Hush Hush Redux: Chapter 1 - Part 1
ZeldaQueen: Well, we met the male lead of our little tale in the prologue, so it's time we met our female lead! Oh boy!
Projection Room Voices: Starting Media in 3...2...1...
Chapter 1 - Part 1
We kick off the first chapter by jumping forward to present day Maine, in the fictional city of Coldwater. We meet our intrepid heroine of this series, Nora Grey.
Ket: You should have crossed out “heroine” too, while you were at it. Also, there is a city in Michigan called Coldwater. Just...just pointing that out.
ZeldaQueen: I suppose it’s a favor, however small, that Fitzpatrick didn’t screw with a real city, like Meyer did. The drawback is that, as we’ll see, it makes navigating this fictional down damned difficult. But that’s for later.
For now, we kick off this exciting tale with… Nora walking into her Biology class and seeing a naked Barbie and Ken pair, with “artificial leaves placed in a few choice locations”, stuck on the blackboard. Huh.
Ket: I wish I could say that it will be the weirdest thing about this goddamn class.
ZeldaQueen: I’m still trying to figure out the purpose of the fig leaves. Barbie and Ken are infamously anatomically incorrect. What, did the teacher buy some underground modified models or something?
Anywho, this weirdosity is explained (for lack of a better word) with the words written on the blackboard, “WELCOME TO HUMAN REPRODUCTION (SEX)”. And… uh, now’s about as good a time as any for me to say that what I know about what high schools teach for this is limited to my own high school’s course. So if I find something unbelievable and it turns to that schools really do do that, I apologize.
Ket: When I learned sex ed, all I remember is a model of the penis, and putting a condom on a banana. Granted, it has been a while for me, so if sex ed has changed in the last...twelve years, I apologize as well.
ZeldaQueen: My class as pretty well-rounded. We were taught about contraceptives, the different chances of effectiveness they had, how they worked and how they potentially failed, STDs, how to treat or avoid STDs, and of course how the reproductive organs themselves worked. I’m pretty sure we all knew already how babies grew and developed in the womb, and I’m positive that most of the class read enough smut from various sources to know the basics of how things worked.
Ket: Wow. Mine was not nearly so comprehensive, but I went to a really ghetto school, and I am a bit older than you. I do remember watching a video about pregnancy that was very detailed and grossed the guys out.
ZeldaQueen: To be fair, I think the condom on the banana would have gone over very well with my class. And all I can remember of my first lesson on how childbirth works is being incredibly traumatized, some sort of demonstration involving a wool knit drawstring sack, going to lunch right afterwards, and vowing to never, ever have children. I was pretty young and thin-skinned back then, though.
Anywho, at this point in the story we’re introduced to Nora’s best and only friend, Vee Skye. Get used to Vee. We’ll be seeing far too much of her, and will completely hate her guts by the time the series is over. She has only two notable traits (besides being incredibly annoying, which was unintentional), and we’re introduced to one of them right off the bat as she comments on the naked dolls.
“This is exactly why the school outlaws camera phones. Pictures of this in the eZine would be all the evidence I'd need to get the board of education to ax biology. And then we'd have this hour to do something productive-like receive one-on-one tutoring from cute upperclass guys.”
ZeldaQueen: Three guesses as to what one of Vee’s characteristics is. Go on, guess! To give you a hint, howzabout I introduce everyone to our next count?
ALL WOMEN ARE LUSTFUL:1
Ket: Uh. Really. If someone wanted to take a video of this, they still would. And they’re not gonna ax a whole class for this. Teacher yes, but not the whole class.
ZeldaQueen: Incidentally, I just wanted to throw this out there - am I the only one wondering why a sex ed/reproduction class is being taught in Biology? My sex ed classes were taught as units in Health. Biology was for more basic species-wide studies. I recall one movie about how a baby grows in the womb, but that was focused on the cellular division.
Ket: Maybe the school was so small it doesn’t have Health. I watched that pregnancy video in...a class that was totally unrelated to anything to do with biology. I can’t remember which one. Oh! Home Ec!
ZeldaQueen: That could be it. I honestly don’t know how big this school’s supposed to be, though. There’s no mention of it having a particularly small student body, and the town itself seems pretty spread out. So I really can’t say.
Nora teases Vee about looking forward to this class, because ha ha, Vee is sex-crazed. Vee flutters her eyelashes at Nora and tells her, “This class isn't going to teach me anything I don't already know.”
