July 5: Jane & Trent, College AU

[kinetic_elaboration]

Jane & Trent, background Jane/Daria stuff, from my (unpublished) College AU

~540 words, 15 minutes

*

At some point, Jane gets it into her head that if she just gets Daria back to Boston, everything will clear itself up. 

Her friends suggest inviting Daria to the avant-garde play some of the seniors are putting on this Saturday—the rumor is there’s only three lines of dialogue in the whole thing and they’re all at the end. And she almost brings it up because it’s sure to be pretentious and awful and the sort of thing Daria would probably like, in a loving-to-hate way, but before she can, Daria mentions that she’s doing an all-night movie marathon with Tom on Saturday. So in other words, she’s already busy.

 

“Which is fine,” Jane says, to Trent, as she balances on the back of his couch with her bare feet sinking into the cushions. He’s all the way on the floor, strumming chords and humming, and occasionally listening to her. “I get it, anyway.” She scratches at a mysterious stain somehow embedded at the very top of the back couch cushion, something red, but not dark enough to be blood. Spaghetti sauce? She doesn’t want to say the rest of her thought out loud but it’s there in her mouth, heavy and square and bitter on her tongue. 

“Get what?” Trent asks, after a very long moment, which is sort of a sign that he is sort of listening. 

“That he’s probably her boyfriend.” Jane shrugs. “So of course she’s hanging out with him on Saturday night.”

“I thought you said she called him a friend.” His tongue pokes out between his teeth, and he strums again, a different chord that jangles at the end. He adjusts his positioning and tries again.

“Yeah but—a guy she’s always talking about? Maybe they’re not official or something and that’s why she doesn’t want to say it.” Doesn’t want to hurt Jane’s feelings has been another hypothesis, but that would assume her feelings are obvious, which she doesn’t want to allow.

“You have guy friends.”

“That’s a different situation.”

“Don’t see how.”

Because she talks about him too much and because of course she’s straight and because that’s just Jane’s luck. Because if she assumes anything else she might—get her hopes up or something. She doesn’t say any of this to Trent.

“You could invite her to the Spiral show next week,” he adds, after another long while, strumming back and forth between his two now-perfected chords.

“Trying to get more people in the door?”

He barely bothers scowling up at her, the shortest of glares. Obligatory.

“Just see what happens,” he says. “It can’t hurt.”

“I guess.” She contemplates some more, scratching at the stain with her nail until it starts to flake off. “Neutral activity.” And when she does see Daria again in the flesh, sees she’s just a normal person and a friend, Jane will stop, maybe, thinking about her so much, and wanting her so much. Right now Daria’s just lines on a screen and a voice over the phone and the memory of their one weird, meandering night in the city. She’s the fantasy in Jane’s head when she should be going to sleep. And Jane can’t just keep indulging in that. 

She just can’t.