Daisy

Daisy is Aza Holmes’s closest friend and a dedicated fan-fiction writer whose stories become a measure of how well the two girls have been attending to each other. When Aza finally reads Daisy’s work, she discovers both Daisy’s creative reach and the accumulated hurt caused by repeatedly failing to take that work seriously. Their friendship breaks under the pressure of that neglect, then finds a way back through apology, forgiveness, and renewed time together.

Identity and Creative Life

Daisy has been writing stories since she was eleven. Her fan fiction is not a passing amusement: by the time Aza reads one of her recent pieces, it has been read thousands of times, and Daisy has become, in Aza’s estimation, something of a celebrity. The scale of that readership surprises Aza, who had spent years not reading work her closest friend had repeatedly asked her to read.

The story Aza encounters, “A Rey of Hot,” appeared the previous week. Narrated by Rey, it places Rey and Chewbacca on Tatooine to collect cargo from Kalkino, an eight-foot-tall man. Ayala, a blue-haired girl traveling with them, is described as Rey’s “my best friend and greatest burden.” The comic premise draws on familiar Star Wars characters, but Ayala’s presence carries a more personal history: Daisy had invented her in seventh grade, and the character had continued to develop over the years. Aza initially sees herself in Ayala; Daisy’s later insistence that Ayala is now her own character makes clear that the story cannot be reduced to a portrait of Aza.

Friendship and the Failure to Listen

The conflict is not simply that Aza has never read a story. Daisy tells her that she asked many times, then grew tired of Aza promising to read the work and not doing so. She also objects that she should not have needed to keep asking: Aza could have made room for an interest that mattered to someone else. The complaint gives the omission a history. What Aza may have treated as postponement has, for Daisy, become a repeated experience of being overlooked.

Daisy’s anger is sharpened by the way Aza interprets Ayala as a version of herself. Daisy explains that the character began with her, but has become independent of that original inspiration. She admits that making Ayala in the first place was a “dick move,” while also refusing to let the character remain permanently defined by it. The exchange reveals Daisy as both accountable for the story’s beginnings and protective of the creative life it has acquired beyond them.

As the argument continues in the car, Daisy recognizes that Aza’s anxiety can invite disasters, but pairs that observation with an explicit declaration of love and an apology for calling Aza exhausting. Aza, in turn, answers with sarcasm about the money and boyfriend Daisy has gained from their friendship, then repeats the story’s cutting description of Ayala as “useless.” The exchange turns on a painful mismatch: Daisy objects to being ignored and to having her character claimed, while Aza hears the criticism as proof that she herself is useless. Their affection remains present, but it does not prevent either from wounding the other.

Repair and Shared Life

The evidence of their repair is both direct and deliberately light in tone. When the two hug, Aza apologizes; Daisy says she is sorry too, then jokes that they have forgiven each other and will live happily ever after. The humor does not erase the earlier dispute. It gives the friends a way to acknowledge that they have hurt each other and choose to resume the relationship without pretending the argument never happened.

Their closeness also appears in less dramatic exchanges. After Aza tells Daisy about texting and kissing, along with the enormous number of microbes involved, Daisy responds that kissing sounds disgusting, then counters that perhaps the other person’s microbes are better and might make Aza healthier. Her answer converts Aza’s anxious, bodily framing into teasing companionship rather than dismissal. The conversation shows a familiar ease in which an uncomfortable subject can be handled through humor.

Aza’s account of missing the days when she and Daisy spent half their lives together at Applebee’s establishes how central their shared time had been. At another point, Daisy walks toward Applebee’s and joins Aza in Harold after Aza has been alone with her late father’s phone and photographs. The scene does not make Daisy the focus of Aza’s private remembrance; instead, her arrival marks the return of their ordinary company after that solitary moment.

Renewed Friendship and Narrative Role

In the months that follow, Daisy and Aza make more room for one another in everyday life. They start a Mental Health Alliance and a Fan-Fiction Workshop to give themselves extracurricular activities for college applications, though the two friends are the only members of both clubs. They spend most nights together at Daisy’s apartment, at Applebee’s, or at Aza’s house, sometimes with Mychal Turner but usually alone, watching movies, doing homework, or talking. Their renewed friendship is built less on a grand resolution than on the repeated choice to show up.

The friendship’s deepest change becomes apparent when Aza and Daisy talk about college, kissing, religion, and art. Aza experiences the conversation as something she is genuinely having, rather than as if she were watching a movie of herself speaking; she can listen to Daisy and knows Daisy is listening in return. This moment gives their reconciliation a concrete measure: not merely that they are together again, but that attention has become reciprocal. Daisy’s stories first expose the cost of Aza’s inattention; their later conversations show the possibility of meeting each other as distinct people, with interests and inner lives neither friend can simply claim as her own.