9.12

He doesn’t have any dreams and nothing weird happens that morning, omg omg so exciting! Maybe the rest of the book can be all the other weird stuff not happening anymore, wouldn’t that be awesome.

I had told Link the whole story. Well, maybe not the whole story. Even best friends have their limits.

The book naturally does not clarify which parts he didn’t tell, because that’d actually be pertinent information. It does involve mentioning he was dreaming of her, but no way of knowing if he said what the dreams were even about.

“You didn’t hook up or anything. You didn’t go in the Haunted Mansion, right? And you never saw, you know… him?” Even Link couldn’t bring himself to say his name. It was one thing to hang out with a beautiful girl, in any situation. It was another thing to hang out with Old Man Ravenwood.

Yeah I’m sure sighting the most mysterious guy in a few hundred miles will definitely make everyone hate and shun you and definitely not hang on your every word.

Anyway, his friend just reiterate that all that matters is that no one ever knows he gave the hot new chick a ride because that will be social suicide.

Then it’s time for English class and he repeats again that wow Lena is so different than anyone ever and different than anyone is totally his fetish it’s like they were made for each other. He’s so busy thinking about how cool she looks he doesn’t notice that she’s right there. He stops without warning and she walks into him.

The second we touched, the ceiling light shorted out over us, and a shower of sparks rained down on our heads.

Is the EVERYTHING ABVOUT THIS IS A DISASTER symbolism intentional? Please god let it be intentional and not some shit about their incredible passion.

Anyway she “jokes” about him trying to kill me for the second time in two days, Ethan?” in a way without anything particularly jokey but I’m assuming that bit’s just writing fail, and then says “That’s what you said last night.” ooooooooooh!

Last night. The two little words that could forever change your life at Jackson

What’s amazing is I don’t think the book is even considering the issue of them sleeping together, which is exactly where every student in the school’s mind should have instantly gone. Incidentally, even if she looked like a mangy dog’s corpse I’m pretty sure he’d still get points for scoring at all at age sixteen, so he needs to shut up about how this is the worst thing ever.

Then she goes and sits right in the Zone of Having To Talk In English Class and really, is this really that awful? It’s fucking English class! The discussion topic is talk about yourself and your thoughts. If you outright didn’t read the book, I can understand the problem – even then bullshitting your way through has got to be more interesting then just sitting there – but otherwise what exactly is the problem here?

Now, sure, maybe you want to use that time to talk to friends or whatever, but she doesn’t have any and you hate everyone. If nothing else, your English teacher is educated and her choice of a book about small-town bigotry suggests she’s not another Civil War fetishizer.

But no, this is proof There was no telling Lena Duchannes where she could or couldn’t sit. and not that maybe it’s not some horrible experience for her. No, clearly it’s more impressive for her to be the sort of person willing to totally fuck themself over just to avoid taking anyone’s advice.

So he sits next to her, and then EMILY THE BITCH WHORE sits next to her as well. OH NO. Also, her posse, who Emothan takes creepy delight in explaining how not worthy they are and always will be. (even though she was on a perpetual diet she just couldn’t shed those last ten pounds. It wasn’t her fault; she was always trying. Ate the pie and left the crust. Double the biscuits and half the gravy. I feel this is probably an insult about how it’s really her fault for trying but not trying hard enough.)

Mrs. English looked up from her desk, suspicious.

So it’s not that she actually can’t see and is getting tricked by their brilliant sit-in-the-back strategy. She just doesn’t want to deal with the brats and likes a ready excuse. This also explains why she has so many extra seats in her class so that they can all normally sit far in the back.

Emily talks in dialect a bit, because remember, she’s dumb and unworthy of our narrator, and then she and her group studiously ignore poor little Lena.

The girl freeze-out—today it was negative fifteen.

And yeah, there’s really no way to believe this is a male narrator by now. He’s completely in tune with girl social drama while his concept of boy socializing is that boys hang out and talk about hot chicks and cars and other boring stuff he has no interest in.

Anyway, so their teacher wants to talk about the social conflict in To Kill a Mockingbird and it’s all strangely fitting because, you know, always is.

“Who knows why Atticus is willing to defend Tom Robinson, in the face of small-mindedness and racism?”
“I bet Lena Ravenwood knows,” Eden said, smiling innocently at Mrs. English.

You’d think the book would be sneering at what an idiot the girls are to not realize Atticus is, you know, kind of the hero and all, but no, it’s not even bright enough to realize it’s writing them as idiots.

