Abigail Barnette's Blog, page 39

The Sickening

Hey everybody! As many of you are aware, there is a deadly strain of flu picking people off in the U.S. right now because the collapse of our government apparently wasn’t providing enough excitement or something. I’ve been trying to fight something off since a bout of mild food poisoning last week, so I’ve elected to take the rest of this week off and spend it sleeping as much as possible. I’ll be back next week, hopefully not with the flu.

The Worst Person I’ve Ever Met (Part 7) “Drop The Rope”

Missed parts one, two, three, four, five, and six? Good news! Those are all links.

This installment features more talk of self harm and suicide.

Despite the pleas of basically everyone who knew him, Sam went to couple’s therapy with Cathy. Though he offered to let her continue staying with him, she cast around for better options. The issue she ran into time and again was that no one in our circle was willing to let Cathy move in and live rent free, and she was still unwilling to get a full-time job. Tutoring at the college’s learning center kept her in money for cigarettes, but she depended on the support of her friends to get her through. Though none of us really wanted to be burdened with Cathy, revelations about her physical and emotional abuse of Sam made us want to keep her away from him as much as possible in the hopes that he would come to his senses.

One weekend when she was staying with us, Sam called and asked to speak to Cathy. There was no protocol in place as to what would happen if he called, and earlier that day I’d seen them part on pleasant terms, so I didn’t think anything of saying, “Hang on,” and handing the phone over. But Cathy refused to take it out of my hand.

“He already knows you’re here,” I pointed out, still holding the phone. She crossed her arms over her chest, turned her head away, and closed her eyes. I lost my patience. “Stop it. He knows you’re here, you’re being childish. If you don’t want to talk to him, tell him yourself.” She covered her ears, scrunched up her face, and drummed her feet on my couch, shaking her head furiously. I dropped the phone in her lap and she kicked it away, then jumped up and ran into my office. I told Sam she didn’t want to talk and that he should call her on her cell phone from then on. If she didn’t answer, getting to her through me wasn’t an option.

When I hung up, I went to my office to confront Cathy about her behavior. I opened the door and she screamed, “Get the fuck out of my face!”

I stood where I was. “Excuse me? This is my office, in my house, where I am allowing you to stay during your divorce. If you don’t like it, go home.”

Her expression crumpled as though she were going to cry, but tears never came. She dug her hands into her hair and said, “Please, I…I can’t.” It was a perfect impression of Sarah Michelle Gellar on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, from the words to the intonation to the expression. And it was all bullshit.

“Get your shit. I’m taking you back,” I said, and walked out.

As I angrily got my keys and shoes, she emerged from my office dry-eyed and perfectly calm. “I’m sorry,” she began in a reasonable tone. “But when I’m upset like that, I’m not responsible for my actions. You made me lash out. If you don’t want me to do that, respect me when I tell you to give me space.” It wasn’t her fault she’d thrown a tantrum instead of simply telling Sam she didn’t want to talk to him. It was mine, for expecting a thirty-year-old woman to behave like an adult.

I followed through and took her back to Sam’s house; that was the last time I offered to let her stay with us. The next day, I received an angry call from Sam, taking me to task for Cathy’s latest bought of self-harm. In a rage at me, she’d held her breath until she passed out. I laughed; there was really nothing else I could do. If she hadn’t been sitting on the bed, he warned me, she might have really gotten hurt, so I shouldn’t have made her so upset and none of this was funny. Especially considering I’d verbally abused her into a suicide attempt.

As I listened to him parrot lines about how I made Cathy do something by not catering to her demands and moods, warning that anything she might do to herself was ultimately my fault, I realized he’d been brainwashed by years of Cathy’s abuse and manipulation. Had he heard “I’m sorry, but you know I’m not responsible for my actions,” after being hit by her? It seems incredibly likely. And though I felt like a terrible person for abandoning a friend in a time of need, especially now that the pieces were beginning to fall into place with regards to what he’d suffered during their relationship, I had to distance myself as much as possible. “You’re my friend and I love you,” I told him. “But as long as you’re going to try to make this marriage with Cathy work, I can’t be around you.” He admitted that they’d only gone to two counseling sessions before they’d quit. At the final one, the therapist had asked them to participate in an exercise where they both held either end of a piece of rope. The therapist asked Sam to pull on the rope as hard as he wanted to try to salvage the marriage. He pulled hard. When Cathy was asked, she looked Sam in the eye and let go of the rope completely.

That should have been enough, I thought, to make him want to get away from her. Their lease ended, and Sam made arrangements to rent a house from a friend of his who’d gotten into the business of flipping homes and who wanted to help Sam out of his bad situation. It was a single bedroom house, so everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Cathy would have to find other accommodations and living on his own, away from her, Sam might be able to see how bad the situation really had been.

Instead, Sam moved her into his new house and let her have the bedroom while he slept on the couch.

“She has a really bad back,” he explained to me. “She needs the bed. Plus, there’s more privacy.” I tried to point out the number of nights she’d happily spent on couches in the previous months, and that she could easily have her privacy if she got an apartment of her own, but he felt anyone objecting to the situation was being heartless and short-sighted. He was invested in protecting Cathy above all else, exactly as she had programmed him to.

Once installed in the new house, Cathy quit her tutoring jobs. She spent all her time on MySpace, filling out surveys and taking quizzes to tell her which amazing historical woman she resembled or who her Harry Potter soulmate was. She posted endless photos comparing herself to Waterhouse models and wrote poem after poem about nebulous abuse she had suffered at the hands of an unnamed (but clearly Sam) ex-lover. Her poetry attracted the attention of a man in Colorado, and they began chatting. When he told her about a six-month low-residency writing program in Vermont, she enrolled–and applied for financial aid to attend, neatly closing the loophole and allowing her to put off paying back the loans she’d been living on for nearly a decade.

Things with the man in Colorado escalated quickly. So quickly, I can’t remember his name. I hope it’s not Wallace because that’s the name I’m giving him, due to his strong resemblance to the beloved claymation character. After a couple of weeks of chatting, Cathy revealed that she would move to Denver to be with him. Sam, still holding out hope that their marriage would be repaired, was despondent. Almost overnight, Cathy’s personality and interests completely altered. She was still a “fully time writer,” a MySpace typo that my friends and I still use to this day to mock her, but she no longer cared for musical theater, which was all she usually listened to and was seriously re-examining her paganism, as Wallace was an atheist. Wallace liked The Clash, so now Cathy was a Clash superfan. She’d never been skiing in her life, hated the outdoors, and had those pesky, blood gushing knees, but Wallace liked skiing, so she couldn’t wait to get to Colorado and hit the slopes. When asked what she planned to do for work in Denver, she informed us that Wallace had plenty of money, so he would take care of her. She talked non-stop about the famous writers she would be interviewing as a journalist for Wallace’s zine and rhapsodized about how much more sophisticated and romantic he was than Sam. She would be moving in a month, and would finally be free. All we had to do was wait it out, as it was becoming clear that she had lost interest in most of us.

Meanwhile, she still had an obligation to her son, Martin. Sam had grown frustrated with Martin’s visits and didn’t know how to broach the subject with Martin’s father. When I asked what, exactly, was going on, Sam told me that when Martin was dropped off at three p.m. on school days, Cathy would make a plate of pizza rolls, put on a movie, then go into the bedroom and leave Sam in charge, only emerging ten minutes before Martin’s father arrived to pick him up. “She only has him eight hours a week now,” Sam said, “and she can’t even handle that.” He mentioned that Martin would be with his mother the next Sunday, and wondered if I could stop in and see what was going on, as he would be out of town.

As it turned out, Cathy ended up asking me if I would want to go get coffee on Sunday night. “I haven’t seen you in so long! We need to catch up before I leave for Denver!” She told me that Martin’s father would pick him up at seven, and we could go after that. I made a plan to arrive early and told Sam not to be there.

At twenty minutes to seven, I knocked on the door. Even outside, I could hear Cathy’s music cranked up to maximum volume and her voice singing loudly over it. I knocked again and the door opened. It was Martin. I’d seen this child maybe three times in his entire life. He didn’t know who I was. But he opened the door and let me in without asking who I was or alerting his mother first. When he went to the bedroom door and shouted, “Mommy, there’s a lady here!” he received no response, but confirmed my suspicion: he had no idea who I was and had just let a stranger into the house.

Cathy didn’t answer. Her loud singing didn’t pause. From outside the door, the acrid smell of stale cigarette smoke was almost overpowering. I called through the door, “Cathy, I’m here!” but there was no answer. I slapped the door as hard as I could to be heard over the music. “Cathy! I’m here!” When she didn’t answer, I pushed the door open a crack. A cloud of cigarette smoke immediately escaped and filled the entire house.

“Martin! I said mommy needs some me time!” she snarled, never looking up from her laptop. Cathy had fully dug herself into the bedroom of the house that Sam was renting and solely responsible for. Within just a few weeks, the fresh paint job was yellow from smoke. The blinds were coated in a gray residue. Everything reeked of cigarettes and rotten food left in bowls and on plates on the floor, which was covered in trash and dirty clothes. Cigarette butts surrounded the bed; she hadn’t bothered to use an ashtray and had taken to flicking them directly onto the carpet, which now sported burn holes. She’d been picking her nose and wiping it on the side of the mattress.

“It’s me,” I said, and she looked up as though absolutely nothing was wrong. “Oh! You’re early. I’ll be out in a second. I have to finish this song.” And then she started singing again, as loudly as she could.

I closed the door. Martin stood beside me and proudly pointed to the television. “You know what? I watched this movie twice today! I watched it once and then it was over and my mom didn’t come out so I watched it again!”

The movie was The Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King. The extended cut. It was already half finished.

Then he climbed onto a chair and hit me in the face with a plastic sword. I grabbed it and took it from him and he swung at me with his fists. I put on my most stern mom voice and said, “Martin, no! You will not hit me. Hitting is not okay.”

Cathy emerged from her room in an instant. “Did I ask you to parent my child?”

I did not say, “Someone has to.” Instead, I said, “I’m not parenting. That’s your job. I’m telling another human that he doesn’t have the right to hit me.”

“He’s just violent because he’s been watching The Lord Of The Rings all day,” she snapped, as though the situation had been completely out of her hands.

Meanwhile, Martin’s violent outburst had passed, and he jumped up and down, tugging on my shirt. “You know what? You know what? Hey! Hey! This isn’t a real sword, but I’m going to bring, next week I’m going to bring my dad’s sword which is a real sword and I’m going to cut off my mom’s head and kill her!”

I stood there, my mouth agape. There was a knock. It was Martin’s father, right on time to pick him up. Cathy immediately became a doting and attentive mother, helping Martin gather up his things and talking about how well he behaved. When they left, Cathy apologized for snapping at me, citing how exhausting “mommy mode” made her. She also thanked me for arriving early, since Martin’s father had also been a bit early and she was glad he hadn’t arrived when she was in her bedroom. “If I wasn’t right on top of Martin twenty-four-seven, he’d be claiming I abused him or something.”

Cathy hadn’t spent a full twenty-four hours with her son since his infancy when she’d left his father for Sam.

On the drive to the coffee shop, Cathy casually mentioned that she’d arranged to meet a guy there and that I wouldn’t have to worry about driving her home. She still was really into Wallace, but they weren’t exclusive; she didn’t even live with him yet, and she planned on sleeping with this coffee guy. When the new guy arrived, he laughed nervously and said, “Uh, I thought you said there was going to be this big group of people.” She played it off as though everyone else had canceled, but she’d never mentioned a big group to me. When she went to the bathroom, he and I compared notes. He was a student she’d tutored, and she’d invited him out to a study group. Then, she’d invited me to go out with her. It was clear that she’d asked him there in the hopes of getting him alone, and asked me there simply to get a ride. She’d intended on ditching me all along.

“Look, I don’t mean to stick you with her, but I’m going,” he said and left. When she came back from the bathroom I told her why he’d gone.

“He thinks you lied to him to get him out here for a date,” I said, too exhausted to sugar coat it. She demanded I take her home immediately so that she could call Wallace, and I did so, gladly.

The next day, I spoke to Sam. “I wanted you to know that I’m calling protective services about Martin,” I warned him. “I know she’s going to blame you for it and I’m sorry, but she’s endangering a child.”

At that point, Sam had hit a wall and was, like the rest of us, just waiting out Cathy’s moving day. “I don’t care. If she wants to blame someone, let her blame me.” But he suggested I call Martin’s father first. “He’s a good dad and he doesn’t know this is going on. Talk to him and if you think he’s not going to do anything, then get ahold of CPS.”

Making the call to Martin’s dad was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. As much as I knew Cathy was a monster, and as much as I knew I had a duty to report child neglect, I was terrified of her. But somehow, I did manage to contact him and prayed he wouldn’t simply blow me off. To my relief, he didn’t. He was outraged when he learned what Martin’s visits entailed, angry with himself to the point of tears that he hadn’t realized what was going on, and told me that he had only allowed the visits to continue because he worried about Martin’s mental health. Martin had been seeing a counselor over the fact that he’d concocted many plans to kill Cathy, some of which were sophisticated, alarming, and fully possible. Martin’s dad and stepmom had hoped that spending more time with Cathy might help; instead, her neglect had exacerbated the issue. They called Sam to corroborate what I’d told them, and Sam admitted it had been going on for a long time but that he hadn’t known how to approach the subject. Martin’s father and stepmother contacted their caseworker with these accounts. Within a week, they had an emergency hearing in family court where they were awarded sole custody and Cathy lost her visitation rights.

I received a call in the middle of the night shortly after. It was Cathy.

“Did you call CPS on me?” I had never heard her sound the way she sounded on that call. I know now it was because I was talking to the true Cathy, not the front she constructed to manipulate people.

“I didn’t.” That wasn’t a lie. I’d called Martin’s father.

“Someone did.” She waited for me to admit to it.

“Well, nobody’s said anything about it to me.”

“I’m going to tell you this just once,” she went on. I can’t even begin to describe how chilling her voice was. Flat, emotionless but somehow threatening at the same time. “My son is my life. If I ever found out someone tried to keep me from him, if I ever find out who did this, I will kill them. You better pray that it wasn’t you.”

I laughed. I laughed so she would know that I wasn’t scared of her. That she wasn’t going to intimidate me. I made sure our gun and ammo was in our bedroom closet, just in case. I made a plan to send my son to stay with my mother for a week. And then I called Sam to warn him.

I don’t know what went down after that. I do know that within days, Sam had kicked Cathy out. At some point he bought a gun. He may have gotten a restraining order, but I can’t remember if it was something he went through with or something he just talked about because it was such a weird time. I scoured internet sites about abusive relationships and applied some of what I learned from them to the situation. I wasn’t going to cut off my friendship with Cathy, knowing she would be leaving in a matter of weeks. I didn’t want her behavior to escalate. But I didn’t contact her.

