June 12: Tom & Daria, Science Fiction

[kinetic_elaboration]

When they’re in fifth grade, spring break at Tom’s school coincides exactly with spring break at the Lawndale public schools, and Tom and Daria 

Tom and Daria as kids, set in the same ‘verse as Heavenly Wine and Roses by @riotsquirrrl.

~640 words, 18 minutes

*

make this everybody’s problem. All of a sudden she’s all but living at his house. Tom’s really into science fiction that year, which she thinks is pretty cool, too. They spend long afternoons running marathons of classic films about aliens and space travel, until Mrs. Sloane shoos them out because don’t you kids want to be outside? It’s really getting so nice out, this spring.

On the swing sets out behind his house, they swing back and forth, though not as far or as high or as fast as they used to, when swinging was the main thing they did, instead of talking. And they start planning out their own science fiction universe, an alien planet with its own society, peoples, history, art, weather. They get really into it. By mid-week Daria’s even writing stories set on the planet Zorblat—vacations always stretch impossibly long when you’re a kid, is how she’ll remember it later, when she finds her old notebook again. 

 

She brings the notebook to the Sloanes and, because the gardeners are outside pruning the hedges or something, and she and Tom have been shooed right back indoors, they hole up in his room, and she sits backwards at his desk chair with her arms crossed over the top of it and watches as he reads. He’s lying down on his back at the center of his bed with the notebook held up above him. He used to read like a normal person, she thinks. Recently he’s been trying to be weird about everything.

“You’re going to be a writer someday, right?” he asks, all of a sudden. She realizes he’s finished, though he hasn’t put the notebook down. Maybe he’s proving his arms aren’t tired.

“I’m a writer now,” she answers. “I wrote that.”

“Yeah, I know. I mean like a professional.” He tilts the cover down and stares at her over it, has to sit up on his elbows to really meet her eye. “Like a famous writer or something.”

Her face is unaccountably warm, and it isn’t the room. The Sloanes have a central air system that keeps the whole house at the exact same, anodyne, undiscernible, non-temperature all year long. She doesn’t look away, though. “Do you like the story or not?”

“I love it, obviously.” He closes the notebook again, sets it down next to him and pulls himself all the way up into a sitting position, leaning back against the pillows. He leaves enough space for her to sit down next to him if she wants. But she doesn’t really want to. For a moment, she doesn’t know why, she regrets ever having written anything. And it’s not because she doubts him or thinks that he’s lying; she doesn’t; Tom’s always been her biggest fan.

“You know what we should do?” he asks after a moment.

“What?”

“Invent a language. For Zorblat. And then you include it in some of your stories.”

Daria tilts her head, considers a moment. They do have a whole half of spring break left. And she likes the idea that he just takes for granted, that there will be more stories, eventually.

“Yeah, okay,” she agrees. They work on it the rest of the day, and into the next, and before it’s time to go back to school they have gotten enough figured out to start speaking it themselves. They challenge themselves to keep talking in it for as long as possible, to the great confusion of Quinn and the frustration of their parents, and sometimes even after school starts again, Daria speaks it to herself in her mind, just to pretend that Tom is there, with her, to hear it and understand.