ALL WOMEN ARE LUSTFUL: 2
Considering how little effort Vee puts into her school work, I find that hard to believe. And yes, that’s the sort of stuff you learn in sex ed. What, did Vee think they’d be studying the Kama Sutra or something? Was she expecting their homework to be writing erotic fanfiction?
Then, out of nowhere, Nora comments, “Vee? As in virgin?” I, uh...wait, what? What does that even mean? Ket? Do you have any idea why she said that?
Ket: *Baffled* I don’t know. Is Vee short for virgin? That’d be a pretty awful nickname. Plus, even if Vee has fucked in every position, I really doubt that she’s going to have a dictionary's worth of knowledge about STDs and the reproductive process as far as conception to birth.
ZeldaQueen: I mean, as far as I know, “Vee” is her actual name. I think the joke itself is that Vee sounds like “V” the first letter of virgin and Nora’s teasing Vee about being one… but why? Is the implication supposed to be that virgins can’t have knowledge about sex, or else be experts on it?
SAY WHAT?: 5
Ket: Or that being a virgin is shameful? This makes no fucking sense.
ZeldaQueen: Sadly, virgin-shaming is a thing. There are people who make fun of virgins, portraying them as naive, silly, childish,
Ket: Oh, I know there are. I don’t care how much or little Vee has had sex--Nora’s comment is still baffling.
ZeldaQueen: It’s even more baffling when you consider how the next book is full of slut-shaming. Apparently not having a boyfriend means you’re too picky, but actually letting a guy stick his penis in you means you’re an amoral bitch. But, that’s for later. Right now, I say it’s time for yet another new count. That joke ought to give you an idea of how successful most of the humor of this book is. We shall keep track of all those times we forgot to laugh.
LAUGH, GODDAMMIT: 1
Well, Not Funny Time is over and everyone hurries to their seats as their teacher, Coach McConaughy, blows a whistle and refers to them all as “team”. We’re informed that this is because “Coach considered teaching tenth grade biology a side assignment to his job as varsity basketball coach, and we all knew it.” You know, I can buy a teacher also filling in for an extracurricular activity. But I’m pretty sure he’d get in trouble if he clearly favored said extracurricular activity over the actual school course. Not to mention, if his primary job was coaching basketball, why would he bother getting the qualifications for teaching Biology? And why hasn’t he gotten noise complaints, blowing a whistle to start class?
Ket: I had teachers that also coached sports, but their primary job was still as teacher. I can’t imagine how you’d get away with not giving a shit about your classes and only caring about your basketball team.
ZeldaQueen: Yeah, folks, “Why hasn’t he been fired yet?” will be a phrase you’ll be seeing quite a lot of, in all scenes involving Coach here.
The lesson starts out in the oh-so-professional manner of “It may not have occurred to you kids that sex is more than a fifteen minute trip to the backseat of a car. It's science. And what is science?” This gets several smart-ass responses, which amazingly do sound like snarky ways kids would respond. I myself would say that reproduction is a science, since that actually sounds professional.
Ket: Science is a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws. But that’s not important right now.
ZeldaQueen: No, because we’ll see that Coach here wouldn’t know science if it kicked his ass. He asks Nora for a definition, and she gives the oh-so-specific answer of “The study of something”. Yeah, hon. That’s descriptive. Coach predictably asks for her to give an answer that’s a little more in-depth, and she says that it’s “Knowledge gained through experimentation and observation”. She then promptly gives the mental follow-up of “Lovely. I sounded like I was auditioning for the audiobook of our text.”
Ket: Both are stupid definitions. Yes, many sciences are studies of something, such as math, psychology, biology, whathaveyou. But you can study things that are no way scientific, such as art or film. The second one is dumb because you can experiment with a lot of shit and observe it to gain knowledge, again that have nothing to do with science. Such as fucking.
ZeldaQueen: And of course, like Bella Swan, Nora’s supposed to be all bookish and smart and embarrassed about showing it off. Because nothing makes for a good female role model like being embarrassed about being smart.
In any case, Coach fails to realize how dumb that explanation is, and instead asks Nora to give it in her own words. She “touch[s] the tip of my tongue to my upper lip and trie[s] for a synonym”. Uh, I get the feeling that if I did that tongue thing, I’d be told off for making faces at my teacher. Ket, is this some form of concentration I’m unaware of?
Ket: I do sometimes stick my tongue between my lips when I’m concentrating. It could be her nervous gesture, I guess.
