Last time on the Summoning, Chloe pretends she didn’t just run into a ghost while getting her lunch back.

Turns out all the trauma it was for nothing, because Chloe just puts her lunch in her locker. I guess her appetite is gone.

The bell sounded and the hall erupted, kids jostling like salmon fighting their way upstream, carrying along anything in their path.

That is a terrible, terrible simile. Salmon going upstream are fighting against water currents and going in a single direction. Kids in a hallway are fighting against each other as they go in a variety of directions.

But anyway. Nate’s there to ask if she’s going to the dance! She is? Great! He is too! Bye! That’s a very fifteen year old way to behave, Nate. I approve.

It’s a shame Chloe is still too distracted by what just hap- haha no she’s totally forgotten. In fact, going by the way the chapter’s written, she was already calm before he showed up. She immediately starts thinking of her outfit.

As I bent to grab my hag, I felt a gush between my legs.

…so, there’s a great deal of variety, certainly, but generally it’s not so abrupt or clear, and if you don’t want to deal with the messy and less glamorized leadup, maybe you shouldn’t make it a plot point in your book. I suppose it might be justified in that her period has to hit right now, very clearly, but in that case I think it’d have been better to say she’d been spotting for some time but it just never progressed. Sure, it’d mess with the view of a period as a sudden magical transition to womanhood, but fuck that view.

Anyway, yeah, she goes to the bathroom and sees perfect bright red.

Luckily, the bathroom has a machine dispensing pads and the lock can be opened by basically anything, so she just uses her house key. (Interestingly, we also learn she’s carrying around fifteen dollars with her. Why?)

So she decides to celebrate adulthood by skipping next period in favor of dying her hair.

Dying a dozen bright red streaks took twenty minutes. I’d had to take off my shirt to avoid getting dye on it, so I was standing over the sink in my bra and jeans. Luckily no one came in.

…okay you’re kind of weird Chloe.

This sequence is starting to go weird and I realized why – she’s doing stuff where she really should be relying on her friends. Having her friend there to jimmy the lock of the pad dispenser open and stand at the door to tell her someone’s coming and to get in a stall would make this seem a lot more likely. And there’s little reason her friends couldn’t be there – this is right after lunch, and really, nothing of value happened last chapter during the film club thing since we could already know that she’s going to see ghosts. (In fact, we already know what’s going to happen because she sees ghosts, because that’s covered on the back cover. This is why, given the opportunity, I prefer to avoid back covers. FFN’s one to two line summaries have ruined me for normal book descriptions. I hate having to spend the first five chapters of a book waiting for it to catch up with what the summary already told me will happen.)

It did look good. Annette would freak. My dad might notice. Might even get mad. But I was pretty sure no one was going to hand me a twelve-and-under menu anymore

Why does Annette care? How will her dad notice when he’s in another country? Also oh Chloe, it’s so cute how you think twelve year olds don’t have pink streaks. I want to pinch your little baby cheeks. It’s been a while since dyed hair automatically meant older teen.

The door creaked. I shoved the towels in the trash, grabbed my shirt, and dashed into a stall.

See? I really, really doubt anyone would have time to do all of that before the person walked in. Now, if there was a friend standing in the way, or the friend handled the towels while she went right for the stall, sure. But by herself it just doesn’t work.

The girl who comes in is crying, so I immediately went with ghost. We did just meet a crying ghost, after all. But it actually does go somewhere clever:

The toilet flushed and the shadow at my feet shifted. The stall lock clicked open. When the taps started, though, her sobs got even louder.
The water shut off. The towel roll squeaked. Paper crumpled. The door opened. It shut. The crying continued.
A cold finger slid down my spine. I told myself she’d changed her mind, and was staying until she got things under control, but the crying was right beside me. In the next stall.
I squeezed my hands into fists. It was just my imagination.
I slowly bent. No shoes under the divider. I ducked farther. No shoes in any of the stalls. The crying stopped.
I yanked my shirt on and hurried from the bathroom before it could start again.

But I actually kind of missed it at first because, having established she can see ghosts, I just figured the shoes were the crying ghost girl’s. If it wasn’t for the crying ghost earlier, I might not have jumped to the conclusion quite so fast, and then the scene would have worked a bit better.

Outside, the janitor shouts at her. Only it is, of course, Ghost Janitor, who wants to talk for some reason. So it seems like ghosts can tell what she is on sight? He was behind her to start, so it wasn’t like she acknowledged him and he realized she could see her.

The only other sound was my footsteps. My footsteps. Why couldn’t I hear his?

Okay, that’s spooky.

Except earlier she heard a thump getting her lunch backstage. I was assuming that ghosts interact with anything but can produce sounds like by hitting a table – after all, if she can hear the sound their nonexistent lungs and throats produce, why not their hands and feet? And come to think of it, Hobb’s pieces hitting the floor was a plop sound.