Also, for those keeping track, we’re in the south, they’re talking about a book set in a town like theirs where racism was a big feature, and there are either no black students in the class or their supernatural contribution to the story is that they turn invisible around white people.

And then even more explicitly supernatural stuff kicks in.

Lena shifted her weight; her chair scraped loudly against the floor. I leaned forward in mine, trying to become a wall between Lena and Emily’s minions like I could physically deflect their comments.
You can’t.
What? I sat up, startled.

Sooooooo sudden telepathy. Seriously. Anyway, she’s picking up his thoughts but doesn’t seem to realize he’s also hearing hers even when half of his thoughts are about how he’s hearing hers. Either that or there’s just nothing surprising about it to her and that’s why she doesn’t seem to be reacting.

Anyway the irredeemable bitch whores say that maybe Old Man Ravenwood would lure kids away to murder them and Lena starts thinking Shut up and I said shut up and no, Lena, you definitely thought instead of saying it and we learn the guy’s name is Melchizedek which they are bible-racist against. I ask you, what even is the point of small towns if you can’t name your kid a random name from the bible?

“My grandmamma says that’s an evil name.”

Maybe that’s because your grammy’s a devilworshipper, given that it’s the name of a high priest of God. I mean I’m assuming this is supposed to be all about smallmindedness and stuff, but it seems like the conversation should end on it being from the bible. I’d sooner believe you could name a kid Jezebel and get that past them because hey, it’s a string of letters that is in the bible, it must be good.

I think the book is getting all this because the guy is the king of Salem and Salem=witches and isn’t that so super fucking clever.

Anyway, Lena-waifu freaks out at all this because I guess she’s just that offended by nonsensical stupid.

Now the voice was so loud, I grabbed my ears. The grinding stopped. Glass went flying, splintering into the air, as the window shattered out of nowhere—the window right across from our row in the classroom, right next to where Lena stood, sharpening her pencil. Right next to Charlotte, Eden, Emily, and me. They screamed and dove out of their seats. That’s when I realized what that creaking sound had been. Pressure. Tiny cracks in the glass, spreading out like fingers, until the window collapsed inward like it had been pulled by a thread.

And she’s all oh no i totally didn’t mean to do that because nothing says women with supernatural power like them being dangerous and being unable to control it.

So she runs out and everyone assumes she hit the window herself.

He’s still hearing her thoughts when he follows her. She tells him not to bother.

It wasn’t just Lena. She wasn’t the first. I’d watched them do it, my whole life.

See, this is the first sign of the main character not being a pile of shit. Being motivated by the weight of everything so far is actually pretty solid compared to it only mattering when it’s Hot Dream Girl Future Waifu. Of course, I’m not actually convinced of any of it, since that is exactly how it’s playing out. At the least it’d have helped to see other bullying before now that he was uncomfortable, and also if his inner narration for all the girls wasn’t the bullying, judgemental nastiness. Oh, and also if there was less about how super not she is.

I knew what I was doing.
You don’t. You think you do, but you don’t.
She was there in my head again, as if she’d always been there.

At this point it’s sounding exactly like they’re literally talking to each other, since he’s responding to her saying this is a bad idea. And even if to her, sudden telepathy is just another Tuesday, shouldn’t he be reacting to it in some way?

The idea that the supernatural stuff is actually totally mundane to everyone in this town could be kind of fun. It’s not like he’s in denial or anything, it’s just that after the thousandth time you’ve accidentally formed a telepathic link, it stops being cool and starts being boring.

I read a book called Slow Funeral, which was also a small town and where magic was mostly there to ruin lives. What was fantastic to us seemed boring to them, while technology was the promise of another world with new, better opportunities.

Anyway, he’s sure she ran home. Even if home was Ravenwood, and she had gone home to Gatlin’s own Boo Radley.

Well, she’s got a car and she’s been all over, so actually, there’s a perfectly good chance she’d respond by just driving blindly to anywhere but here – not that it’d be a good reaction, but freaking out and running out of class was hardly the best reaction either. Depends mostly on if she’s actually close to her uncle, and there’s really no way to say – all we know is she cares enough she didn’t like hearing them insulting him, and that could just be that she didn’t like them indirectly saying all that stuff about her.

He goes there and explains he’s not scared because it’s not like a list of shit in his life, but then says that all the unusual shit in his life has nothing on this place, which would seem to mean that yes he is so what’s and then I remember I hate him and I stop caring.

If anyone had told me a month ago that I would ever walk past those gates, up that hill, and set foot anywhere on the grounds of Ravenwood, I would’ve said they were crazy. In a town like Gatlin, where you can see everything coming, I wouldn’t have seen this.