She did, however, contact me, relentlessly. As if she hadn’t threatened to kill me, as though everything was just fine, she called me to tell me she might be living with us until she moved to Denver. “Don’t worry. I know you said it wouldn’t work out if I stayed with you, so you’re at the bottom of the list.”

“Well, take me off the list,” I said. “Because with my kid is starting school, our schedules are going to be sacrosanct and it’s not going to work out if we have a roommate.”

“I know, that’s why I was thinking I would live with you for half the week, and then I would live at Cristin’s house for the other half,” she said, as though it were all decided and possible, with or without my consent.

“No.” I was absolutely firm and clear in my reason not to allow her to move in. “For one thing, you don’t have a car. I have a job and a family, so I don’t have time to drive you around. Even if I had the time, inclination, and gas money to do that, I would still say no. You can’t live with us.”

“Oh, believe me, I know. I was thinking you could drive me to work when you drop him off at school,” (and this point she’d gone back to tutoring), “and then you guys can hang around in town until I get done at four–”

“I am saying no, Cathy,” I said again. “You cannot come and live with me. I will not drive you anywhere. I will not pick my son up from school at noon and try to entertain him in the car all day while you work. You are not my responsibility and you very recently threatened to kill me.”

She laughed. “Oh my gosh, I wasn’t threatening to kill you. Where is everyone getting this from? Like I was saying, you could–”

“No.”

“I know. That’s why you’re on the bottom of the list. Even if I’m just staying with you on weekends.”

“No. You won’t be here on weekends. You will not be here. You cannot stay with us under any circumstance.”

“Right, right. That’s why you’re at the bottom of the list.”

I hung up.

Later that day, I was at Cristin’s house when Cathy called her. Cristin took her phone into the other room, but I heard her say over and over, “No…no way…no. No.” Finally, she said, “Because I don’t want you in my life, and I certainly don’t want you in my house.” She came out of the bedroom and said, “Um…Cathy just called me to ask if she could stay with me during the week because she’s going to be staying with you on the weekends.” I informed her that no, that absolutely would not be happening. But when I got home, there was a message on my voicemail.

It was Cathy, asking when she, Cristin, and I could sit down and work out the schedule for which days she would be staying with us and who would be driving her to work. And she left the message after we’d both turned her down.

 

Next time: “The Parting Gifts”

Jealous Hater Book Club: Handbook For Mortals Chapter 13, The High Priestess or “The Big Skew”

How is it possible to have more Handbook For Mortal news when the book isn’t even like…a thing? Well, I don’t know, but this is where we are.

Jeremy West brought it to the attention of Twitter that Lani is using “#1 New York Times Bestseller” stickers on copies of Handbook For Mortals:

If you notice, the logos of both publications are reproduced exactly. I’ve reached out to the New York Times for comment, but they’re presumably out of the office on a nation-wide hunt for the three remaining Trump voters they haven’t profiled yet.

Sarem also told author Claribel Ortega that the film version of Handbook For Mortals will be out this year. If you’re familiar at all with big budget, effects-heavy fantasy movies you will know that is not enough time to accomplish a good one, even if the movie released on December 31 because the project is still “in development” according to IMDB.

Now, let’s go to the recap. Oh, and again, warning for just an unsettling amount of racism. Just, a staggering amount of it.

More weeks flew by. My life had become pretty comfortable and happy.

I actually just checked to make sure I was starting on the right chapter because so many of them begin with weeks going by and how great things are going.

I should have known that things had been almost “too normal” for too long. Something was bound to break. I just didn’t expect what was coming, that’s for sure.

Wow, I bet whatever’s coming is so super exciting and has to do a lot with the exciting mahjicks of colored sparks coming out of her hands just like Sarem ripped off from The Magicians.

The show is in a rehearsal, and Mac and Zack are up on the catwalks for yet another part of the show where Zendaya–no. I’m sorry. I cannot bring Zendaya into this. Where Zerbert descends from the ceiling.

We were standing very close together and pretty much alone in that part of the theater–or at least that’s what we thought.

The POV and tense skews throughout this chapter are plentiful, my friends. Strap in.

Speaking of strapping in, Zumba is trying to adjust her safety harness so it’s extra super safe, which requires her to move into all sorts of sexy positions in front of Mac:

Twisting back and forth, I was eentually bent all the way over trying to make sure the harness felt right regardless of what position I was in.

“You know how hot you look in that harness?” Mac asked.

Tee hee, she bent over and he looked at her butt. Every time there’s any mild sexual banter, I remember that line from the Vulture article about dubious thrills from light petting and making small talk with Carrot Top or something like that.

I wrote a romance novel in middle school about a passionate romance going on between the leads in Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and I wish I still had it so I could compare it to Handbook For Mortals. I honestly believe they were written at the same skill level. I mean, this exchange right here could have absolutely been something I wrote when I was twelve and thought it was the height of erotically charged banter.

She doesn’t take the fucking compliment, so Mac says:

“No, seriously!” Mac retorted and as he grabbed part of my harness and pulled me closer to him.

And as he grabbed part of your harness and pulled me closer to him…what? How does that non-sentence end? How did “three editors” miss this?

Due to the humidity and temperature in the theater we both instantly felt sweaty as his skin touched mine.

On the first page of the chapter, Zex Zuthor thinks about how the inside of the theater is humid because of all the water and how it reminds her of home. I want to hear from some tech people on this because if it’s really so humid that their skin instantly sweats when it touches, that can’t be good for like…a lot of the equipment.

Also…why is their skin touching? Presumably, Mac is in his “show blacks” and is therefore clothed. This makes it sound like he pulled her up against his bare chest. And what is Leanne wearing? Vegas showgirl costumes expose a lot of skin, but we don’t know what Xenomorph is even wearing. Which, by the way, shocks the hell out of me. I can’t imagine Sarem missing the opportunity to describe how great her avatar looks in her amazing and intricate costume that isn’t as slutty as the other performers’ but is just the right amount of sexy to make all the men instantly want her.

“You’d look amazing in anything,” he said with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “And even better in nothing,” he added as he rubbed his hand over the small of my back.

Better in nothing means naked. Get it? This is sexy and not cliche at all.

Mac helps Zaw III up onto the floating bed thing she’s going to ride down.

He pulled me in for a kiss. I kissed him back quickly before grabbing the bar hanging by my head and pulling myself on top of the set peice where I was supposed to start.

So, I need you all to keep in mind that it’s now been months, even being generous and assuming “a few” and “several” and “more” means three weeks and not longer, since she’s been in town dating Jackson and Mac. That she and Mac are “keeping it quiet” at work, except for when they’re up there grinding on the catwalk. Just keep that in mind for like, the rest of this section and all of the next.

At that exact moment I noticed Charles standing farther down the catwalk.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “This had better not be the normalcy-shattering moment that was foreshadowed by the first paragraph, well, I hate to tell you. This is it. This is the huge conflict. Chavid Spopperfield has noticed her snogging the crew.

I pretended not to notice him, thinking that maybe even if he had seen us together maybe he hadn’t really seen what happened–or maybe he’d pretended I didn’t see him. That was a lot of pretending, even for a magic show.

This might be the one thing I like in this whole book because it’s genuinely funny.

Then it gets ruined with a block paragraph that’s nearly a page long, detailing why Charles is up on the catwalk and not rehearsing the show. Zeb stands in for Charles at rehearsals so that Charles can watch the show and see what’s going on. Okay, got it. That’s where it should end, but no, we have to also know that Charles has never missed a show, that Zeb is a “Magi” and so is Rene, so Rene fills in for Zeb when he’s being Charles’s stand-in and how that whole thing works out. Stuff we will never, ever need to know, weren’t curious about, and which drags the story straight down to the bottom of a well.

Hey, didn’t she say “Magi” was an insult in the magic community in an earlier chapter? Like, there was a stigma to it, that it was demeaning? Why yes, yes she did, and here she is using it to describe other people.

How unlike her to be so hypocritical.

We get one of those triple goddess star map ornaments and head straight into italics town, where the fun begins. Charles has come to find Mac, and that’s why he’s up on the catwalks. Mac knows Charles has seen him kissing Zupa Loscana, so there’s another long, block paragraph about how unintimidated Mac is by Charles Spellman, internationally famous magician and oh, yeah, his boss.

Mac didn’t get worked up because someone was famous or powerful. It doesn’t hurt that Mac is a perfectionist when it comes to his job and he is also a hard worker, always on time and never calls out. He is also really good at his job and knows how to fix anything, make anything, and solve any problem, faster and quicker than anyone else.

So we went from third person omniscient past tense to third person omniscient present tense…

Charles also knew how valuable and rare a guy like Mac was and how much of a big deal he was to the show.

And right back into third person omniscient.

Mac knew that Charles was well aware of this and knew he didn’t have much to fear when it came to work or the one person in the theater who was really considered Mac’s boss, Charles.

That comma should be a colon, but it wouldn’t save this sentence or this section or this book from being so clunky.

“Mind following me to my office? I would like to speak to you about something in private. It won’t take but a few minutes of your time,” Charles asked politely.

It won’t take but a few minutes of your time in the middle of a rehearsal while you’ve got a performer literally dangling in the air. You can step away for a minute, right?

But Mac goes with Charles.

Charles slipped his key out of his pocket and waved it in front of the door. It was a magnetic lock–like on a hotel door–and you could hear the grinding of the door unlocking.

Could I? I don’t remember hearing it. Hey, wait, how do you know what I was hearing?

I believe I may be in the minority here but a generalized “you” in a first person POV scene doesn’t strike me as a POV skew when I read it. I just assume that it’s the narrator speaking informally in their own head or they’re a self-aware narrator addressing the audience directly. But in third person omniscient, that generalized “you” seems to more definitively switch the sentence into the second person, and second person omniscient past tense, even for a moment, is super jarring. Also, this is the third time POV and tense have jumped the tracks in this section alone.

And I’m not sure why we need to know about the locks on the door, but I’ve given up on ever receiving any actually important details from this book.

Charles tells Mac he wants to have a “man to man talk” and I’m going to omit a lot of the scene because so much of it is filler. For example, explaining where Charles sits when they have a normal meeting and how those meetings usually go. This leads to Mac believing he’s going to have to fire someone like he had to in the past.

The guy wasn’t a bad lighting guy and actually did an alright job, but Charles just hadn’t liked him.

The guy hadn’t been and had actually done an alright job. What should have been past perfect tense is for some reason past tense right up until the last few words of the sentence.

Mac technically gets the say in that matter of any crew, but he wasn’t too attached to the lighting guy at the time so it wasn’t a big deal.

And now we’ve once again gone from past tense to present tense to past tense.

He hoped this time it wasn’t someone that he really like and was attached to, like Riley, who happened to be out sick today which is why Mac was even in the grid with Zade.

This is what I mean about details we don’t need. We didn’t need to know and weren’t interested in Zeb standing in for Charles and Renee standing in for Zeb. We didn’t need to know and weren’t interested in the lock on the door or what a normal business meeting with Charles is like. We don’t need to know that Riley is out sick. At least, not here, when the time to explain what Mac was doing on the catwalk instead of Riley has passed. That’s an explanation we needed while he was on the catwalk, but the author was so set on getting to the kissing, she skipped it.

“May I be Frank with you, Mac?”

Mac, who loved being the smart-ass and typically would try to make light of things if he could, jovially responded with a laugh. “Sure. You are the boss. You can be Bob or Bill, too, if you want.”

Charles looked puzzled before responding with a deadpan, “Oh. Humor.”

First of all, the “may I be frank?” joke has been used in so many movies and television shows over the years, it doesn’t feel original here. It also strikes me as odd that, because of the aforementioned over-use of the pun, Charles doesn’t understand that it was a joke.

But most perplexing about this paragraph is the description of Mac as a smart ass who makes a habit of joking around. We have seen absolutely no evidence of him joking around and taking things lightly at work. In fact, it was his seriousness and lack of humor that made him clash with Zade in the first place. We’ve even seen other people comment on how serious and not-fun he is at work.

Charles has noticed the relationship Mac has with Zithromax even before the kiss he witnessed, and that’s why he wants to talk. Mac tells him that he and Zoloft are just friends.

Charles smiled, finding it funny that Mac had tried to say they were just friends.

But I thought they were keeping it super secret at work? And now this guy who is barely even there unless he’s on stage, does nothing with his employees socially, and uses a stand-in at rehearsals knows what’s going on? How discreet are they actually being?

Charles asks Mac what his intentions toward Zart are, and Mac subtly points out that it’s not really any of Charles’s business because Charles is himself dating a performer. Charles says:

“Yes, of course. It’s what happens in this business. Well–you both are very important to me. Professionally. I know my show would struggle without you. And she–well, you see how special and important she has become to us. She brings something extremely unique. Wouldn’t want anything to cause issues.”

My favorite thing about all of this is how important and extremely unique Zorro is, when all we’ve seen her do is shoot sparks out of her hands (which, by the way, again, is ripped off from The Magicians, which I just started watching and in the first episode there’s a fight scene where a guy uses magic to pin a girl to a wall and she fights back by shooting multi-colored light and sparks from her hands just like what happens earlier in this book) and do a high dive illusion. We’ve had absolutely no evidence of how important and unique she is, just assurances from other characters that she is. But Mac backs it up by thinking about how every single performer is expendable except for Zed.

Mac paused, trying to gather his thoughts. It certainly seemed reasonable for Charles to be concerned. Mac had seen the show lose someone here or there when a romance had soured.

Uh…yeah. Like…his. He had a romance sour, resulting in the performer leaving. But it’s not mentioned at all in this scene. Why wouldn’t that be on Mac’s mind? Why wouldn’t Charles point it out?

Then Mac says:

“Well, I have grown to care for her. We are friends. We haven’t labeled it, beyond that, though.”

Again, we’re at almost 60% in the book and nearly every section or chapter starts with a few weeks going by. And they have yet to define their relationship. So, we’ve got two guys pursuing Lanzi and giving her all this room to make up her mind between them for months because she’s so unique and special and this magical prize.

“Do you love her?” Charles’s eyes narrowed as he looked directly at Mac.

Let me pause here and address something that has been chaffing my magnificent ass for a while. Everyone is always looking directly at someone or looking someone straight in the eye when the reader would already kind of assume that’s happening. Mac and Charles are the only people in the room and they’re having a pages-long, serious conversation. Neither of them have ever been described as seeming uncomfortable looking people in the eyes or having difficulty talking to people while looking at them. I would give it a pass (and recognize the importance of the gesture) if they’d been described that way, but it seems like every character at one point or another is said to “look directly at” another character in situations where you’d assume they already were.