But maybe it’s a manifesting thing, where ghosts can do it but don’t always. Or he could just be floating – she doesn’t mention this, but maybe she was too startled to notice that he was floating and not walking toward her.

A blur passed me. The air shimmered about ten feet ahead, a figure taking form in a custodian’s shirt and slacks.

So ghosts do have to move about, but can move faster manifested, and apparently, can’t fly or anything when they’re manifesting as human. Which in turn means they probably can’t float, and that explanation for the lack of footsteps doesn’t work.

Chloe, reasonably, just skids to a halt and runs the other way.

The man let out a snarl that echoed down the hall.

See, this is what I mean. By all other appearances, it seems like the ghost version she perceives interacts normally with physics, it’s just that it doesn’t alter anything on the material reality level and only she notices the ghost version. The ghost voice is still affected by normal hallways and echos the way a normal voice would. So why wouldn’t his feet make sound?

She then runs into the ghost the third time he manifests.

He looked like a mannequin that had gotten too close to a fire. Face burned. Melted. One eye bulged, exposed. The other eye had slid down near his cheekbone, the whole cheek sagging, lips drooping, skin shiny and misshapen and—
The twisted lips parted. “Maybe now you’ll pay attention to me.”

Two things. First, we really are getting very inconsistent with how this works. If ghost sound functions like regular sound when it comes to echoing, why doesn’t it when it comes to speaking with your face burned off?

Second, this is stupid.

See, she’s running away because she’s scared of him. Scaring her further is convincing her she’s right. She wasn’t telling him she didn’t want to talk to some pervert janitor chasing fifteen year old girls. She was running away because she could tell he was a scary ghost. Now he’s a scarier ghost. How is this helping?

Let’s talk about the Sixth Sense. I saw the movie only once, but it’s currently burned into a chunk of my brain I might otherwise have used to remember equations or something thanks to whatever members of the ratings board thought it was funny to call it a PG-13 movie, may they rot in hell.

ANYWAY.

In the Sixth Sense, the ghosts want his help but tend to just terrify him instead. Why? Because they don’t know what’s going on. The ghosts are unaware of their death wounds, who he is or where they are. They’re often acting out the last sections of their life or other major moments, which are generally unpleasant, and because of the way their perception of reality is warped, they see him as a player in those dramas (and because of the general unpleasantness around such memories, often someone they hate). They’re oblivious to why he’s scared or even who he is.

So you don’t have to explain why the kid ghost with the back of his head blown off casually turns around to terrify the nine year old. Kid ghost doesn’t realize he’s dead and most of his skull is missing. Burned face ghost doesn’t know. Smashed skull lady doesn’t know. Even when they can see him though their usual delusions, they can’t make sense of his reactions, and of course they don’t know they want him to help them because they don’t even understand they need help yet. Obviously it’d be a good idea to hide whatever terrible wound they have as much as possible, talk calmly to the kid, say they don’t mean him any harm and they know they look a bit scary, and could he help them? But they can’t behave like that because they’re just ghosts, and that’s why things happen the way they do in the movie.

But what’s this guy’s excuse? If I saw a ghost suddenly char up into nothing, I would run faster because hey, maybe he can do that to me! I’m not exactly a ghost expert here, maybe he can. He’s behaved in exactly the worst way possible.

For the record. The best way possible is to keep his distance, first off. If he’s got to manifest in front of her to stay nearby, do so well away from her. Ten feet would be a barely acceptable minimum but she’s running full speed, so no, he was trying to get close to her and probably he was just trying to avoid her accidentally running through him. He should explain he won’t get any closer if she doesn’t want him to. This should be followed by saying he’s not going to hurt her. I would personally go with “I am totally unable to do anything to hurt you because I can’t touch anything anyway.” Even if I’m wrong and ghosts can mess with material plane things, it’s still the best thing to say. Also, begging is a lot more vulnerable seeming than demanding. You want to focus on making her not run away before you get into asking her help. Apologizing for scaring her is good. Once she’s no longer running too fast to listen, then he can get into the please-help-me pitch details.

Now, I can see a desperate ghost screwing up on this, but he’s acting in exactly the worst manner. He’s lost his temper within a minute of coming into contact with her and she hasn’t even done much. He hasn’t said anything about why she shouldn’t run, he’s just shouting at her. He doesn’t come off as desperate, just frustrated and impatient with a side of temper issues.

The ghost doesn’t have to do everything wrong for Chloe to panic. He’s a ghost. Most people would panic. And anything he does do wrong would be a perfectly valid reason to put him into the Terrible Threat category and ignore anything else he says to try to calm her down.

“Talk to me!” the horrible, garbled voice snarled, getting closer. “Do you know how long I’ve been trapped here?”

In short, this is not how it’s done.

Now, with the Hunger Games, I mentioned YA not being that subtle. So it’s possible we’re getting into that here. The author may be pushing against the expected stupidity of the reader, who, knowing that of course the ghosts just want her help and friendship, will think Chloe’s weird for running away screaming instead, so she wants to make it clear why the first meeting with a ghost is so disastrous.