ZeldaQueen: Ah, alright then. She sums it up as “Science is an investigation”, which apparently satisfies him. He follows up on this with “Science requires us to transform into spies”. Uhhhh… not exactly, no. I guess depending on what you’re studying you could see it like that, but that’s a really wonky way to describe it.
Ket: This explanation is also stupid. It would only require you to turn into a spy if you’re trying to study people without them knowing, which is pretty unethical. Being a writer turns you into way more of a spy, for how much most of us people-watch.
ZeldaQueen: Oh, but Ket, if we didn’t go with this stupid spy thing, we wouldn’t get the rest of this chapter and wouldn’t that deprive us!
Nora, for her part, things that Coach’s explanation makes science sound fun (which, going off of something Fitzpatrick said about how she wanted to join the CIA in college because being a spy sounded fun, sounds like Author Appeal here), but knows not to expect much from him. Aaaaand now’s probably as good a time as any to mention that I suspect Coach here is based off of a teacher Fitzpatrick had in school. She mentioned how she heavily drew upon memories of her high school years when writing this book (we’ll get a specific example later), and like with Mervin and Meyer’s “I Could Have Been a Contender” count, this is all really, really uncomfortable. I’ll just leave you with this paragraph from the “About” section of Fitzpatrick’s old website, preserved on her wiki (yes, really).
“My sophomore year, a friend blackmailed me to try out for the basketball team, and I still remember the coach telling me (through clenched teeth) that due to the unbelievably low number of girls trying out that year...I survived the cut. Everyone did. I think he actually thought I coveted a spot on the team. The truth is, I hated every minute of those three-hour practices. And to this day, I resent the coach telling me I looked like I was dancing when I was on the court. Coach: It's called shuffling. Thankfully, I was much better at academics than at sports, and I graduated valedictorian of my class in 1997.”
ZeldaQueen: ...Yeah.
Ket: Becca, if you graduated in 1997, you’re older than me. I’ve been out of high school for over a decade, and my high school experience sucked. Get over it and grow up.
ZeldaQueen: Hell, I graduated in 2008 and I got over all my various “fun” high school memories!
Coach, at this point, turns to Nora and brings up how she and Vee have been sitting beside each other for all of the year and work at the “e-Zine”. I’m going to assume that the e-Zine is some online magazine they have, like an electronic school paper. Does that sound correct? My school only ever had an actual paper newspaper.
Ket: I would assume so? Mine only had an actual newspaper as well, but I’m Christmas Cake, and way too old to know about what these kids do nowadays.
ZeldaQueen: Dubstepping and updating statuses on Facebook, if The Media is to be believed.
Ket: *Snort* the person I know that updates their facebook the most is a male in his mid-forties. I get like, ten new messages from him a day. Are you that bored at your job, sir?
ZeldaQueen: XD I don’t know how much my friends update Facebook, but I’m kind of a caveman in that regard.
In any case, Coach says that “I bet you know quite a bit about each other”, and Fitzpatrick decides to follow this up with some...interesting subtext.
“Vee kicked my leg under our table. I knew what she was thinking. That he had no idea how much we knew about each other. And I don't just mean the secrets we entomb in our diaries. Vee is my un-twin. She's green-eyed, minky blond, and a few pounds over curvy. I'm a smoky eyed brunette with volumes of curly hair that holds its own against even the best flatiron. And I'm all legs, like a bar stool. But there is an invisible thread that ties us together; both of us swear that tie began long before birth. Both of us swear it will continue to hold for the rest of our lives.”
Ket: I actually have a friend like that--we’ve known each other since sixth grade, and she calls me her hetero lifemate. But, this is hilarious to me because there is a concept in Japan and in China as well, I believe, about people being connected by a red string before they were born. Romantically. Not as friends.
ZeldaQueen: It reminds me of a certain quote form Game of Thrones. Oh, what was it again…? Ah, yes!
Cersei Lannister: “Jaime and I are more than brother and sister. We shared a womb. We came into this world together, we belong together.”
Ket: Cersei, I’d be more sympathetic if you weren’t a monstrous bitch.
ZeldaQueen: Funnily enough, we’ll be saying the same for Nora and Vee soon enough.
Anywho, long story short, Coach decides that the best thing to do is change the seating arrangements, permanently for the rest of the year. And since, as Vee points out, it’s April, he decided to do that just before the end of the school year. Coach’s response is that he’s doing this because, well, he’s the teacher and he says so. How...smart? I mean, it’s not like teachers can have students move around the room to work with people they aren’t sitting next to. It’s a whole lot easier!