I’m starting to think the problem is less that everything in your town is boring and predictable and more that you, personally, are incredibly boring and predictable. Maybe later you could become an accountant and then complain about how your life sure is full of doing math, maybe moving will fix that.

Anyway the house is super old and falling apart, and over the door is some weird symbols that look like moon phases. Werewolves or magic?

He knocks, there’s no response But then I heard it, the familiar melody. Sixteen Moons. She was here somewhere. or he could just be hallucinating it again, unless we’re to believe she was also in his ipod. Opening the door he finds that not only is the place in perfect condition inside, but it’s absolutely supernatural because there’s also light coming in from the windows that are covered in vines and dirt outside.

So it seems like it’s preserved in the past except in addition to being brightly sunlit it’s brand new. There was no antique period furniture or oil paintings of the Ravenwoods who came before Old Man Ravenwood, no antebellum heirlooms. This place looked more like a page out of a furniture catalog. Overstuffed couches and chairs and glass-topped tables, stacked with coffee table books.

And…actually, this seems kind of disappointed compared to the time displacement option. And even if we accept the lose of time travel as an inherently cool thing, we’re still left to contend with Old Man Ravenwood apparently being super into suburban furniture magazines to make his house look like one, and on top of that, that he collects coffee table books for all the people who never come over.

It’s just…I don’t know, lazy. All it’s telling is is that there’s something weird going on, but nothing about the guy’s character, unless he really is a weirdo who designs his house out of magazines even though no one ever comes over.

Then some black dog or maybe-wolf (no elaboration on why he assumes that’s an option) appears with a leather collar that’s impressively visible for him to be noting that and a silver moon charm dangling on that.

There was something odd about its eyes. They were too round, too human-looking.

This is not actually difficult. Human eyes are the ones with the whites in them. Does it have that? Then human. No? Then not human. Wasn’t that easy?

The wolf-dog growled at me and bared its teeth. The growl became loud and shrill, more like a scream. I did what anyone would do.
I ran.

What I did was stand still and not do anything threatening, which I must say worked much better than inciting the dog by running away from it. Not everyone is a raging coward who’s also ignorant of how dogs work.

Anyway, this is apparently a very fat, arthritic wolf-dog, because running away works great instead of triggering the dog to tear out a chunk of leg. But for some reason he doesn’t run into his car but through the plantation fields and former orchards and finds an ancient walled garden maybe even a secret garden, like something out of a book my mother would have read growing up in Savannah.

If you like books so much, why didn’t you read The Secret Garden yourself? And then you’d have known that the secret garden wasn’t secret because it was a walled garden.

Anyway, the garden is full of rosemary and lemon trees, which I assume the book thinks is answering the question of why that smell keeps showing up instead of further confusing me about what parts of things are real and what parts are supernatural.

Lena of course is there, so, uh, she smells of lemon and rosemary from hanging out in this place? and makes a bid for Emothan’s emocrown by saying everyone hates her and anyone who doesn’t hate her just doesn’t know her well enough. He says they’re all just jealous of how cool and worldly she is, and she says that switching schools constantly actually isn’t huge fun and her only friend is her dog, so apparently it’s just a dog.

They stare at the clouds and as she waves her hand, the cloud seems to change in response. She explains she hates the stupid dyed blonde bitches but she also cares what they think and that makes her even dumber, which is a surprisingly sane observation for this book. He tells her he reads novels.

Tolstoy. Salinger. Vonnegut.

I would not talk to anyone who said that.

It’s not even about whether or not I like the books in question, it’s that you just listed off the back of an English syllabi. You’re not telling me what you like to read, you’re namedropping well-known authors. If you like to read, then you should be reading all sorts of stuff, not just the tiny handful that makes up American literary canon, and even if hypothetically your tastes exactly align with English syllabi you’d still be doing more than just giving the names. (He also reads Silver Surfer but only at school. I think the author probably doesn’t much know what modern comics are like.)

But she responds by saying she’s into poetry, so I guess they’re a pretentious match. He, desperate to avoid talking about her interests, quickly shifts the subject to what the fuck was that anyway?

“I really don’t know. Things like that just happen to me, sometimes. I can’t control it.”

Like every other powerful woman ever! Bitches be crazy.

Also she accidentally blurts out that yeah she totally knew about the dreams and was just acting because she wanted to keep him from getting involved with her or something because she has a tragic terrible destiny. So she’s all the boring parts of Edward with none of the nighttime creepering and brake cutting, it seems.