Mac sighed, feeling very put on the spot with such a loaded question. He and Zade hadn’t even said what they were doing was dating–much less something way beyond that involving something as strong as love.

It. Has. Been. Months. Of. Dating. And. They. Don’t. Know. If. They’re. Dating. If you are going on dates all the time with a person, for months, you’re dating. Maybe not exclusively, since Jackson Rathbone is around as an option. But going on dates over and over again with the same person for literally months is dating.

“Well, I…I think she’s amazing. I…” Mac stumbled over his words, unsure what to say. As he sat in the office, he had to admit to himself that he also didn’t know the full extent of what was going on with Zade and Jackson, which was something else they didn’t talk about. It was dawning on him that for two pretty open and honest people–who were especially open and honest with each other–they sure had a decent amount of things they just didn’t talk about.

The last time we saw them, she had never talked to him about anything to do with her past. The only time we’ve actually seen this intense, open honesty, they were talking about Red Vines and Aimee Mann.

He thought about all the reasons that he shouldn’t be in love with Zade. Then he thought about what else he knew. He had learned that the funny thing about love is that love doesn’t care if you’ve labeled it or not–and it also doesn’t care if there might be another person vying for the person you love. Jealousy might, but not love.

That’s pretty much all romantic jealousy is about. It’s not a might, here, pal.

You can love someone who doesn’t even know you really exist.

No, that’s infatuation.

Love really knows no boundaries and sometimes it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. You can wish it away all you want but just like Cupid’s arrow, once you’ve been hit, you’ve been hit.

I’m starting to get the feeling that Sarem really doesn’t think anyone reading this book has ever heard of love before, and she’s the one who has to break this news.

Mac realized that was not the response to give Charles. He decided to give him the most open and honest answer he could: “Well, it has possibility.”

 

Is the “it” here Zud? Because “Do you love her,” and “Well, it has possibility” makes her the “it.” If the answer had been, “It’s a possibility,” he would be saying that the whole concept of him loving her would be possible. Otherwise, he’s saying “it” (Zanzi) is possibly lovable.

Charles tells Mac that he won’t bother him about the relationship thing anymore, and they shake hands on it. Then there’s a long paragraph about how Charles never lived a normal life and how he’d grown up touring with a circus before becoming famous because again, this is all detail we were aching for in this particular scene. Charles asks Mac not to tell Lubyanka about the conversation, and because Mac is always so open and honest with her, he’s like, yeah, sure, it’s totally appropriate to not tell her that her boss is poking around in her personal life. Before he leaves the office, Mac thinks about how Charles might be faking his awkwardness just because he wants to be weird for attention, and Mac isn’t going to think of Charles as eccentric because that’s some bourgeoisie nonsense.

After another triple goddess symbol to indicate a section and POV change, we get this:

It was a long time before I knew about the conversation that took place that day, but I could feel the weird nervous energy that Mac was projecting the next time I saw him. He seemed “off” for the rest of the night, and I couldn’t place my finger on why.

The next day, Mac and I found ourselves walking through a park, talking about nothing in particular.

Look. If Zipper doesn’t know about the conversation, she doesn’t know about the conversation. This whole thing about opening a chapter or paragraph with something that’s going to happen in the future is an unnecessary device that separates the reader from any sense of urgency when the reveals happen. There’s no reason that she can recognize Mac’s nervous energy while they’re talking about nothing.

Because any truly fucking terrible book wouldn’t be complete without it:

I was still trying to figure out what was going on in Mac’s head when a bicyclist clipped me, causing me to drop my purse.

You must, must, must get hit by or almost hit by a bicycle to truly clinch that bestseller status these days.

It wasn’t a big deal, but something felt weird about the collision. The cyclist was on a thin, fast racing bike with drop-down handlebars and was wearing bright yellow and pink cycle spandex. All of that meant, to me, that he was an avid biker who knew what he was doing–not a clumsy teenager who had simply misjudged the crowds on the park paths.

A biker rides a motorcycle. He was an avid cyclist. If you want to avoid word rep (and honestly, why start now?), “biker” isn’t a substitute that works here. But I’m not sure why it feels “weird” due to the information given. When I read, “something felt weird,” I assumed it had to do with something supernatural.

Because I’m a chump. Nothing actually supernatural is going to happen in this book about mahajahick.

I wasn’t too worried about the contents of my purse, except that I usually carry a deck of my tarot cards in my purse among other “normal” things like my wallet and chapstick. The velvet bag that held them must not have been closed all the way because when my purse flew all the contents of my bag spilled out and the cards went everywhere.

Mac yells at the guy and starts picking up the tarot cards and looking at them.

My pulse was racing and all I could think was that the biker.

Three editors.

Zarpo thinks about how the “biker” needs better manners and that he could have really hurt a little kid or an old person and how he’d been rude by not stopping and saying sorry.

Before I even thought about what I was doing, I balled my fists quickly and squeezed.

The biker flipped upside down as if he’d hit a massive pothole that came out of nowhere, or at least to anyone else it probably looked like that. He landed pretty hard on his back, and made a few loud sounds of shrieking pain as the bike crashed into a bench, sending a few pieces going in different places.

I was fairly certain he wasn’t permanently injured, but he also wasn’t going to be riding anymore today; that was for sure. Mac’s back was to the biker, so he didn’t even see what happened, and was too pre-occupied with examining the cards to even notice what I’d done. I hoped what I’d done to the biker might teach him a karma-related lesson.

He landed flat on his back on pavement and is shrieking in pain, but as long as Zadist is “fairly” certain he’s not permanently injured, that makes it all right. I mean, the fact that she’s the heroine makes it all right. We have to like her no matter what, because she’s special and majhik and unique and beautiful in an alternative, multi-hued way and not like other girls, so it’s obviously okay that, because someone knocked her purse out of her hands and spilled it, she physically harms that person. Oh, and as long as the love interest didn’t see her do it, so her secret is safe. That’s really the most important part. Overlook the fact that she’s only “fairly” certain she didn’t paralyze him or something. It’s okay that she did that because he spilled her purse and could have hypothetically hurt someone. He needed to learn a “karma-related” lesson, and Zim is apparently an authorized agent of karma, even though karma itself doesn’t work like that.

And she’s still calling him a fucking biker! It’s not like she’s avoiding word rep by not over-using cyclist! She just picked a different, wrong word to use over and over and over again!

Even though there’s a dude screaming in pain and broken bike parts flying everywhere, Mac is more concerned with the tarot cards:

“What are these?” Mac inquired as he helped me pick up some more of my cards. When I looked up at him, he had a look of disdain on his face; he was holding up a few of them in his hands, the Devil card sitting out and most prominent.

Because of course, it was.

Mac looked deeply perturbed. “You don’t really believe in that stuff, do you?”

I could hear the disapproval in his voice. I thought for a moment about what I should say back. I studied his face, and then realized that if I lied to him it would just become more complicated later. This was very much a part of my life and who I was–and it would always be that way. If Mac was going to also be a part of my life then he was going to have to accept this as well. Sooner or later we were going to have to have this conversation. I would not have picked that day for it, but I might as well get it out of the way and see how it takes it.

Past tense to present tense, and as a bonus, Lava is now referring to Mac as “it.” Turnabout is fair play, I guess?

“Yeah. I do. I mean, my mom does readings for a living. I kind of grew up around it; my family are Gypsies and practice it. It’s fun. It’s not a big deal.” I downplayed it, thinking that if he accepted it at all he could slowly work up to getting used to it. I didn’t have to shove it down his throat all at once.

Okay, let’s talk about how fucking disgusting it is to write a character who is Romani and have them present that as something they should be ashamed of, hide, or ease people into knowing when the author herself is not of that same ethnicity. Like, let’s just really stress this. This is an author who blithely uses the g-word, both in her book and in her descriptions of herself and defends her right to use it despite the fact that she is not Romani. Then she writes a character who is Romani but makes that character nervous and reluctant to reveal her heritage, which is presented in the most watered-down and stereotypical way possible. Then she has the gall to claim on social media that Romani readers appreciate the representation this book gives them. If this were a book written by a Romani author about a character trying to hide their heritage or being ashamed of it due to outside social pressures and prejudices, it wouldn’t be this outrageously offensive. Instead, the character’s heritage is played up for magic powers and tarot cards and now is being depicted as something that should be hidden so a guy will love her. Again, this could be an effective plot of a book written by a Romani author. Written by someone who isn’t Romani, it’s just racist as all fucking get out.

At first he said nothing. Then he looked somewhat confused again, and asked, “I thought you were Jewish.”

I smiled softly, trying to ease Mac into the conversation. I almost found this a funny question for him to ask and smirked a little before clarifying. “I am. We, my family and I, are. One is not exclusive of the other.”

Wait. Wait. Zeppelin grew up in a small, close-minded Southern town in a state that has, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, thirty-eight hate groups in current operation, including skinheads, neo-nazis, white nationalists, neo-confederates and ten distinct chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, among other notably antisemitic groups and she and her mother were persecuted for reading tarot cards?

Not. Buying. It.

We haven’t heard about Zark being Jewish until right now (again, 60% into the book) and by all accounts, it should have been a major part of her backstory and reason for wanting to escape her birthplace. It would have strengthened her leaving so much, and explain more of the resentment toward her mom for keeping her there. Instead, it just gets dropped in like, “Oh yeah, I’m Jewish and used to live in Tennessee and nothing ever really happened with that, it was really all about how mahjickkal I am because I can read tarot cards that you can buy at fucking Barnes & Noble because tarot cards aren’t actually that special and mysterious.”

“That stuff is hogwash,” he growled. “You’re too smart to believe in stuff like that. You shouldn’t believe something just because your parents do–or your family does.”

Um…that’s kind of what being raised in a religion is. If there’s no problem with her being Jewish, then why is there a problem with her believing something else her family does?

I also want to know where the fuck this family is. For the entire book so far, the picture we’ve been given is of Zorb being raised by a single mother in an isolated situation. It’s always been made to sound like they had nothing but each other. In fact, at the beginning of the book, it sounds like that’s the reason her mom wanted her to stay.

I didn’t like his reaction, but it wasn’t like it was the first time I’d heard words like his–or far worse–once someone found out that my mom does readings. I’d been called things I won’t repeat here but I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

Yeah, I bet you got called the g-word, which you throw around freely. What did they call you when they found out you were Jewish? I mean, since that was absolutely not a factor in the abuse you received in any way.

“I don’t just believe in it because of my mom and my family. I believe it because…well…because I believe it.” I decided to try to appeal to his sense of curiosity. “Have you ever taken the time to learn anything about the tarot?”

She’s not at all concerned with the fact that he’s insulting her heritage. She’s concerned about him insulting tarot cards. This character is a member of two historically persecuted ethnic groups who have faced rampant discrimination and centuries of genocide, but it’s the tarot cards that the author is choosing to focus on.

What really confuses me here is that Lani Sarem is Jewish. I’m not going to try to tell anyone how they should be Jewish or how to feel about their experiences as a Jewish person, but I’m not sure where the disconnect comes in that it’s okay to stereotype an entire culture that has been subject to some of the very same atrocities as your own, especially when people doing that has historically harmed you, as well. It comes off as though oppression of Romani people is more exotic and mystical and romantic or something and therefore is more interesting and totally available for Sarem to play with as she pleases.

“No. You know I base what I know off of logic. What’s logical about telling someone’s future based off of a fancy deck of playing cards? All that voodoo stuff is bullshit.”

Mac turned away from me for a moment. I knew him well enough to know that sometimes he had a gut reaction that didn’t always stick once he had calmed down. I had learned that sometimes I just had to let him breathe for a moment and process.

You need to learn that if someone flies into a rage because they’ve discovered that you belong to a marginalized group (and here I’m talking about Romani people, since I’m not going to completely disconnect fortune telling from Romani heritage for reasons that are easily google-able if anyone wants to educate themselves further on the subject), that person is not safe. Whether or not all of Zerd’s majikhal heritage is stereotypical bullshit, it is her heritage, and the love interest is “growling” at her about how unacceptable he finds it. This isn’t the behavior of a hero. It’s the behavior of a bigot.

“Is it okay that I feel that way? Or did I just insult your way of life–and your mother?” he asked.

NO! No, it is not okay for you to feel that Zut’s Romani heritage is bullshit! Even if it’s badly represented in this story, it’s not okay.

“No. You didn’t insult anything. I’m used to that reaction.” I shrugged as I answered him and followed it with another sigh.

LANI SAREM IS NOT ROMANI. SHE DOES NOT GET TO WRITE A ROMANI CHARACTER SHRUGGING OFF PREJUDICE LIKE IT’S NO BIG DEAL. SHE IS NOT ALLOWED TO DOWNPLAY THIS AGGRESSIVE ACT OF BIGOTRY THROUGH HER AVATAR AS “IT’S OKAY BECAUSE EVERYONE DOES IT.”

Authors need to stop writing marginalized characters giving white/cis/straight/male characters a pass on being racist/transphobic/homophobic/misogynistic. What that tells readers is that reasonable, likable marginalized people will let you fuck up as badly as you want and still welcome you with open arms. That it’s their duty to be understanding of your inability to respect them as a person and to apologetically ease you into accepting that they are, in fact, human. We see this all the time with concentration camp romances, with slavery romances, interracial and LGBTQA+ romances written by white people and straight cis people. It’s this fantasy of being forgiven or something and it’s such bullshit.

As much as I wanted him to be different from all the rest who had learned about my tarot cards–which were a small part of a much bigger portion of my life–the disappointment of him not understanding was starting to get to me.

At least here she acknowledges that it’s not just about the god damn cards.

Mac gives her an “I’m sorry, but” kind of non-apology in which he reiterates that he feels strongly about how all of this is stupid but he didn’t mean to hurt her feelings.

At least he doesn’t think I’m the devil now, I guess. I wasn’t sure I could cound that as a win. I hung my head. I could feel the beginning of tears springing to my eyes.

Mac cupped my chin with his hand. “Chin up, princess, or the crown slips,” he said.

I really want the bicycle guy to come back and stab Mac to death in the goriest and most violent fashion possible. I mean, just keep stabbing until all that’s left is ground meat. Long after he’s already dead. I mean, I want the jurors at the trial to throw up right there in their chairs. I want the press to omit details on the attack because they’re too gruesome. I want the judge in the case to resign. I want nothing but bad, horrible, terrible, painful things for Mac. Because here he is, telling her he’s sorry that his tirade hurt her feelings, but he’s not sorry about still feeling all the feelings he expressed in that tirade, and then when she’s visibly upset he throws out a trite saying from a mug someone gives as a fortieth birthday gift to an office coworker they don’t know well but who prides herself on being sassy and independent. And he tells her this not to make her feel better, but because he wants her to pretend to feel better so that he doesn’t feel bad anymore.

