Last time, lots of setup, not much events. Now, mindfuck.

19
11:49 P.M.
MINDCASTER“Whizzway’stown?”

…The fuck? Oh, it’s just Rex trying to talk while holding a flashlight in his mouth. Someone misses Jonathan, I see.

Anyway, Rex and Melissa drive somewhere close to midnight, being mindful to avoid main roads in case they are busted by the sheriff. Rex is spooked over Jonathan spending two nights in jail. Melissa is mostly indifferent about the police and worries more about the monsters.

“Jonathan’s weekend disappearance had been alarming for Melissa too, but for
different reasons. All Sunday’s secret hour she’d been casting on her roof,
mostly watching the growing darkling activity but partly wondering why Jonathan
had never appeared. Normally she could taste him shooting across the landscape.
He was easy to spot, faster than anything else in the midnight psychic terrain,
even a flying darkling.

His absence had worried her more than she would have thought. When she found
out on Monday morning that he’d only been in jail, surrounded by opaque steel,
it had been a relief. Rex might have sheriff-phobia, but there were worse things
than getting busted.

She smirked. A night on the ground might even have done Jonathan some good.
He’d tasted a little more humble this week.”

While not the most sympathetic thoughts to have, her priorities are pretty good.

We learn that even though it would be more convenient to use bikes during the secret hour, they picked driving as otherwise they would be exposed to the monsters, which would be bad without weapons prepared by Dess. Dess isn’t aware of what they are doing now and, in fact, doesn’t know everything about Melissa’s power in general.

“They had never told Dess all of the lore about mind casting. It would be hard
for anyone else to understand the mistakes they’d made when they were young.”

And isn’t that sinister.

“That search had been the hardest, finding Rex the first time. Melissa had
felt him for as long as she could remember, since before she could talk. When
the blue time came and the maddening noise would finally stop, only a single
voice would remain. A lone taste out there in the suddenly empty world, as
tenuous as an imaginary friend. The idea that he was a real person had taken
years to form, another year to act on. Finally she had run the miles to his
house in the secret hour, eight years old and wearing pajamas covered with
pictures of cowgirls, half thinking it was a dream. But finding each other had
made the whole thing real.

It had been a close call, she realized now. Much longer alone and she would
have gone crazy.”

A bit of backstory explaining why Rex and Melissa are so tight together. They were the first to meet each other, saving each other from the loneliness and suspicions of madness. Right now it’s pretty sweet, but keep this in mind for the next post.

As the secret hour takes hold and Rex with Melissa start walking, it becomes clear they are near Jessica’s house to do something related to Melissa’s power and involving Constanza. We get a few more sinister hints like, “Don’t worry, Rex. What they don’t know won’t hurt ’em.”

We also learn that there are even more slithers around lately, though they completely ignore Rex and Melissa in favor of watching Jessica. Rex admits that Jessica being with Jonathan is actually a good thing. They now fly in town, away from badlands. Rooftops apparently give them enough ground to get away from wandering darklings and swarms of slithers, so Jessica is more safe with Jonathan than she would be in her room.

Well, I guess Jonathan does learn, after all.

Rex and Melissa watch Jessica depart with Jonathan again and walk into her house. We get even more sinister hint:

“Don’t worry, I promise not to have too much fun.”

“Just don’t start to enjoy it too much. The lore is full of—”

Then Melissa says she doesn’t hate Jessica, she just doesn’t think Jessica is a real Midnighter, what with being a reasonably well-adjusted and all.

Then they walk into Jessica’s parents room and…

Jessica’s parents lay there, frozen while asleep.

Melissa looked at them, pale and defenseless. Like all stiffs, they didn’t
seem quite human, more like department-store mannequins that someone had tried
really hard to make realistic but had mistakenly taken a left turn at creepy.

Rex was poking around the room, peering into the moving boxes near the
closet. Like the other midnighters, he was a little bit freaked out by stiffs. (“stiffs” being a slang Melissa uses to describe people frozen during the secret hour)

Melissa didn’t mind them at all. Cold and hard though they were, this was the
only time she would ever willingly touch another human being. She pulled off her
gloves.

“I think we’ll start with Mom.”

Yep, she mindfucks them. And, judging by the hints in this chapter and my knowledge of future books, she did it before, less than successfully.

Before that chapter, Midnighters were the Club Awesome. They had that elitism going, but it’s pretty common for urban fantasy. It’s bad, but often endorsed by the narrative. There was also Jonathan, but it’s easy to dismiss him as an irresponsible idiot. Now, though, we are shown Midnighters crossing the line, very definitely and undeniably. What’s more, it’s intentional. I don’t think this book deals with the revelation of what Melissa’s done here, but the next two do, and it’s not pretty. In the next chapters we’ll find out more about the underlying problems of the group and the toxic dynamic they have going.