Then he touches a thing and suddenly it’s flashback time!


Mud clung to the bottom of her skirts, causing her to stumble every few feet on the voluminous folds of fabric, but she forced herself to keep moving.

It’s hard being super rich, because one day you’ll be trying to get somewhere and your expensive clothes will weigh you down. And your only options will be to rip it off or keep going while tripping over it, and you sure as hell aren’t going to rip it because then how will people know how rich you are?

She could hear the soldiers shouting orders of murder.
“Burn down those houses. Let the Rebels feel the weight of their defeat.
Burn it all!”
…
Genevieve watched the homes of her neighbors, of her friends and family, surrender to the flames. And in the worst of circumstances, many of those friends and relatives surrendered as well, eaten alive by the flames in the very homes where they were born.

Oh for fuck’s sake.

The myth of Sherman’s slaughterfest is exactly as much southern apologia as the War of Northern Aggression. He burned the industry of the south because they were selling that shit for more guns to shoot Union soldiers with. He also did his best to destroy records so that land redistribution had a better chance of happening – and since we all know forty acres and a mule didn’t happen even with that aid, he was clearly right in being concerned. They did not rape and slaughter their way through civilians. They did not burn everything in sight. Admittedly, it was worst in South Carolina, where this takes place, but on the other hand, South Carolina started the war and people were a little upset by that, and even there a lot of the destruction was just done for practical reasons.

Sherman is credited with the concept of total war, but he deserves to be lauded for successfully avoiding that – this was the polar opposite of firebombing civilian targets the way modern warfare is done. They did not harm civilians. They systematically went after military targets, giving those there time to flee before it was destroyed, and went after the rich plantation-owner’s assets to cripple the south economically and make a point that if they wanted to, they could raze the entire place to the ground, which successfully broke the southern army as people headed home out of fear, and let’s face it, a lot of that was because they knew what they grew up doing to powerless women and didn’t like the idea of their own families being in that position. Even the likely dramatized account of their worst excess, the burning of an entire city, has looting and arson their highest crime. It accuses them of pulling families out of their beds to ransack and then burn the house, not of them raping every women they could find and then lighting them on fire. Not how we’d want our armies to behave, but better than our army generally behaved historically or, honestly, currently is.

So yes, it is possible some of his men would burn all the houses of the slave-owners they found in South Carolina, although more likely they would’ve torn the place down for the wood because they were using that to construct roads to move their wagons on. They did not burn them with the families inside, and we’re talking about houses built off slave labor here by people funding a war to keep their right to own other people. Sherman took the fight to the fuckers running the place and he did it with minimal loss of life – a very good case can be made that it actually saved most of the remaining Confederate soldiers – they had taken some pretty horrible casualties by this point.

Why look it’s the Stars and Stripes, the one newspaper you’re allowed to subscribe to in this town, and even they know this!

It was the smell that told her she was too late. Lemons. The tart smell of lemons mixed with ash. They were burning the lemon trees.

Oh noooo the poor slaveowners are losing their pretty things!

Maybe this all wouldn’t happen if only you weren’t terrible people.

She planted those trees right in front of the cotton field, tending them herself. On those cold winter nights, she had covered the trees with wool blankets and piled dirt along the edges to keep the moisture out.

Fun fact: the book has not even mentioned slaves existing yet. The crops exist, but I guess it was harvested by, let’s say unicorns and pixies. Damn the Union and their anti-unicorn and pixie policies!

Anyway the vision ends and they realize that they must be past the edge of Ravenwood into Greenbrier, because obviously the locket can only have been dropped within the territory of its owner even when the flashback is her rushing to get there.

On it is a date that’s her birthday and she freaks out.

“ECW & GKD. This locket must have belonged to one of them.” I paused. “That’s weird. My initials are ELW.”

Oh my god they’re tragic reincarnated slave owners what is this book doing?

Touching the locket again does nothing. At least he’s trying to investigate the supernatural for once. Anyway she insists more he shouldn’t be friends with her and he says she seems super fragile and she says that it’s five months until her sixteenth birthday and that’s what the number she writes on her hand is and this is relevant to the conversation for reasons she won’t explain.

She looked past me, up toward Ravenwood. When she finally spoke, she
wasn’t looking at me. “You like that poet, Bukowski?”
“Yeah,” I answered, confused.
“Don’t try.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s what it says, on Bukowski’s grave.”

Which clarifies nothing! She runs off, he’s confused, we end.