But. Well, the author’s reusing the same scary ghost death, so there was a much more interesting option.

Janitor guy shows up. In the bathroom, I would suggest. He starts to insist he needs Chloe’s help, no really, has to be her has to be right now. Chloe, not wanting to help some pervert with his loli fetish, understandably is not interested. He switches to undead form in an attempt at a plea – look at me this is awful I need your help. I did say I would accept the ghost making some mistakes out of desperation.

Chloe just gets a flashback to Hobb and flips the fuck out. There you go. Any attempt to calm her down past that by the ghost won’t work, because she assumes the scary ghost is just trying to get her to hold still long enough to burn her alive.

Anyway, instead of running out of the school, she runs up the first flight of stairs. It’s even lampshaded as stupid. What isn’t lampshaded but is probably even stupider is her next move, to run into an empty classroom. How did she know it’s empty? Does she have the entire school schedule memorized? Why doesn’t she try to run into one of the many full classrooms along the way? Remember, she doesn’t think she’s crazy and needs to hide it, she thinks a monster is going to attack her. First instinct should be to find people.

(The ghost is still screaming at her this whole time, of course. Because if she was scared when you asked nicely, surely getting into a bloodthirsty rage will convince her to stop running so you can catch up. And he’s still in deathmask mode as he does so.)

I swerved into the nearest empty classroom and slammed the door. As I backed into the center of the room, the custodian stepped through the door. Right through it.

I want to point out that she didn’t lock the door, so it doesn’t really matter he’s going through it. Would it really have been that much better if he just opened it?

Incidentally, this would have been a great point for him to try to calm her down, by not going inside. He’s obviously got a perfectly good shouting voice, there’s no reason not to stop at the door and say he’s willing to talk from outside. Instead, all he does is take off the melted flesh face.

“Is that better? Now will you stop screaming and talk to—”

I just really don’t believe that a person would act this stupid. He’s obviously frantic to talk to her, and that should translate into being frantic about pacifying her.

Chloe, in what is admittedly pretty in line with her previous characterization of not knowing about glow in the dark chemicals or to not run upstairs or to not run into a classroom with an unlocked door, decides her next great escaping decision will be through the third story window.

Now.

I’ve been to a lot of schools in my life, but all in the same state. So I’m not sure how universal this is, but absolutely every school I’ve ever seen had doors connecting the classrooms to each other. Literally. Every single one. Just from a zoning point of view I suspect you need more than one exit from a room.

This could work if she ran to one of them and found it locked, at which point the ghost was close enough she didn’t think she could try to run across the room to the other. But no, she just likes the idea of windows. Incidentally, every school also had windows that weren’t big enough to fit through.

“Chloe!”
The door flew open. It was the vice principal, Ms. Waugh, with my math teacher, Mr. Travis, and a music teacher whose name I couldn’t remember. Seeing me at the window, Ms. Waugh threw out her arms, blocking the two men.
“Chloe?” she said, voice low. “Honey, you need to step away from that window.”

This doesn’t make any sense at all.

First, the window is still closed. Chloe was looking at it trying to figure out how to open it. And I know she’s not very bright but still, if this is something that needs contemplation I’m going to have to assume these are not the sort of windows you can open and jump through within a second, so they’re not the sort of windows where you’d assume anyone standing nearby would be about to jump. And I refuse to believe teachers can tell that you’re intending to jump out a window just because you’re looking at it, especially when she must have turned toward them as soon as they came in.

(The windows almost always have a counter next to them. If Chloe had climbed onto that counter I could see teachers reacting nervously, especially because there are often glass panels that can’t be opened but have big enough frames for someone to smash through.)

While Chloe is being confused, she’s tackled by one of the teachers. The janitor ghost, being pretty dumb, figures that this means she’s got to talk to him now and not that she’s about to be expelled and never see him again. The teacher is surprisingly bad at the whole restraining thing, and she gets a knee in her chest, her arms twisted and she bites her tongue. Hello impending lawsuit.

Anyway, she’s also shouting about the janitor ghost, who’s still playing deathmask peek-a-boo like this is productive. He is shocked, just shocked, when other people show up to knock her out and take her out of school, because that wasn’t obvious.

So what we’ve learned this chapter is that either Chloe or ghosts radiate stupid at high enough concentrations to affect ghosts or Chloe, depending. One of them also radiates insanity particles that only affect adults.

Also, ghosts can run around in daylight and are not stopped by different levels, but are stuck to particular areas. Hm. Perhaps their range can be expressed as a sphere, and all the ghosts in baby Chloe’s basement were from surrounding houses and at the very edge of their respective spheres, so none of them, including Hobb, could go upward but the others could retreat back to the centers of their sphere where there was no overlap with Hobb’s.