But of course, she laughs and thinks that at least he’s “appeased” and how she hopes someday he’ll come around. Then there’s kissing.

We move on to a few days later, and Lubzi is on a date with Jackson.

Of course he chose the latest action superhero flick starring Ryan Reynolds.

Just say Deadpool. It’s so weird that she’ll write out the lyrics to whole songs and invent scenes for actual, real-life people to participate in, but she won’t use the title of a movie and just hints around at it.

Ryan Reynolds is just really good at being clever and funny in almost any role and he made the film exciting and fun.

“Please, Mr. Reynolds, be in my movie.”

“Thanks for humoring me and not making me take you to a chick flick. I mean…it’s not that there is anything wrong with them, I’ve just really been wanting to see that movie since I saw the first preview months ago.”

Why would she make you go to a chick flick, Jackson Rathbone? She’s Not Like Other Girls™.

He makes a joke about doing a love spell on her and asks her if she wants to visit an instrument shop, but along the way, they walk past a tarot card reading place and he tells her they should go inside and get a reading. He assures her that he thinks stuff like that is fun and asks her if she believes in it.

I let out a deep breath. “I actually believe in it more than most people. My mom reads cards for a living.” I paused. “I’m just used to everyone saying it’s stupid.” I looked away, thinking about how seldom my beliefs and lifestyle had been met with real acceptance–and how much it continued to hurt for people to be cruel just because they didn’t understand. Even more so, it hurt how little anyone tried to understand or learn more about it before passing judgment.

I can’t believe we’re still going on with how oppressed she is for owning tarot cards, while she belongs to two actually marginalized groups. Owning tarot cards is not an oppression. There’s plenty of material in Lugnut’s backstory to draw on that would make far more sense than, “I better hide the fact that I use tarot cards or no one will accept me!”

Jackson gently lifted my chin with his hand, bringing his eyes to meet mine. “I’m not everyone,” he said quietly.

I smiled a little. “you’re right,” I said. “You’re so different from anyone I’ve ever met.” His reaction was so different than Mac’s–or that of any guy I had ever known.

A part of me wants to be like, “Then pick Jackson. Stop going out with Mac.” Another part of me is wondering, from what we know about Jackson, if he’s talked to Mac and heard about the tarot card incident and now he’s using it to gain the advantage.

With that he kissed me passionately while bending me back like they do in the movies until my knee popped, which anyone who’s ever seen any romantic movie would know, is a very good thing.

Until her knee popped? Is he a chiropractor? And I love being told that I have to find something romantic because it’s romantic in other media. I mean, what’s the use of actually writing something so it seems passionate if you can just be like, “if you thought it was romantic in movies, you have to think it’s romantic here.”

God, this book is so fucking terrible.

The Worst Person I’ve Ever Met (Part 6) “The Red Squirrel”

Missed past installments? You can find them here: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five

In this installment, I will cover several of Cathy’s claims about diagnoses she’d received from “a doctor”. Having an invisible illness myself, I hate when people try to prove that patients are faking their symptoms. This, however, is Cathy. You’ll have to forgive me and everyone who knew her for doubting. Mea culpa.

There are also mentions of suicide in this post.

I’m not sure what, exactly, was the acknowledged reason for the breakup of Cathy and Sam’s marriage, because it all dissolved so quickly. One of the factors was certainly the loss of their roommates, who asked Cathy and Sam to vacate the house for the evening so they could have a small dinner party then moved out without notice, leaving behind a note detailing their grievances. Among them was the filth; with two roommates, Sam was able to cut back to one job, but he still didn’t pitch in and Cathy had moved on to an additional reason she couldn’t do any housework: debilitating arthritis.

Despite the fact that the only doctor visits Cathy ever made were to Planned Parenthood for basic gynecological services, she insisted she had developed and been diagnosed with arthritis that was so advanced, so devastating that her knees would “literally hemorrhage” if she stood up too much. This prohibited her from walking any distance (that she didn’t want to walk), working any job besides her occasional tutoring of other college students, or sitting the backseat of any vehicle.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Cathy had a whole host of illnesses and allergies when the situation called for them. One day, while barbecuing, my husband asked her how she liked her steak. “It has to be well-done,” she insisted, with far more vehemence than called for. “I am allergic to anything but well-done meat. I will literally die.” While allergies to red meat are possible (and some people with the allergy can eat red meat if it’s well done), Cathy’s constant claims of bogus medical conditions left us skeptical. “Wow, what will happen if you eat under cooked meat?” I asked, having been to countless restaurants and meals with her before this ever came up. She said she didn’t know, but a doctor had told her about the allergy. My husband stood over the grill and grumbled, “You can just say you don’t like it pink. It doesn’t have to be fatal.” That, in addition to her claim that a doctor told her to never quit smoking or she would “literally die”, and that she should limit all activity because of her dangerously high IQ, her “my knees will hemorrhage” claim seemed somewhat dubious based on the fact that she couldn’t provide details on what type of arthritis she had and she had no idea what a rheumatologist was. Shortly before moving out of the house, one of the roommates, a nursing student, asked her what medications she was on to manage the condition. “I don’t believe in pills. I won’t even take Motrin for it. I don’t like any substance that changes your body chemistry,” she said, taking another drag off her ever-present cigarette. “I’ve learned to live with the pain. I guess I’m just a stronger person than most people.”

On another occasion, Cathy learned about Fibromyalgia. She began telling everyone that she also suffered from the disease, until her nursing student roommate snapped, “It’s not even real. Ask any doctor, they’re going to tell you it’s not real.” Later, the roommate confided in me, “I know it’s real. I just didn’t want her adding to her stupid collection. Just do the fucking dishes, Cathy.” After that, Cathy denied ever self-diagnosing the illness, but continued insisting that “a doctor” told her she had arthritis, didn’t need any medication to manage the symptoms because she was strong, and frequently went to art hops that involved walking miles around the city visit different galleries.

She always wore staggeringly high heels to do this.

It struck me as bizarre that, now that Cathy didn’t have cash rolling in from student loans, she would get rid of her only source of income. Since a job would give her ALS, joint bleeding, and probably Feline Leukemia, she decided she would become a full-time poet. She constantly talked about her book, a collection of poems she was writing. “Oh, like a chapbook?” I asked. No, a full-length collection of poetry. Knowing the amount of spare time she had, I believed this was something she definitely could do, so I encouraged her. A week later, she called me to announce that she’d finished her first book. Thirty pages of poems, many of which she’d written for her disastrous English class. Each was about her body and sexuality, including one particularly self-aggrandizing piece about how motherhood had saved her from the anorexia that had been killing her before her pregnancy. In it, she spoke of how alarmingly thin she had been, weighing under one hundred pounds, no longer menstruating, being able to count individual bones through her skin. It was actually kind of sad; it came off as someone who thought she had recovered using the tale of her recovery to praise herself for being skinny. She compared herself to a concentration camp victim (I suggested editing those lines out, which she thankfully did) and called her son a miracle and her savior.

She still only saw him every other weekend, despite being offered increased visitation time. “I’m really too busy writing,” was her excuse for not spending more time with her savior and “the most important part of her life”. Motherhood, she continued to insist, “defined” her and brought her “as close to being a goddess as any woman could be.” She wanted the title but not the job.

Despite her refusal to work and her expectation that Sam would continue to bring all the money into their struggling household (they were unable to secure new roommates), it was Cathy who initiated the divorce. The only reason she would give at first was that she no longer loved Sam, but as the weeks went on, the reasons began to mount. She didn’t love him when they married but she felt she had to go through with it. She was still wounded over his affair from years ago. She wanted a divorce.

Sam was crushed. He truly loved her and her declaration that their relationship was over was completely unexpected to him. Even those of us who’d placed imaginary bets on the length of the marriage were surprised; one minute, Cathy was head over heels in love, bragging about her perfect husband and how happy she was. How her role as a “housewife” suited her. The next, she was desperately unhappy and felt stifled by Sam’s own unhappiness at achieving his goals.

“It’s just like in The Last Five Years,” she explained to me over coffee. “Here I am, a successful writer, and there he is, struggling to make anything of himself. I was listening to that song Jamie sings at the end, that goes, ‘I could never rescue you.’ All I could do was love him, and it wasn’t enough. I can’t fix him.”

It took a lot to not scream in her face that the reason Sam couldn’t “make anything of himself” was that he was trying to get through college a class at a time while working his ass off to keep them from being homeless. That her “successful” writing career consisted of one unpublished chapbook that she hadn’t bothered to submit anywhere or self-publish. That Sam was in need of rescuing: from her, not by her.

Because she didn’t have the money to move into a new place–and because Sam still loved her and hoped they would patch things up–Cathy continued to live in the house Sam paid rent on. She “got” their bedroom and bed; he slept on the couch, as he couldn’t afford to buy another mattress. A week after the split, she made plans to spend the Fourth Of July with us, only to immediately cancel when another friend, Cecily, offered a better option. Cecily would be going to Lake Michigan with her Dungeons and Dragons group, and one of the guys in that group, Lucas, was Cathy’s sexual target. Though he’d rebuffed her advances a handful of times before, Cathy was certain that spending the day with the group would seal the deal.

Later, Cecily told me the story of what had happened. When she arrived at Cathy’s house to pick her up, Cathy, in full view of Sam, actually did a dance and celebrated with a sing-song, “I’m gonna get laid, I’m gonna get laid!” When Sam got up and left the room in tears, Cathy flew into a rage about how manipulative he was. Once they arrived at the beach, Cathy planted herself on her towel, legs spread to display her “crown”.

“Jen,” Cecily told me, her eyes wide, “Lucas said it looked like she had a red squirrel trapped in her bathing suit.” There was no doubt that he was not interested.

Cathy spent the day making suggestive comments, trying to lure Lucas off alone, and always sat with her legs spread to expose herself to him. He was intensely uncomfortable and eventually left, despite Cathy pouting and trying to use her feminine wiles to get him to stay. After he left, she sat alone, sullen. She spent the night at Cecily’s house. When they left the next day, their route took them past Lucas’s house.

“Stop the car!” Cathy screamed. “Turn around! I have something I want to say to him!” When Cecily refused, Cathy shouted, “No! You are going to take me back there. Nobody turns this down!”

Cecily did not comply, and Cathy spent the rest of the ride fuming about Lucas’s rejection.

A few days later, Cathy called me to tell me her version of the story. Lucas, she informed me, was a really sweet kid, but he came on too strong. “He wouldn’t stop touching me or looking at me. It made me really uncomfortable, but Cecily wouldn’t leave, so I had to just put up with it. Honestly, I felt harassed.” She’d made it clear that she wasn’t interested in sex with him, she claimed, and now she was worried about ever being alone with him.

She went on to describe Sam’s “emotional manipulation” and how trapped she felt by him. She admitted to the premature celebration of her potential lay but insisted that Sam was trying to control her by reacting to it.

“Okay, but…imagine how he felt,” I said, knowing I risked the wrath of Cathy by even bringing it up. “His wife just left him a few days ago, and then she’s dancing in front of him bragging about getting laid. You can’t see how that was maybe a little bit hurtful?”

To my surprise, she admitted that perhaps that had been insensitive. We finished our conversation and hung up.

About ten minutes later, I checked my email and found one from Cathy. There was no subject line, but it had been sent after our call. It was an all caps ramble about how every other one of her friends agreed that I was unsupportive and toxic for taking Sam’s side. That I was jealous of her successful writing career. That I was jealous of her body and unhappy that guys weren’t attracted to me because of my weight. “SAM IS AN ASSHOLE AND HE IS RIGHT ABOUT NOTHING!!!!!!!!” she wrote, and ended by telling me that if I was going to continue to be so harmful to her mental health, she would kill herself.

In a sick twist, as I was reading this email aloud to a disbelieving friend, my phone rang. One of my cousins, who suffered from bipolar disorder, had died by suicide, leaving behind two little boys. I hung up, shaking and numb, and the phone rang again.

It was Cathy.

“Hi…” she said, drawing the word out in syrupy mock apology. “Have you checked your email yet?”

“Yes,” I said, my voice stony.

All she said was, “Oh.” Then, dead silence. I waited. She started talking again. “I’m sorry about what I said. But you need to be aware of how your words–”

“Shut up!” I screamed at her, my knuckles white around the receiver. “I just found out that a family member actually killed herself and I don’t have time for you!”

The next day, one of her friends called me, furious. “Where the fuck do you get off telling Cathy to kill herself?” I didn’t, I stammered. She continued to rage at me that Cathy had attempted suicide after I hung up on her the day before and that I’d told her, “Shut up! Go actually kill yourself, because I don’t have time for you.” I explained what had really happened and told her another person had been present at the time of the call and could corroborate the story. I offered to send them the email Cathy had sent me. They backed down somewhat and admitted that Cathy’s “suicide attempt” had been comprised of holding a pillow over her own face. “That should tell you how much she wanted to die,” I snapped. What Cathy had told this friend about the demise of her relationship was far different than what had really happened. Sam had been physically abusive, often slapping her or pushing her into walls, and that’s why she desperately needed to escape. She had been looking for a roommate and felt hopeless like there was no way out.

When I spoke about this with one of Cathy and Sam’s old roommates, she actually laughed. “Uh, no. Cathy was constantly beating up on Sam. We told him to call the cops and he never would.” She recounted an anecdote about Sam sitting silently, reading a book, and Cathy becoming angry because he wasn’t paying attention to her. Without a word, she’d gotten up and punched him in the head over and over while he cowered from her until the roommate’s boyfriend had restrained her. Another time, Sam had been on the toilet when Cathy became furious with him for no apparent reason and burst in, slapping and kicking him. When I asked Sam why he never told any of us, he said he was embarrassed and that he didn’t want us to think badly of Cathy. He knew she had problems and he wanted to help her. He didn’t think she could survive on her own and worried that she would attempt suicide again.

