Classy, classy chapter name there.

12.01


On Monday morning, Link and I drove down Route 9, stopping at the fork in the road to pick up Lena. Link liked Lena, but there was no way he was driving up to Ravenwood Manor. It was still the Haunted Mansion to him.

Because why?

It’s never even been explained why they’re actually scared of it – even legitimately intimidating places should have kids jumping the fence on dares, and Ravenwood doesn’t even have that, the guy who lives there just doesn’t go out. Okay, the place is actually a giant ball of magic, but they don’t know that! There’s not even a lone rumor of weird sounds coming from the place?

Anyway, Link says his mom and her posse are up to something new to kick Lena out of school, oh no that is so terrible and he honestly claims it sounded equally dangerous as the events of all last chapter, which involved a half dozen potential ways to die.

You know, in my pre-fanfic days, when I was restricted to actual books, I read a hell of a lot of realistic fiction about kids in middle or high school, and there were plenty that involved bullying. I remember this one where this kid comes to a small town and doesn’t look like the rest so he’s immediately a target, and then it comes out that he’s there because his dad turned out to be a serial killer and that takes what brakes there were off the bullying. I have no idea how good it was, overall, but it certainly showed the actual sort of cruelty people could get up to. Much of the book was devoted to the events at school, not occasionally giving us status updates that yeah, still in school, eating lunch alone together, life is suffering. In fact, as far as I remember, actually showing school life was a thing most of them managed.

The worst thing that’s happened so far to Lena is some girls in witch costumes, not even ugly witch costumes, drew her birthmark on their face in the morning before washing it off before school actually started, and she can’t have been that upset when her retaliation is to make it so they can’t clean it off. Oh, and this other time some girls sat near her but didn’t talk to her and then they said her uncle was weird. She hasn’t even gotten shoved in the hallway yet. Something we should be glad of, because so far she’s gotten disproportionate revenge for both slights, so someone actually touching her would probably spontaneously ignite or something. Poor persecuted casters.

He explains how Link’s mom and company hate everyone different and super hated her mom for being all liberal and worst of all, a vegetarian (which ruled out any dinner invitations from Mrs. Snow) and also from her own house which is fried chicken as far as the eye can see.

The area where I live has been having a lot of immigrants, to the point that the school my mom works at is now mostly nonwhite. How much of their culture will be preserved as their children grow up here I don’t know, but about half of them are vegetarians and that sure is preserving well. The kids largely don’t have any real moral concerns about it, it’s just that if your mom and dad don’t cook meat for supper, you don’t like meat. Even if you are okay with the stuff, you aren’t going to seek it out because it’s not what you think of for meals – it’s not what you eat for celebrations or comfort food, it’s not what you reach for when you need to throw together a meal, it’s not what you look for at a store.

What sort of vegetarian raises a kid who eats like he does? Not only is it bacon and pulled pork, but everything else he eats is basically an exhibit in why the south was scurvy central – starch, starch, starch. Even if you assume she was vegetarian solely because she was brought up to it, which should be pretty rare for someone of her age and presumed background, and even if you assume she paid as little attention to their house mammy’s menus as possible, at the least she should have introduced other vegetables because you can’t live on a diet consisting of grits and biscuits and also they’re both probably made with lard anyway.

And it’s not like he grew up eating both and it’s just Amma stopped bothering with the other recipes when his mom died, because he reacts to everything she cooks as if that’s all she ever cooks. And it can’t be that his mom used to cook either, because it seems Amma has always been sole caretaker. He has no nostalgia for tofu or pasta or any other dish his mom might have eaten. Once again, we learn about his mom’s distinctive character yet see that somehow it’s still impacting absofuckinglutely nothing.

Also, we learn that yeah, the town has plenty of churches and his mom’s church-hopping was one of the many things that drew ire. How big is this damn place?

But my dad had grown up here and was considered one of Gatlin’s sons. So when my mom died, all the same women who had been so judgmental of her when she was alive dropped off cream-of-something casseroles and crock pot roasts and chili-ghetti with a vengeance. Like they were finally getting the last word.

What the fuck is wrong with you people?

My mom would have hated it, and they knew it. That was the first time my dad went into his study and locked the door for days. Amma and I had let the casseroles pile up on the porch until they took them away and went back to judging us, like they always had.

Unlike you who never stopped for a split second.

No wonder they all hated you! You’re horrible!

If you guys were vegetarian, and that was nothing but pot-roast and meat chilis and hamburger casserole, yeah, that would have been a horrible thing to do. But first they didn’t make any special effort there and second that’s not a factor even if they had, that’s all stuff you eat four servings of every meal so it’s not even like your mom cared in the least, apparently. So otherwise they…gave you food because it’s an established way to express condolences and an acknowledgement that you’re probably too busy grieving to cook for yourselves properly because you’ve experienced a horrible loss and they recognize that. And you left it to rot on the porch because they’re not good enough for you.

