Last time on the Summoning, Chloe’s not a slut and it’s wrong to care about appearance.

After that lecture, Chloe and Derek leave and Chloe tries to dawdle and fuss with her shirt to give Derek a chance to walk off first. Instead he stands there and waits to talk to her.

“What are you wiping at?” he whispered finally.
“A spot.”
“There’s no spot.”
I straightened, tugging my shirt down and adjusting it. That’s because I fixed it.”

I quote because if I had to read that, so do you.

We’re going to keep talking about other books. So, in A Dance With Dragons, a lot of the story is various characters almost but not quite meeting up. (Actually, that’s half the series, really.) But there’s always a ton of things going on. So while it’s painful when something almost works out but doesn’t, the route to that point is enjoyable and we always learn all sorts of new things and meet various interesting characters.

This is the polar opposite of that. There is filler coming out the seams here, and it is absolutely fucking pointless. It is air. It is sawdust.

With that brilliant bit of conversation over with, Derek says they need to talk. No shit, but maybe not one foot away from the room full of adults who just told you to keep away from each other. There’s a difference between Derek not having social skills and Derek being a fucking moron.

Chloe points this out in a less angry tone, probably only because she doesn’t realize quite how stupid it all is. Derek is all “yeah I mean later duh” and shut the fuck up Derek, if you’re bright enough to realize now isn’t a good time to talk you’d be bright enough to realize TALKING ABOUT PLANNING TO TALK MORE LATER IS STILL TALKING.

IN FACT IT’S JUST INCREASING THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF TALKING YOU TWO DO.

Derek’s master plan? Meet up in five minutes to talk.

Chloe shows a flash of intelligence, which may not be much but again, it’s more than we’re getting from our supposed genius here, and instead fucks off to a different room.

Rae shows up and wants to know what happened. Chloe immediately says it totally wasn’t like that at all.

“Well, duh.”

Thank you, Rae.

Chloe, I know remembering other people exist is hard for you, but you already told Rae about the ghost and she was with you at the crawlspace the first time, she would know you really did have a reason to be exploring and not “exploring”. Also, she knows you think there’s a ghost watching you down there, which generally puts a damper on makeout sessions.

She’d known me less than a week, and she knew I hadn’t been fooling around in a crawl space with Derek.

Well, yes. As I just said, she also knows you see ghosts and that one of them is telling you to mess around in the crawlspace. Your aunt doesn’t.

Chloe says she’ll explain later in their room, because Chloe wants to drag this out. Then she whines about how much it sucks when people think you did something and you really didn’t.

Rae commiserates. At her school, they were always telling her not to get involved with gangs.

Rae’s birth mother was Jamaican. She’s called Chloe “girl”, she’s the only poor one and now she goes to shitty schools where fourteen year olds named Trina run away, get involved with gangs and die in driveby shootings (which, incidentally, are infamous for hitting random bystanders, so I don’t like the implication it happened as a direct result of being involved with a gang). It just seems a bit much. She’s hitting all these racial stereotypes, and when she’s been adopted by some random other woman. If nothing else, all this seems at odds with the fact she’s adopted by someone who can support a half dozen kids. Wouldn’t living in gangland central of the driveby shootings give an adoption agency pause?

Also:

Hello? What does that have to do with me? There’s a reason Trina and I weren’t friends anymore.

Some people might be slightly upset this happened to their friend less than a year ago. (Rae, like Chloe, is only fifteen.) But fuck that. The only thing important about Trina is that it slightly inconveniences Rae. Trina got what she deserved! (She sounds like “that kind of girl”, you know?)

Anyway, before Rae can tell us more about how hard it is to have supportive parents who care about you not running away and joining a gang the way Trina probably didn’t, Derek shows up to say it’s been longer than five minutes. When Chloe tries to make it clearer she’s brushing him off, he says Simon wants to talk.

Rae points out that Simon can say that himself. She doesn’t also point out that unlike Derek, Simon isn’t even under orders to avoid Chloe, but that seems even more relevant here.

Derek really wants to talk though. In fact, he almost says please. Chloe says that if he had said that she’d have gone, but he stops himself at the last minute so she doesn’t. Fuck you both for dragging this out further.

Chloe asks about the pool. Seriously, fuck you Chloe.

Then thank god Simon shows up. Say something plot relevant.