Against the advice of everyone who knew him, Sam asked Cathy to go to counseling before proceeding with the divorce. She agreed. Meanwhile, the rest of us were looking for an escape. That was when my friend Cristin warned me, “Jen, do not piss her off. I’m serious.” She informed me that once, she’d told Cathy something she’d been sensitive and embarrassed about. “Don’t worry. I would never tell anyone,” Cathy promised, then added, “Unless I get really mad at you. Then I’ll tell everyone. When I get mad, I’m vicious.” For all the years of our friendship, Cathy had been saving information we’d given her in confidence as an insurance policy; if she knew anything at all that could publically embarrass us or harm us in any way, she would use it. I thought back to the night of that ritual, where we’d written down the personal failings or past hurts that had been harming us, and the way Cathy had read each one before burning them. Then, I remembered the spell she’d worked on Sam’s ex-girlfriend and her unborn baby. Cathy wasn’t above using the secrets we’d confided in her to harm us, and she wasn’t above attacking us through spiritual means.

We had no way out.

 

Next time: “Drop The Rope”

The Big Damn Writer Advice Column

It’s Thursday, so it’s time for some questions from the big damn writer question box!

 

Q: I believe you mentioned that you wrote “The Boss” series to show how a concept like “Fifty Shades of Grey” can be written correctly. However, have you ever read a novel/series where a central idea or theme was executed almost perfectly, but you still wanted to write your own spin on it? Do you think this can be done, or is it better to try and come up with another idea?

A: If I see something that I feel has been done great, but I want to put my own spin on it, that’s when I generally go to fanfic. A good example of this is Merlin. I loved that show, but there were just a couple of things in canon that I would have wanted to change. Enter my unfinished, unpublished rewrite of the entire series in fanfic form. The thing is, it’s too damn close to the characters, settings, and plot of the actual show, so mine wouldn’t be okay to publish professionally.

However, Jessica Jarman also loved the show and wanted to put her own spin on it, which led to her Albion’s Circle books. They’re inspired by her love of Merlin, but they’re not connected to the show in any way. The characters, settings, and plot have changed, and the only commonality might be that if a person who loved Merlin as much as Jess does pick up the books, they’ll really like reading them for the same reasons Jess likes writing them.

So, yeah, there’s always a way to take something awesome and put your own spin on it. It’s what you change that makes it your own.

 

Q:  Hi Jenny, I’m re-reading Say goodbye to Hollywood again and wonder where is the line from “inspired by true events” and “everything is fiction and any resemblance with real stuff is coincidental”? I see real people in this work of fiction and I don’t think you’ve been coy about who/what inspired you so how does that work? Thanks in advance.

A: Good question! I had to look it up myself back when I was writing it and needed to see what disclaimer to use. I ultimately went with “This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.” And now you’re probably going, “But it’s not coincidental. You specifically wrote this about E.L. James!”

But I didn’t. And that’s where you absolutely have to throw a disclaimer on there.

Back in the day, MGM made a movie wherein the rape of a fictional Russian princess by the monk Rasputin is hinted at. An actual Russian princess thought it was pretty clear that the one in the movie was based on her and when she sued, the courts agreed. On top of what she was awarded in the civil suit, MGM settled with her for one million dollars out of court. In 1932. That would be like eighteen million in today cash. My assumption is that the princess feared people would think they were watching a true story about her when she’d never consented nor been consulted as to the veracity of events.

The main character of Say Goodbye To Hollywood is definitely inspired by E.L. James, but she’s not E.L. James. I don’t know E.L. James, so I can’t write a faithful portrayal of her. I wasn’t there for the production meetings that went off the rails; all I had were rumors and blind items to work from. On top of that, much of the terrible personality of “Lynn Baldwin” came from a different real-life author. So, I couldn’t hand this book to someone and say, “This is a book about E.L. James.” That would be libel because I would be claiming that this person did and said all the stuff that happened in the fictional events of my book. Putting the disclaimer on makes it clear that you’re writing a fictional account similar to something that really happened, but it protects both the person who could be mistaken for a fictional character and your own butt if someone thinks your Russian princess seems a little too close to their own story.

 

Bonus Question: What program do you use when you write your books?

A: Right now, I just write in Google Docs, a new document for each chapter and compiled into a Word file when it goes to edits. In the past, I’ve used Scrivener, which I really enjoyed, but there isn’t an online option and I don’t have a laptop, so it’s not very practical if I need to leave the house to write. Novlr is a good online solution to that, but I’m too cheap to pay for it. If any of you are out there despairing that you can’t write because you need better or special software, don’t worry about it. Words is words and Google Docs is free.

 

That’s all this week! Got a question for me? Put it in the box!

 

 

Jealous Haters’ Book Club: Handbook For Mortals, Chapter 12 “The Sun” or “Art Imitates Life.”

Before we begin, I thought I should mention that when I took my hiatus to tech a show, it’s a show directed by someone who actually did work for Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas.

And I wear show blacks. Although, technically they’re just black leggings and a black dress because I’m a dresser and not climbing up scaffolding or anything like that.

Still, I thought you would all appreciate that.

Also, for our next selection, it’s gonna be a book about a writer who wins the lottery.

Heads up, there’s a racial slur in this recap and an examination of why Sarem feels she’s special and gets to use it.

The chapter opens with Zade walking down a hall at the theater.

Zeb caught me in the hall and put his hand up against the wall, creating an obstruction and keeping me from passing. He just stood there, staring into my eyes like I had lasers coming out of them or something.

Why would he stare directly into lasers?

“You aren’t ready for this; you should have been more prepared.”

I didn’t know what he meant and wasn’t sure how to respond, but had been really frustarted with how little he seemed to like me and how cold he was. I ignored his comments and went straight to the heart of what I had wanted to ask him ever since I had met him. “Why don’t you like me?”

This section really strikes at the heart of what makes this book boring and uninteresting. The author is more concerned with everyone loving the heroine, and that bleeds into the heroine being so self-absorbed that when an odd, standoffish character delivers a dire warning, she blows right past it. Instead of, “What are you talking about?” or “More prepared for what?”, the questions that would naturally follow, she jumps to, “Why don’t you like me?” And it’s a question she’s wanted to ask since they met. Meaning she is bewildered by the fact that this person did not like her on sight and did not react to her with the deference and enthusiasm she requires.

Zeb looked confused. “I never said I didn’t.”

Zeb is like, wait, did we jump ahead in the script? That doesn’t really follow my line.

“Some things don’t have to be said. You certainly act like you don’t.”

Zeb looked frustrated. “I just don’t think you take our craft seriously. I take it very seriously. You need to try harder. Really important things are at stake.”

What on earth is prompting this scene? The fact that she just spent her days off rehearsing a new illusion? The fact that all she really ever does is work? There’s no reason for this confrontation because there’s no evidence of any of this. If we’d had some scene where Zeb saw her goofing off with Jackson or something like that and then this happened, we could be like, “Okay, he only saw that one incident and he already didn’t like her, this makes sense.” Instead, it’s like out of the blue, aggressive, impeding her progress down a hallway by physically blocking and intimidating her. It makes absolutely no sense for things to have escalated to this point with a character we rarely see, especially with no inciting incident.

Zode asks if Zeb will help her…I don’t know. Try harder? Take the craft seriously? Is that something you can teach?

I had learned that when someone has an issue with the way you do something, asking them to help teach you what you’re missing is the fastest way to get them to feel better about it.

Just pretend you’re interested in improving yourself and your skills. That’ll get people off your back without you having to do anything.

Zeb contemplated my question before he replied. “Maybe. I’ll think about it. If I see real effort from you, I’ll consider it.”

Real effort like coming in on her days off to work extra? This conversation doesn’t make sense since we’ve been told over and over again how much Zide Lod works and how dedicated she is to her craft. Plus, what is he going to help her with? Like I said above, it’s not like he can help her be more serious or try harder. Those things are totally out of his control. There was no specific grievance here.

Zeb leaves and the interaction ends. Now, it might be pointless. It’s a real dice roll with any of the scenes in this book as to whether they’ll come up later. But if it isn’t pointless and this scene does come up later, it’s going to be in such a way that we’re going to look back and go, “Wow, that was an incredibly clumsy and obvious setup, considering there was no reason for that scene in the first place.”

I was tired and in thought over my odd interaction with Zeb, which caused me to walk very slowly–so slowly in fact that had I been walking any slower I’d just not have been moving at all.

Zani can’t think and walk at the same time. That checks out.

She hears someone singing in the wardrobe room:

I couldn’t quite recognize the voice, but knew it sounded familiar. It sounded like she was singing along to the radio and she sounded better than the artist actually singing it. I stopped short of entering the room and snuck just enough of a glance to see who had the amazing pipes.

You’re not going to believe who it is.

Okay, you’re going to guess who it is, because there’s really only one named female character in the book we’ve seen or thought about in chapters.

Sofia was the only one in the room. She was half dressed, with her back to the door, and was singing her heart out, apparently while waiting on one of the wardrobe girls to return with her costume. I waited for her to finish the song; she sounded so good that I really just wanted to hear her sing.

A lot about this book has surprised me, but this absolutely flattens me. Is this praise for Sofia? Really?

My first thought was to turn around and walk away, but after my confrontation with Zeb, something stronger in me just wanted to talk to her.

Wait… is Zimba into Sofia? Because it sounds kind of like she might be.

“Wow, Sofie. I didn’t know you could sing.” I made my sure my comment sounded as sincere as I could; I didn’t want her to think for even a second that I was being saracastic.

Why would she ever think that?

Sofia tells Zirt that there are lots of things she can do that Zart doesn’t know about.

I thought about snapping back at her, and a few really great replies popped into my head.

I can assure you that they were not great.

I quickly pushed out those clever-but-mean thoughts and chose to be the bigger person.

God, it’s like the author is retroactively passive-aggressively scolding me through the pages she’d already written.

“I don’t doubt that at all. I can tell how talented you are.” I smiled. I decided that I was not stooping to her level, no matter what she said to me.

Yeah, be a good person out of spite! That’ll get you places!

“Aw shucks, I bet you want to give me a nickname now, huh?” *Bats eyes, produces a lace parasol out of nowhere like a real southern lady*

Jackson’s eyes twinkled

Finally.

“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” he declared. “You can plow into me any time. You are my favorite hurricane.”

Calling someone ‘The Hurricane’ counts as a good time to you?
Plows are for snow.
Hurricanes are rainy.
Lani Sarem isn’t good at metaphors.

Jackson moved in a bit closer to me. I was now almost pushed up against the wall. Jackson pressed his left hand against the wall. He had me almost pinned and was looking right at me.

Are you sure he wasn’t almost looking right at you? And can you tell us exactly how the wall is involved in his looking at you?

But this almost romantic almost almost wall wall is interrupted by the arrival of a small child who wants Lani’s autograph:

She threw her arms arouund my neck. “I want to be you when I grow up.”

There are times when the self-aggrandizing fantasy of this book is so specific and pointed that I almost feel bad for Sarem.

It passes quickly.

When the kid leaves, Jackson asks Liver why she’s at the theater so early, and she tells him she’s been working on the new illusion.

“I don’t mind, really,” I clarified. “I like being here early. Keeps me focused.”

Jackson studied me. “You take your work really seriously. I like that about you.” He nodded.

So, you know in that earlier scene where Zeb tells Liaper Zag that she needs to take things more seriously? There’s not a point in that conversation where she asserts that she does take her work seriously, or where she even refutes that charge internally. She doesn’t think, “That’s not true, and a lot of people have said so,” or anything like that. But now, Jackson is saying it. Why? Because the reader needs to be reminded that a flaw someone pointed out about Zeaf Lile is not true. The chapter cannot end without someone coming to her aid and rescuing her from criticism.

“You know what they say? Surround yourself with people that take their work seriously, but not themselves.”

I have shocking news for you about your author, Lando.

I loved quotes and sayings. I had one for almost every situation and I could rattle them off all day. I guess it made me feel like I could always comment on something without sounding dumb.

It’s not working.

Of Jackson, Zert thinks:

Charm just flowed out of him the way most people sweat in the sun on a hot August day in Tennesee.

Ah, yes, nothing speaks to the brutal hotness of a dude than comparing his charm to excessive perspiration.

Obviously, this claim of Jackson’s alleged charm is backed up by evidence, right?

Of course not! Instead, we get a lesson in regional climate:

It got hot in Vegas, like 124 degrees hot, but it was a dry heat and let me tell you it was not as sweltering as a humid ninety degrees in Tennessee. You will sweat buckets without even lifting a finger the moment you step outside.

That’s nice information to have, I guess, but it doesn’t belong directly in the middle of a dialogue exchange that has nothing to do with the weather.

They go their separate ways, but:

Somehow I just knew that Jackson would still be standing there watching me walk away. I locked eyes with him. Most people probably would have been embarrassed to be caught like that but if he was he didn’t show it. He simply smiled and waved at me.

WTF did you expect him to do, whip his dick out and start tugging right there in the middle of the casino?

I then turned around and disappeared out of sight.

POV skew. You don’t know what he can and can’t see.

So, that was this chapter. Something kind of happened in it, at least.

True Blood Whoopsday! S05E10 “Gone, Gone, Gone” *and* S05E08 “Somebody That I Used To Know”

Hey everybody! I’m such a ding-dong. I totally forgot to post S05E08! So, you can find that here and S05E10 here. Hit play when the HBO sound and logo fade.

Thanks to Jess for noticing that!

The Worst Person I’ve Ever Met (Part Five) or “The Last Five Years”

Since there hasn’t been an update to this story since last year (ha ha, get it, because it’s January now?), you can refresh your memory or jump in for the first time with part one, part two, part three, and part four.

I also apologize in advance for my horrible poetry from 2007, which you will be subjected to in this installment. Please still respect me once you know how terrible I am at it.

After Cathy and Sam’s wedding, things went pretty much back to normal. I was able to focus on my (much smaller and easier to plan) wedding, and when the excitement was over, I got sent out to a sales conference in Colorado Springs to meet with Harlequin staff. I think that was the first time it occurred to Cathy that while she might downplay my success to everyone, she couldn’t change reality. I had written two books at that point and they were both fairly well received and I was profiting.

Obviously, Cathy needed to become a writer.

With her graduation from college approaching, things really kicked into high gear. Cathy had, as I mentioned before, been attending a two-year college for about as long as it takes most people to become doctors. There’s nothing wrong with people taking longer than the traditional amount of time to finish a degree, of course, but Cathy didn’t have a job. She didn’t have full custody of her son. She had very few responsibilities and spent most of her time chain-smoking, reading, and listening to music. So, what was causing the delay?

Laziness and greed.

Cathy had a system. While Sam worked two and often three jobs, she got by on federal student loans. She could navigate a FAFSA form so deftly, she could have made a decent living just helping other people fill them out. Instead, she applied for and received loan after loan, taking just enough credit hours to defer payment. “All I have to do is take six credit hours a semester,” she said, bewildered that no one had found this loophole before. “They can’t ask you to repay them if you’re still in college.” As for what would happen when she did finally graduate, she said she would just declare bankruptcy. The loans were, as she described them, “free money.”