What I don’t know is why the book didn’t go for him saying they pretended they’d cared about her. That’s what I think when I imagine someone dying young and people who disliked her lining up to bring the family sympathy casseroles. He could hate the two-facedness of it, how they couldn’t be civil to her when she was alive but everyone is best friends with the dead. That’s what I was expecting.

But no. The book can’t even get something that simple right. Nor can it go the obvious pot-roasts-for-vegetarians route and at least give them cartoonish evil actions to go with Emothan’s bleating about how they’re cartoonish villains.

At school, his mom is there and seems they’re doing some sort of anti-violence campaign. Are you fucking kidding me. This is your threat.

“Know the signs!” Emily was approaching Carrie Jensen’s window. “We’re formin’ a new club at school, the Jackson High Guardian Angels. We’re goin’ to help keep our school safe by reportin’ acts a violence or any unusual behavior we see around school.

Say you’re so glad the school’s got an anti-bullying policy after how cruel the students have been to poor Lena.

“Look at them. They think I’m a monster. They formed a club.”
“They just can’t stand outsiders, and you’re the new girl. A window broke. They need someone to blame. This is just a—”
“Witch hunt.”
I wasn’t going to say that.

Lena is a monster.

She’s terrifying. She can retcon reality. You don’t think every last cheerleader thinks it’s kind of scary how their makeup pencils all disappeared and somehow there was a sharpie in their purse when they don’t even carry those and the mark they each drew on in pencil wouldn’t come off? Even when they remember using the pencil, even when they remember watching each other use the pencil, even when the marks didn’t even look like sharpie until they tried washing them off? He wonders if Emily’s new clumsiness when she’s balancing on top of the pyramid is Lena’s doing – you don’t think Emily thinks that too, ever time she stumbles on something she didn’t have a problem doing before?

Not only do they lack Lena’s powers to defend and protect themselves, but they don’t even understand what’s happening. They have no recourse at all because they don’t know what she’s doing. And she knows this and taking advantage of exactly that.

Mrs. Lincoln noticed us standing there and zeroed in on us. The other mothers followed her gaze. For a second, they didn’t say anything. I thought maybe they felt bad for me and they were going to put down their flyers, pack up their minivans and station wagons, and go home. Mrs. Lincoln, whose house I’d slept at almost as many times as my own. Mrs. Snow, who was technically my third cousin to some degree removed. Mrs. Asher, who bandaged my hand after I sliced it open on a fishing hook when I was ten. Miss Ellery, who gave me my first real haircut. These women knew me. They’d known me since I was a kid. There was no way they were going to do this, not to me.

Why the fuck should they?

I don’t know what they think of Lena, but it can’t possibly be worse than what you think of them, and they know it.

Emily stepped in front of us, shoving a flyer at me and ignoring Lena. “Ethan, come to the meetin’ today. The Guardian Angels could really use you.”

Say you’re so glad the school’s got an anti-bullying policy after how cruel the students have been to poor Lena.

I pushed her hand away. “That’s just what Jackson needs, a little more of your angelic behavior. Why don’t you go torture some children. Rip the wings off a butterfly. Knock a baby bird out of its nest.” I pulled Lena past her.

NO YOU SAY YOU’RE SO GLAD THE SCHOOL’S GOT AN ANTI-BULLYING POLICY AFTER HOW CRUEL THE STUDENTS HAVE BEEN TO POOR LENA AND THE TWO OF YOU CAN’T WAIT TO SIGN UP.

THIS IS NOT THAT FUCKING HARD. YOU WILL NOT SHUT UP ABOUT HOW THE SOUTH IS PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE CENTRAL AND YET YOU SEEM TO BE FUCKING BLINDSIDED BY IT EVERY SINGLE TIME.

For some reason instead of theatrically gasping and gesturing to everyone so they can see what a horrible influence that Ravenwood girl is and that poor boy, taken in by her evil, Link’s leading lady mom does the what-would-your-mother-say despite Emothan just finishing telling us how even in death she was still hated. Also, I’m pretty sure it’s universally regarded as a faux pas to say She would cry. She would be turnin’ over in her grave.” when you are talking to a sixteen year old whose mother died a few months ago.

Mrs. Lincoln didn’t know anything about my mother. She didn’t know my mom was the one who had sent the School Superintendent a copy of every ruling against book banning in the U.S. She didn’t know my mom cringed every time Mrs. Lincoln invited her to a Women’s Auxiliary or DAR meeting.

