Apparently we are done with the hospital scene and Mara learns exactly nothing else about the building collapse, because neither the police or fire department could figure anything out about why it fell, because we skip right on ahead to Rachel’s funeral.

We get some of Mara ruminating on what’s happened since then.  She’s been having symptoms which include nightmares, altered sleep patterns, extreme mood swings, memory loss, and at least one instance of breaking a mirror and possibly considering self harm with it.  I am totally on board with this depiction, and then I lose it when she’s diagnosed with PTSD.

Guys, I am super picky about PTSD.  I will get pedantic like WOAH as soon as you pull out that term, and especially if it’s supposed to be an official diagnosis.  There are eight categories of criteria for diagnosis and one of them is duration.  Symptoms have to persist a month or longer.  Mara’s friend died a few days ago.  A week a most.  (Funerals happen fairly quickly in most cases, though her flashbacks include a lot of things happening, so it’s hard to tell a timeline?)  Anyway, my point is, “a building fell on you and put you in a coma a few days ago” and “PTSD” are not the same thing.  They can be, absolutely, and I’m sure she’ll persist with symptoms long enough to meet the criteria, but the short term care necessary for someone directly after trauma and the long-term care necessary for someone who literally cannot cope with it are not the same thing.

If your friends die and a building falls on you, you’re allowed to be fucked up for a week without it being a disorder.

something about my behavior in the psychologist’s office made him recommend a long-term care facility.

Um…no.  Unless her parents are rich and/or he wants to make kick-backs, then I’m really not seeing this.  Someone who is not a danger to herself or others and who has capable support at home does not need to be sucking up a bed somewhere before anyone has even tried outpatient treatment.  And if she did, say, claim that she wants to commit suicide or try to stab her eye out with a pencil in his office and she just forgot, then you’d think her parents would remind her of it when she emphatically protests to the idea.

Mara proposes that they move instead, because there’s too many reminders of her dead friend all over her house/school/town.

1) Again, it’s been maybe a week, maybe less.

2) This is actually a reasonable request for her to make and could have been proposed by either Mara or her parents without pulling in hospitalization as if it’s some sort of boogieman.  I am thoroughly sick of seeing these places being used as a cheap threat.

Back to the funeral.  It is full of much sadness.

No one asked me how it happened, and I was glad because I couldn’t tell them. I still didn’t know.

Okay, but, what do people expect her to remember?  I get everyone wondering why they were in that building to start with (we still have no idea what the building was, btw), but beyond that?  She’s in a building, it falls over, do they think she…saw a hobo whacking the supports with an axe?  Had an intimate look at the massive termite colony in the basement?  Witnessed a super-villain testing out his seismic earthquake ray?  Odds are good that someone in a collapsed building isn’t going to remember anything more than parts of the ceiling rushing at their face, so while this drama might make sense on a small-scale, personal level, there should also be a real investigation going on simultaneously.

At the end of the funeral Mara reflects on how nice her family is for packing up and moving with her, because apparently that’s already been decided on? 

It was too easy to forget that my parents were leaving everything behind too; my father’s law practice, my mother’s patients. And Joseph, though only twelve, accepted without much explanation that we were moving and agreed to leave his friends without complaint.

And not only are they moving, but they’re moving so far away her parents have to quit their jobs?  If her only complaint is seeing Rachel everywhere, going ten miles down the road to a new school district seems like it would get the job done just as well.

The super compressed timescale of this is really bugging me.  Unless Rachel’s parents waited a ridiculously long time to hold the funeral, I can’t imagine anyone coming to a decision this drastic (and it sounds like they’ve done a good bit of prep work as well) so quickly.

So the next chapter opens in Miami, Florida, because when my kid tells me “I’m sad because this house reminds me of my dead best friend,” I of course think that the best option is to move 1500 miles away.  Obviously there were reminders of Rachel everywhere within a 1499 mile radius of their old house and nothing less would do.

Options that would make this more palatable:

• One parent had a job offer down there anyway and was only staying for the kids, and since that excuse is shaky now, might as well move.
• Mara didn’t move with the family, she got sent to live with a relative.
• The Dyer family already lived near Miami, in a suburb, and the big ‘fish out of water’ aspect comes from moving further into the city.
• Older brother Daniel, now age-bumped to over 18, was already planning to move and Mara begged to go along with him.  (Shaky, but doable if you tone down the hints of self-harm above and if Daniel is shown to be especially responsible.)

The chapter opens with Daniel and Mara bantering before he drives her to her first day of school in this new place.

We’d moved to Florida only a few weeks ago, but I wouldn’t recognize my old life in a lineup. I hated this place.

And another thing.  If you’re moving because your daughter is so traumatized by her old house, wouldn’t you want to minimize the number of new things that are going to cause her to stress out?  Wouldn’t you want to keep as many familiar things around as possible while only removing the bits that are reminding her of her friend?  Wouldn’t her mother who is also a psychologist know this?

They arrive at their new school, which is apparently a private school for snooty rich kids.  All the while Mara and her brother have bantery conversation, which on the one hand is nice for what it is, and on the other is bothering me.

See, last chapter was all about Mara not dealing well with the aftereffects of a building squishing her friend, but most of her trauma was told to us in summary.  The most we got in present time was her being sad and confused at the funeral.  Which, while well done, is pretty minor considering you could probably go to a stranger’s funeral and still feel incredibly sad about it.  Funerals are inherently tear-worthy.  And then our first chance to see Mara interacting in her day-to-day life, and we get complete normalcy.  This from a girl who supposedly was so bad that her doctor suggested she needed full-time care!

He opened his mouth to respond when I heard Chopin emerge from his pocket. The sound of Chopin, not the actual Chopin, thank God.

…thanks, I was really confused on that point?

The move on and Mara complains about everything that any normal person moving would complain about: the school looks snobby, she lacks the uniform and will stand out, her first class is one she doesn’t like, etc. 

Yes, annoying things that get complained about, but again: it’s your first chance to show Mara’s mental state in a real-time way after the funeral and you’ve chose only the most trite and normal of complaints.

Mara decides to go to the vending machines for food because she missed breakfast and she’s hungry and already late, so who cares about a few more minutes.

I set the papers down on the ground and dug in my bag for change. But as I inserted one quarter in the machine, the other one I held in my hand fell. I bent to search for it, as I had only enough money to buy one thing. I finally found it, placed it in the machine, and clicked on the letter-number combination that would provide my salvation.

It stuck. Unbelievable.

I’m riveted.  No, really, please tell me more about your great Vending Machine Debacle. 

And then the obvious love interest shows up to get three paragraphs of description.

We had one line tucked in there about Mara missing Rachel, but psh, what’s really important is that we get every detail of this guy’s “artfully disheveled” outfit just right.