Okay, here we go, attempt number two to finish this chapter.

After we get finished mocking and slut-shaming one person, we move on to mocking her gay best friend.  I forgot to mention him before.  Anna’s best friend is a big hulking footballer-looking dude named Aiden.  He used to date Anna, then came out of the closet and is best friends with Anna now.  That…sounds like there’s a sweet story in there somewhere.  Too bad Jamie’s judgmental assholery tries to paint it as something mock-worthy, then gives Aiden the nickname of “The Mean Queen.”

And I’m supposed to root for this asshole?  He uses the guy’s sexuality as a point of mockery, and that after (probably purposely) conflating it with a separate concept.  Gay =/= queen. 

“Let’s just say I tried to make friends with Davis once. In the platonic sense,” Jamie clarified. “I’m not his type. Anyway, my jaw still clicks when I yawn.” He demonstrated it for me.

I’ve spent less than a chapter with your fuckfaced dickery and already I’m willing to bet you didn’t try to “make friends” and probably deserve that punch to the face.

Jamie countered by threatening this guy with Ebola, and apparently he was convincing enough that the school got his parents involved to make sure he doesn’t really have highly dangerous viruses in his possession.  (His parents work in a hospital; to someone who doesn’t know the level of protection that shit is kept under, it’s conceivable he could have acquired some.)

Jamie is also adopted.

How many tokens can you give to one character?

Jamie walks her to her next classroom, which is hard to find because the school’s layout is wonky, and Mara congratulates herself on finding a new friend.  Mara, I don’t even like you and I still think you can do better.

I planned to offer this news [of a new friend] to [Mom] like a cat presenting a dead mouse to its owner. It might even be enough to help stave off therapy.

If, of course, I kept today’s hallucinations to myself.

And here we have our ominous chapter ending line, which tries to make drama out of something that’s not surprising, because Mara has been hiding hallucinations for…well, okay, we don’t know how much, but we do know that this is not exactly something new.

After school, Mara’s mom picks her up but gets suspicious when she sees a bit of blood on her.  Mara explains it away with a nosebleed.

“You’ve never had a nosebleed in your life.”

…who hasn’t ever had a nosebleed?  Those are common as dirt and have 234987239823030 different causes.

I wasn’t going to admit that I thought I saw my classroom fall apart the second I walked in it. Or that my dead friends reappeared today, courtesy of my PTSD. I’d been symptom-free since we’d moved. I went to my friends’ funerals. I packed up my room. I hung out with my brothers. I did everything I was supposed to do to avoid being Mom’s project. And what happened today wasn’t remotely worth what telling her would cost.

I still don’t buy this.  For so many reasons.

1. If you’re diagnosed with PTSD, why would you not do any actual research into it (or have someone tell you all about it, that seems like it would be step one for therapy/counseling) and realize that your hallucinations aren’t quite in line with what other people describe?
2. If you’re diagnosed with PTSD, why are you not already getting help?  Who would diagnose someone with a disorder and then say “whelp, have a nice life, come back if you wanna”?  Well, okay, that happens, but her mom seems to be chomping at the bit to get Mara into help, and that doesn’t fit at all with “here’s a diagnosis, now get out.”  She doesn’t need to be convinced that Mara needs help if someone has already told her that Mara needs help.
3. The timeline is still completely wonky.  If she moved right after the funeral, then when did the symptoms start?  If there haven’t been any since then, in such a short amount of time, how did she get slapped with PTSD instead of “you freaked out after a building fell on you, but you seem to be adjusting to it now, good on ya”?
4. WHY IS GETTING HELP WORSE THAN NEEDING HELP?  YOU ARE HAVING TRAUMATIC HALLUCINATIONS WHICH INTERFERE WITH YOUR DAILY LIFE AND CAUSE MASSIVE STRESS AND FEAR, WHY IS “OH NO, I’D HAVE TO TALK TO A DOCTOR” SO MUCH WORSE THAN THAT?

Her mom is still suspicious about the ‘random nosebleed’ excuse, but they drive home while Mara mentally whines about everything in the world, because why be a teenager with special drama when you can whine about mundane things like strip malls instead?

Mara tells us about her brothers and her new house when she gets home and there’s some average slice of life stuff.  We find out that her brothers both look more like their POC mom, while she is the whitest McWhiterson to ever be of mixed parentage.  She goes down the hallway and randomly decides to describe an old family photo of her grandmother, who is posing in her wedding sari.

