‘Sick, Sad World.’ If we
can manage that. We missed their special on UFOs today.”
“UFOs,” he said. “I remember the one that brought Quinn.
I didn’t think she’d be staying for this long.”
“Oh, you like her, and you know it.”
“I like you, Jane.”
There was a pause. “And I like you, too,” she said at
last. “I like you a lot. I don’t know how you learned to kiss, being in an
all-male military school, but you kiss damn good. I hope it’s because you
practiced on your pillow. Look, I’ll call you back, okay? After Romeo here
finishes making up with Juliet, I mean.”
“Okay,” he said. “Listen, have a good night.”
“I already am,” said Jane. “Bye, Darius.”
“Bye, Jane.” The phone clicked, and the dial tone came
on. Darius turned off the phone and continued sitting on the top step, arms
resting on his knees, looking down the stairs and wondering what Jane and Quinn
had been talking about. Women—he would never figure them out. He got up and
went into Quinn’s room to give her the phone.
“What did you and Jane talk about?” he asked.
“Stuff,” said Quinn. She lay on her stomach on her bed,
reading a girls’ fashion magazine. “Now, shoo. I have to make a lot of calls.”
Darius went back to his room and shut the door. He locked
it this time and went back to his computer, turning on the monitor. The short
story he’d been working on swam into view, and he read the last few lines. They
sucked. The whole story sucked.
In disgust, he saved the document and shut down the
computer. He wasn’t up to finishing and editing the tale, which was about an
intelligent flesh-eating bacteria. The chaos over Quinn and Jane had ruined his
mood. Darius shook his head and thanked God he had not been born a girl. Who
knew what he’d be doing right now if he had been? He went to his bed, picked up
a book entitled, When Bad Things Happen to People Who Deserve It, and
began to read. It never failed to cheer him up.
This time, however, he couldn’t follow a single word. All
he saw in his mind was Jane’s face close to his. He remembered the soft touch
of her lips against his mouth, how the scent of her filled his head with
nothing else but the moment she was in his arms, when she was his.
After many long minutes, he put the book away and lay
back on his bed, looking at an interesting crack in the ceiling, and waited for
Jane’s call.
“I’ll bet you didn’t know,” said
Jane, pointing a chicken finger at Quinn, “that it’s not just Lawndale High
that does it. Every single high school in
“Does that have anything to do with
pesticides in the drinking water?” asked Darius. No one paid any attention to
him. He sat beside Jane at the cafeteria table, facing Quinn, but for all that
he might as well have been invisible.
“No way!” said Quinn to Jane. His
sister beamed like the morning sun. “Don’t they do anything else besides
football?”
“Oh, sure, lots of stuff,” said
Jane, “but football is played in yearly quarters. Lawndale High even has a
football team to play the other schools during the summer. It’s like a
religion, only the football fans are more fanatical.”
“That should be on ‘Sick, Sad
World,’” said Darius. “‘Football addiction: Can it strike your—”
Quinn cut in. “You know, I was
thinking about becoming a cheerleader, but they have only that one outfit, you
know? How fashionable is that?”
Jane waved away the idea. “You
wouldn’t like it anyway. I hear that cheerleaders are required to date only
football players.”
“And fail a reality test,” mumbled
Darius.
“Oh, no way!” cried Quinn, laughing.
“That’s so, like, restrictive! What it I wanted to date, like, some rich kid
who didn’t play—”
Jane drew a finger across her throat
and made the sound of someone’s head being cut off. “Off the team,” she said.
“They don’t allow it. They’ll repossess your pom-pom.”
Quinn laughed hysterically.
Darius sighed and checked his watch.
Twelve thirty-two. His new girlfriend and his sister were hitting it off like
gangbusters. What was next on the agenda—giving each other makeovers and going
shoe shopping together at the mall? He felt so far out of the loop, he didn’t
even know where the loop was.
Quinn wiped her eyes. “Oh, my God,
you are so funny! This has been great!”
“You have class in eight minutes,”
said Darius blandly.
“Oh, I know. I’m just having so much
fun. Whew!” She reluctantly got up from her seat. “I’d better get to my locker
and get ready for math.”
“Hey, quick question,” said Jane.
She pointed at Quinn’s face. “What color do you call that, your eye shadow?”
“What?” Quinn stopped laughing and
leaned close to Jane, her eyes wide. “Is it smeared? Is it running?”
“No, no, no!” Jane said quickly. “I
just like that color and wanted to know what it is. I’d like to use something
like that in a painting I’m doing, a portrait.”
“Oh, sure! Um, this part—” Quinn
pointed to the area below her eyes “—is your basic Perfect Peach, and the
eyelids are Desert Rose, with a dusting of Gold Starburst. I sometimes use two
colors together on the same spot to get a different effect, and maybe smear
them together, but these are pretty much right out of the box.”
“Desert Rose with gold,” said Jane.
“Thanks!”
“Oh, you’re welcome!” said Quinn.
“Dari, would you take my tray back? Thanks! Bye!” She waved as she hurried off.
Jane waved back, but Darius merely
lifted a finger and wagged it. He turned to Jane. “So, feeling enlightened
after your talk with the Zen master?”
“She’s got a fantastic color sense,”
said Jane with clear admiration. “It’s amazing. No wonder she looks so good.”
“Jane, we’re talking about makeup
here, not Rembrandt.”
“Color is color. Hey, are you going
to eat those fries?”
“All yours,” said Darius, pushing
his tray over. “I’m taking a five-minute break from fat.”
“You look glum.”
He shrugged. “I’m not glum,” he
said. “I’m . . . I’m . . .”
“Bull,” said Jane, her mouth full of
fries. “You’re pouting because Quinn and I are buds now and we don’t need you
anymore.”
