“Hey, are you gonna be okay?” she asked, and god, that was lame enough all right, Daria sitting there on the edge of the crapper, arms tight around her bass, face buried in her hands and everything hidden beneath her blood-red hair. She wasn’t crying; Theo had never seen Daria cry, and she had a feeling no one else had, either. She was just sitting there, breathing too hard and too fast, a dry and graceless sound stranded somewhere useless, the stillborn expression of something she knew Daria would never even admit to feeling.
“I am so goddamned sick of this,” she said, the words squeezed out like toothpaste between her clenched teeth, and her voice only made Theo feel that much more ineffectual.
“He’s just gonna keep jerking us around like this, and pretty soon I’m gonna be too tired to even care anymore. Christ, I hardly give a rat’s ass now,” the last word hissed, and she kicked the wall, drove the toe of her Doc Marten into the bare Sheetrock.
“Then maybe it’s time to cut him loose, babe,” and there it was, out quick before she could back down, before she lost her nerve.
Daria looked up through the red straggle, slash-mouthed lips pulled tight and those eyes, red-rimmed but tearless, their twin fires banked for now, but the last green coals still dancing around her pupils, and Theo looked away.
“We’re nobody without Keith. Do you honestly think people are gonna pay to hear Mort, or to listen to another froggy-voiced chick with a bass? Even when he’s so high he can’t find his dick to take a piss, he plays like…” but she trailed off, and her face disappeared back inside the shaggy veil of her hair.