Last time on the Summoning, Chloe whines about how she’s short and hasn’t had her period and her hair isn’t good enough. Also, ghost boy.

BETWEEN THE DREAM I couldn’t remember and the boy I couldn’t have seen, I was spooked.

Dreams really, really don’t work this way. It’s common to wake up from a nightmare with a sense of dread, but like the details of what the dream was about, it doesn’t last. Now, seeing someone nearly get run over, on the other hand, is definitely good for spooking you. But that’s not what she’s saying here.

In fact, in a worrying development for my future enjoyment, she doesn’t seem like she’s bothered by the wellbeing of the kid at all. She’s already worked out that what mattered about last scene was that she saw it and other people didn’t.

Have you ever seen what looks like something about to be hit by a car? It’s really, really stressful. People react to other people/people-substitutes in danger in a similar way to if they’re in danger. We also have some screwy object permanence rules in our brain. If you see what looks like a kid run into traffic, you’re going to panic because OMGHITBYCARNO, followed by calming down when you realize that hasn’t happened, followed by <b>trying to see what the kid did instead</b> so you can fully reassure yourself that you didn’t see the kid run into traffic and that the kid is okay. This is not fully rational, but it is how our brains work, and it does have a reason – if we register someone in danger, it’s good to know they’re fully out of danger instead of that they avoided the first blow of many.

She tries calling her aunt, so apparently she has a cell phone she can use at will, but not a branded cell phone. This stands out. Why doesn’t she have an iphone? Well, because iphones came out in 2007, when the manuscript must have been finished if the book came out in 2008. I wouldn’t normally notice this, but once you start putting in brand names you’re priming people to think this way. Unless you can keep it up, don’t do it at all.

When she reaches Doctor Aunt, she immediately demands to know if she ever lived in a house with a basement. Okay, this is getting into “she read the script” territory. The spooky part of the nightmare was not whether or not she’d actually lived in a house with a basement. It doesn’t matter.

Here’s a way this could have gone. Clearly, Chloe is a hypochondriac. That’s why she went to a speech therapist for the severe dysfunction that is occasionally stuttering under extreme stress. (Hey, her mom died when she was little, that can give you an obsession with health.) She’s calling her aunt to find out what can cause you to hallucinate boys with old fashioned lunch boxes and are any of the diseases brain cancer and how many types of brain cancer are fatal. Her aunt tells her to calm down and she says she’s sorry, it’s just there was this boy and earlier she had this nightmare about a basement, which is dumb because she’s never even lived in a house with a basement, and her aunt says she did back when she was a little kid, doesn’t she remember?

Instead, she Just Knows there’s something important about the basement, so she asks and her aunt confirms they lived in one ages ago.

“Thanks. It was—”
“Bugging you, I can tell. Must have been a doozy of a nightmare.”

I am only irritated further by the book’s insistence this entire chain of thought is considered reasonable by others.

my imagination’s in overdrive today. I freaked Milos out this morning, thinking I saw a boy run in front of the cab.”
“What?”
“There wasn’t a boy. Not outside my head, anyway.” I saw Kari at her locker and waved. “The bell’s going to ring so—”
“I’m picking you up after school. High tea at the Crowne. We’ll talk.”

Huh. So, that’s a point to the theory her family (or perhaps just the maternal half, I don’t believe it’s been said if the aunt is her mother’s sister or her father’s sister) knows what’s going on. On the other hand, if her aunt knows what’s going on, why not just get her out of school? Even assuming her aunt is unable to get out of work right that instant, she’s driven to school in a cab, she can just get another cab to drive her home or to her aunt’s place to wait.

Anyway, now it’s time for special rich girl art school.

when you put kids together, no matter how similar they seem, lines are drawn. Cliques form. Instead of jocks and geeks and nobodies, you get artists and musicians and actors.

Okay, shut up.

The problem with schools are not cliques. The problem is a social hierarchy. The reason the jocks/popular kids are able to abuse the others is that the rest of the school wants to be part of their group, and this gives them social power. In many schools, teachers also favor those students over others, adding to their ability to abuse those of lower status.