Ket: His reasoning doesn’t bother me. The reaction from Dumb and Dumbass here does. But we’ll get to that in a bit.
ZeldaQueen: Indeed. For now, Coach goes into way too much detail about how everyone should move around and, by the end of it, Nora is now seated next to a Tall, Dark, and Jerkass kid she doesn’t know. Well gee, I have no clue how this is going to turn out!
Ket: Her not knowing his name baffles me. I was a very shy kid, but I still knew at least the first name of everyone in my classes.
ZeldaQueen: Well, here’s what we get by way of explanation.
“I knew the names of all my classmates … except one. The transfer. Coach never called on him, and he seemed to prefer it that way. He sat slouched one table back, cool black eyes holding a steady gaze forward. Just like always. I didn't for one moment believe he just sat there, day after day, staring into space. He was thinking something, but instinct told me I probably didn't want to know what.
He set his bio text down on the table and slid into Vee's old chair.
I smiled. ‘Hi. I'm Nora.’
His black eyes sliced into me, and the corners of his mouth tilted up.
My heart fumbled a beat and in that pause, a feeling of gloomy darkness seemed to slide like a shadow over me. It vanished in an instant, but I was still staring at him. His smile wasn't friendly. It was a smile that spelled trouble. With a promise.”
ZeldaQueen: So there you have it. She somehow knows he’s a transfer student, but doesn’t know his name because Coach never called on him. Apparently he also has no friends and talks to nobody, even in other classes or when Nora passes him in the halls.
Ket: I call bullshit. Not on him having no friends--I didn’t have any friends in my high school either--but on her not knowing his name at all. Transfers in the middle of the school year are generally a subject of curiosity. And if he was a creepy weirdo sitting in the back of the class with a Kubrick Stare, people would be talking about him.
ILL LOGIC: 8
ZeldaQueen: This is never addressed, though. He interacts with no one, seems to just drop back out of school after this book, has no parents even though he’s clearly meant to be a teenager, and no one thinks it’s weird that a seventeen-year-old is winning Jeeps playing poker and pool against grown men in bars. Of course, besides Nora, Vee, and a handful of other characters, the other members of the student body might as well not exist.
ILL LOGIC: 9
As a note to all aspiring writers, incidentally, if you decide to kick off a romantic couple meeting by having the very sight of the boy inspire gloomy feelings in the girl and have the girl outright say his smile isn’t friendly, you’re not off to a very good start.
And speaking of that last part, “It was a smile that spelled trouble. With a promise”. Really? Thank you for spelling that out for us! I never could have figured it out otherwise!
HAND HOLDING: 2
Ket: And another note to aspiring writers: if one of your leads is uneasy around their supposed love interest and it only gets worse as the story goes on, your book is going to have a trip straight to my s-bend.
ZeldaQueen: As a third tip, love interest aside, please put some damned logic in your books! Because Coach here, after mixing up the seating, starts talking about how human sexuality is a sticky (hur hur) subject that requires mature handling, “And like all science, the best approach is to learn by sleuthing”. Long story short, their intro to their sex unit is… to pair up and “study” each other and do a write-up on it.
...Ket? Does that sound even remotely like a way to start a unit like Sex-Ed?
Ket: Hell no! Number a, the coach’s statement is moronic. The best way to learn science is by study, testing, and experimentation. The last two are not things you want to tell teenagers to do when it comes to sex! Number 2, interviewing another person will tell you nothing about sex. It will tell you about them, sure, but what will you really learn? I’ve had classes where I’ve had to interview classmates for an assignment, but I’m pretty damn sure it wasn’t science!
DID NOT DO THE RESEARCH: 2
ZeldaQueen: The only class where I did anything like this was the one unite on journalism I had in college. And I’m pretty sure that if you tell a group of smart-ass high school students that they’re studying sex and then say they’re supposed to “study” their partners, I’m sure there’d be more than one person asking if that means peeking through bedroom windows.
Ket: Or if that meant they were supposed to go to a closet and make out.
ZeldaQueen: Yep! In any case, sense - this makes none.
ILL LOGIC: 11
SAY WHAT?: 6
And on that nonsensical note, we shall take a break. Tune in next time, for when this all starts to get even dumber.
DID NOT DO THE RESEARCH - 3
SAY WHAT? - 6
ILL LOGIC - 11
JERKASS EXTRAORDINAIRE - 10
RELIGION FAIL - 3
HAND HOLDING - 2
ALL WOMEN ARE LUSTFUL - 2
LAUGH, GODDAMMIT - 1
Onward to: Chapter 1 - Part 2
Back to: Prologue - Part 2
Return to: Table Of Contents
Projection Room Voices: Starting Media in 3...2...1...
