Last time on the Summoning, Chloe runs away from a ghost, gets tackled by a teacher, and then she’s knocked out and taken to a hospital.

When she wakes up next chapter, her aunt tells her she needs to go to a group home. Wait, what?

“It’s the school. Unless you spend two weeks undergoing evaluation in a group home, it will go on your permanent record.”
“What will go on my record?”
Her fist clenched around the tissue. “It’s that da—” She caught herself. “It’s the zero-tolerance policy.” She spit the words with more venom than the curse.
“Zero tolerance? You mean violence? B-b-but I didn’t—”
“I know you didn’t. But to them, it’s simple. You struggled with a teacher. You need help.”

Zero-tolerance policies can be anything, and do lead to weird rulings. That said, they’re often easily challenged. The courts think they’re bullshit, Chloe’s dad is rich so they can get lawyers even when they aren’t in the right, and she seems like she’s going to a private high school with tuition, which has an interest in not dicking with students in a way your average public school doesn’t.

Next, this involved physical contact. Picture the headline: school punishes fifteen year girl for teacher assaulting her. She bit open her tongue and she’s going to be covered in bruises. There are very few ways of explaining a rule that says teachers have the right to touch students in any way they want and students aren’t allowed to react that don’t sound like “we enjoy hiring pedophiles to molest your children”. Chloe only became violent after being tackled, getting a knee to the stomach and then held down by two adults. The only way this could be worse for public relations is if they broke bones in the process.

(No mention is made of any such bruises or her tongue hurting or her period, oddly. Well, not that oddly, this story’s starting to have a weird dreamlike, floaty feel. Details arise at random from otherwise undifferentiated misty, and cause and effect are barely present.)

This is all beside the point, the point being that Chloe is clearly nuts. Doctor Aunt should know she just went nuts and needs treatment. Instead, she’s spinning this like Chloe is fine and just needs to prove it.

We also learn Doctor Aunt is on her mother’s side and hates her dad. She wanted to raise Chloe but her dad said no. It doesn’t explain why, but since apparently she also hates Dad for getting her sister killed by virtue of being in the same car when someone else drove into them, it’s possible that’s because she’s kind of nuts herself and Dad didn’t want his kid raised by someone who would convince her he killed Mommy.

Her dad shows up that night, having flown in from Berlin.

I don’t think Dad ever wanted kids. But he’d never tell me that, even in anger. Whatever Aunt Lauren thinks of him, he does his best. He just doesn’t seem to know what to make of me. I’m like a puppy left to him by someone he loved very much, and he struggles to do right by it even if he isn’t much of a dog person.

I like this description. It fits well with the family dynamics of the prologue too. But it’s weird that if her dad doesn’t know what to do with kids he’d refuse the aunt’s help. I mean, has she really been living with housekeepers since second grade? Because that’d mess you up pretty bad.

When you run screaming through the school halls after dying your hair in the girls’ bathroom, the first thing people say—well, after they get past the screaming-through-the-halls part—is “you were doing what?” Coloring your hair in a school bathroom isn’t normal. Not for girls like me. And bright red streaks? While skipping class? It screams mental breakdown.

Actually, I’d think the first thing they’d want to know was what was in the dye, followed by if there was a gas leak or something in there.

I can’t exactly say this is wrong, because Chloe is fifteen and if she wants to go on a weird assumption tangent here it’s not unrealistic. But once again we see little sign she’s meant to be an unreliable narrator.

Her dad, though, is 0kay with it. I think that’s meant to be a sign he’s a good guy, but culturally, dying your hair has gotten steadily more normalized. Considering her dad’s never around, he’s probably thrilled she’s more interested in some nonrebellious hair streaks than drugs or sex.

Chloe then reports that she can tell the doctors know there’s something seriously wrong but they won’t tell her. That seems weird. And considering her dad doesn’t seem to be the type to keep secrets, they’d have to be refusing to tell him either. I’m not sure what the actual protocols for schizophrenia are, but as she’s currently lucid and that could change, it seems telling her sooner rather than later would be a good idea. Bear in mind paranoia is an incredibly common symptom of schizophrenia, so this is really the last time to be talking behind her back.

It also doesn’t fit with her going into what amounts to celebrity rehab instead of a serious institution. Going for a two week evaluation to prove you’re not really that crazy is what you do when they can’t find anything wrong, not when they think you’re insane.

(Of course, the entire diagnosis of schizophrenia doesn’t fit, but I’ll wait until we actually get to it to see their explanation.)

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen people who weren’t really there. That’s what Aunt Lauren had wanted to talk to me about after school. When I’d mentioned the dream, she’d remembered how I used to talk about people in our old basement.

…that makes absolutely no sense.

Schizophrenia has no such warning signs. People with it don’t have an early childhood history of seeing things that aren’t there, they just suddenly develop it, usually as in their twenties. And kids claiming they saw someone who doesn’t exist is too commonplace for anyone to remember it and immediately connect it to the fact they’d seen someone look like they were heading into traffic and then lost sight of them.

(We also learn that yes, magic pendant necklace is what originally stopped the ghosts as a kid.)

Chloe considers the possibility that maybe she just had a really bad day, and maybe there was a hormone flood from getting her period. This, again, actually kind of plausible in intent, if not in details. The only confirmed hallucinations come after she spends a half hour in the bathroom dyeing her hair, right after her period starts.

Only then, Chloe makes it clear that nope, she is batshit.