All of Mara’s heritage is sort of dropped on us randomly like this.  She’s a white person living a white person life with white person concerns and a white person’s interaction with the world.  She has a Caucasian outlook and people treat her as a Caucasian when interacting with her.  And, fine, that happens when someone of mixed parentage looks more like their Caucasian parent.  But then we don’t get to see anything in her home life that nods to anything non-white except for this random picture and a few descriptions of her family members.  There’s no sense of mixed heritage in her home life or her thoughts.  I could be reading too much into this – it’s not a book about race and we haven’t spent that much time at home yet – but it irks me that there is so much potential when it comes to half-POC characters (even “passing” ones) and that potential gets swept under a rug of Whitey White McWhiterson.  It feels like someone just wanted to get ‘credit’ while not actually doing anything different.

Again, this book hasn’t been focused on anything that might be affected by her parentage so in a vacuum it would probably be okay, but I felt the need to rant.

It’s what I do.

Anyway, the paragraph-long description of her grandmother leads to absolutely nothing as she continues on into her room to mope.  I feel like this is more of a poor-foreshadowing thing than a “lookit me, POC” thing; the book has done this before.

Small ceramic roses dripped from the arms of the chandelier my mother had installed, but against the dark walls, it didn’t overly feminize the room. It worked.

Because, you know, that would be just horrible.  Somehow.

I kind of like the passage about her room, in an unreliable narrator sort of way.  She had a pink bedroom in RI, and she scoffs when her mom wants put in a pink bedroom here to give her some familiarity.  Mara wants it to be dark blue instead and says that “a wall color won’t bring Rachel back.”  Yeah, it’s nonsense, but it’s the kind of nonsense someone in her situation would think and so I can roll with it.  But then you drop in that line about how feminizing a room, when apparently she used to like pink and only the desire to change things up made her pick otherwise?  It’s actually rather confusing.  Did she never like the pink before?  Then why not bring that up as a reason for changing it?  Why just drop that line in there as if it’s just so obvious that having a feminine room is a bad thing?

And that’s it.  Ch 8 was really dull, served no point, and ended on description.  I hate when a chapter ends on a description, it makes the whole scene feel unfinished.

Ch 9 opens when Mara’s mom coming to talk to her.

“Is Dad home?”

 “Not yet. He’s working on a new case. He probably won’t be home for dinner for a while.” 

It’s honestly kind of amazing that this book could bring up so many questions about ancillary things.  You almost have to try to make the background this confusing.

Did her dad already have a job lined up here?  How did he find work so fast if he didn’t?  It seems like they made this move soon after the accident, but for someone who does specialized work job searching takes a long time.  How did he get a case so fast?  They’ve been here two weeks.  Sure, you can find lawyering jobs where you just get handed stuff, but for something important enough to keep you in your office every night for “a while,” you generally have to go out and find your clients/network/build relationships.  The “just hand it to you” cases are the boring, non-career-building ones no one wants.  And that’s assuming you find a firm willing to take you on.  If you’re building your own firm, even those jobs require some hunting.   They’ve been in town two weeks.

I should not be asking this many questions about a throwaway line.

I mean, yeah, I should be letting it go, but also you could just give half a second of thought to what your characters’ professions really mean while writing.

Apparently hospitalization is still a looming “threat,” even though 1) people not in Mara’s head shouldn’t think she needs it, because she’s relatively stable and high functioning 2) why jump straight to that instead of out-patient care first and 3) why is Mara so thoroughly against getting any help from the very scary hallucinations?

IDK, maybe she’s scared of it because anyone who thinks a full-time institution is a good first step is probably a bad doctor all the way through; I certainly wouldn’t want that person in charge of my health.  But that’s not how it’s being treated.

Mara wanders out into the living room and watches the news, which conveniently enough is talking about her accident.  Seems Rachel and Claire’s bodies were recently found, but Jude’s is still missing and it’s hard to look for it because parts of the building are really unstable.  Um…this book is just determined to fuck the time line six ways from Sunday, isn’t it?

I don’t even know what to say about this.  It’s so boggling that it defies all attempts to comment on it.

Then the story switches over to a murdered girl named Jordana Palmer and how police are still searching for evidence and it’s all very vague and just as awkwardly introduced as Mara’s grandmother.  I don’t know why this book even tries to do foreshadowing if it’s going to be this bad.

Then it’s time for mundane dinner.

I tried to laugh at their jokes as we ate, but I couldn’t blot out the images of Rachel, Jude, and Claire I’d just seen. No, not seen. Hallucinated.

Oh.  So the news story about her friends wasn’t real.  Well, at least that…doesn’t make the timeline worse.

God, if only all the hallucinations had been that mild, she might actually have some validity to her “no, I don’t need help” parade.  By that I mean it would make sense for her to think it, not that she doesn’t really need help.

As I walked back down the hallway to my bedroom, I shot a look at my grandmother’s portrait. Her eyes stared back, following me. I was being watched. Everywhere.

Throw in a bit more of this so it feels like she’s being paranoid, not just that her grandma’s picture is super random, and you’d have the makings of a pretty tense story.  Maybe take out all of Ch 7 while you’re at it.

Alas, we do not have that story.