Chapter 1 - Part 1
We kick off the first chapter by jumping forward to present day Maine, in the fictional city of Coldwater. We meet our intrepid heroine of this series, Nora Grey.
Ket: You should have crossed out “heroine” too, while you were at it. Also, there is a city in Michigan called Coldwater. Just...just pointing that out.
ZeldaQueen: I suppose it’s a favor, however small, that Fitzpatrick didn’t screw with a real city, like Meyer did. The drawback is that, as we’ll see, it makes navigating this fictional down damned difficult. But that’s for later.
For now, we kick off this exciting tale with… Nora walking into her Biology class and seeing a naked Barbie and Ken pair, with “artificial leaves placed in a few choice locations”, stuck on the blackboard. Huh.
Ket: I wish I could say that it will be the weirdest thing about this goddamn class.
ZeldaQueen: I’m still trying to figure out the purpose of the fig leaves. Barbie and Ken are infamously anatomically incorrect. What, did the teacher buy some underground modified models or something?
Anywho, this weirdosity is explained (for lack of a better word) with the words written on the blackboard, “WELCOME TO HUMAN REPRODUCTION (SEX)”. And… uh, now’s about as good a time as any for me to say that what I know about what high schools teach for this is limited to my own high school’s course. So if I find something unbelievable and it turns to that schools really do do that, I apologize.
Ket: When I learned sex ed, all I remember is a model of the penis, and putting a condom on a banana. Granted, it has been a while for me, so if sex ed has changed in the last...twelve years, I apologize as well.
ZeldaQueen: My class as pretty well-rounded. We were taught about contraceptives, the different chances of effectiveness they had, how they worked and how they potentially failed, STDs, how to treat or avoid STDs, and of course how the reproductive organs themselves worked. I’m pretty sure we all knew already how babies grew and developed in the womb, and I’m positive that most of the class read enough smut from various sources to know the basics of how things worked.
Ket: Wow. Mine was not nearly so comprehensive, but I went to a really ghetto school, and I am a bit older than you. I do remember watching a video about pregnancy that was very detailed and grossed the guys out.
ZeldaQueen: To be fair, I think the condom on the banana would have gone over very well with my class. And all I can remember of my first lesson on how childbirth works is being incredibly traumatized, some sort of demonstration involving a wool knit drawstring sack, going to lunch right afterwards, and vowing to never, ever have children. I was pretty young and thin-skinned back then, though.
Anywho, at this point in the story we’re introduced to Nora’s best and only friend, Vee Skye. Get used to Vee. We’ll be seeing far too much of her, and will completely hate her guts by the time the series is over. She has only two notable traits (besides being incredibly annoying, which was unintentional), and we’re introduced to one of them right off the bat as she comments on the naked dolls.
“This is exactly why the school outlaws camera phones. Pictures of this in the eZine would be all the evidence I'd need to get the board of education to ax biology. And then we'd have this hour to do something productive-like receive one-on-one tutoring from cute upperclass guys.”
ZeldaQueen: Three guesses as to what one of Vee’s characteristics is. Go on, guess! To give you a hint, howzabout I introduce everyone to our next count?
ALL WOMEN ARE LUSTFUL:1
Ket: Uh. Really. If someone wanted to take a video of this, they still would. And they’re not gonna ax a whole class for this. Teacher yes, but not the whole class.
ZeldaQueen: Incidentally, I just wanted to throw this out there - am I the only one wondering why a sex ed/reproduction class is being taught in Biology? My sex ed classes were taught as units in Health. Biology was for more basic species-wide studies. I recall one movie about how a baby grows in the womb, but that was focused on the cellular division.
Ket: Maybe the school was so small it doesn’t have Health. I watched that pregnancy video in...a class that was totally unrelated to anything to do with biology. I can’t remember which one. Oh! Home Ec!
ZeldaQueen: That could be it. I honestly don’t know how big this school’s supposed to be, though. There’s no mention of it having a particularly small student body, and the town itself seems pretty spread out. So I really can’t say.
Nora teases Vee about looking forward to this class, because ha ha, Vee is sex-crazed. Vee flutters her eyelashes at Nora and tells her, “This class isn't going to teach me anything I don't already know.”
ALL WOMEN ARE LUSTFUL: 2
Considering how little effort Vee puts into her school work, I find that hard to believe. And yes, that’s the sort of stuff you learn in sex ed. What, did Vee think they’d be studying the Kama Sutra or something? Was she expecting their homework to be writing erotic fanfiction?
