Luce wakes up the next morning to the horror of all horrors:  A fitness test.  I guess to someone (otherwise healthy) who thinks that raking is a brutal effort, that would be cause for concern.  I don’t care, though, mostly because I’m hoping someone will tell her to get some exercise more.

After several pages of I-don’t-give-a-fuck, Luce finally gets to the gym and is told she’ll be doing her fitness test at the pool, because for some reason everyone isn’t doing the same thing they’re being broken up into different stations.  Luce is distraught about the fact that Gabbe is assigned to the pool as well, because how dare that bitch kiss-but-maybe-not a boy that Luce likes?

I get that teens are stuffed full of feelz and those feelz aren’t exactly logical.  I get that Luce has a crush on Daniel and is hurt by the assumption that he likes someone else.  I’ve been there, I’ve felt that, I get it.  BUT.  Fiction provides a framework for people going through new experiences.  If you’ve never felt something before but have read about it, that’s what you’re going to draw on when you try and make sense of things.  So maybe the reason girls are lashing out at other girls is because THEY KEEP READING BULLSHIT LIKE THIS THAT PERPETUATES IT.  Stories (books, movies, jokes, stereotypes, what-have-you) will continually cast “the other woman” in the role of the villainous temptress.  It’s not actually necessary to lash out at a fellow female when you’re hurt.  It’s easy to do that, but because we’re trained to do that.  Maybe it’s time we train our teens to do something healthier.  Like, you know, just feel sad.  That’s okay.  You can feel sad that the boy you like doesn’t like you back.  Really.  And then you can deal with that sadness and move on from it.  You can do it all without calling “the other woman” a harpy or even blaming her at all.

Too much time is spent describing the pool.  They basically gutted the middle of an old gothic church and sunk a pool in the middle of the floor.

“Problem is, even if I did feel like pitching in, I’d have no idea what to do with all this [religious paraphernalia laying about], or even how to clear it out without offending, like, everyone and God.”

Basement.  Seriously.  Or attic; there’s a pool in your church basement now.  Have you seen a church basement?  Try it sometime.  Ours is full of everything we only bring out at Pentecost, all shoved into corners along with fake Christmas tress when we’re done with them.  And then surrounded by bat traps, because we have bats. 

Why would anyone think that god will strike them down for moving some junk, but not for digging a hole in the middle of the sanctuary?

Then after description time is over (644 words), Luce sees Arriane, Molly, and Roland sitting out because they have notes, and Gabbe joins them and they all chat.  Luce randomly decides that these are “the cool kids.”  …why?  Because fuck making any sense, this is high school, there has to be a cool kids clique, that’s why.

200 words dedicated to wishing Cam was there.  Riveting.

Turns out Luce is an awesomesauce swimmer.  But raking makes her tired.  Because it’s not like swimming takes a lot of muscles or anything.

Then she randomly hears Gabbe say the word “Daniel” and that’s enough to make her come to a complete stop in the middle of her test and just stand there waiting to hear more.  Uhg, I thought we were finally going to get a hobby for this girl, but nope, guess not, boys are the only important thing.

I don’t care that she’s preoccupied with boys, this is a romance, but she doesn’t need to be obsessed.

“What happened?” she asked Luce. “You were totally killing him.”

Luce shrugged. Gabbe was what had happened

Shut the fuck up, book, your Gabbe hatred is beyond irritating.  The girl has been nothing but nice and friendly, but she had a conversation with a guy Luce likes, so now everything’s her fault.  Fuck that.

After swimming, she gets distracted by watching Daniel work out in a weights room, because…oh, hell, okay, I’d be distracted by that, too.

In the middle of her rapt drooling over Daniel (and, to be fare to the plot, there’s some déjà-vu creepiness, too), one of the shadows pops up and shoves her back into the hallway.

“Ow!” she cried, not because she was hurt exactly, but because she had never been touched by the shadows before.

Then why the fudge are you scared of them?  Even when they do stuff they don’t hurt you.

That was impossible—she’d just been standing in a weird place; a draft must have shot through the gymnasium.

YOU HAVE BEEN FOLLOWED BY SHADOW MONSTERS YOUR ENTIRE LIFE, YOU OF ALL PROTAGONISTS SHOULD BE OPEN TO THE IDEA OF THE SUPERNATURAL, WHY DO BOOKS PERSIST IN TRYING TO EXPLAIN AWAY STUFF LIKE THIS IT’S NOT INTERESTING STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT.  WEIRD SHIT IS HAPPENING, INVESTIGATE IT, STOP TRYING TO PRETEND LIKE THE PLOT OF YOUR OWN BOOK ISN’T HAPPENING, WE CAN TELL YOU’RE JUST DOING IT FOR PADDING, STOP IT.

Either make your plot interesting enough to last a whole novel or write a short story.  Don’t resort to ignoring shit for the sake of upping the page count.

She thought about Roland’s suggestion that she just ask Daniel what was up, but quickly dismissed the notion. It was impossible to ask anything of Daniel.

A romance book in which the two main leads don’t interact.  Riveting.

She does end up going in the gym and talking to him, but only because she dropped her key in there.  He makes more creepy comments indicating he’s known her for a while, which begs the question of why he’s so bad at this, and then she confronts him on the whole “I swear we know each other” feeling.  He categorically denies it.

Eh, at least it’s an interaction.  Progress?