When I pointed out that federal student loans can’t be discharged in a chapter seven bankruptcy, she went pale and still and said nothing.

Eventually, she reached a point where she had to graduate, and so she announced that in the spring, she would receive her associate’s degree in English. She only had a couple more credits to complete. One of the classes was “Minority American Literature,” different from classic American literature classes in that none of the authors read were white men. Since “anyone but white men” is a lot to cram into a single class, the final assignment was a paper about a marginalized figure in American literature who was not covered by the syllabus, including why the student believed that author should have been included. Cathy was outraged that one very important, obvious figure had not been included.

“I’m writing my paper on Virginia Woolf,” she said shaking her head sadly. “One of my favorite writers and, once again, she’s not valued because of her sex.”

“She might not have been covered because she was from England,” I suggested.

Cathy paused. “Was she?”

I nodded. “Yup.”

“Oh.”

Cathy decided she would write the paper on Virginia Woolf, anyway, because, “It’s not like [the professor] is going to know that.” I don’t know how the paper went down, but she did somehow pass the class.

The other class she took was some sort of creative writing course. This is where a large part of Cathy’s ego drives completely off the rails. Because now, not only am I writing just Harlequins, she is writing serious, academic-level fiction and poetry that will surely change the world. She became enamored with the idea of microfiction, stories contained in a few sentences like the famous “baby shoes, never worn.” When explaining it to me (patiently, of course, since my plebian brain couldn’t possibly grasp the intricacies of something so profound), she showed me one of her own pieces. I don’t remember the exact wording from memory, but it was something like:

The courtyard lights blaze auras in the mist while the shadows make a lunar landscape of the snowy ground.

“That’s not really a story, though,” I said, rereading the single line. “The baby shoes thing is a full story because you know it’s a story about people who either wanted a baby and couldn’t have one or about a baby that died. There’s a plot there. This is just a description of the courtyard at your school.” It wasn’t even fiction, really, as she told me she’d written it while actually looking at the snowy courtyard. But I didn’t get it. There was nuance, she told me, and someone at my level of education couldn’t just pick up “real, literary” writing.

While her microfiction was the bane of my existence, her poetry was the bane of her professor and classmates. The man who taught the class was in his late thirties and happily married. So, Cathy set her sights on having an affair with him. Obviously, she didn’t declare this intention, but anyone who knew her at all could see her end goal from the moment she talked about how much he enjoyed her poetry, which always had something to do with her body and sexuality. He left perfunctory comments on a piece comparing her vulva to a flower and her legs to flower stems; clearly, this meant he wanted to have sex with her. He said the imagery in the poem describing an orgasm was colorful, so the only conclusion was that it had turned him on. She read his comments aloud to me and her other friends, even to Sam, analyzing them from every angle until she could tease out some proof of the professor’s desire for her. Every piece of poetry and microfiction she wrote became more and more sexual, until finally after she brought in a poem rhapsodizing over her own queenly pubic hair and decrying women who shave as “little girls who wish they had a crown,” the professor told her to stop.

“He said he loves his wife,” Cathy said with a knowing smile, flicking ash from the end of her cigarette. “But my poems were making it hard for him not to cheat.”

Everyone knew this wasn’t the truth. It just couldn’t have been. Another friend in the class, Amelia, who had been there for what she described as the “very awkward” conversation about Cathy’s poetry, told me what had really happened. The format of the class included group critiques. Every poem Cathy brought to class, from her crown of pubic hair to her orgasms like the sea, was read aloud in these smaller groups. Some classmates had complained that Cathy’s poems made them uncomfortable and that when they’d tried to suggest she bring in material of a less sexual nature, she’d denounced them as prudes and misogynists seeking to stifle a woman’s voice. The professor also said that he would be more comfortable if Cathy concentrated on other subjects, as he didn’t care to read about his students’ sex lives, either. Amelia said that after leaving the class, Cathy went on a lengthy tirade about the professor being an asshole, a misogynist, and very likely a rapist. She would complain. She would get him fired for harassing her. She would make him pay.

None of us were surprised that she’d lied. At that point, we all just accepted that Cathy was a liar, but for some reason, we couldn’t walk away.

During this time, she invited me to a weekly slam poetry contest at a local coffee shop. I’d never heard of slam poetry, but I ended up enjoying myself a lot. We went every week, and sometimes we joined in with poems of our own or to volunteer to judge the friendly competition. One week, a poem I wrote about my continued frustration with George W. Bush won the competition and the twenty dollars in prize money. The poem, “Leader” wasn’t even that great:

You are not a leader.

A leader doesn’t leave us

twisting in the wind

no direction

without discretion

and against all advice

but that of your vice

your jones for power

as you sit in your tower

like the evil wizard in a fairytale

who is too power-greedy

to see his plans are doomed to fail.

I will not support

as the ribbons urge

but pray

for our troops

who’ve been duped

into believing they fight for me

poisoned with every MRE

while CNN, MSNBC and the BBC

are telling me

that it is not freedom

I’m not dumb

each life cashed in buys a drum of black gold

Texas tea

Please don’t tell me

that freedom isn’t free

You can keep your patriotism

my school zone is drug and bullshit-free.

 

See? Not great, but I was proud of myself. Cathy debuted a poem she wrote about how the birth of her son saved her from anorexia; I’ll include that in a later post, as it ties into the dynamic between Cathy and her son, and I found it inexplicably tucked away in an old journal. Cathy didn’t place that night and didn’t call me for several days.

The next week, Cathy arrived at poetry slam with a friend I’d never met before and announced that she wouldn’t be taking part in the slam. She had to study for her creative writing class. She never competed or engaged in the open mic again. Sam liked slam poetry, too, so he kept attending. One weekend, Cathy and her new friend, a professor from the college, wanted to go to a local brewery to see a band they liked. Cathy invited me, but I was fairly sure I was only asked because she needed a ride. Slam was held on Sunday nights, and Sam wanted to attend, so they asked me if I would leave slam early and give Cathy a ride. Why Sam couldn’t do this, I don’t know, but I was so conditioned at this point to believe I owed it to them to chauffeur her around that I reasoned that Sam rarely got time to socialize and it would be a nice gesture. But on Saturday night, Sam and Cathy came over to our house and we all had a bit too much to drink. The next day I was hung over, I didn’t want to go to the slam, and I certainly didn’t want to go to a loud bar. I didn’t want to completely bail on my friends and I couldn’t reach them by phone, so I went to the coffee shop and explained that I wasn’t feeling good and didn’t plan on seeing the band or staying for slam, after all. I asked if Sam could drive Cathy–I asked if Sam could drive his wife, the woman to whom he is married and who lives in the same house he does–to the bar, which was less than half a mile from the coffee shop where slam took place. Sam insisted that since I had agreed to drive her, I had an obligation to do so, despite not feeling well. They both lectured me on the importance of keeping promises and said that my friendship was very one-sided; all I ever did was take from them, giving them nothing in return. In a rage, Cathy called her friend and canceled the whole evening, despite the friend offering to pick her up from the coffee shop and drive her there. I had ruined everything. As Cathy and Sam left together (in the same car that could have easily delivered her to the bar in five minutes, round trip), he snapped, “Wine is awesome, right?”

To give context for that remark, I was, at the time, at the peak of my struggle with alcohol. I drank a six-pack of flavored malt liquor beverages a night, on top of several mixed drinks like Long Island Iced Tea or Jack and Coke. If we had friends over, which we frequently did, I drank even more because it was then “social drinking.” At a doctor’s appointment earlier in the week, I had tallied up the number of drinks I had in a single week; when the doctor had seen the total, she’d blanched and asked, “how would you describe your drinking?” I’d replied with a shrug and said, “Moderate?” She’d informed me that an average of eighty alcoholic beverages a week was not “moderate”. That Saturday night, I’d declared my intention to cut back on drinking and told Cathy and Sam this story and how much it had alarmed me, but they urged me to keep going. “We’re just hanging out, it’s okay to drink when it’s us.”

Despite enthusiastically encouraging me to drink two full bottles of wine, numerous shots of hard liquor, and my nightly foundation of six Smirnoff Ices, Sam now felt victimized by my drinking. Because I had ruined his wife’s weekend.

The next week at slam, I read a new poem:

I drink too much.

I know it.

But getting stinking,

puking

fall down-drunk-and-die

is not something I try

to justify.

I never blame my behavior

on liquor

make excuses for

or ignore

what I do under the influence

of my problem.

And it is a problem

not yours, all mine

as long as I fall in line

all the time

and you aren’t annoyed

or inconvenienced by

what I do when I give in

to the temptation

you reserve for parties and weekends.

You’ll still call me friend.

You’ll say nothing except,

“That’s just Jen!”

I’m supposed to be cute

and drunk and funny

dispensing more with each cup

more wit

more love

more money

more more more

so you can enjoy the person I am

as I destroy myself

But if I’m too hungover

to take something off your shoulders

laugh at your jokes

listen to your stories that get staler and older

too drunk the next morning

to be the care-free, spend-freely

laughing friend

you want me to be

you come down on me

to say “You have a problem,”

to disapprove

to judge

to lay a guilt trip so long

and so thick

I need to sit on my suitcase

to get all your condescension in.

But I should still call you friend.

So I fill up another glass

knowing I can stop

anytime I want

and knowing you’ll be there

with your moral superiority

when my problem is no longer convenient to you.

It was clumsy, it was horrible, but it was pointed. I maintained eye contact with Sam and Cathy throughout the reading, shaking with my anger. When I left the stage, all Sam said was, “Well, at least you recognize how your actions are affecting other people.”

He was still angry that I hadn’t driven Cathy to the bar.

Maybe it was rude of me to change the plans so abruptly, but she hadn’t needed to skip the band. Her friend had offered to drive her when plans changed. And again, her husband had a car. Why was I more responsible for her than he was?

We stopped going to poetry slams after that.

Cathy’s creative writing class continued to give her some sorely needed leverage over me in an area of shared interest. That was very much the way a friendship with Cathy operated. You had common interests, but she had to be better at them or more knowledgeable about them than you were. I brushed the writing off; I was a USA TODAY bestselling author making a very nice living. If she needed to tear me down to validate herself, I didn’t lose anything by letting her believe she was a better writing than I was. But our most intense one-sided rivalry was still theater.

After several failed attempts to become a local star, Cathy had given up on community theater. I wasn’t doing much, myself, but I did still love singing and began taking classical voice lessons for fun. One week, my lesson was on the same night as a planned meetup with our friend, Cristin, who lived right down the road from the studio. “Why don’t you just pick me up and I’ll wait and read a book during the lesson?” Cathy suggested. “That way you don’t have to run back and forth across town.” I agreed that this was a good idea, and she sat in the hall outside the practice room while I had my lesson. That night happened to be the one and only time I’ve ever hit my all-time highest note: a G6. I couldn’t believe I’d managed to support it for the very brief second I’d managed it, and when the lesson was over I rushed out, exhilarated.

“Did you hear that?” I asked, laughing. “I hit a G6!”

Cathy was sullen. She stood without a word, slung her purse over her shoulder, jammed her book into it and finally snapped, “Yes. I heard it. It sounded painful.”

She was angry because I’d hit a higher note than she could, one time.

But she still loved listening to musicals and singing along with them with me. We spent a lot of time trading CDs and discovering new shows. “You need to listen to this one,” she said, giving me a copy of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years. “I identify with this one so much.”

If you’re unfamiliar with The Last Five Years, it’s a show about a couple meeting, falling in love, getting married, and getting divorced within five years. The couple is on a split timeline; the show opens with the woman, a failed actress, devastated about the divorce, while the man, a brilliant young writer, has just gotten his first agent and met the girl of his dreams. It’s based on Brown’s real-life marriage and divorce (to the point that his ex-wife threatened him with legal action), painting the male writer as the helpless victim of his wife’s unrealistic expectations. At the time, I thought it was a poignant and incredible work. Now, for reasons unrelated to Cathy herself, I find the entire thing trite and self-aggrandizing, but the point of telling you all of this is that when I listened to it, and when Cathy (who I’ve named here after the heroine of The Last Five Years) told me she identified so strongly with the male lead, I told my husband, “I bet within five years, Cathy and Sam get divorced.”

My estimate was off by four years and three months; Cathy and Sam never made it to their first anniversary as a married couple.

Next time: Part 6, or “The Red Squirrel”

Blog Hiatus This Week!

Hark, all ye citizens of Trout Nation! There won’t be posts this week because I’m not only hard at work on the next Ian and Penny novels, but I’m also knee deep in tech week for Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery at the Kalamazoo Civic Theater. I’m a dresser (a person who stands backstage and helps actors change their clothes quickly), and that’s a big job on this show, where five actors play forty characters!

If you’re in the Kalamazoo area, I highly encourage you to come check out the show. It’s funny and farcical and I’m snort-laughing backstage every night. For tickets and more information, please visit here.

Next week there’ll be another installment of The Worst Person I’ve Ever Met, as well as True Blood Tuesday, Handbook For Mortals, and hopefully a Big Damn Rewatch post.

The Big Damn Buffy Rewatch S04E03: “The Harsh Light Of Day”

In every generation, there is a chosen one. She alone will burn herself out on her “New Year, New Me” plan in about two hours. She will also recap every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with an eye to the following themes:

Sex is the real villain of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe.
Giles is totally in love with Buffy.
Joyce is a fucking terrible parent.
Willow’s magic is utterly useless (this one won’t be an issue until season 2, when she gets a chance to become a witch)
Xander is a textbook Nice Guy.
The show isn’t as feminist as people claim.
All the monsters look like wieners.
If ambivalence to possible danger were an Olympic sport, Team Sunnydale would take the gold.
Angel is a dick.
Harmony is the strongest female character on the show.
Team sports are portrayed in an extremely negative light.
Some of this shit is racist as fuck.
Science and technology are not to be trusted.
Mental illness is stigmatized.
Only Willow can use a computer.
Buffy’s strength is flexible at the plot’s convenience.
Cheap laughs and desperate grabs at plot plausibility are made through Xenophobia.
Oz is the Anti-Xander
Spike is capable of love despite his lack of soul
Don’t freaking tell me the vampires don’t need to breathe because they’re constantly out of frickin’ breath.
The foreshadowing on this show is freaking amazing.
Smoking is evil.
Despite praise for its positive portrayal of non-straight sexualities, some of this shit is homophobic as fuck.
How do these kids know all these outdated references, anyway?
Technology is used inconsistently as per its convenience in the script.
Sunnydale residents are no longer shocked by supernatural attacks.
Casual rape dismissal/victim blaming a-go-go
Snyder believes Buffy is a demon or other evil entity.
The Scoobies kind of help turn Jonathan into a bad guy.
This show caters to the straight/bi female gaze like whoa.
Sunnydale General is the worst hospital in the world.
Faith is hyper-sexualized needlessly.
Slut shame!
The Watchers have no fucking clue what they’re doing.
Vampire bites, even very brief ones, are 99.8% fatal.
Economic inequality is humorized and oversimplified.
Buffy is an abusive romantic partner.
Riley is the worst.
Joss Whedon has a problem with fat people.
Spike is an abusive romantic partner.
Why are all these men so terrible?