Then, out of nowhere, Nora comments, “Vee? As in virgin?” I, uh...wait, what? What does that even mean? Ket? Do you have any idea why she said that?
Ket: *Baffled* I don’t know. Is Vee short for virgin? That’d be a pretty awful nickname. Plus, even if Vee has fucked in every position, I really doubt that she’s going to have a dictionary's worth of knowledge about STDs and the reproductive process as far as conception to birth.
ZeldaQueen: I mean, as far as I know, “Vee” is her actual name. I think the joke itself is that Vee sounds like “V” the first letter of virgin and Nora’s teasing Vee about being one… but why? Is the implication supposed to be that virgins can’t have knowledge about sex, or else be experts on it?
SAY WHAT?: 5
Ket: Or that being a virgin is shameful? This makes no fucking sense.
ZeldaQueen: Sadly, virgin-shaming is a thing. There are people who make fun of virgins, portraying them as naive, silly, childish,
Ket: Oh, I know there are. I don’t care how much or little Vee has had sex--Nora’s comment is still baffling.
ZeldaQueen: It’s even more baffling when you consider how the next book is full of slut-shaming. Apparently not having a boyfriend means you’re too picky, but actually letting a guy stick his penis in you means you’re an amoral bitch. But, that’s for later. Right now, I say it’s time for yet another new count. That joke ought to give you an idea of how successful most of the humor of this book is. We shall keep track of all those times we forgot to laugh.
LAUGH, GODDAMMIT: 1
Well, Not Funny Time is over and everyone hurries to their seats as their teacher, Coach McConaughy, blows a whistle and refers to them all as “team”. We’re informed that this is because “Coach considered teaching tenth grade biology a side assignment to his job as varsity basketball coach, and we all knew it.” You know, I can buy a teacher also filling in for an extracurricular activity. But I’m pretty sure he’d get in trouble if he clearly favored said extracurricular activity over the actual school course. Not to mention, if his primary job was coaching basketball, why would he bother getting the qualifications for teaching Biology? And why hasn’t he gotten noise complaints, blowing a whistle to start class?
Ket: I had teachers that also coached sports, but their primary job was still as teacher. I can’t imagine how you’d get away with not giving a shit about your classes and only caring about your basketball team.
ZeldaQueen: Yeah, folks, “Why hasn’t he been fired yet?” will be a phrase you’ll be seeing quite a lot of, in all scenes involving Coach here.
The lesson starts out in the oh-so-professional manner of “It may not have occurred to you kids that sex is more than a fifteen minute trip to the backseat of a car. It's science. And what is science?” This gets several smart-ass responses, which amazingly do sound like snarky ways kids would respond. I myself would say that reproduction is a science, since that actually sounds professional.
Ket: Science is a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws. But that’s not important right now.
ZeldaQueen: No, because we’ll see that Coach here wouldn’t know science if it kicked his ass. He asks Nora for a definition, and she gives the oh-so-specific answer of “The study of something”. Yeah, hon. That’s descriptive. Coach predictably asks for her to give an answer that’s a little more in-depth, and she says that it’s “Knowledge gained through experimentation and observation”. She then promptly gives the mental follow-up of “Lovely. I sounded like I was auditioning for the audiobook of our text.”
Ket: Both are stupid definitions. Yes, many sciences are studies of something, such as math, psychology, biology, whathaveyou. But you can study things that are no way scientific, such as art or film. The second one is dumb because you can experiment with a lot of shit and observe it to gain knowledge, again that have nothing to do with science. Such as fucking.
ZeldaQueen: And of course, like Bella Swan, Nora’s supposed to be all bookish and smart and embarrassed about showing it off. Because nothing makes for a good female role model like being embarrassed about being smart.
In any case, Coach fails to realize how dumb that explanation is, and instead asks Nora to give it in her own words. She “touch[s] the tip of my tongue to my upper lip and trie[s] for a synonym”. Uh, I get the feeling that if I did that tongue thing, I’d be told off for making faces at my teacher. Ket, is this some form of concentration I’m unaware of?
Ket: I do sometimes stick my tongue between my lips when I’m concentrating. It could be her nervous gesture, I guess.
ZeldaQueen: Ah, alright then. She sums it up as “Science is an investigation”, which apparently satisfies him. He follows up on this with “Science requires us to transform into spies”. Uhhhh… not exactly, no. I guess depending on what you’re studying you could see it like that, but that’s a really wonky way to describe it.
