Luce gets a chance to call her best friend from her last school, and during the phone call she notes that Roman Holiday is playing in the background.

Luce’s favorite scene had always been the one where Audrey Hepburn woke in Gregory Peck’s room, still convinced the night before had all been a dream. Luce closed her eyes and tried to picture the shot in her mind. Mimicking Audrey’s drowsy whisper, she quoted the line she knew Callie would recognize: “There was a man, he was so mean to me. It was wonderful.”

Wow.  Subtle.

Luce thinks about Daniel but talks about Cam.  If you can’t tell your best friend about a guy because you know that it sounds like a terrible, unhealthy thing, then shouldn’t that be a big warning sign?  And even then, they’re just gossiping, why can’t she say “there’s this really cute guy here, but he’s a jerk to me every time I run across him.”  That’s perfectly acceptable gossip fodder.

Through a long, long, long instance of useless padding that involves false starts and convolutions that go nowhere, Luce gets off the phone and ends up talking to Cam.  No, I don’t know why that took over 500 words to accomplish.  (Was this book a NaNo project?)

They chat for all of about two seconds when Luce’s mysterious shadow arrives again, but that sticks around for just a second before Daniel walks in, too, and that makes the shadow leave.  What is this, musical plot devices?  How can we spend so many pages on talking to her BFF and then cycle through mysterious shadows in a millisecond?  

Cam invites her to a party, which from how it’s described seems to be more of dig/challenge at Daniel than anything else.  Hard to tell, though.  Could be nothing more than Luce’s inability to stop noticing everything the guy does.

She was still trying to slow her breath down from her run-in with Cam and Daniel when Penn barged into her room to drag her back out the door.

How do you get out of breath from standing still while other people talk?

Anyway, they’re off to Wednesday night social, which basically what it sounds like: mandatory group activity.  The teens, being teens, complain endlessly about it.  (Okay, to be fair, people of all age complain about that.  Doesn’t matter how fun or boring the activity is, no one likes to be forced.)  So, boring movie night gets long, drawn-out boring set-up full of thoughts about Cam and Daniel, of course.  If the intention was to make us really feel the tediousness of the situation, congratulations, book.

Near the end of the movie, that shadows show up again and…tug on her feet.  While Luce ignores them.

These shadows are pretty piss-poor antagonists.  We don’t have a good description of them, they’re always just “shadows that make weird noises,” and we don’t know anything about them.  When they show up, they have no effect on anything and they’re easily ignored.  We’ve got suggestion that they knocked over the statue and lit the fire that killed Luce’s boyfriend, but one was in flashback and the other was an isolated event.  On the whole, the shadows are adding nothing to the story.  At least, nothing to justify why Luce goes rigid with fear every time she sees them.  They’re more like an annoying pet that follows her around, and that’s hardly something I’m going to get worried over.

Although, it’s a shame, because “ominous shadows that Luce ignores” could have been interesting if it had taken a more toned-down attitude.  If she was used to ignoring them and only described them in passing, described them as a semi-constant presence but not something she had to deal with, and then the ominousness could be from their disappearance and not their appearance.  They disappear around Daniel, and Luce doesn’t even think about them until she goes “hm, something is wrong, wha- Hey, where are my shadows?  This is odd and ominous!”

I mean, sure, that’s a bit gutted because an active threat is always better than the absence of something.  But at least it’s matching an appropriate level of reaction to the description.  

Later, they go to Cam’s room for the party.

Arriane pushed off the ground and used the boa to cover the face of the hallway surveillance camera while she reached around the back of the device and switched it off.

“That’s not suspicious or anything,” Penn said.

What is the point of having cameras around at all if they’re not going to impact the story?  I mean, I get that this school sucks even in its stated goal because it’s not a real reform school, but why make a big deal out of the cameras back in Ch 1 if nothing actually comes of it?  People’s behavior is not altered in any way by these cameras.  They’re pointless.  No one even bothers to make plans that revolve around turning the cameras off in the best way, they just wander around doing whatever they please and then, occasionally but not always, go “oh yeah, let me walk straight up to this camera here and turn it off, no biggie!”

The party is typical.  Teens, booze, loud music.  It could have come out of any high school movie.  It takes another 300 words of stalling before Luce and Penn even go inside.  (And that’s not counting the description of the party.)  The paaaaaaaaaadding is drooooooooowwwwwwning meeeeee!

She flirts with Cam and thinks about Daniel.  Well, at least it’s progress from not talking to either of them.

As soon as her eyes found him, it was hard to look anywhere else. Which didn’t make sense, because a gorgeous and friendly guy was standing right behind her, asking her what she’d like to drink. The other gorgeous, infinitely less friendly guy sitting across from her should not be the one she couldn’t stop looking at. And he was staring at her. So intently, with a cryptic, squinting look in his eyes that Luce thought she’d never decode, even if she saw it a thousand times.

Still reads like mind control to me.  He’s like an evil Charles Xavier who doesn’t quite have a handle on his powers yet, so he has to really, really concentrate and even then the person just gets stuck instead of actually doing stuff.

Maybe this was what Arriane meant when she said Roland knew how to get things. The only off-limits item Luce could imagine wanting badly enough to ask about was a cell phone. But then … Cam had said not to listen to Arriane about the inner workings of the school. Which would have been fine, except so much of his party seemed to be courtesy of Roland. The more she tried to untangle her questions, the less things added up.

The only reason that doesn’t add up is because you take Cam’s word without question and disbelieve Arriane, despite clear proof.  Also, Cam only said not to listen to Arriane, not that she’s telling exact-opposite lies 100% of the time.

Why is Luce confused about things that don’t require confusion?  What does this even add?  Does the campus really need to be confusing on top of being a downer?

Halfway through the festivities, Daniel sneaks out and Luce makes excuses to follow him (250 words).  She runs across him and Gabby arguing, something about she wasn’t there when he needed her, and her saying she’ll just have to trust him.  Luce, of course, immediately assumes this is a lover’s quarrel and imagines them kissing.  Which we know must be 100% true a thing that they did, because she didn’t actually look, she just assumed, and it’s not like that has ever been used in a romance novel before.