Have I missed any that were added in past recaps? Let me know in the comments.  Even though I might forget that you mentioned it.

WARNING: Some people have mentioned they’re watching along with me, and that’s awesome, but I’ve seen the entire series already and I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So… you know, take that under consideration, if you’re a person who can’t enjoy something if you know future details about it.

We join Oz on stage at The Bronze. Willow and Buffy are in the crowd, and so is Stupid Fucking Douchebag. Buffy is trying to do the thing where she doesn’t look at him or notice him, but she’s secretly scoping him out in a mirror. Which, honestly, must be a nice change in terms of dating. A dude having a reflection, I mean. Willow points out that Buffy has spent all week with SFD and therefore it’s okay if she wants to look at him. Buffy argues that she doesn’t want to crowd him, so we’re clearly in the “We don’t know if we’re dating” stage of dating here. Willow tells Buffy that since she’s single, there’s nothing wrong with crushing on a dude, something that I really think Buffy needs to have hammered home for most of the series. Why, you ask? Because any time Buffy has any kind of romantic or sexual attraction toward a guy (though I’m still on the fence as to whether or not Buffy might actually be asexual or demisexual), there are extremely negative consequences.

Buffy, it’s not you. It’s your creator.

SFD offers to walk Buffy back to her dorm, since it’s “not safe around here.” I assume he means Sunnydale. Buffy takes him up on his offer, while Willow and Oz and Devon (the singer) pack up the van.

We need to have a chat, Devon. It’s about your outfit.

First of all, If you’re about to leave the house, a good thing to do is check and make sure your pubes aren’t visible or likely to become visible during the course of whatever errand you run. I don’t know, maybe it’s a shadow from your belt buckle making it look like I can see your pubes, but that really shouldn’t be a question I’m having to ask here. The possibility of seeing your pubes should be 0% without me having to think about it. Second, only one man gets to wear a child-sized t-shirt and get away with it, and that man is Chris Evans as Captain America. This half-assed sorta crop-top t-shirt look cannot be blamed on ’90s fashion. I was there. This was not common.

Devon, you need to be dressing every day like those are the clothes an archaeologist is going to dig you up in. Don’t embarrass the entire human race.

Devon and Oz go back inside, and who shows up but my favorite character in the entire god damn series. Like, even more than Giles, maybe:

 

Willow: “Harmony, hi! Hey, I haven’t seen you since–”

Harmony: “Since graduation. Big snake, huh?”

Willow: “Yeah. So, how was your summer vacation?”

Okay, okay. Sunnydale nonchalance is starting to grow on me.

Harmony tells Willow that she really wanted to go to France, but she didn’t. Also, she’s surprised to learn there are museums there. Willow tells her she hasn’t changed at all, and Harmony is like, well…

She attacks Willow and we go to the opening credits.

This gives me a chance to talk about #10. We saw Harmony get bit by a random vampire at the end of “Graduation Day (Part 2)”. We’ll find out later in the episode that she’s been hanging out with Spike, who is not her sire and who doesn’t seem to be the most patient of teachers. So…Harmony has pretty much been going it alone, from what we can see in the series. Yet she’s doing a bang-up job pretending to be human to lull her prey into a false sense of security. She’s not dressed in leather or dramatic makeup, looking as dangerous as possible. She’s just Harmony, adapted to vampire form.

After the commercial break–which on Hulu was a Smirnoff commercial that implied Ted Danson is an alcoholic and I can’t wrap my mind around how that’s going to sell the product but okay–Oz saves Willow in the nick of time.

Harmony: “Okay, fine. Hide behind your boyfriend. But guess what? I have a boyfriend, too. And he’s going to be mad that you were mean to me!”

She runs away, and we join Buffy and SFD mid-stroll. He’s asking her questions about her life, which are obviously difficult for her to answer since the only hobby she has is killing monsters that SFD may or may not accept the existence of.

Hey, this brings something up. Are all the students at UC Sunnydale from Sunnydale? SFD certainly didn’t go to Sunnydale High. Why would anyone come to the college if it has such a high rate of disappeared or murdered students? And since #8 wouldn’t apply to them, being from out of town and not as blasé about demons walking among them, wouldn’t someone end up running to the news or writing a book or at least turning the place into a horrific kind of danger tourism attraction?

Case in point, SFD notices Buffy’s bite scar (which, like Giles’s tattoo is going to come and go throughout the series). It’s clearly a human-shaped mouth thing going on. But Buffy says she was attacked by an angry puppy–thus dooming Angel to that unflattering moniker in several fandom circles of the time–and he just kind of accepts it. Buffy asks SFD about his life, and he tells her about his dead dad.

SFD: “I’m okay to talk about it now. And I’m not doing the deep, get sympathy routine. I mean, don’t you just hate guys who are all ‘I’m dark and brooding so give me love?'”

Buffy: “I don’t think I’ve ever met that type.”

SFD then immediately jumps into the deep, get sympathy routine. He tells Buffy that what bummed him out about his dad dying was the thought of all the things his dad left unfinished, and how that’s made SFD appreciate “living for the now.” Buffy can obviously understand this because it hits her right in the destined-to-die-young. She tells SFD about how she drowned but came back from being dead, so she doesn’t put stuff off anymore.

SFD: “That’s great. I mean, everybody says they get it. ‘Oh man, me too, live for today.’ But what they really want is an excuse to goof off and not study for finals.”

SFD, of course, is so much nobler than those a-holes, because he uses “live for today” to dupe chicks into sleeping with him so he can blow them off right away. I wish I could reach into the screen, slap him, and gently herd my girl away from him. Instead, she asks him what he’s going to regret not doing and he says he’s going to regret not asking her to go to a party with him. Then he asks her if she wants to go to the party, and she, of course, says yes because she’s like eighteen and hasn’t heard that line before.

Meanwhile, at Giles’s apartment, he no longer has a tattoo. Because what did I just say up there? He and Xander are reorganizing the occult books.

Xander: “I don’t get your crazy system.”

Giles: “My system? It’s called the alphabet.”

Anya lets herself into the apartment, which Giles dislikes for two reasons. One, she just let herself in. Two, the last time he saw her she had unleashed Vamp!Willow onto the world. Though she’s human now, Giles isn’t her biggest fan, and she doesn’t ingratiate herself by telling him that she needs to talk to Xander, so Giles should leave. When he doesn’t (because it’s his apartment), she makes a very confused Xander leave with her. In the courtyard, she drops this bombshell:

Anya: “So, where is our relationship going?”

Xander: “Our what? Our who?”

Anya: “Relationship. What kind do we have and what is it progressing toward.”

Xander points out that she used to be a demon who tortured and killed men in many inventive and varied ways and that creates an issue in the relationship they don’t have. Anya is terrible at picking up on hints, or actually, outright rejection, so she forges ahead:

Anya: “I can’t stop thinking about you. Sometimes, in my dreams, you’re all naked.”

Xander: “Really? You know, if I’m in the checkout line at the Wal-Mart I’ve had that same one.”

Anya wants him to agree on some kind of verbal dating contract but he points out that relationships evolve naturally over time. He doesn’t know how, but that’s how they work.

Cut to Buffy’s dorm room, where SFD drops her off and is about to kiss her goodnight when Oz and Willow run up to hint at Harmony having been turned into a vampire. SFD asks Willow if her bleeding neck is okay and Buffy gets it. SFD fully understands bleeding emergencies, though, and he tells Buffy he’ll pick her up for the party.

In the dorm room, Oz tenderly cleans Willow’s wound:

Swoon.

Willow: “She just made me so mad. ‘My boyfriend’s going to beat you up.'”

Buffy: “‘My boyfriend?'”

Willow: “Well, I mean, if you believe her. She always lied about stuff like that. ‘Oh, he goes to another school. You wouldn’t know him.'”

Buffy says that whoever would date a dead Harmony would have to be the most tolerant guy in the world, so cut to:

After the commercial break, we slowly sink below the normal life of Sunnydale, to Spike’s subterranean digging project. He’s looking to tunnel into a crypt, and things seem pretty serious because he slams the foreman’s head into a table in frustration. At that point, Harmony comes in to hang all over him and request that he kill Willow in retaliation for being mean to her. Spike points out that if he kills the Slayer’s best friend, she’ll know he’s in town. Which he’s trying to avoid.

As a boyfriend, Spike is outright abusive. When Harmony complains that she doesn’t want to eat the human they have chained up because she had a math class with him, Spike slams her into a wall. Harmony tries to match his violent posturing with sexy simpering, but there’s a definite feeling that it’s calculated for survival. If you’ve seen True Blood, it’s very similar to the way Tara reacts to Franklin while he’s holding her captive. While I don’t believe Harmony is truly a captive, I do think she’s staying with Spike for survival. And this is point one in my argument for #10. Harmony is adaptive for survival in a way the other female characters on the show are not. Now, I’m not saying staying in an abusive relationship makes you strong. That’s not part of her strength. But while we see Buffy and Willow struggling to fit into their new college lives and, over on Angel, Cordelia dealing with being newly poor, we’ve got Harmony here who has literally been killed and transformed into an actual monster. Yet, she’s found a vampire to attach herself to, she’s learned how to manipulate him, and she’s done this all in the same amount of time it’s taken the other characters to deal with shit that, let’s face it, is pretty ordinary even when they are constantly fighting evil. If Harmony was just the girl we see on the surface, she wouldn’t be able to do all of this. It makes me wonder if her high school days as a lackey to Cordelia wasn’t just Harmony lying low and waiting for the moment to strike.

Anyway, Spike promises he’ll take Harmony to a party the next night. Which is when Buffy and SFD are going to a party. Which is where we go, next. Bif Naked is playing at this party, which is awesome because that’s how I found out she existed. They’re headed into another room to dance, which is weird because they’re walking away from the place where everyone is dancing, and who should they run into but Spike and Harmony, with a near-corpse dangling between them. SFD thinks the guy is just drunk, and the conversation goes a lot like two exes who are still way bitter and hateful about their breakup and not like a conversation between two people who are going to try to kill each other real, real soon:

Spike: “Say, let’s have a look at the new boy.”

SFD: “Hi, I’m [redacted on account of fuck him, that’s way].”

Spike: “I like him. He’s got, um, what’s the word? Vulnerability.”

Buffy: “And you with Harmony. What, you lose a bet?”

Spike makes a break for it, actually pushing the near-dead guy into Harmony to secure his getaway. Buffy runs after them both and they trade verbal punches amid a series of physical ones, while Harmony (wisely) stands back and just watches.

Buffy: “What’s the matter, Spike? Dru dump you again?”

Spike: “Maybe I dumped her.”

Buffy: “She left him for a fungus demon. That’s all he talks about most days.”

I feel like the last time we saw Spike, Dru had dumped him already for a Chaos Demon. I suppose they could have gotten back together in the meantime, but without knowing that his plan to torture her into coming back to him worked, it seems like a continuity error.

The fight kind of ends when Spike calls it off, which might seem weird and like he only gets away because he’s needed for the rest of the series, but remember, he’s killed Slayers before. I think making him one of the only vampires we ever see who has been able to kill multiple Slayers was really smart, but something that maybe should have been revisited as the series went along and they kind of made him into a joke.

As he leads Harmony away, she shouts something at Buffy about the Gem Of Amara. Spike grabs her, hurting her in the process, because again, abusive. And you know what? I’m making a new number. #40: Spike is an abusive romantic partner. We already got a hint of this in his interactions with Drusilla, but since she’s his sire I go back and forth on whether or not the power imbalance between them makes him an abusive partner to her. I think the only time we saw him physically harm her was when he knocked her out during the final season two fight with Angel, and I feel like that doesn’t really count because he was trying to stop her from, you know. Ending the whole world. I’m not even sure we could make a case for the emotional and mental abuse of Drusilla because more often than not we saw Dru harming Spike in that arena. But once we take Spike and put him in a relationship with any other character, he’s controlling, isolating, and physically violent with an explosive temper and no regard for the mental or emotional well-being of his partner.

Meanwhile, in Xander’s basement apartment, he’s hanging up a disco ball when Anya stops by. He offers her a juice box, but when he turns back from the fridge, she gets naked. End scene.

Buffy calls Giles to give him the update re: Spike and Harmony. Wait, let me rephrase: Buffy calls sweaty, out of breath Giles who is holding a fencing foil and mopping his brow, clearly having exerted a lot of physical effort working out, sword-fight style. I just want to state for the record how fucking furious I am that we never got that scene, but how many times did we have had to watch Angel shirtlessly and sweatily Tai Chi his way through his gloomy vampire sadness? This is bullshit.

Oh, right. The phone call.

Buffy: “Yeah. Spike with Harmony. If you can believe it. I couldn’t figure out why he ran away, but Harmony said something. Why they were here. They, they were looking for the gem of something. Um. Amara.”

Giles: “The Gem of Amara? Are you sure?”

Buffy: “Yeah, what’s up?”

Giles: “It’s, it’s just um, it’s not real.”

Giles reads to Buffy from an old book that says vampires looked all over for it in the tenth century before concluding that it just didn’t exist. It’s basically a vampire myth. Satisfied that there’s no danger, Giles tells Buffy to go to bed, and she pretends like she’s totally not out at a party.

Back at Spike’s subterranean lair, Harmony is lounging in bed reading tabloids while Spike broods over drawings of his plan.

Harmony: “Is Antonio Banderas a vampire?”

Spike: “No.”

Harmony: “Can I make him a vampire?”

Spike: “No. Wait, on second thought, yeah, go do that. Take your time. Do Melanie and the kids as well.”

I’m not 100% on why Spike is keeping Harmony around if he doesn’t like her at all. As she chatters on, he screams at her to shut up. But when he sees her lying there all cute and sexy…

Who wouldn’t?