If I was crazy, I’d be doing more than seeing and hearing people who weren’t there. I’d be acting crazy, and I wasn’t.

Thinking hallucinating things that aren’t there isn’t a problem is the point where yep, you’re crazy. Sane responses include hoping it never happens again or trying to figure out external thing might have caused, not insisting that you’re totally sane regardless. Self-doubt is sane. I could see the reverse happening, going over everything and thinking that aside from the hallucinations the rest of your brain still seems fine, but it’s worrying for it to be her starting point.

There’s also the fact that her hallucination terrified the shit out of her, and yet she doesn’t seem to have any concern about preventing another one. She seems to have completely dismissed the whole hallucination business except for how it’s making people wrongly think she’s nuts.

Then Chloe gets even weirder. Instead of recognizing that insisting you’re totally fine despite hallucinations is acting crazy regardless of other behavior, she goes back on it and says that yes, she was acting crazy in the other, innocuous things she was doing.

I couldn’t remember doing anything weird. Except for dying my hair in the bathroom. And skipping class. And breaking into the napkin dispenser. And fighting with a teacher.

…so it’s clear Chloe is not really right in the head by the fact she thinks all of those behaviors qualify people as insane. She does consider that the teacher thing at least wasn’t that weird since she was just trying to get away from the hallucination, but she still thinks it’s fair to call that “fighting with a teacher”. We aren’t really given anything indicating Chloe is concerned about rules, but this paragraph means she’s apparently obsessed with it. Note also her comment earlier about “girls like me” – ie, good girls. And good girls are a group and they never ever do bad things,like streaking their hair or jimmying a lock to steal some cheap pad because they don’t have coins. Consider also how she’s ignoring her actual problem in favor of focusing on if she counts as crazy or not, not wondering if some horrible monster is going to pop out of nowhere, because clearly that’s the first priority right now. So yeah, she does seem like she’s wound a little too tight.

She continues to justify to herself that she’s sane by the fact that before she hallucinated and ran around screaming, everyone thought she was acting normal. Because you were, Chloe. That’s why they say “going insane” as opposed to you just being nuts as a default state.

Instead of realizing this, Chloe wonders if she hallucinated the whole thing. And it’s from this that she gets to the conclusion earlier about how if you’re insane you might not realize it – ie, from the completely wrong source. She makes no effort to ask people what really happened, of course, since apparently she’d rather wallow in misery.

Instead, she heads off to the group home.

They’d given me some medicine before I left the hospital and it made me sleepy. Our arrival was a montage of still shots and clips.

This is a good way of putting it. The following description doesn’t really get it across well at all, though. Her “snapshots” and “clips” are not only too detailed, but they show plenty of analysis. To go to the film analogy the book keeps failing to capitalize on, it really is exactly like movie clips to indicate how choppy things are, but with the viewers able to see them perfectly clearly and notice all sorts of things she wouldn’t. Only this book is written in first person. I think a particularly bad offender is The older woman—a nurse, who introduced herself as Mrs. Talbot— chirping a guided tour that my fuzzy brain couldn’t follow. If your ability to write memory is down to random snippets and you can’t follow the speech, you’re just going to remember that as someone talking about something you don’t understand. I’m honestly dubious she’d be able to remember the woman is a nurse and has a name, let alone the actual introduction, let alone all of that and the fact she’s on a tour. This is being written as if her perception is choppy snapshots she can’t make sense of, but it’s refusing to follow through on it – she has the context for each scene. She can even tell that one nurse is nice and one isn’t, because reading subtle body language is totally something you’re up to when you’re doped out of your mind.

(She also shows no further worry for the possibility she’s hallucinating any of this, despite the fact there was no claim the medication was for that.)

Why is she that badly doped up? Either they think she’s really dangerous and needs to be drugged into incoherence, or they think she’s basically fine and able to go to some group home for rich kids to stay a few weeks and prove their breakdown didn’t mean anything. It doesn’t sound like they’re too worried about her because she doesn’t seem to be drugged in the hospital, so why when she’s given enough of a clean bill of heath to transfer to the group home? Her father should be calling the shots here, so why’d he okay it?

And then they wear off sometime that night, when she wakes up to see the other girl she shares the room with sleeping and manages to think coherently. So she’s transferred to a new place while her memory’s messed up, but the tranquilizers are entirely a temporary thing that wait to wear off until there’s no one familiar around and the change has already been completed? And after she’s already had problems with real hallucinations and she’s currently scared she can’t tell what is and isn’t one? I’m not a trained psychologist but this seems perfectly designed to cause a meltdown. Especially when schizophrenia seems like it’s stress-induced.

Naturally, none of that happens. She just cries quietly about how humiliating it is to be nuts and how she can never possibly go back to school after everyone saw her lose it. I’m not sure why this is only just now occurring to her, honestly – this is Sunday night, so she’s had at minimum all of Saturday to think about it assuming Janitor Ghost was Friday and she spent all Friday afternoon busy with either unconsciousness or testing. And from the sounds of it, she spent longer than that in the hospital.

If she’s going to start crying, I’d expect it to be over what’s happening right now -she’s in an unfamiliar place with people she doesn’t know, with some stranger she’s never even seen in the bed next to her, and she’s having second thoughts over if this is even worth it, having already decided that her school career there is over anyway. Also, because she’s probably hitting withdrawal for whatever drugs she’s on. This is why real doctors don’t give everyone drugs.