Last time, Melissa is an escapee from a horror movie. Now, multicolored rant.

22
10:31 P.M.
DRESSED TO KILL

“Jessica stared at herself in the mirror. She recognized the red hair and
green eyes, but that was about it.”

Oh, hey, I kinda forgot or didn’t catch Jessica’s description earlier. Her appearance, as described here, does help her image as an average kid caught up in mysterious things that don’t truly suit her. I mean, as we all know, YA fiction is populated by green-eyed redheads. Certainly, it’s much more plausible for Jessica to be that than spout those exotic brown colors.

Anyway, Jessica is with Constanza, dressing up in preparations for the party. Constanza decided to lend her some dresses and make up, and Jessica actually enjoys trying it on, mostly because it makes her feel like a normal teenager. There is one titbit, though, that bothers me:

“Jessica felt weird dressing up like this. She never particularly thought
about what she wore to school or even to go flying with Jonathan. She knew she
didn’t have to worry about that with him.”

As you know from this blog, a lot of YA writers have that fetish for “natural” looks and the idea that make up is evil. The sentiment started from a good place, from the idea that women shouldn’t be expected to wear make up if they don’t feel like it, that they shouldn’t have to change their appearance if they don’t want to do that. Then it went in bad places with sentiment being demonstrated by portraying women who do wear make up and otherwise prettify themselves as evil and fake. And, of course, it didn’t help that the female lead was beautiful anyway, make up or no make up, and ugly people tend to be evil in fiction unless there is a Very Special Lesson about appearances. That created a situation where “good” women are still expected to look pretty, just not in a way that would expose any effort that went into it.

I don’t think that’s what’s going on here, since Jessica does like spending time with Constanza, trying on new dresses and such, but still… I think a lot of my complains about the book, especially from earlier chapters, are like that: even though some stuff isn’t overly problematic here, it was used awfully elsewhere, so I automatically expect the worst.

Anyway, Jessica is ready, so she and Constanza start driving to the Rustle’s Bottom. On the way, Jessica sees the place where her mother works and talks about it with Constanza.

“Hey, my mom works here,” she said.

“You said she designs planes, right?”

“Just wings.”

“That’s so funny that your mom works and your dad doesn’t.”

Jessica shrugged. “Dad gave up his job in Chicago to come down here. He’s
always switching jobs anyway.”

“That was pretty cool of him, though.”

“Yeah, I guess. I think he’s wishing he hadn’t.”

*Sigh.* I liked it when her father not working while her mother did was passed mostly without comment, as something natural. I mean, I doubt Constanza would have praised Jessica’s mother for leaving her job if the roles were reversed. And I doubt the mother would be portrayed as being driven nuts by the situation.

Eh, at least it’s brief and mostly positive, even if it’s a double standard.

23
11:03 P.M.
COORDINATES

Dess is sitting in her room and frets. Rex and Melissa are supposed to come and pick her up, but they are late. They did establish the protections at the snake pit, but then returned home to wait for their parents to go to sleep.

“Dess itched to call, but that would be totally stupid. Melissa’s parents let
her do whatever she wanted, but Rex’s dad was a major psycho. If Rex was
creeping out his window this very moment, it would be a bad time for the phone
to ring.”

There were a few more references to Rex’s father being pretty bad, though not much came out of it yet. Also, another possible mindfuck found in Melissa’s parents. Isn’t she a darling? Well, I wouldn’t say otherwise anywhere she could hear, in any case.

Dess’ thoughts turn dark when minutes creep past her with no sign of Melissa’s car.

“It was all Melissa the Mindcaster’s fault. She’d tracked Rex down when they
were both eight years old. Dess was only a year younger, but it had taken
Melissa another four years to find her. Melissa’s excuse was that Dess lived too
close to the badlands and that back then all the darklings and slithers had
confused her unformed talent.

That sounded like a load of crap to Dess. Melissa could pick Rex up from a
mile away even in daylight; in the blue time another midnighter was like a flare
on a dark horizon. She’d found Jonathan and Jessica within days after they’d
arrived. But for the four years that Rex and Melissa had been alone together,
all Dess had known was slithers, the lonely surety of math, and Ada Lovelace. (Ada being a mechanical ballerina on a music box which Dess tinkered with to change the tune into an endless rhythmic sound instead of a specific melody and make Ada move the way she would program it.)

