Last time on Beautiful Creatures, there’s a beautiful creature I mean girl yes girl no objectification here.


9.11

The storm had been building all week. There was a weather advisory on every radio station I could get any reception from, which wasn’t saying much considering the Beater only got three stations, all AM.

Arg!

This is the worst kind of bad writing, the kind where it could have worked fine if only someone was thinking.

The core idea of these two sentences is “The storm is srs bsns.” But then it sidetracks into “lol shitty car” and indeed, that isn’t saying much.

All that needed to be done was to reverse the order of the sentences. First say the car’s shitty radio only gets three stations, then say that it doesn’t matter today because they’re all the same weather advisory, because the storm is so bad all radio stations in the area have been taken over to broadcast the warning. There, now the focus is on how bad the storm is.

Also christ kid do you enjoy your emo that much? If you like the radio, then just buy a damn radio. If you want something to listen to, you’ve got an ipod. And doesn’t that come with radio anyway?

The radio was reduced to static, but I heard something. I cranked the volume and the song flooded through the crappy speakers.
Sixteen Moons.
The song that had disappeared from my playlist. The song no one else seemed to hear. The song Lena Duchannes had been playing on the viola. The song that was driving me crazy.

Okay book let me stop you there.

He has no reason to have the radio on. You just said that the car has only three stations, those three stations are AM and therefore talk radio, and today they’re all just telling people to not drive around like idiots in this weather, and also he has an ipod. And we know he takes the ipod to school because he was flipping through the song list on the way to school back in the first chapter.

Now. If you wanted him to have the radio on right then, all you have to do is remove the ipod. In fact, that’ll also fix the earlier scene where the magic ipod gets a song. And as a bonus, the more you avoid modern technology, the less obvious your missing internet is.

So. In the morning, his radio alarm clock goes off. He hears the song while half asleep, but when he mentions it to his friend, who would actually know all about music instead of just listening to a narrow genre, the guy hasn’t heard it before, and it isn’t played again on the station in the car, because crappy or not, car radios can get FM and a guy who’s really into music would have wanted to fix that anyway. (Really, just how old would a caar have to be to have nothing but three AM stations? I think you’d be passing over old and cheap into old insanely pricey to get there.)

There we go. Made the first appearance of the song less stupid, explained the radio being on for the third.

Anyway then he nearly runs over someone.

Lena Duchannes.
I couldn’t breathe. I knew she had green eyes; I’d seen them before. But tonight they looked different—different from any eyes I had ever seen. They were huge and unnaturally green, an electric green, like the lightning from the storm.

So you mean exactly like you last described them, only a bit more normal since before you were claiming they were an all-new shade of green that had never existed before but now you’ve dialed it down to just electric green.

Lena’s hair whipped in the wind around her, dripping with rain. I took a step toward her, and it hit me. Wet lemons. Wet rosemary.

You’ve been sitting next to her and stuff, if she actually smells like that normally you’d have noticed.

Anyway, he grabs her wrist and sees scratches where he grabbed for her. So while he’s waking up with unexplained dirt under his nails, she’s waking up with unexplained nail marks. Apparently even when they’re vampire werewolf fairies, women still get the bad end of the deal.

When I touched her, electricity ran through my body. Lightning struck the tree not ten feet from where we were standing, splitting the trunk neatly in half. It began to smolder.

Okay, that’s sounding less like a metaphor for true love and more like a metaphor for this being a bad idea.

“Are you crazy? Or just a terrible driver?” She backed away from me, her green eyes flashing—with anger? With something.

No, I think anger’s a good bet, maybe a side of fear from, you know, almost getting run over by you.

Anyway he just babbles about how she’s her and real and he’s not crazy because she’s right there.

“Not for long.” She turned her back on me and started up the road. This wasn’t going the way I had imagined it.

That’s because you almost ran her over and don’t seem to even care about that fact. Surely the fact she’s Dream Waifu should just make it even worse how you almost killed her?

“It was you in the dreams. And the song. The weird song on my iPod.”
She whirled around. “What dreams? What song? Are you drunk, or is this some kind of joke?”
“I know it’s you. You have the marks on your wrist.”
She turned her hand over and looked down, confused. “These? I have a dog. Get over it.”
But I knew I wasn’t wrong. I could see the face from my dream so clearly now. Was it possible she didn’t know?

Well that went into creepy stalkerville fast. She’s handling this pretty well, all things considered – remember she’s alone in the middle of nowhere with a crazy guy who just grabbed her.