Except she knew your mother was a feminist democrat vegetarian suspected demonworshipper probable communist church-hopper and supposedly loathed her. Oh, and he then says his mom believed in taking a stand for your beliefs, but apparently also in never saying any of this stuff to their faces.

That small-minded brand of superiority women in Gatlin, like Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Asher, were so famous for.

It feels really weird to say this, but are the men ever going to do anything?

Anyway he says his mom would’ve said good for him and heads off into the school with Lena.

“What the—”
I turned and looked over my shoulder just in time to see hundreds of neon green flyers, curling away from windshields and out of stacks and boxes and vans and hands.

So let’s talk about X-men! I mostly know it from the cartoons. I feel the basic x-men hated and feared for powers beyond that of a human’s thing really hits a good balance – these are people with superpowers, but superpowers only go so far when you’re badly outnumbered. If this kind of thing was the limits of her ability, there’d be some legitimate tension between the fact that she does have recourse that an ordinary person doesn’t, but it’s not going to help her in most situations. You could understand what’s setting people off while still showing clearly that it’s unfair to treat her as a walking nuke when the most she can do is scatter some papers and it’s really about the fact this is new and different, not the fact she’s an objective danger.

But Lena’s power is explicitly the ability to do whatever she needs to do. It doesn’t manifest in fun ways, like that one mutant whose power is to adapt away from anything fatal but without any control over the solution or ways to remove the generally major and disfiguring result once it’s no longer needed. It doesn’t even manifest in uncontrolled ways – aside from the window-smashing, everything we’ve seen from her is deliberate.

12.06

The Sisters had a clothesline that ran the length of the yard, and every morning Aunt Mercy put Lucille Ball on a leash and hooked it onto the clothesline so the cat could exercise. I had tried to explain that you could let cats outside and they would come back whenever they felt like it, but Aunt Mercy had looked at me like I’d suggested she shack up with a married man. “I can’t just let Lucille Ball wander the streets alone. I’m sure someone would snatch her.” There hadn’t been a lot of catnappings in town, but it was an argument I’d never win.

While cats don’t generally get lost they do get run over and such. Mine do stupid stuff like refuse to come in at night and then wake me up with a yowling fight at two AM or come in in the morning with a fat infected bite. And a purebred Siamese is indeed something people will steal.

Now, generally a static leash isn’t a good idea because it’s important they have somewhere to escape up if a dog wanders by, but presumably the clothesline is attached to a tree (and also she’s probably keeping watch since she’s worried about someone stealing her cat). In that case, if you’ve got a cat that can handle being leashed, why not. At least you’re preventing it from doing too much damage to the local wildlife population this way.

When he goes in he sees they’re caring for baby squirrels!

“Well, Ruby couldn’t take care of ’em—” Aunt Mercy started.
“On account a that awful husban’ a hers. He won’t even let her go ta the Stop & Shop without tellin’ him.”
“So Ruby gave them ta us, on account a the fact that we already had a cage.”

That’s pretty much how we get animals!

The Sisters had rescued an injured raccoon after a hurricane and nursed it back to health.

And look, they even know what they’re doing! The babies will be okay then!

For some reason he hates the idea of all this.

“You know squirrels can carry rabies.

No they don’t.

You can’t handle these things. What if one of them bites you?”
Aunt Prue frowned. “Ethan, these are our babies and they are just the sweetest things. They wouldn’t bite us. We’re their mammas.”
“They are just as tame as they can be, aren’t y’all?” Aunt Grace said, nuzzling one of them.

This is very true. They are sweetiepies.

All I could imagine was one of those little vermin latching onto one of the Sisters’ necks

Okay, look, I’ve accepted that the book wants me to like this guy. I can believe that the fact I don’t is an accidental thing on the book’s part.

But he is currently calling defenseless baby animals vermin and wanting them thrown out to die a horrible, terrified death by slow exposure and dehydration.

“We have ta feed them every four hours with this little dropper,” Aunt Grace explained. Aunt Prue was holding one of the squirrels in her hand, while it sucked ferociously on the end of the dropper. “And once a day, we have ta clean their little private parts with a Q-tip, so they’ll learn ta clean themselves.” That was a visual I didn’t need.
“How could you possibly know that?”
“We looked it up on the E-nternet.” Aunt Mercy smiled proudly.

Yes! Which is what you do, instead of saying that you just know they’re all rabid and also they should die anyway. But even as they demonstrate they actually know what they’re doing and have taken the intelligent route here in checking for information and then using it, he just focuses on how they mispronounce internet and are clearly idiots.