She reached into Ada’s box and switched the errant gear around, wound her up
again. “Dance, my pretty.”

Dess was sure that her isolation in those early years had been purposeful.
Melissa had played for time while she and Rex explored midnight together, grew
up together. The scheme had worked. By the time Melissa finally “found” Dess,
Rex and Melissa were so tight that nothing could ever come between them. And
Melissa’s psychic hold on Rex made it impossible for him to even think
about what Melissa had done.”

Melissa continues to be goddamn terrifying, and this little decision is much harder to explain away that what we’ve seen before. If Dess is correct, Melissa doomed her to long years of complete isolation in an elien dangerous world while she worked on getting a firm grip on Rex. Rex, of course, was completely isolated too before Melissa found him, so it’s easy to see how he would fall under her control, willing to do anything lest he damage the one connection that kept him sane and turned the secret hour beautiful instead of terrifying. That’s a very basic and very effective form of brainwashing.

Of course, Dess is not entirely reliable in her assertion. From what we’ve seen of Melissa, her decisions concerning Rex didn’t feel overly calculated. Still, it’s a plausible version, and one that paints Melissa in a very dark light.

Moving on. To distract herself from thinking she was abandoned, Dess muses about the speed of midnight moving across the world. She quickly calculates the speed on the equator, which is easy since she knows Earth’s circumference there and how long the day is (she says it’s 24 hours, which I would note is incorrect. The day is a bit longer than that, hence why 29th February is a thing. Normally it’s not that important, the difference would be minimal and she just approximates anyway, but for someone with Dess’ math affinity it’s a weird oversight), but she soon realizes it would be different for Bixby. To find out Bixby’s relation to equator, she checks a map and…

“She turned from the empty window and pulled her social studies textbook off
the shelf, opening it to the back. Flipping through it, she found a map of the
midwestern United States. A postage stamp like Bixby wasn’t on it, of course, but she
knew the town was just southwest of Tulsa.

This was easy: a latitude and a longitude line crossed right where Bixby
would have been if anyone had bothered to put it on the map. Thirty-six degrees
north and ninety-six west.

“Oh boy,” she said softly as the numbers rattled around in her head. All
thoughts of midnight’s speed disappeared. This was serious.

Thirty-six was a multiple of twelve. Ninety-six was a multiple of twelve. The
numerals all added up (three plus six plus nine plus six) to twenty-four,
another multiple of twelve.

She closed the book and whacked herself on the head with it. Dess had played
with the zip code, the population, the angles of the architecture, but it had
never occurred to her to look up Bixby’s coordinates before.

Maybe it wasn’t just the mystical stones and untouched desert that made Bixby
different; maybe it was the spot on the globe itself. Just like the
thirteen-pointed stars everywhere, the clue had been hidden right out in the
open, on every map in the world.”

OK, that really doesn’t make any sense. If you think about what coordinates are and how-

OBJECTION!

Not this time, Scott Westerfeeeeld! I’ve let you get away with many things over this review, but this one is where I would make a stand, for not only this piece of world-building contradicts common sense,  it also goes against things established previously in the book!

As I said before, the setting is stuck between human perception and physical reality, so let me tackle both and demonstrate why neither can explain the importance of coordinates. Let’s start with human perception.

Fact: it was established that darklings were around for thousands of years in Bixby. An ancient spear killed one, there are various legends about them. Specific number of ten thousand years is mentioned.
Fact: coordinate system simply didn’t exist back then. It’s invention is placed somewhere in 3rd century BC, and there were several improvements on it since then.

In other words, the only way it makes sense if we assume coordinates are important because humans gave them importance is if the darklings created the secret hour after the inventiion and spread of the coordinate system.

But! There is a problem of meridians. The modern coordinate system was codified in 1884 at the international conference in Greenwich, hence why the zeroth meridian goes straight through the city. Before that, different prime meridians were used, which would destroy Dess’ calculations there.

