It’s time for the infamous snowball fight!

While getting ready, Grace lets slip that she’s talked to Jaxon a few times and Macy flips out because Jaxon is so reclusive…but also popular? Presumably something to do with weird vampire power hierarchies, I mean later we find out there’s a vampire King and Queen. Of course, that’s all we find out, which is really annoying. Oh the things we could have learned if this book didn’t spend 300 pages pointlessly hiding things from Grace!

Also we find out that Jaxon has a special clique-within-a-clique of about five other vampires and they are called…The Order. Don’t look at me like that, I have no explanation.

The rest of the chapter is the girls talking about how hot, special, but also scary Jaxon is, and Grace should stay away from him. But, oh no, there he is! When they get to the main entrance of the school to go out for the snowball fight, Jaxon is just sort of loitering there.

Jaxon tries to warn Grace away from…idk, having a social life? I mean, in context he’s clearly got something against Flint and thinks that Flint is dangerous for Grace. But he won’t explain anything so from her point of view it’s just telling her not to make friends. Of course she won’t listen to that. It’s ridiculous advice.

“You’re determined not to listen to me, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I whisper back, but I can’t look him in the face as I say it. Not when I’m lying – I know exactly what he’s talking about

Oh. Or. Does she know?

his proximity and the orange and dark-water scent of him

The fuck is a ‘dark-water scent’? Because my closest association is black water, which is another word for sewage.

Jaxon postures a bit while Grace flibbertygits over his … weird smell, I guess. Then it’s time for the snowball fight.

And, I’ll be honest with you…it’s a snowball fight. It’s a whole chapter of a fun, no-sides-no-score, everyone v everyone snowball fight. Which, okay, seems like a grand time, but that was a lot of buildup over not much. Macy said this was going to ‘legendary’ and given all these kids are paranormals, I’m just not seeing it.

Macy, Grace, and Flint have formed a mild alliance and they decide to climb a tree to get the drop on other people. A really harsh, persistent, some might say magical wind strikes up and knocks Grace out of her tree, but Flint jumps after her and catches her in a way that he hits the ground first. He ends up fine, which the kids struggle to explain away to Grace, and Grace has a sprained ankle.

Jaxon shows up, fuming and furious, and directs all of his ire towards Flint. There’s a tense stand-off that Grace doesn’t understand, because as far as she knows the whole thing was a weird accident. The situation is only defused when Jaxon realizes Grace is hurt and needs to go back inside.

Absolutely pitiful murder attempt, if you ask me. All these magical kids around, Grace outside and everyone with projectiles, and that’s the best they’ve got? Even without Flint to cushion her fall, who’s to say that she would have died? Falling out of a tree isn’t usually fatal.

And see, if we didn’t spend three hundred pages keeping the magic a secret for no reason, the murder stuff could have been way more interesting! Instead these kids are bound and determined to…maintain their human facade even when they think she’s about to die? Because yes, multiple kids in this fight are trying to kill her for reasons revealed later, but none of them are like “oh, who cares if she knows I’m a werewolf, she’ll be dead in a second anyway”?

Utterly baffling.

But, back to flibbertygiting. Because, see, once Jaxon sees Grace has a hard time walking, he just carries her back to her room.

Oh! The romance! The…sewage smell!

Back in the dorm room, Jaxon is determined to play nurse and also yell at Grace for being reckless. While still not telling her that it’s a real danger. Grace is flibberty over his hotness but also mad at his scolding, Macy is just flibberty over a vampire prince playing nursemaid.

After he leaves, the girls continue to be flibberty.

“I’m pretty sure the details are what’s important here.”

“Not right now they aren’t! Right now, it’s all about the big picture.”

“And what exactly is the big picture?” I ask.

“That the two most popular boys in school are obsessed with you.”

Okay, so, Macy doesn’t know the murder plot so that’s okay. But also she knows that Jaxon and Flint aren’t just “the most popular”? I don’t know what Flint’s status is within the paranormal world, but at minimum he and Jaxon have some history and Macy knows that, but she still frames it as “teehee, cute boys”????

And that part wouldn’t even require breaking masquerade! “They hate each other and now you’re in between them and there’s a good chance at least one of them is just acting to make the other riled up” is something Macy could totally say here and that would make sense to Grace’s current level of information and it would make the book more interesting than just a flaccid love triangle!

But I guess we can’t expect an (ALLEGED) plagiarist to come up with something new, can we?

But no, instead we just get lots of talk about how Jaxon makes moon eyes at Grace.

Grace texts with her old best friend in San Diego which is pointless except I want to whine about this line.

She includes a DTF emoji in the last one, and I laugh despite myself.

Huh? I know what DTF means, but I had to google and check if there’s a specific emoji for it, which…no?

The cousins then spend four pages talking about the plot so far. Which is so thin that they can only make it stretch to four pages by sprinkling in diversions about how much ice cream costs in Alaska. “There are cliques in this school. They are more intense than normal high school cliques, for reasons I won’t explain. Everyone hates Grace, except for two hot boys and two hot girls, one of which is her cousin. One of the hot boys is scary. The end.” For now.