She pulled up her hood and began the long walk to Ravenwood in the pouring rain. I caught up with her. “Here’s a hint. Next time, don’t get out of your car in the middle of the road during a storm. Call 911.”

I did not cut out some sense-making transition there. It goes from him babbling nonsense to talking down to her. He has still not expressed the slightest remorse over almost killing her.

Anyway, he then offers her a ride. She refuses. He insists. She keeps walking away.

“Come on.”
“What?”
“The car. Get in. With me.”
She looked at me, and for a second I wasn’t sure if she was going to give in. “I guess it’s safer than walking. With you on the road, anyway.”

So offering didn’t work, reasoning it was a bad idea didn’t work, but alphamaleing it up by just ordering her in, that was a winner.

I snuck a look.
Even though she was a pain, she was beautiful.

Welp there goes the last bit of like I had for the protagonist. He’s whiny, then he goes on about how he’s not into the popular girls and how he hates them and their stupid mouths, and now he’s doing the same goddamn thing to the one person who supposedly met his smartness and non-town standards, because god, the bitch just will not let go the almost killing her thing, but at least she’s easy on the eyes right?

And then he goes on about her appearance again, this time mentioning she has a small birthmark under her eye that’s crescent shaped of all things, and that probably means she’s a special magic werewolf, and then explains that she doesn’t look like any of those other girls.

She pulled the wet poncho over her head. Her black T-shirt and jeans clung to her like she’d fallen in a swimming pool. Her gray vest dripped a steady stream of water onto the pleather seat. “You’re s-staring.”

Yeah, his next advice is to take off the vest. For her own good, really, and not for the better look at her tits. At least he’s too awkward to keep staring at her and instead gets her a sleeping bag from the backseat to try to warm up with, and that helps. So whatever supernatural she is, she’s warmblooded. Considering how human vampires are these days, that actually doesn’t narrow things down.

I tried to keep my eyes on the road, tried to remember the rest of the dream—some detail, one thing that would prove to her that she was, I don’t know, her, and that I was me.

Yeah, that’s totally a better idea than just telling her you’ve been having the dreams and seeing if she has the same ones.

He nearly misses the turn for Ravenwood Plantation, and she tells him to turn.

I felt sick. We climbed the hill up toward Ravenwood Manor, the great house. I had been so wrapped up in who she was, I had forgotten who she was. The girl I’d been dreaming about for months, the girl I couldn’t stop thinking about, was Macon Ravenwood’s niece. And I was driving her home to the Haunted Mansion—that’s what we called it.
That’s what I had called it.

And…?

I still see no reason why it matters so much to you that she’s living with a recluse, especially when you’ve explicitly pointed out your dad has gotten just as bad about the never ever leaving the house thing, and when you’ve made it equally clear you hate everyone so you shouldn’t care about their opinions.

He decides to make smalltalk about why she moved her, and she says she’s lived lots of places because her parents are dead and she bounces around between relatives. Her grandmother is the main one, but she left on a trip so she’s dumped on the uncle now.

“My mom died, too. Car accident.” I had no idea why I said that. I spent most of my time trying not to talk about it.
“I’m sorry.”
I didn’t say it was okay. I had a feeling she was the kind of girl who knew it wasn’t.

Okay, so she’s saying she has a shitty life where she’s constantly moving to new places and dumped on various people who apparently don’t want her all that much, and your response is WELL MY MOM’S DEAD TOO SO THERE, and then when she says the only thing you can say in response to that, he just stops talking so they can bask in the awkward silence.

They get there and the lightning seems to have stopped, and her eyes are less intense and apparently smaller? So maybe she’s some sort of electric thing. Are there any electrical monsters? All I’m coming up are D&D blue dragons. Being a shapeshifted blue dragon would be pretty cool.

Anyway, she says she can go in by herself because her uncle is super shy.

I stared at her smiling at me, almost like we were friends, which was impossible. I started to feel claustrophobic, like I had to get out of there. “It was nothing. I mean, it’s cool. Don’t worry about it.” I flipped up the hood of my basketball sweatshirt, the way Emory did when one of the girls he’d blown off tried to talk to him in the hall.
She looked at me, shaking her head, and tossed the sleeping bag at me, a little too hard. The smile was gone. “Whatever. I’ll see you around.”

Well, something sure just happened, but no clue what.

Anyway, apparently she really does smell of lemon rosemary, because now the sleeping bag smells of it.

And he warns her about how if she sits elsewhere in class the teacher won’t call on her, and she says maybe she likes talking in class, and he drives off and then he finds a silver button from her vest. Okay.