“And you can look up just about anything, even dirty pictures. Every now and again, the dirtiest pictures you ever saw would pop up on the screen. Imagine!” By “dirty,” Aunt Grace probably meant naked, which I would’ve thought would keep them off the Internet forever.

1) No, she means porn. No one makes spam popups that are just of naked people.
2) Yes, she probably did not like the popups! And yet she knew the alternative was not knowing how to care for defenseless baby animals who needed help, so she did it anyway. Because she isn’t a monster like the author is.

He then goes for the they’ll-bite-you-when-they’re-older defense. Incidentally, won’t.

“Well, of course we aren’t plannin’ on lookin’ after ’em forever.” Aunt Prue was shaking her head, as if it was a ridiculous thought. “We’re going ta let ’em go in the backyard just as soon as they can look after themselves.”
“But they won’t know how to find food. That’s why it’s a bad idea to take in wild animals. Once you let them go, they’ll starve.”

You just put food out for them. It’s not that hard.

And he goes on to explicitly say that he does not say this because he believes it but because This seemed like an argument that would appeal to the Sisters and keep me out of the emergency room. because he just really wants the innocent harmless babies to die.

Luckily, he can’t confuse the nice old women with his lies because the internet comes through again! Where they read about how to reintegrate them into the wild.

And showing they’re smarter than this asshole thinks they are, they then troll the little fuck:

“You have ta teach ’em ta gather nuts. You bury nuts in the yard and you let the squirrels practice findin’ ’em.”
I could see where this was going. Which led to the part of the day that had me in the backyard burying mixed cocktail nuts for baby squirrels. I wondered how many of these little holes I’d have to dig before the Sisters would be satisfied.

Well, are your hands bleeding yet? Then no, keep digging.

A mere half hour in, he’s found A thimble, a silver spoon, and an amethyst ring. I’m not even sure how you’d know it was a silver spoon. It’s not like silver stays silver very long when it’s buried in the ground. He takes all this as an excuse to go in. Get back out and keep digging.

Inside they chat with him about how apparently the Ravenwoods showed up first.

“The Ravenwoods were the first in these parts, all right. Got themselves a land grant from the King a Scotland, sometime around 1800.”

“Except for all those godless injuns, but hey, who’s counting them?”

“They were farmers, and it turned out Gatlin County had the most fertile soil in all a South Carolina. Cotton, tobacco, rice, indigo—it all grew here, which was peculiar on account a those crops don’t usually grow in the same place.

And you obviously aren’t farmers because fertile soil doesn’t work that way. Different plants have different requirements and too much of something can be even worse than too little. That’s before getting into the other factors like temperature, light, water availability…

Once folks figured out you could grow just ’bout anything here, the Ravenwoods had themselves a town.”
“Whether they liked it or not,” Aunt Grace added, looking up from her crossstitch.
It was ironic; without the Ravenwoods Gatlin might not even exist. The folks that shunned Macon Ravenwood and his family had them to thank for the fact they even had a town at all.

You mean sort of like how the reason European settlements did so well was because they found cleared fields and granaries?

Obviously the Ravenwood situation is very different, what with them apparently not doing anything but happening to be the first Europeans to farm there. I’ve got no idea why they need to be thanked for doing that.


I stared down at my hand, covered in that inexplicably fertile soil.

It’s not still inexplicably fertile. Or, well, it probably is but it makes no sense it would be. The soil in the early slave states was quickly exhausted by cotton plantings – it’s one of the many reasons slavery was such a hot issue, the slave states weren’t even sustainable in terms of crops, they had to keep expanding to new soil. Besides, if the supersoil was still around, scientists would be crawling over every inch of this place trying to figure out why. Also, you guys would probably have farms around in that case, yet you apparently don’t have even the smaller set I’d expect.

So he shows the stuff and they’re all yay that stuff, then start talking about how some woman was buried with her recipe book so no one would know how to make her peach cobbler, and they say it’s spiteful, then that it wasn’t that good anyway, and I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a joke that they’re being spiteful or not because this book just advocated killing baby squirrels.

This prompts him to wonder what if Dark Lemon Lady was buried with the book, because no one actually involved knowing the history would have noticed something like that! No, only he is so brilliant.

Then because the author belatedly realized what a shitty job she was doing of making him look good, has one of the women trying to feed the dog dark chocolate because they’re so dumb, and another one says not to because she heard Oprah said not to, but maybe that was onion dip, because that’s totally how people who went straight to the library to learn how to care for baby squirrels would act! And naturally he doesn’t do anything. Probably because dogs can bite and have rabies, but they ignored his previous lobby to lock the filthy vermin out of the house to starve so now he’s passive aggressively trying to get it killed instead.

I really hope this book ends in a tragedy.