We are now in full flashback mode, following along with Mara and her friends as they sneak into the old abandoned movie set– erm, I mean asylum.

I don’t even understand the point of these flashbacks. There’s nothing interesting here so far. Obviously we’re waiting to see what’s going to cause the building collapse, everything besides that is pure useless fluff. We don’t need to see them meander their way up the drive way or climb over the fence; we can assume well enough that these things happened. So the flashbacks don’t really do anything except remind us that there is something to learn…later, but we don’t get it now.

Near as I can tell there aren’t even any clues in these scenes. There’s just…waiting. I despise things that are doled out in bits and pieces like this but ultimately add up to nothing besides “tune in next time.” It’s the sign of a weak mystery, a gimmick to replace any actual progression. We’re not invited to figure things out, we’re invited to wait patiently and passively for an answer to be handed over. And while that’s okay for a straight-forward story, that’s not okay when you need to justify gratuitous flashbacks.

Claire continues to tease Mara for being nervous. I continue to be confused over whether this is normal “creepy shit is creepy” or something else, since it’s both bland but needlessly harped upon.

They see a pully system in the foyer that operates all the cell doors remotely, and Mara recounts a story of how a boy died by accidently getting trapped in one of those rooms and not having anyone to pulley the door open and let him out. Mara’s dad sued the city for leaving such a deathtrap up and easily-broken-into, but lost the case. (Is that why Mara is scared of the place more than the other kids? It’s just so fucking bland, idk.) How did he loose that case? This is a fairly affluent neighborhood (or I assume so, if Mara’s parents live there) so basically right in the demographic of people who seriously protest this shit and also pay enough taxes that the city can afford to tear it down.

Jude pulls her away from the other two to makeout, and we finally get our first tiny scrap of a semi-clue. He pulls her into room 213, which is the same as the room number to her classroom at school back when he first showed up as a hallucination to chase her.

Mara trips and wakes up back in the present. (Wow, what an eventful flashback, right?) She finds that she’s being carried back to the car by Noah, who I can only hope at least tried to asses her condition before moving her. (He heard a scream and found her on the floor. He can’t tell what was hurt, or how, or if moving her would hurt things further, or why she’s unconscious. These are rather important things to know before you just up and lift someone.)

Noah is thoroughly unconcerned about her condition, even when Mara tries to explain herself. This is not because he’s a respectful person who doesn’t want to pry into her medical status because privacy, no, it’s because Daniel has already told him everything.

Um…what has Daniel told him? Explaining that her friends died and they moved because of that, okay, but that doesn’t really cover spontaneous scream-fainting.

Mara, instead of wondering exactly what Daniel said that could explain away that fainting episode, just assumes that Daniel coerced Noah into going out with her. Noah has to spend two pages assuring her that, no, he really does like her and he was the one who asked Daniel for information.

He then explains that when he cornered her in the bathroom (yes, he actually uses that phrase, apparently he doesn’t realize that “cornering someone” is not considered a nice thing) he backed off because they got an audience and at the party his sister was merely teasing him for moping over Mara, not laughing at Mara.

The bathroom. The club. I was wrong about everything.

See, except, not really. Okay, the club one I’ll give you, but none of the rest of this was actually confusing. In fact, I’m more confused over your confusion than I am over anything Noah has done. And nothing about this section is contradictory to his actions previously, so…?

Mara starts claiming that she’s “broken” and then begs Noah not to tell her family about the fainting because they’ll lock her up in a mental hospital. (Um…she legit lost consciousness, wouldn’t they take her to an emergency room? In fact, why are these two kids here not more worried?)

And the hopelessness of it was suddenly too much to take. “There’s nothing anyone can do to fix it,” I said quietly. Finally.

I really, really want to rage right now. Mara hasn’t done anything to try to get treatment, and she refuses any attempts to treat her stringently but her only excuse is that she’s “too broken to fix.”

But I’m not mad that Mara thinks that. I’m not. Because that is a real thing that people really think, and it’s one of the reasons that getting mental illnesses seen to is so difficult. Depression literally fucks your brain until you don’t want to get treated for depression. So Mara thinks this, cool, it’s a good thing to bring up! Or it would be if I had any faith that the book was going to treat it as what it is.

But I have no faith that the book actually means it as a symptom of her depression. I have no faith that the book means this as anything good, because the book then goes on to have Noah say,

“Let me try.”

Fuck you, book, for taking a legit symptom of depression that real readers might really recognize and identify with and then slapping on some healing romance.