Honestly, that’s probably the best part of these books. Midnighters are messed up, and the book knows it. I don’t remember if it deals with the issues gracefully, but it attempts to deal with them, it acknowledges that the protagonists mess up and don’t always make good or moral decisions. That’s pretty rare for YA fiction. It’s no wonder Midnighters didn’t get to four stars on Goodreads.

So, what do I think about Melissa now? Well, it’s hard to say. I’ve talked before about the problems with writing telepaths sympathetically, especially when they scoff at other people, and with her comments about “stiffs” and enjoying what she’s doing, Melissa certainly fits the category. On another hand, I kinda sympathize with her, given how much her life sucks, how lonely she was before meeting Rex and how she can’t connect with anyone else, being drowned in the noise of the crowd constantly. On the third hand, rape metaphor, much? And on the gripping hand, that’s hardly everything she’s done on that front and others, with some of her actions being revealed soon enough.

So, I guess in the end I enjoy her as a character whose motivations I understand and who behaves in entertaining ways, but I don’t like her much as a person and wouldn’t want her be in the same town as me.

One point of criticism I do have is that all this stuff takes time to become apparent. I don’t think there would be any major inter-group conflicts in this book, which does make sense, given they have more pressing concerns, but also is a shame, since the potential for it is pretty good.

Well, anyway, let’s find out the point of brainwashing.


20
7:22 A.M.
A CHANGE OF MIND

“Good morning, Beth.”

“In what sense?”

“Sight, sound, smell, all the other senses. It’s sunny, and the birds are
chirpy, and I’m letting you have this toast that I just put in for myself.”

Beth paused next to the table. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. You are my sister, and I’m making you toast.”
 Beth plonked down at the kitchen table and looked at her big sister warily.

“Aren’t you kind of happy for someone who’s grounded?”

Jessica considered this for a moment, watching the elements inside the
toaster warm to a red glow. The smell of toast came from the machine, drawing a
deep breath from her.

“Toast is good,” she answered.”

So, yeah, flying is sex. Here we have a clear case of endorphin overdose.

Anyway, Jessica reminiscences a bit about flying and how good it feels, and how she at last feels safe during the secret hour. Beth talks with her about Jonathan, then mentions she noticed that Jessica was dressed on the night when she came in Beth’s room, indicating she went out. Jessica tries to brush it off by saying she just went for a walk, not being able to sleep, but Beth doesn’t buy it. She didn’t tell anything to their parents, though. While Beth is still bratty, they do share something like an emotional moment.

Their mother walks into the kitchen and talks to Jessica about her punishment. She talks about how she and the father should have thought it out more before deciding on anything, how Jessica probably just wants to fit in the new environment, that she needs friends, etc. So, parents have decided that while Jessica is still grounded, she can visit her friends one night per week provided she warns her parents about it beforehand, thus giving her an excuse to go to that convenient party.

That’s obviously a work of Melissa, though of course Jessica doesn’t realize it and just thinks it’s weird her mother would back off like that since she’s a firm believer that punishments shouldn’t be negotiated as it lessens their effect.

Jessica is also scared of going through with Rex’s plan.

She then goes to a library. Jonathan is apparently good at physics and helped Jessica with it, but she still has some troubles with formulas, and so seeks Dess’ help. After some studying, they talk about the recent events. Jessica tells her about how weird it is that she isn’t grounded anymore, and we get this little titbit:

“That happens. My parents do it all the time. Last spring, the
first time I got busted with Rex and Melissa for breaking curfew, they said they
were going to send me off to psycho camp once school was out.”

“Where?”

“It’s like a summer camp for juvenile delinquents. Run by the state and very
jail-like. My dad works on oil rigs, and he’s a big believer in hard work to
purify the soul. But a couple of days after the bust they completely changed
their minds. Since then they’ve been pretty cool. They’ve even started to like
Rex and Melissa.”

Yep, Melissa is getting more terrifying by the minute. Apparently, she has no trouble with messing up human minds for the sake of convenience. So far, she does it for good causes: solving the mystery of why Jessica attracts monsters’ attention is important, and the camps like the one described… tend not to be good places. There are plenty of horror stories on the Internet about such facilities trying to cure teenagers of being teenagers by throwing them into wilderness with few means of survival and basically brainwashing them by means of deprivation. Such organizations tend to feed on fears of the parents and their desire for a quick solution, and they tend to just mess kids up instead of doing anything remotely productive.