Ket: This explanation is also stupid. It would only require you to turn into a spy if you’re trying to study people without them knowing, which is pretty unethical. Being a writer turns you into way more of a spy, for how much most of us people-watch.
ZeldaQueen: Oh, but Ket, if we didn’t go with this stupid spy thing, we wouldn’t get the rest of this chapter and wouldn’t that deprive us!
Nora, for her part, things that Coach’s explanation makes science sound fun (which, going off of something Fitzpatrick said about how she wanted to join the CIA in college because being a spy sounded fun, sounds like Author Appeal here), but knows not to expect much from him. Aaaaand now’s probably as good a time as any to mention that I suspect Coach here is based off of a teacher Fitzpatrick had in school. She mentioned how she heavily drew upon memories of her high school years when writing this book (we’ll get a specific example later), and like with Mervin and Meyer’s “I Could Have Been a Contender” count, this is all really, really uncomfortable. I’ll just leave you with this paragraph from the “About” section of Fitzpatrick’s old website, preserved on her wiki (yes, really).
“My sophomore year, a friend blackmailed me to try out for the basketball team, and I still remember the coach telling me (through clenched teeth) that due to the unbelievably low number of girls trying out that year...I survived the cut. Everyone did. I think he actually thought I coveted a spot on the team. The truth is, I hated every minute of those three-hour practices. And to this day, I resent the coach telling me I looked like I was dancing when I was on the court. Coach: It's called shuffling. Thankfully, I was much better at academics than at sports, and I graduated valedictorian of my class in 1997.”
ZeldaQueen: ...Yeah.
Ket: Becca, if you graduated in 1997, you’re older than me. I’ve been out of high school for over a decade, and my high school experience sucked. Get over it and grow up.
ZeldaQueen: Hell, I graduated in 2008 and I got over all my various “fun” high school memories!
Coach, at this point, turns to Nora and brings up how she and Vee have been sitting beside each other for all of the year and work at the “e-Zine”. I’m going to assume that the e-Zine is some online magazine they have, like an electronic school paper. Does that sound correct? My school only ever had an actual paper newspaper.
Ket: I would assume so? Mine only had an actual newspaper as well, but I’m Christmas Cake, and way too old to know about what these kids do nowadays.
ZeldaQueen: Dubstepping and updating statuses on Facebook, if The Media is to be believed.
Ket: *Snort* the person I know that updates their facebook the most is a male in his mid-forties. I get like, ten new messages from him a day. Are you that bored at your job, sir?
ZeldaQueen: XD I don’t know how much my friends update Facebook, but I’m kind of a caveman in that regard.
In any case, Coach says that “I bet you know quite a bit about each other”, and Fitzpatrick decides to follow this up with some...interesting subtext.
“Vee kicked my leg under our table. I knew what she was thinking. That he had no idea how much we knew about each other. And I don't just mean the secrets we entomb in our diaries. Vee is my un-twin. She's green-eyed, minky blond, and a few pounds over curvy. I'm a smoky eyed brunette with volumes of curly hair that holds its own against even the best flatiron. And I'm all legs, like a bar stool. But there is an invisible thread that ties us together; both of us swear that tie began long before birth. Both of us swear it will continue to hold for the rest of our lives.”
Ket: I actually have a friend like that--we’ve known each other since sixth grade, and she calls me her hetero lifemate. But, this is hilarious to me because there is a concept in Japan and in China as well, I believe, about people being connected by a red string before they were born. Romantically. Not as friends.
ZeldaQueen: It reminds me of a certain quote form Game of Thrones. Oh, what was it again…? Ah, yes!
Cersei Lannister: “Jaime and I are more than brother and sister. We shared a womb. We came into this world together, we belong together.”
Ket: Cersei, I’d be more sympathetic if you weren’t a monstrous bitch.
ZeldaQueen: Funnily enough, we’ll be saying the same for Nora and Vee soon enough.
Anywho, long story short, Coach decides that the best thing to do is change the seating arrangements, permanently for the rest of the year. And since, as Vee points out, it’s April, he decided to do that just before the end of the school year. Coach’s response is that he’s doing this because, well, he’s the teacher and he says so. How...smart? I mean, it’s not like teachers can have students move around the room to work with people they aren’t sitting next to. It’s a whole lot easier!
Ket: His reasoning doesn’t bother me. The reaction from Dumb and Dumbass here does. But we’ll get to that in a bit.
