The next day at school, Mara and Daniel complain about how bad the traffic is in their new home and Daniel mentions he’s about ready to start playing bumper cars in the parking lot because of how bad it is.  Then they watch as one car cuts off another car to get into a parking space.

I nodded as I watched the driver of the Mercedes exit the car along with another passenger. I recognized the immaculate sheet of blond hair on the driver even before I saw her face. Anna, naturally.

The “naturally” here means we’re supposed to have guessed it was her from the behavior, but not five seconds earlier her brother was saying he’d do the same thing if only he had the opportunity for it.  Besides which, crowded parking lots have a way of turning the nicest of people into steely balls of vehicular rage.  So I guess we can chalk this up to “everything the mean girl does is going to get sneered at, no matter what, and I’m justified because she’s the mean one.”

Mara gets to her English class, where they are covering something she already learned in her last school.  That’s kind of a cop-out, it gives her all the answers without requiring her to have any actual interest in the subject, which would at least give her some personality besides “judges everything and ignores hallucinations.”

Noah is in her class, and he keeps interrupting her as she tries to give answers, resulting in a minor bit of debate about a play.

A bit bored, I took out my thoroughly dog-eared and well-loved copy of Lolita and hid it behind my notebook.

…considering what we know of Noah so far and the fact that he’s clearly the love interest, the fact that Mara adores Lolita doesn’t bode well.

I mean, it’s got beautiful prose and it’s iconic in its genre, but you throw it into the middle of an already iffy love story and I side-eye you hard.

Noah catches up to her after the class and finds her book, which he starts quoting from.

And I’m just seriously super skeeved, because he picks a passage about how Dolores is utterly unique among her peers and yet unaware of her great power, and it’s followed by “But the way he said it, the way he was looking at me, was shockingly intimate. Like he knew my secrets. Like I had no secrets.”  Yeah, they’re clearly trying to draw parallels there, and that ain’t gonna work unless you’re writing a horror story with an unhappy ending.

And then they call Lolita “smut.”  You know, that genre of writing where the point of reading it is to get your rocks off?  I shouldn’t be surprised considering the number of “great romance books” that book lands on, but I can be very, very skeeved and disappointed.

Should’a stuck to Wuthering Heights for your “required old book to quote from.”

“No,” I said, louder this time. “I mean asscrown. The crown on top of the asshat that covers the asshole of the assclown. The very zenith in the hierarchy of asses,” I said, as though reading from a dictionary of modern profanity.

Okay, I do like this, though.

She gets away from Noah after some bantering, then goes to Algebra where Anna and Aiden walk in.

The pair walked in like a matched set of evil.

Things Anna has done so far in this novel: Say “watch it” in a curt manner, park aggressively.

Yeah, sooooo evil.

She doesn’t do anything in this scene, either.  Jamie comes in to make me want to punch him some more, then we skip over the rest of the day.

There’s a lot of minor family interaction, some ominous hints about a big envelope that their father’s client dropped off, and then she goes to bed, making much of that…utterly pointless.  What a strange couple of pages.  All of the skipping over time and hurrying through the day makes it feel like we’re supposed to get somewhere, and then she just goes to bed.  Nothing else happened that day that was so important we couldn’t just skip straight to the Flashback-Filled Dream she’s about to have.

She dreams about Jude coming to her window back in Rhode Island, where she is asleep, to pick her up to go to the building that eventually collapses.  Apparently they had all made this arrangement beforehand, but Mara was planning to skip it and sleep through instead, at least until Jude showed up to needle her.

We also finally get a smidge more information on said building.  It’s an asylum.  That’s it.  That’s all we’ve got.

Mara wakes up like she just had a nightmare, but really she’s just all kerfluffled over finally remembering something. 

After the second night of the same dream, the same terror, I silently began to agree with her. I was a basket case in school that day, and the day after that.

And we go straight from her sitting in bed and thinking about her incomplete memory to that.  No transition.  No time skip.  I had to read it twice to realize that she’s not still in internal narration/remembering mode and that time actually had progressed and she had another dream.  Book, why do you spend a full page on her dad interrupting homework for smalltalk, but you can’t give us anything right here? 

There are just so many ways that time is jacked up in this book.

But with everything on my plate at Croyden, I needed, more than anything, to relax.

Wait, what’s on your plate at school?  Sure, being a new student is stressful, but so far you’ve had a very mild transition, at least on the actual school side of things.  We haven’t even heard about any overload of homework to get her caught up.

On Friday, Mara drives herself to school because Daniel has a dentist appointment.  She gets there early to beat traffic, but then she’s too early and she has nervous energy to burn, so she goes for a walk around the neighborhood.  Turns out her school, despite being very nice itself, is in a bad part of town.

When she passes one lot, she sees an abused dog chained up in the front yard and tries to pet it while seeing if she can get its collar off.  Unfortunately, the owner of the dog catches her, and he’s an unsavory looking fellow so Mara tries to talk her way out of the very obvious fact that she was trying to steal his dog.

It doesn’t work, so she lambasts him for animal abuse instead.

The guy tells her to get lost, then kicks his dog and smirks at Mara.  It’s at this point that I don’t really care about the guy.  That’s unfair of me, super-mega-assholes exist, but things have been piled on so heavily that he’s turned into a cartoon.  The book had to pile on not just animal neglect, but also being physically ugly, smelly, bald, and generally gross and threatening, harp on all of that, and then also he kicks his dog while grinning?  Stop trying so hard to make me hate him.  I hated him already at the abused dog part, you didn’t give me room to let my hate fester and now I’m distracted by being annoyed at the book.

Mara runs away (because there’s nothing she can do but she’s got angry energy now) and vividly fantasizes about the man’s death.