So, Dess escaping such fate is an unquestionably good thing.

Still, that Melissa would do that without at least Dess’ knowledge or consent, that she would go farther and make things more convenient to her and Rex, well… She is shaping up to be a star of a horror movie, though she isn’t really there yet.

Anyway, Dess brings up the party as the easiest way to get Jessica to the snake pit. Even though Jessica would be alone at first during the secret hour, she would be right next to Dess’ defenses they are going to set up, so she should be safe enough. Certainly, it’s a better alternative than trying to get there some other way and having to fight darklings.

Jessica protests, but can’t really find a good argument against it, and a quick call to Constanza confirms she’s still invited.


21
12:00 A.M.
PEGASUS

Pegasus actually refers to a sign on the highest business office in Bixby. Jessica and Jonathan often stop there during their flights. The building is right in the middle of the town. It’s made of steel, and it’s clean since slithers and darklings rarely go so far into the town. Basically, it’s a little safe haven.

Though Jonathan noticed slithers appearing in bigger and bigger numbers across town, creeping slowly towards buildings and claiming the town bit by bit. If it continues, sooner or later they would take all.

Jessica is nervous, and Jonathan notices it. He asks what’s wrong. Jessica, not wanting to approach the subject right away, accuses him of being distant during the daytime and never even touching her hand. He brushes it off by saying he holds her hand all the time during the secret hour, and they need to rest sometimes.

Yeah, given his thoughts on the normal time, it seems he regards the secret hour as the real life, while normal time is just a time to kill, not important. It does seem he goes full out with his antics during the secret hour because it’s the only time when he actually lives.

They discuss the approaching party and Rex’s plan. Jonathan doesn’t like it partly because it’s dagerous (yeah, you are the one to talk) and partly because he doesn’t trust Rex. Specifically:

“It’s more complicated than mat.” He swallowed,
wondering how much he should say. “You don’t know Rex and Melissa as well as I
do. Let’s just say I don’t trust Rex. I don’t think he tells everything he
knows, even to Melissa.”

“Why would he do that?”

“To keep control of the whole thing. If everyone else knows what he knows, being a seer doesn’t give him any power.”

That’s kinda a plot hole given that a few paragraphs earlier he wondered how Rex could stand Melissa, what with not having any privacy even inside his mind. Still, it’s about time for Rex to show some flaws. So far he was kinda ridiculously well-adjusted. Wanting to have control and using information flow to achieve it is not bad for the task. It’s subtle since he does reveal plenty of information, just not enough to prevent people from relying on him. And it’s consistent with what we’ve seen before. Though Jonathan cites Rex not mentioning him to Jessica to keep her in his group, the thing about Melissa is a more definite example of the flaw.

But, his reservations aside, Jonathan says that Jessica doesn’t have much choice in the matter. There are no better alternatives to Rex’s plan, and finding out what’s going on is important.

“Yeah. It’s a setup. We’ve all got our own talents. Rex reads lore, I fly,
Melissa casts, Dess does the math. You must do something. So we wind up
all dependent on each other, like we’re supposed to fit together into a team.”

Jess squeezed his hand. “Jonathan, what’s so bad about that?”

He scowled. “I didn’t ask to be on a team. I don’t even know who put the team
together.”

Eh, you are PCs, of course you are built with each other in mind. I mean, having two mission controls in party would be redundant and can only lead to conflicts, and you have enough of that already, Mr. Lone Wolf with Katana.

Jessica says nothing is rigged, it’s just life: you can’t do everything alone and will always need other people with their unique talents. It’s a good sentiment marred by the fact the game is totally rigged, though it’s a talk for the next book.

They fall silent, lost in thoughts about the future dangers.

“The fear in her voice chilled him. Midnight should have been so beautiful for
her, an infinite playground, but it seemed as if something—Rex and his lore, the
curfew, the darklings—was always screwing it up.”

Yeah, I am not keen on his worldview, but at least it seems to be actual conviction and he is committed to making Jessica safe during the secret hour and able to enjoy it. It’s interesting how character archetypes that normally irritate me are actually tolerable or outright entertaining in this book.

Jonathan promises to be there at the snake pit for Jessica in case she needs help. Then she kisses him. Jonathan gives her his enchanted necklace, then they kiss again, Jessica pushing them off the sign. Huh, even romantic subplot is not that bad so far, mostly because it’s brief and comes after actually important stuff and character-building moments.

Well, that’s it for now. Tune in next time to find out more about how hilariously fucked up Midnighters truly are.