false 3 0 false true Fri Jun 26 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Fri Jul 03 18:10:07 -0700 2009 Fri Jul 03 18:13:32 -0700 2009
Deanna gets a job at a pizza parlor – discovering at the last minute that Tommy works there, too. Although she thinks she can deal with this, the tension between them slowly mounts (compounded by Deanna’s situation at home and a fight she has with her best girlfriend Leigh, and a clandestine kiss she shares with Leigh’s boyfriend and her best guyfriend Jason), and Deanna ends up exploding. She goes out with Tommy one last time, and confronts him – asking him why he said what he said about her, why he did what he did, how he could make her feel special and then take it all away. Amazingly, he apologizes. This leads to further outbursts, where Deanna is finally free to express how she feels – to her family, to her friends, to everyone. And slowly, things start to improve. She can finally breathe in her own skin, and she doesn’t hate her life (or even Tommy) anymore.

This was incredibly sad, but eventually empowering and hopeful. Deanna Lambert had me convinced that she was doomed to keep on repeating her mistakes and that she’d be stuck forever in Pacifica feeling sorry for herself and becoming one of those hard, emotionless, dead people that life is wasted on. It was such a relief when she finally opened her mouth and got all of the anger and sadness out of her. By the end, I was pretty sure she’d be ok. I wondered a bit at Deanna’s reasons for hooking up with Tommy in the first place – mostly because it was something I’d never have done at her age. But he made her feel special at a time when she didn’t have friends and her family was falling apart (her father lost his job). I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. I can’t say that I understand (or that Deanna understood) the choices she made when she was thirteen, but I think she definitely paid for them many times over. I’m not sure how she survived the caustic atmosphere around her for the three years that her father shut her down and shut her out, and where everyone knew everything they thought they needed to about Deanna Lambert. ]]>