Mara and Noah head out to the New Age-y (not hypnotist, oops) “unlock your mind” seminar, which is located in a run-down neighborhood and also inside a junk shop. But because that seems just so very reasonable (or something), they go inside anyway.

They go to the back room where there’s a bunch of folding chairs and some people there to attend the seminar. The speaker comes out, sees Mara, and gets very nervous. But the speech goes on as normal, and it’s new age candles and beads bullshit, so the teenagers talk and joke all the way through. Or, we are told they do, the summary of the event is pretty bland.

There’s a lot of dithering after the presentation is over, as Mara hangs around afterwards and accidently knocks a bunch of stuff over. The guy, Lukumi, ignores their offers to pay and just wants them to leave quickly, which of course is suspicious as hell so they stay instead. Noah offers the man $5,000 to help Mara, or at least tell them what it is that’s making him so twitchy. I feel like I should be bothered by this sequence of events, but after a whole book of utter nonsense, I can’t really bring myself to care too much.

Mara wonders why Noah had $5K cash on him, and Noah admits that he was going to take her to an artist he knows and buy her something for her birthday.

“With that much money? In cash?”

“He has cash vices, shall we say.”

“And you’d enable them?”

Noah shrugged a shoulder. “He’s supremely talented,”

But he’s just so fucking moral for not buying a fancy car, right?

Lukumi comes in with a glass of something and tells her to drink it; it will cause her to go to sleep and remember things.

It wouldn’t help.

But neither did the pills. And the alternative was waiting. Waiting and talking to Dr. Maillard, while my nightmares got worse and my hallucinations became harder to hide, until I’d eventually be pulled out of school

1) You said the pills were making you feel better. 2) Your dreams aren’t getting worse; you barely ever have them and by all accounts they aren’t interrupting your sleep cycle. 3) You’re doing fine with your hallucinations and the only reason anyone knows you’re having them is authorial cheating, and even in that case they’re not really getting worse.

Mara takes the drink that some complete stranger handed her in the back of a seedy shop in a seedy part of town. She wakes up 8 hours later, naked in Noah’s bed. Noah claims she was acting intoxicated and jumped in his pool, took her own clothes off, and got in his bed. He also details a few other “hilarious” antics she did while under the influence.

Apparently at no point in any of this “hilarious” story did Noah think “holy shit she took a strange drink from a stranger and is now acting out in a manner that could possibly be attributed to drugs, I should take that glass and her ass down to a hospital and make sure she’s alright.” Nope, instead he thought “eh, let’s just laugh at her antics and take her home.”

This book’s view on health care in general continues to absolutely boggle my brain.

The whole thing is forgotten in favor of realizing that they’re alone in the house and flirting. They paid $5K to a strange man acting suspiciously for a strange drink that was supposed to do one thing and just made her erratic instead, and they react to the whole event like she’s just coming off a particularly embarrassing bender. Where is the concern for what happened to her? Where is any amount of questioning over if the strange drug made her remember stuff or not? Where is the indignation at getting taken in by a con artist (if they think it didn’t work)?

They start making out on his bed and mid-macking, she gets hit with a bunch of memories from the asylum night. Instead of it being a flashback, it’s Mara’s overly-poetic narration, which…I’m okay with. Yeah, flashbacks are annoying, bring on this other stuff.

She realizes that she killed her friends, and Morales and the dog owner. Then she realizes that Noah is spontaneously dying, so she shakes him and slaps him to wake him up.

Noah sits up and says he was just asleep, that the makeout never happened, and she must have dreamed it, and why does my face hurt? Again, I wish all of Mara’s hallucinations could be of this variety. Complete with actual interpersonal consequences, rather than her just shrugging it off. This is both nicely creepy and lasts beyond the end of the incident.

Mara, however, is now convinced that she’s not crazy and that instead she’s lethal and she really did do all that stuff. The only problem? Um, we don’t really get any idea of how. She just keeps repeating “I collapsed the asylum” and “I killed Morales” but never really considers how she did it. The drug she took made her ‘realize everything,’ but we’re left with literally no more information than we had before. It’s written like a big revelatory moment, but it’s actually completely useless. Maybe if things had gone smoother before and there was an actual note of confusion over what’s real or not, this would have worked, but come on. Was anyone really doubting?

If anything, this whole “I killed people with my brain but without any further details besides ‘with my brain’ and I’m now utterly convinced of my own sin” bit makes it feel like she’s…well, actually gone delusional. Like she was holding it together before and now she’s gone off. It’s kind of backwards from what (I think) the book wanted it to be: looking like she was losing it before but finally knowing the truth now.

If I had any more faith in the book’s quality, that would actually be kind of cool, though.