And here is Harmony, playing to her strengths. At heart, Spike is the abusive person he is because he was basically the original Red Piller. An awkward dork who was rejected so many times that once he got a little taste of acceptance, his ego exploded into a violent, consuming fireball. Harmony has spent so many years watching and participating in Cordelia’s bullying of the weakest members of the herd, she can tell that Spike is a lonely, attention-starved nerd who’s never had a chance with a girl who’s basically a real live Barbie doll. In fact, when we see “Cecily” reject Spike in a season five flashback, she is exactly like Harmony. Though she annoys Spike thoroughly, he has to have her. She represents all the women who ever turned him down. Harmony knows that she has this power over him and she’s using it to her advantage as a fledgling vampire who needs food and protection. She even taunts him about Drusilla as part of their foreplay; she attacks his vulnerabilities to make him crave her more.

God damn, Harmony. Teach me your ways.

Over at Xander’s house, we rejoin Anya’s tactical seduction still in the explanation phase:

Anya: “–at which point the matter is brought to a conclusion with both parties satisfied and able to move on with their separate lives and interests. To sum up, I think it’s a workable plan.”

Xander: “So, the crux of this plan is–”

Anya: “Sexual intercourse. I’ve said it like a dozen times.”

Her theory is that if they bang, she’ll be over liking him and can return to life as normal. Xander tells her that he believes sex is about more than just getting down, that there are feelings involved. And as he says this, he mentions that considering these things makes him a woman. Because only women care about emotions during sex because toxic masculinity go go go. (#6) Anya insists that it’s just silly of them to not have sex. Xander gives in, musing aloud that Anya is more romantic than Faith.

Buffy returns to the party and tells SFD that the reason she ran after Spike was that he’s an old friend who’s an alcoholic and shouldn’t be at a party full of beer. SFD tells her she did the right thing and asks if she used to date Spike, resulting in hysterical giggles. Buffy and SFD dance to Bif Naked’s “Lucky,” which isn’t a very long song but is for some reason still playing later in the night when Buffy and SFD are sitting on a couch talking about making choices and other life-affirming bullshit that dudes say when they’re trying to bang you. So, of course, they end up having sex. Giles finds something worrying in a book and tries to call Buffy, but she’s busy making the worst god damn choice in men.

After the commercial break, Buffy wakes up alone in SFD’s bed. She’s trying to collect her clothes up from the floor when he comes back with coffee and an excuse about his mom coming to visit, so he can’t hang out. He tells her he’ll give her a call.

BABY, HE IS NOT GOING TO CALL YOU.

In Xander’s basement, Xander and Anya are very quietly and tensely getting dressed when Anya announces that she’s fully over him. When Xander doesn’t care enough about that, she storms off. And in Spike’s lair, Spike wakes up to find Harmony writing “Spike Loves Harmony” on his back in black lipstick. He gets mad, presumably because it’s his black lipstick. Harmony is not wearing that 1996 shit in 1999. He also storms off.

Are we starting to sense that the theme of the episode is the title of the episode? Are we all on the same page here?

Buffy goes back to her room and immediately starts undressing, not realizing that Giles and Willow are both there. While Giles gives Buffy a withering glare, Willow stands behind him making all sorts of exciting hand signals that roughly translate to “good for you for getting some last night.” Mortified, Buffy starts trying to lie about being at the library all night long on a Saturday, while Giles makes this face:

Prompting Buffy to just give up and declare:

Buffy: “You know what? I’m an adult and it’s none of your business where I was!”

Giles: “And I’m sincerely relieved to hear it. Now can we discuss the impending disaster?”

Turns out, the Gem of Amara might actually be real and it might actually be in Sunnydale. Buffy makes plans to find Spike and eliminate him before he can get to the gem, and Giles leaves to do more research. The second he’s gone, Willow wants to hear all about Buffy and SFD, because Willow is also young and dewy-eyed and not suspicious enough of men. She’s living a little bit vicariously though Buffy’s dating life:

Willow: “I love this part! Don’t you love this part? When it’s all new and everything’s a discovery?”

That’s a #21. No, it’s not terribly far in advance, but pretty soon here Willow is going to be making some big, big discoveries.

Spike’s people have managed to tunnel beneath the crypt, so he tells Harmony that she’s not allowed to leave the lair because the risk of leading the Scoobies back there is too great. She tells him it’s unfair that he promised her he’d take her to France and all these other great places, but now he’s imprisoning her underground. He turns violent, calling her stupid and shoving her into a wall (which seems to be his signature abuse move).

Harmony: “I don’t know why I let you be so mean to me.”

Spike: “Love hurts, baby.”

So, here’s the deal. I saw this season. Millions of other people saw this season. How on Earth did we ever buy the transformation of Spike The Girlfriend Abuser into Spike The Toothless Woobie? If “cinnamon roll” had been a meme at the time, people would have been calling him their beautiful, dead cinnamon roll, too pure for this world or something. I used to absolutely love him. I felt bad for him. Why is it only now, during this specific rewatch, that I’m seeing what an absolute villain he is? Was it James Marsters’s charisma that did it? Why are the men on this show (and I woefully have to include Giles on this one, for actions later in the series) so fucking terrible?

Why are all these men so terrible?

Fuck it. #41: Why are all these men so terrible?

What follows is a montage of Buffy roaming UC Sunnydale’s campus with a yearbook, trying to see if anyone has spotted Harmony around, interspersed with shots of her checking her lack of messages and Spike digging. Spike finally enters the secret crypt and it is chock-full o’ treasures. Harmony joins him and asks if she can take stuff, while Spike jerks a necklace off a corpse and puts it on, expecting to feel invincibility course through his veins or something, but it doesn’t work. In the background, Harmony is playing dress-up with her newfound cache while she chatters on and on about how they have all this money now and can go to France, etc. Spike rips part of the casket off and stakes her.

He stakes her.

Spike intends to kill his girlfriend and a huge portion of the fandom just kind of glosses over this. What’s worse is, that same part of fandom will grudgingly admit to his later attempted rape of Buffy (while explaining away why it was really Buffy’s fault), but some feel this moment was justified because Harmony annoyed him. The Spike apologia is so bizarre. The weird thing is, I know I’m going to like him later. I know he’s one of my favorite characters. I know this about myself. Why does this happen?

Luckily for Harmony (and for us), one of the pieces of jewelry she’s idly put on is the Gem Of Amara, a little ring in the shape of a skull like something you could buy at Hot Topic. To test it out, Spike wraps a crucifix in a piece of tattered cloth and holds it against Harmony’s head. Furious she takes off the ring and throws it at him, ordering him to get out. He gleefully announces that he’s going to go outside, presumably into the daylight, leaving a hurt and tearful Harmony behind. Despite her transparent manipulation, Harmony really does want Spike to love her because people like Harmony crave love and adoration. It’s what drives them to position themselves as “above” everyone else.

At Giles’s apartment, the gang is in research mode. Well, most of them are in research mode. Oz is looking through Giles’s records. When Giles says there are more important things going on, Oz holds up a copy of The Velvet Underground’s Loaded and Giles agrees that at least that album is more important than a super evil Slayer-killing vampire getting his hands on an ancient relic that will make him impervious to every vampire weakness.

Xander, however, has uncovered something even more important hidden behind stacks of books and boxes:

Xander: “Whoa, Giles has a TV. Everybody! Giles has a TV! He’s shallow, like us!”

While Willow and Giles both make excuses for why there might be a television in a grown man’s house, Xander finds a news report about a massive sinkhole. This pretty much confirms what I’ve been thinking for most of the series, that the number of subterranean lairs beneath Sunnydale pose a threat to the town. The gang takes off with this new information.

I feel obliged to point out that for most of this scene you can see the tiniest shadow of Giles’s chest hair, and that’s going to lift my spirits for days.

Buffy is walking across campus when she sees SFD talking to another girl, giving her the same speech about his dad dying and living for now that he gave Buffy before. She interrupts them and SFD tells this random girl that he’ll talk to her later. When Buffy asks him why he didn’t call her, he tells her it’s only been a few days and everything is okay, but he’s vague and puts her off when she tries to make plans with him. She asks if she’s done something wrong and he says that he had fun, but that’s all it was.

Buffy: “It seemed…like you liked me.”

SFD: “I do. But I”m starting to feel like you thought that meant…what? Some kind of commitment? I mean, is that really what you want right now?”

Buffy: “I just thought…”

SFD: “Look, I’m sorry if you misunderstood something. I thought things were pretty clear.”

Buffy: “I-I didn’t mean to mis– I’m sorry.”

So, here’s the thing about this full-time douchebag. He spends a week hanging with her, having these deep conversations about his dad dying or whatever, stringing her along. Then, when she thinks that means something he’s like, no, that’s not what’s happening and it’s weird that you would think or want that. And then he ends up making it seem like it’s all her fault for not seeing through his blatant manipulation.

FUCK THIS GUY.

What’s worse is, after SFD leaves, Buffy hears:

Spike: “Well, that was pathetic.”

Right before day-walking Spike punches her in the face.

After the commercial, Spike monologues about how he’s outside in the day and suddenly, fight scene. On campus, in broad daylight, with tons of people around. Except conveniently, every single person we saw in this scene before the commercial break has suddenly disappeared. This is so lazy, you guys. I love this show, but this is so lazy. Now, it’s possible that society is so jaded that if someone saw a guy punch a girl in the face in broad daylight, nobody would intervene, but this is a campus full of students who’ve been going to Take Back The Night rallies and whose parents have warned them about the big, wide world. I just feel like someone is going to step in to be the hero. But that doesn’t matter because, again, everyone wandered off during the commercials. There needed to be a reason that Buffy is standing next to a building on a crowded, busy campus during the middle of the day and nobody is seeing this.

Going past all of this, Buffy stakes Spike and realizes that he’s got the Gem Of Amara and thus, invincibility. The jackass holds up his hand and actually shows her the damn ring, which is like, come on. Villany 101. If I were a vampire with the Gem Of Amara, I would put it on a chain and wear it around my neck or something. Or, if this were Vampire: The Masquerade, I would be a Tzimisce (which is the clan I always played, anyway) and I would use Vicissitude to make a little pocket in my finger I could just slide the ring into and cover with my skin, much in the way I always made a pocket and put my two handfuls of soil in so my dice pool was never affected.

You know. If I were a nerd or something. Pfff.

Spike is about to kill Buffy when Willow, Oz, and Giles find the crypt and Harmony, who’s crying.

Harmony: “Being a vampire sucks.”

I know, baby. But you’re going to get through this.

Xander has gone to Buffy’s dorm to warn her about Spike. Anya finds him there and wants to talk about their relationship, but Xander tells her he doesn’t have time, leaving her wounded. It’s a good thing she can’t do the vengeance anymore.

Giles, fully prepared to stake Harmony, asks her if Spike has the Gem.

Harmony: “He staked me and then he took it. He tried to take it right off my finger, like I wouldn’t have just given it to him. I would have given him anything he wanted. He was my platinum baby and I loved him.”

So, Harmony really did love Spike, though I can’t see a reason why she would beyond Stockholm syndrome caused by having to hang with this dude to survive. Harmony, for all the strength I see in her, has fucking terrible taste in men. I’m not sure that’s really her fault, though; all the men here are awful. It’s kind of like Beauty And The Beast, where everyone rags on Belle all the time for picking a guy who imprisoned her in a castle but the only other eligible bachelor in town was a guy who wanted to breed her and keep her from reading and who tried to get her father locked up in an asylum so it’s no fucking wonder the Beast seemed like a better option. I don’t blame Harmony for falling for Spike, and I’m psyched that she ends up leaving him on and off.

In the fight that is improbably not witnessed (and I must add, is taking place in front of a huge bank of windows, so even if everyone is inside, someone is going to notice a girl getting her ass beat and thrown through a glass table), Buffy grabs Spike by the throat, choking him. (#20) Xander arrives to help and is promptly knocked out. Things look bleak. Spike taunts Buffy about how SFD treated her and tells her that Angel said she wasn’t good in bed. All of this just fuels Buffy’s fury, and she manages to wrestle the ring from Spike’s finger. He flees into a conveniently open grate of some kind, leaving Buffy with the Gem.

Back at Giles’s apartment, the gang gathers around the Gem and talk about how to destroy it. Buffy says they’re not going to do that.

Giles: “Buffy any vampire that gets his hands on this is going to be essentially unkillable–”

And then Buffy makes this face at him:

And Giles is like, oh, right.

Oz says he can drop the ring off in L.A. when he plays his gig there, but Xander still hasn’t caught on.

Willow: “She’s giving the ring to Angel. Don’t make a fuss.”

Giles asks if Buffy is sure that she should give her vampire ex-boyfriend a ring that will make him able to walk around in the day and live life like a normal guy and she reiterates her stance that Angel definitely needs to have it. And Giles makes this face:

You know, because Giles was recently almost tortured to death by Angel, who also murdered his girlfriend. Oh, and he’s totally and fully falling in love with Buffy as I will obnoxiously harp on about in this season because this might have actually been the season I started shipping them? Maybe it was “A New Man” where I did that? Or something. IDK, that was a thousand years ago. Prepare yourselves. But yeah, kind of consider his position here. Angel, the guy who, again, tortured him and murdered his girlfriend, is finally fucking gone and his Slayer is still hung up on protecting him. That sucks. I feel for you.

But not so much that I can forgive your season seven transgressions, Giles.

On campus, Buffy asks Willow if all guys are going to be evil after she has sex with them. Willow says that it’s no big, Buffy just misjudged and that’s okay.

Buffy: “[SFD] said it’s okay to make mistakes. It was sweet.”

Willow: “No, it wasn’t. He was saying that so you would take a chance and sleep with him.”

Buffy agrees that SFD is a manipulative and bad person, but that only makes her question why he doesn’t want her.

Buffy: “Am I repulsive? If there was something repulsive about me you’d tell me, right?”

Willow: “I’m your friend. I would call you repulsive in a second.”

Buffy muses that she and SFD could work things out, and Willow is basically like, what did I just say? But nicer, because she’s Willow. Buffy wanders around campus sad, and we see Anya and Harmony also wandering around campus sad. For some reason. Even though only one of them has cause to be there. And also Buffy doesn’t notice Harmony like fifty feet away from her. So, okay.

There are a lot of plot holes and nitpicks in this episode. The most major one, I think, is that the Gem Of Amara was lost since before the tenth century but it’s buried in a Christian tomb in California that’s filled with jewelry and relics in styles ranging from the late middle ages to the Miss Universe pageant. This happens a lot, and I can somewhat buy that maybe vampires from Europe were somehow coming to this Hellmouth, but would they bring crucifixes with them? But there’s also a lot to like here. Jane Espenson writes really fast-paced, snappy episodes with dialogue to die for, and she has a great grasp on what we like most about the characters. Season four is considered a throwaway season by some fans, but a lot of the most quoted lines of dialogue originate here. I continue to enjoy season four more on this rewatch than I have in the past, and I’m super psyched to get to the haunted house episode.