“Hey,” Simon said.
He perched on the love seat arm. I moved over to give him room, but Rae was on the other side, so I couldn’t go far, and his hip brushed my shoulder.
“I—” I began.
“Don’t want to go outside,” he finished for me. ‘That’s cool. We can both hide out from Derek in here, see how long it takes him to find us.”
“I’ll leave you two—” Rae began, pushing up from the sofa.
“No, stay,” Simon said. “I didn’t mean to butt in.”
“You didn’t. I hear chores calling my name, though, so I’ll take off.”

All three of you.

Listen closely.

This is very important.

I WANT YOU TO DIE.

Anyway, we suddenly get the detail shooting up and a paragraph about them sitting on the couch and not touching but almost and stuff. I think in a book with better description normally this would have worked very well, but it’s normally so barebones that it comes off as incredibly hamhanded. Look! bellows the narrative. A BOY and GIRL together. Brushing against each other. ALONE.

Besides I’m pretty sure Derek’s the winner and this is all red herring stuff. YA romances, like all romances, will never settle for the one who makes a degree of sense.

Simon is apologetic and tells her she was super duper brave.

“It was pretty interesting,” I said after a moment.
“I bet. The kind of thing that’s really cool in the movies, but in real life . . .” Our eyes met. “Not so much, huh?”

Now, you can argue that this sort of stuff is exactly what actual teenagers might say. People default to platitudes and cliches when they’re out of their element. The problem is there isn’t the slightest bit of that self-awareness here. Hasn’t been this entire book, really.

So we talked about zombie movies, debating and discussing the merits of films that, according to the ratings board, neither of us should have seen.

Author.

R rating doesn’t mean no one under seventeen. It means no one under seventeen without an adult saying it’s fine. People regularly take five year olds into these things. And renting a movie is even easier. Let us not even get into the might of the internet. I’m not claiming this is actually a good thing. I’m just saying that no real kid would be acting as if “the ratings board” was a big deal.

For god’s sake, I saw R-rated films by that age and my parents actually gave a shit about me! Kids who don’t get to see horror movies don’t get to see them because their parents personally say no, and they know this.

If you are thinking about films that the rating board says they absolutely should not see, you are talking of NC-17. I am sure there are NC-17 zombie films. I am even more sure that is not what you meant to talk about.

They continue to chat about “zombie movies” in the most generic of terms for a while. The Chloe explains that studios want movies that have a broad appeal, only she doesn’t put it in normal terms.

The studio is God. And they just want something they can sell, something that’ll fit their four little quadrants.”
“Quadrants?”
“The four main demographic groups. Guys and girls, divided by young and old. Hit all four, and you’ve got a blockbuster . . . and a very happy studio.

Actually, Chloe, the studio mostly wants a movie that’ll appeal to one quadrant, male 18 to I forget. Those are the blockbusters. They involve explosions. While we’re talking of casual sexism, you should stop sneering at indie films and go look at the percentage of female directors in Hollywood and realize your relative chances.

“How do you know all this?”

Uh…this is like three steps below “wikipedia” in terms of obvious stuff.

I’m wired. I subscribe to Variety, Creative Screenwriting, a whack of industry loops, bookmark the blogs …

Look, if you can’t understand this newfangled “internet”, for the love of god, just set the damn story in the past.

Derek comes to interrupt, thank god. Let’s see if he’ll finally drag the story somewhere.

Nope, he just bitches about them talking about zombie movies, which is exactly as pointless as talking about zombie movies. Oh, and for no reason he claims Chloe is in danger. Since when? I mean, sure, Tori may or may not have been trying to kill her, but everyone seems fine about that and I don’t think Chloe’s going to hang out in crawlspaces with her again anyway.

Go ahead. Take it easy. I’m sure Dad will walk in that door any minute and rescue us. And if he’s in trouble? If he needs help? Well, too bad, ’cause that would require effort and you’re too busy . . . chilling.”

This too doesn’t make sense. They’ve been hanging out here for months, and Derek was completely in favor of plan Pretend To Be Normal Until They Let Us Out, so it’s weird he’s suddenly flipped to saying their dad’s the one in trouble, as if they would rescue him right now and it’s just that Simon’s dragging his feet.

Anyway, Simon and Chloe leave and the chapter ends, with a sum total of FUCKING NOTHING again taking place.