So, unless the secret hour was created after the Greenwich conference, which seems implausible given strong implications darklings were defeated in ancient times with fire and spears, Bixby cannot be important because humans unwittingly placed importance upon it.

Now, the physic reality. Meridians strike again there. The prime meridian is a product of human mind and doesn’t correspond to any geologically important location. Moreover, Earth is not a perfect sphere. The distance between North and South poles is actually 22 km shorter than a distance between two opposite points of equator, which makes latitude slightly skewed and undermines validity of the coordinate system as far as the natural laws are concerned.

In other words, Bixby is a random patch of land that had no importance either in human perception or physical reality at the time of creation of the secret hour.

And so, in conclusion, witches don’t exist! Bixby’s coordinates cannot be the reason why the secret hour manifests there!

Try to say otherwise in red, Scott Westerfeeeeld!

Oh, goddammit, I forgot he has an authorial power of ignoring random rants on the Internet.

So, I guess we are running with “coordinates are important,” after all, even though it makes zero sense. Dess certainly thinks so and concludes there must be other places like Bixby. At least three more in different quarterspheres, and probably other places with the same math properties. Some of those places would be located in an ocean, but others would be patches of land, perhaps with towns or other settlements around.

Dess is still not entirely convinced, of which I approve because it’s stupid, so she sneaks into her father’s office to check. He’s a rig foreman, so he has much more detailed maps. And sure enough, latitude and longitude cross exactly at Rustle’s Bottom.

Gah, I still can’t let it go. You know what would make more sense, given the general moral of progress and science being awesome and helping us fight wild monsters? If the secret hour was once everywhere not on the map. But the moment humans started charting maps and label the lands, darklings couldn’t manifest anywhere not associated with the number twelve. Before the Greenwich prime meridian was accepted worldwide, they would manifest elsewhere, there probably was some leeway allowed to them due to different countries using different prime meridians, but afterwards their haunts shifted to Bixby and other places with similar properties. This way we do lose thousands years of history, but, eh, a century is more than enough to build up some local legends and such, and you could get the information about them being around much longer from lore which would now contain stories of previous Midnighters following the suddenly shifted secret hour and trying to find a reason for the change. That reason wouldn’t be immediately obvious, especially since at the time an average person would have little incentive to follow changes in coordinate systems. Or it could be a known fact, and Rex just didn’t get to that point in his reading as there are plenty of other stuff that seems to be there.

But anyway, Rex and Melissa finally arrive, and Dess comments they wouldn’t be able to get to the place in time.


24
11:25 P.M.
RUSTLE’S BOTTOM

Jessica arrives at the party. For a few minutes she enjoys the view: the empty desert, the sky full of stars and a lonely fire. She wants to freeze that moment rather than going through with the plan.

Then more people arrive, and the beer starts flowing. Jessica declines the offer of beer, hopes nobody would get into accident due to that party and generally feels too young to be there. Those are all good concerns, though they are kinda surprising coming from her. Between her being a teenager and her worries about the near future, I would have expected her to try and enjoy the party to the best of her ability before she has to go.

But anyway, a boy named Steve approaches her. He looks younger than the other boys at the party, and he and Jessica make a small talk. It’s time to go, however, and Jessica awkwardly tries to ditch him to get to the snake pit before midnight. Steve instead volunteers to show her the route since she’s never been here before.

They walk for some time, and soon Jessica notices by the position of Milky Way in the sky and the bonfire that they turned in a wrong direction. She asks if Steve really knows where he’s going, and he says it’s not a big deal and if she’s cold, they can go to his car, which is right there.

“Listen, Jessica,” he said. “The snake pit’s no big deal, all right? It’s
just this old sinkhole full of rainwater and snakes. That’s Broken Arrow’s idea
of magic, I’m afraid.” He moved closer. “I can show you something much more
interesting.”

Yep, he’s an asshole. Jessica ditches him and reorients herself in the right direction, using a map, a compass and a flashlight Dess gave her. She walks away, ignoring Steve, but he catches up with her and grabs her arm. He tries to scare her away from the pit by saying she’d be lost and snakes would get her. Jessica breaks his grip, and the midnight falls. She runs.

Well, that’s it for now. Tune in next time for the climax.