“Except to carry your trays back.”
“Oh, get over your damn cheap self,”
Jane said cheerfully. “She worships you, you know?”
Darius looked Jane in the eye. “The
acoustics in here are bad. I thought you said—”
“She does. That’s why she wanted to
meet me. She needed reassurance that evil slut Jane wasn’t stealing away her
dependable but naïve big bro. That’s all that was up.”
“Excuse me? Naïve?”
“As far as women are concerned, yeah.”
Jane said it as a statement of fact, but without a trace of insult.
He looked away, mortified. Did both
Jane and Quinn know more about him than he did? Was there any justice in the
universe at all? Why was he even bothering to ask? “I wasn’t always that
dependable,” he muttered, changing the subject. “She and I used to fight a lot,
years ago when we were little kids back in
“That was before your dad sent you
off to that army school because he was fighting with you so much, right?”
“Yeah.” He then frowned and turned
his head to Jane, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t recall mentioning why I was sent
there.”
“Oh, Quinn told me all about it last
night. I’d sort of figured it out for myself, but she put the final pieces in
place.”
“What, did you tell you what kind of
underwear I wear, too?”
“No, but she did tell me she used to
make you carry her piggyback so she could pretend she had a pony. She said she
used to call you Tornado.”
Darius dropped his head in mock
shame. “I’m going to burn all of her scrunchies.”
“Dari,” said Jane, lowering her
voice, “Quinn is hungry for your acceptance. Maybe ‘desperate’ is a better
word. I think more than anything she wants to be sure you don’t forget her. I
can’t be more analytical than that, or I’ll lose my armchair psychologist’s
license.”
“How could I forget her?”
said Darius, looking at the table. “I mean, every time I turn around, there she
is, poking around in my life.” He sighed. “It’s not so bad, really, I guess. I
missed her a lot when I was at Buxton Ridge. I did a lot of thinking then about
her and me. A lot went on in her life while I was gone, and I think a lot of it
was bad. It really bothers me.” He looked off into space. “I can’t believe how
much she’s changed. She’s like a whole different person. The little Quinn who
wanted me to play pony is gone.” He broke off and swallowed.
“She is something, isn’t she?”
Darius nodded as he picked at the
remains of his food. “I don’t see why she needs my acceptance, though. She’s
friends with half the planet, and the other half just hasn’t met her yet. She
doesn’t have to do anything to be a boy magnet. Being popular is part of her
genetic code. I’m surprised the Fashion Club didn’t make her president for
life.”
“All that’s surface stuff,” said
Jane softly. “Surface stuff is easy. I’m guessing now, and maybe I’m poking my
nose into a place it doesn’t belong, but you’re probably the only person who
really knows her who doesn’t yell at her all the time.”
Darius stared at the tabletop and
said nothing. He had not thought of that. A pang of guilt shot through him for
all the times he had yelled at his sister. After a long moment, he
grimaced and checked his watch. “We’d better go,” he said, pushing back from
the table. “Mr. O’Neill’s probably dying to tell us about Hamlet’s self-esteem
problems.”
They stood and collected their
trays. Darius stacked Quinn’s on top of his own.
“Speaking of self-esteem,” said
Jane, “I’m getting out of that after-school class. O’Neill teaches it, by the
way.”
“How are you getting out?”
“Oh, I have all the answers to the
release test. I can take it at any time and drop the class.”
Darius stopped, almost spilling the
contents of both trays he carried. “You what?”
“Sure! I’ve taken this self-esteem
class six times before, mostly in my freshman year. It hasn’t changed a bit.”
Darius stared at her. “If you
could’ve gotten out,” he said, “why didn’t you?”
“Because having low self-esteem
makes me feel special.”
“I think that’s the heroin talking,
not you. No, seriously. Why didn’t you?”
Jane shrugged. “I didn’t have
anything else to do after school. No one’s at home most days except
“So, what are you going to do with
all your new-found free time?”
Jane smiled, not looking at him.
“Well, I thought I’d ask you for ideas. Got any?”
The rest of the week passed without
serious disruption, other than flare-ups between Darius’s parents. Friday
afternoon found Darius and Jane walking into Pizza King, reputedly a
better-than-average restaurant near the high school where many of the students
congregated.
“Great self-esteem speech at the
assembly,” said Darius to Jane, waiting for her to take a seat at the booth
he’d found for the two of them. “I liked the part at the end where you ran off
crying. That was Oscar material. It got my vote.”
“It’s what Mr. O’Neill gets for
making me get up in front of everyone and talk about how I beat negative
self-esteem,” said Jane. She picked up a menu, glanced at it, and threw it down
again. “I’m bloody starved.”
“Tut, tut, language.” Darius picked
up the menu and squinted at it. “You learn that in
“I learned it from my dad,” said
Jane. “He went to Wales for four months when I was a kid, and when he came back
he kept saying ‘bloody this’ and ‘bloody that’ when he was developing his
film.”
“You know, about the assembly
speech, you could have just faked laryngitis and gotten out of it.”
“Nah. I’ve got theater in my veins.
If it’s art, we Lanes do it.”
“Is sleeping an art? Say yes.”
“Some people think so.
“Hmmm. You wanna split a giant
pizza?”
“Sure. Let’s get the garlic bread,
too. They make fantastic garlic bread here. We’ll need extra napkins.”
“Okay,” said Darius, still reading
the menu. “My treat.”
“Let me split the bill with you.”
“Nah. Isn’t done.”
“Isn’t done by whom? I’ve got
money.”
Darius winced. “It . . . just let me
pay for it. I’m good.”
“Good you are, but is this
guy-always-pays thing something they drilled into you at the academy?”
Darius didn’t answer. A muscle tightened
in his cheek. He suddenly thought about things he had hoped he never would
again.