June 1: Fic Excerpt

[kinetic_elaboration]

Feeling tired and a little down–Sunday blues.

Here is a fic excerpt instead of thoughts:

“Is it something about you and Jane?” Quinn asks, then, abruptly. “Everyone at school thinks you’ve been acting weird around each other.”

Daria’s eyes narrow. “Weird how? Also—what do you mean ‘everyone’?”

“Weird like more distant or whatever.” She shrugs, and lets the other question hang. “Like how, the last time you were this weird, you ended up telling the whole school you’d kissed her boyfriend.”

“I didn’t tell the whole—”

“Daria, what you say in the middle of a crowded hallway, you say to the whole school but that was a long time ago and not the point.”

She scowls anyway, and crosses her arms against her chest. Quinn and her revisionist history. She is also, annoyingly, not entirely wrong. Daria had avoided Jane last year, after the kiss in Tom’s car, because she’d known she might end up confessing everything on a hair trigger, knew her guilt might overflow her attempts at tact, let alone secrecy, flooding over the weakest of dams. But the damage she’d focused on in the aftermath was that to Jane. Who cared about the fleeting, shallow opinions of a bunch of people who had never even looked twice at her? If she’d fed the rumor mill at all, it must have been short-lived. Summer came. Tom didn’t even go to their school. People forgot.