ZeldaQueen: Indeed. For now, Coach goes into way too much detail about how everyone should move around and, by the end of it, Nora is now seated next to a Tall, Dark, and Jerkass kid she doesn’t know. Well gee, I have no clue how this is going to turn out!
Ket: Her not knowing his name baffles me. I was a very shy kid, but I still knew at least the first name of everyone in my classes.
ZeldaQueen: Well, here’s what we get by way of explanation.
“I knew the names of all my classmates … except one. The transfer. Coach never called on him, and he seemed to prefer it that way. He sat slouched one table back, cool black eyes holding a steady gaze forward. Just like always. I didn't for one moment believe he just sat there, day after day, staring into space. He was thinking something, but instinct told me I probably didn't want to know what.
He set his bio text down on the table and slid into Vee's old chair.
I smiled. ‘Hi. I'm Nora.’
His black eyes sliced into me, and the corners of his mouth tilted up.
My heart fumbled a beat and in that pause, a feeling of gloomy darkness seemed to slide like a shadow over me. It vanished in an instant, but I was still staring at him. His smile wasn't friendly. It was a smile that spelled trouble. With a promise.”
ZeldaQueen: So there you have it. She somehow knows he’s a transfer student, but doesn’t know his name because Coach never called on him. Apparently he also has no friends and talks to nobody, even in other classes or when Nora passes him in the halls.
Ket: I call bullshit. Not on him having no friends--I didn’t have any friends in my high school either--but on her not knowing his name at all. Transfers in the middle of the school year are generally a subject of curiosity. And if he was a creepy weirdo sitting in the back of the class with a Kubrick Stare, people would be talking about him.
ILL LOGIC: 8
ZeldaQueen: This is never addressed, though. He interacts with no one, seems to just drop back out of school after this book, has no parents even though he’s clearly meant to be a teenager, and no one thinks it’s weird that a seventeen-year-old is winning Jeeps playing poker and pool against grown men in bars. Of course, besides Nora, Vee, and a handful of other characters, the other members of the student body might as well not exist.
ILL LOGIC: 9
As a note to all aspiring writers, incidentally, if you decide to kick off a romantic couple meeting by having the very sight of the boy inspire gloomy feelings in the girl and have the girl outright say his smile isn’t friendly, you’re not off to a very good start.
And speaking of that last part, “It was a smile that spelled trouble. With a promise”. Really? Thank you for spelling that out for us! I never could have figured it out otherwise!
HAND HOLDING: 2
Ket: And another note to aspiring writers: if one of your leads is uneasy around their supposed love interest and it only gets worse as the story goes on, your book is going to have a trip straight to my s-bend.
ZeldaQueen: As a third tip, love interest aside, please put some damned logic in your books! Because Coach here, after mixing up the seating, starts talking about how human sexuality is a sticky (hur hur) subject that requires mature handling, “And like all science, the best approach is to learn by sleuthing”. Long story short, their intro to their sex unit is… to pair up and “study” each other and do a write-up on it.
...Ket? Does that sound even remotely like a way to start a unit like Sex-Ed?
Ket: Hell no! Number a, the coach’s statement is moronic. The best way to learn science is by study, testing, and experimentation. The last two are not things you want to tell teenagers to do when it comes to sex! Number 2, interviewing another person will tell you nothing about sex. It will tell you about them, sure, but what will you really learn? I’ve had classes where I’ve had to interview classmates for an assignment, but I’m pretty damn sure it wasn’t science!
DID NOT DO THE RESEARCH: 2
ZeldaQueen: The only class where I did anything like this was the one unite on journalism I had in college. And I’m pretty sure that if you tell a group of smart-ass high school students that they’re studying sex and then say they’re supposed to “study” their partners, I’m sure there’d be more than one person asking if that means peeking through bedroom windows.
Ket: Or if that meant they were supposed to go to a closet and make out.
ZeldaQueen: Yep! In any case, sense - this makes none.
ILL LOGIC: 11
SAY WHAT?: 6
And on that nonsensical note, we shall take a break. Tune in next time, for when this all starts to get even dumber.
DID NOT DO THE RESEARCH - 3
SAY WHAT? - 6
ILL LOGIC - 11
JERKASS EXTRAORDINAIRE - 10
RELIGION FAIL - 3
HAND HOLDING - 2
ALL WOMEN ARE LUSTFUL - 2
LAUGH, GODDAMMIT - 1
Onward to: Chapter 1 - Part 2
Back to: Prologue - Part 2
Return to: Table Of Contents