Unless art school has a similar ranking of worth, in which actors want to be musicians want to be artists, each group’s ability to abuse the other ones is extremely limited. You could get fighting between the groups with each group thinking it’s the best one, but everyone in every group is getting the social high of thinking they’re the top monkeys. This has a lot to do with why schools start mellowing out by high school and even more by college, because you transition from everyone competing for top social status to people having different values and goals. That guy over there won a football championship THEREFORE HE’S A LOSER FOR SPENDING HIS TIME DOING BORING THINGS I DON’T CARE ABOUT.

Social suffering requires either the adults in charge favoring one group over the others or that there’s intra-group competition, where they’re each competing to be the popular actor/musician/artist. The latter I would completely buy, in fact it’s what I’d expect, but it’s not what the book’s saying here.

Also, I find listing it with jocks on top very, very odd. When girls talk about it, it’s the popular girls, sometimes known as cheerleaders. School is very gendered. The jocks beat up on the weaker boys and the popular girls exclude and humiliate the less popular girls. Using jocks as the top group is something I see when adults are talking about high school social structure in general, perhaps for reasons related to how in gendered languages the presence of any men turns the group masculine. It’s not something you usually see when it’s a girl describing her own experiences.

As a theater arts student, I was lumped in with the actors,

…if there’s such a meaningful difference here, why would they be lumping them together? Why doesn’t she just hang out with the rest of the theater arts kids?

where talent seemed to count less than looks, poise, and verbal ability.

Uh. Okay. In what universe are poise and verbal ability unconnected to talent? Frankly, even looks requires a deal of skill regarding makeup and clothing. What talent are we talking about here exactly?

Bear in mind “actor” is not going to mean “movie star”. If nothing else they’re going to spend a lot of the time in plays. There’s also radio, which is just vocals. There are a fuckton of pretty people. Anyone who wants to be an actor will have already compared themselves to the prettiest people on TV and realized looks alone are not going to get them to the same place. Anyone who isn’t this bright then had their teachers explain it to them.

I didn’t turn heads, and I scored a fat zero on the last two. On a popularity scale, I ranked a perfectly mediocre five. The kind of girl nobody thinks a whole lot about.

This is also not how bullying works. She’s just claimed she fails completely at all three things her group values. That doesn’t mean she’s mediocre, that means she’s a failure. The mediocre kids are the ones who are mediocre, which as she just admitted, is a five, not a zero.

But I’d always dreamed of being in art school, and it was as cool as I’d imagined.

So as far as I can tell she’s in art school because she likes the idea. She has yet to give any indication of actual interest in anything it’s teaching. It’s a good thing her dad’s decided to give her money as a cold substitute for his affection, because otherwise he might be bothered by blowing his money on this waste of time.

I mean, come on! What’s so cool about it? All you did was bitch that they’re still doing doing popularity things and you’re not on top of the heap, and also that you have no respect for the other students in your area of interest!

I spent the morning thinking about that boy on the street. There were plenty of logical explanations. I’d been staring at his lunch box, so I’d misjudged where he’d been running. He’d jumped into a waiting car at the curb. Or swerved at the last second and vanished into the crowd.

BOOK. MAKE UP YOUR MIND. YOU CAN’T HAVE HER THINKING THIS WHEN EARLIER HER CONCERN WAS WHY SHE’D IMAGINED IT, NOT WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

Then it’s lunchtime. Chloe is hanging out with her two friends, who seem like generic but friendly girls with no negative comments about their appearance in comparison to Chloe’s! They talk to her about someone she has a crush on and how she should talk to him. One offers to ask him for her and Chloe begs her not to.

Her round face screwed up in disgust. “God, you can be such a baby.

aaaaaaaand never mind.

We find out that in addition to being fat, Miranda is a pushy slutty bitch.

