I got these for Hunger Games, so let’s keep that going. Let’s talk about the book we’re not reading.
The correct structure for this story is so obvious to me that at times I almost forget it isn’t there, and keep expecting new developments to conform to that one rather than the mess we’re actually presented with.
Chloe is a rather disconnected girl. Most children are scared of things like the dark or being alone, but young Chloe took it to extremes, and although she’s grown up and done her best to hide it, she’s still nervous and prefers to stick to the same safe routine.
Film is her main outlet. When it comes to real things, Chloe’s scared of her own shadow, but she’s an avid horror fan who can watch anything without so much as blinking. In fact, most of her life experience and expectations is really the experience of watching how things play out on a screen. Chloe isn’t stupid – she doesn’t literally expect things to play out according to obvious tropes. But like many people she does mistake film-realism as being an actual reflection of reality, and because she has so many more experiences with the former compared to the latter, she’s especially prone to thinking in those terms.
For example, Chloe would not think that standing up to a bully would lead to an afterschool special moment where everyone becomes friends. But she would stereotype bullies based on appearance, and she’d expect them to fit into the standard roles.
(Chloe’s film club likes to talk about how important real experiences are. They’re mostly sheltered kids like she is, so this amounts to talk with the occasional big deal being made about some vacation they went on. It’s something Chloe thinks of as a big deal, but as something that just happens to people sometimes.)
Then, of course, Ghost Janitor.
No one’s sure quite what to make of Chloe’s breakdown, so they pack her off to the group home to see if it’s a one-time thing or if she gets worse.
Throughout this, Chloe tends to narrate things as if they’re happening in a film as a coping mechanism, discussing how the scene is put together and how people might view it.
It’s Chloe who comes to the conclusion she’s seeing ghosts, thanks to her extensive film learnings on the subject. It starts off as just a nagging thought, and she goes to look up the janitor to prove to herself that things like that aren’t real only to find a picture matching the man she saw.
Chloe’s film learnings also tell her she should keep this secret because no one believes crazy people, so she starts plotting how to prove it’s real but until then she doesn’t want to get any of the adults involved.
Her behavior (and internet use) do not convince the adults in charge she’s okay, and they start talking about possible diagnoses and more medication. It’s around now that Tori overhears them talking about ghosts, spills the gossip to the rest of the group, makes her ill-advised comment to Liz, and triggers whatever the fuck was going on there.
Throughout this, Derek’s been hovering creepily and occasionally giving her minor clues. Instead of this being because Derek’s a controlling dick, Derek is shy and not that great at asserting himself. He thinks she might be a necromancer but doesn’t say it outright because he doesn’t think she’ll believe him and he isn’t totally sure, and also, if he starts saying crazy stuff about ghosts to her and she tells people, he’ll never get out himself.
Assuming we need Simon to exist, he can take the dick role. Simon doesn’t want to tell her for some self-serving reason.
The affair with the fake note comes about because he’s overhearing something worrying about her and his brother is refusing to do anything, and he’s aware it was a shitty thing to do instead of blaming her for it. She doesn’t get chucked across the room – he grabs her, she panics when she can’t get loose, he lets ago and she runs away.
If Simon, it’s at this point Simon gets involved, threatening her not to tell anyone about what happened with Derek. I can’t really figure out why or how the fog, but one easy answer is making the threat there explicit – he can make weird stuff appear and she’s got to pretend she isn’t hallucinating. (This works better if he can manipulate the fog enough to make it look like different things.) If she gets Derek in trouble, he’ll make sure they think she’s completely unhinged as well.
If no Simon, we proceed with her aunt finding out and Derek backing off right as things start getting weirder for her and she realizes that maybe he did know something important.
It’s around now, not near the beginning, that whatever happens with Liz happens. Chloe does not actually see things going everywhere. She tries to brush Liz off and go back to sleep, maybe thinking it’s a trick to get her in trouble, and seconds later the whole room is destroyed. She’s groggy enough she can’t be absolutely certain how long it took, but Liz is standing untouched and barefoot in the center when there’s stuff splattered everywhere and shattered glass covers the floor.
They don’t tell her that Liz is being taken away. They give her a sleeping pill and when she wakes up the next morning she sees Liz. Ghost?Liz says she was taken away and she doesn’t know what happened next, and then when she disappears. Chloe tries to brush that off as a hallucination, but then she finds out Liz really is gone and they won’t let Chloe call her at the hospital.
She looks up the name of the hospital they gave her, and it doesn’t exist.
Throughout this, there’s hints something weird is going on with the place. It turns out they specifically contacted her father to suggest sending her there. Liz and Rae say neither remembers anyone being allowed to go home. The computer won’t let anyone search for anything even halfway related to mental illness. Chloe’s been given tranquilizers this whole time (she’s been spitting them out afterward because she’s scared of the idea) even when they said they were sure she was fine. And they seem far too interested in what, exactly, she’s been seeing, if all it is is a figment of her imagination.