“Like phoning a guy until his mother tells you to leave him alone?” Kari said.
Miranda only shrugged. “That’s Rob’s mother. He never said it.”
…
she’d had more boyfriends than she could name.

……Anyway, we now get our lecture on the evils of peer pressure and trying to fit in or something. See, once Miranda started hanging out with the rest of the group, they all had to get interested in boys for real, and Chloe had made up a crush so she wouldn’t seem like a baby.

It’s not that I can’t see the basic dynamic happening, it’s how self-aware it is and how it’s putting everything on one newcomer. These are fifteen year olds. They can want to date boys for other reasons than because the evil, evil slut is using the power of peer pressure on them.

I figured I could just name a guy I liked and that would be enough. Not a chance. Miranda had outed me—telling him I liked him. I’d been horrified.

See how evil she is! She’s acting in a productive manner based on information she thought was true! Girls are supposed to sit passively in the background and wait for boys to ask them out! SHE IS A FALLEN WOMAN!

The fallout from this is…Brent avoids Chloe a bit more now. Not teasing or harassment. If this was the sort of situation where you’d be mocked for a crush I could see the problem with Miranda’s behavior, but it’s not. Chloe had/claimed to have had a crush on someone. (She admits to being disappointed by Brent’s reaction.) Now she knows he isn’t interested, and she can either go after someone else or plot how to get him instead of sitting around! Miranda is the Alexander of teenager relationship angst.

At this point another boy shows up, from Film Club. Okay, so if she’s in art school to be a director, why does she care so much what the actors think of her? Why’s she getting lumped in with the actors when there’s plenty of students in her chosen interest? (And I thought the director was more on the artist end of the scale?) If nothing else, why hasn’t she fallen back on the smug certainty that one day she’s going to be their boss and they’ll be begging her for work and she’ll say no.

Did you forget Petrie rescheduled film club for lunchtime this week? We’re discussing avant-garde. I know you love art films.”
I fake gagged.

Also, I mean, sure, arty films can suck and taste varies etc, but it’s still weird that her opinion is exactly the same as mainstream kids on this subject. For all the book insists it’s ~*~ART SCHOOL~*~ it’s exactly like the usual generic, detail-free version of regular high school adults normally describe.

We discussed the short, and I was on the list for directors—the only freshman who’d made the cut

So she’s totally mediocre and normal and zero, except for the part where within her chosen specialty she’s awesome. Nice try, book.

Now, this can work if it’s clear no one else gives a shit. A good start would be for this not to be taking place at art school. Then she’s just the film geek the popular girls laugh at because she cares about film and not the right clothing brand or boys or whatever. Also, it’d help if she showed anything resembling interest or enthusiasm for film. I know absolutely nothing on the subject. I’d be happy to hear someone discussing why it’s so awesome.

Anyway, she’s so interested in whatever this involves she ignores the film clips selected because of (DETAILS MISSING), as she’s distracted by planning her addition tape (DETAILS MISSING) that she forgets her lunch. She heads back to retrieve her lunch bag.

You know, why isn’t she just eating school food? I realize the quality varies widely, so there’s no set rule for if the popular rich kids buy or bring their food, but generally the kids with absent parents buy it and I would personally assume that the fancy rich girl art school her dad picked was fancy and rich enough to produce decent food. Certainly the housekeeper doesn’t seem like she’d want to make meals for Chloe. This isn’t a a big deal, it’s just something that really should have been mentioned instead of treating it like it’s expected. Does Chloe make her own lunches (she spends a half hour getting ready for school and a chunk of that in the bathroom, so that’s kind of a time crunch)? Do they buy prepackaged food? Does she do this because school food is terrible or because it’s uncool to buy it or because the lines take forever or because she’s really obsessed with her diet?

Whoever left the auditorium last had turned out the lights, and I didn’t have a clue how to turn them on, especially when finding the switch would require being able to see it.

Hello ridiculous plot device, I see you’re back for this chapter as well! I hadn’t missed you.

First, she’s made it clear she’s spent plenty of time in the auditorium, it’s not a new place for her. Second, for exactly this reason the light switches are generally near the door. In the rare event they aren’t near the door you’re using, they’re near some other door that at least one person left through, and seeing as that person is an ordinary club member like her, Chloe should know and use that other door herself.

This could be made palatable with greater detail. For example, saying that the light switches were up on the stage and blah blah archaic wiring they couldn’t have a second set near the door. The Chloe explains she doesn’t have time to backtrack all the way around outside to get to that door when her lunch box is just a little way inside. There, issue solved.

Instead, Chloe decides to go on a tangent about glow in the dark light switches.

Of course, I’d need someone to actually make them. Like most directors, I was more of an idea person.

Chloe is apparently too stupid to know that glow in the dark plastic and glow in the dark paint already exists. My sympathy for Chloe’s predicament is rapidly vanishing.

Chloe walks on and on and on, never finding any light switches. Her lunch bag is apparently backstage, which means it’s probably got other ways in than walking through the entire auditorium, ones which presumably have either lights on or at least accessible light switches.

Remember when I said the book did a good job of rushing through the basement scene and not wasting extra time on dramatic irony? It’s making up for that now.

I’m afraid of the dark. I had some bad experiences as a child, imaginary friends who lurked in dark places and scared me. I know that sounds weird. Other kids dream up playmates—I imagined bogeymen.

Chloe, absolutely fucking everyone is afraid of the dark, and you know how bogeymen aren’t real yet we have an established word for them? Why yes, that would be because imagining them is normal. You aren’t special, deal with it.

The makeshift hall seemed to stretch before me, yawning into darkness. It was the perspective—the two curtained sides angled inward, so the hall narrowed. Interesting illusion, especially for a suspense film. I’d have to remember that.
Thinking about the corridor as a movie set calmed my nerves. I framed the shot, the bounce of my step adding a jerkiness that would make the scene more immediate, putting the viewer in the head of our protagonist, the foolish girl making her way toward the strange noise.

Ah, finally. This is pretty good.

I’d like the way it’s a coping mechanism to be a bit better – the first paragraph does it, but the second is sliding into genre savvy, which should just be scaring her more. She should stick to focusing on the way arbitrary lighting is making ordinary objects look sinister and how interesting it is that the human eye is so easily deceived, not on the fact that in any movie the girl doing this is about to get stabbed to death by the monster. Focusing on what’s making her feel this way would let her view it from a distance.

But then there actually is a sound. A sudden thump.

At this point Chloe kind of goes nuts. She just keeps narrating the film in her head. She doesn’t explain why she’s suddenly hearing sounds. I would have expected her to explain it as similar to how you can hear your own name sometimes, that she’s thinking so much about sounds she’d play in the movie that her brain is making her hear them. No, she just works the fact she’s hearing stuff like something crying in the room into her movie and then bolts. You know, I think she may actually just be mentally ill. And I don’t mean schizophrenic like the book says. Hallucinating voices doesn’t make you crazy in the sense of disordered thinking. It’s quite possible, even common, to hallucinate and respond to it in a perfectly rational manner. Here, she’s coming off as unhinged in her response, which is to pretend she’s watching a movie and none of this is happening. That’s some really severe disassociation and she’s doing it at the drop of a hat.

Anyway, so apparently there’s some crying kid ghost here? And it’s starting to seem like ghosts prefer a lack of light, or else she should have noticed the sounds earlier. But that doesn’t quite make sense since baby Chloe said the lights were because Hobb was sneaking up on her, not because they kept Hobb away completely, and the playing-in-traffic boy managed fine too. Maybe it was just too nosy for her to make out the sound earlier? It would have been good to specify it was really soft, at the edge of hearing crying instead of a full out sob.

We haven’t learned much of anything about how the world works this chapter. We have learned that art school is incredibly boring, and I’m looking forward to Chloe’s breakdown in the hopes the mental institution is better done. If nothing else I don’t have experience being stuck in one for years, so there’s less to stand out as wrong.