Like Ariel mentioned yesterday, we’re doing Hush, Hush double time because we came up with an awesome (read: awesome) idea we want to do in October, so we need this book done by then! Also, we can’t wait to be done with this book.
You may also have noticed that the “.wordpress.com” part of the URL is gone now. That is because Ariel and I own the domain now. This means all kinds of awesome stuff for you, the reader, like banner ads super awesome surprises!
Chapter Eight
Nora comes back from flirting with/telling off Patch and tells Vee and Elliott that telling her stalker to leave her alone totally worked and they totally buy it because they’re fools. Nora confronts Vee about playing up Patch’s creepiness to Elliott and Vee insists she did Nora a favor.
“It’s the law of supply and demand,” Vee said. “Who would’ve thought economics would come in useful?”
Okay. No. Supply and demand are two independent properties. Since supply remains the same (there’s only one Nora (I assume)), what increasing the demand does is increase the price. Also, it will increase the quantity that people will buy at that price. Except there’s still only one Nora, and… now she costs more… Okay, look, I didn’t do that well in economics either, but I’m still calling bullshit on Vee.
Nora then decides that she needs cotton candy, so she leaves for a moment to buy cotton candy, but gets lost/feels like someone’s following her/something/runs into Patch again. Patch tries to talk her into riding the Archangel roller coaster with him again. Now, up until this point, Nora has made it very clear that:
- Patch scares her
- Roller coasters scare her
So when faced with both of them at the same time, her response is:
knowing I’d be with Patch made me feel safe.
Wait, no, that doesn’t… Fuck it. Go ride the roller coaster, Nora. I hope you pee your pants.
The car swerved to the right. I felt a jolt of panic, and then it happened. My left shoulder slammed against the car door. It flung open, and I was ripped out of the car while the roller coaster sped off without me. […] I tumbled over the edge, plunging straight down through the black air. The ground rushed up at me, and I opened my mouth to scream.
The next thing I knew, the ride screeched to a stop at the unloading platform.
And what is Nora’s reaction to what is so far her second hallucination in which she is in mortal peril?
“I think I’m more of a guardian angel girl.”
Also, symbolism happens.
“[Archangel] means high-ranking angel.” There was a definite smugness to [Patch’s] voice. “The higher up, the harder the fall.”
Subtle.
Chapter Nine
Nora and Patch go back to where Nora totally abandoned her friends a whole chapter ago and is surprised to find they aren’t there anymore! They’re nowhere to be found and her cellphone mysteriously (and conveniently) dies and, man, I bet Patch has nothing to do with this. So Patch offers her a ride home, and I hope you’re ready to start laughing your ass off, because:
Patch takes her home on his BADASS MOTORCYCLE THAT IS BADASS and Nora tries to act like she’s cool with it by saying things like “Nice bike” and “I like the feel of the wind on my face”. No, seriously. This is a real thing that she does and it would be cute if my eyes hadn’t rolled all the way around my head by now. They get to Nora’s house and Nora can’t get her keys to open the door, but Patch can. Dramatic! Then Patch invites himself in and… starts making tacos…
Patch said, “It’s late.” His eyes followed mine closely, reflecting a wayward glint. “You must be hungry.”
“No. Yes. I mean, yes, but-” […]
“You like Mexican?” he asked […] “Tacos?”
“Tacos?” I echoed.
This seemed to amuse him. “Tomatoes, lettuce, cheese.”
“I know what a taco is!”
Before I could stop him, he strode past me into the house. At the end of the hall, he steered left. To the kitchen.
I have no idea why I think this scene is so hilarious, but I can’t stop laughing. This is just so random.
“Come here. I’ll teach you how to make tacos.”
Sadly, the ensuing scene is nowhere near as awesome as My Drunk Kitchen, and after you’ve learned how to make tacos like that, everything else is just disappointing.
Things get sensual, as it often does when you’re making tacos, and Nora talks about her feelings, and I’m not gonna make fun of it because she explains exactly how she feels to Patch in two sentences, whereas this same conversation has lasted for six hundred pages and counting in Fifty Shades of Grey, so I’m gonna let Nora get away with this one. But I’m not gonna let her get away with how she gets Patch to stop trying to seduce her.
My brain couldn’t process one logical thought. Patch’s mouth was roaming up over my jaw, gently sucking at my skin…
“My legs are falling asleep,” I blurted.
Smooooooooth.
Chapter Ten
Nora wakes up to Vee calling her asking her, quite reasonably, where she went to and why she never brought back any cotton candy.
“What happened to you? What happened to bringing back cotton candy?[…]”
Nora explains that she couldn’t find them and Patch brought her home, to which Vee immediately says:
“You sound agitated… flustered… aroused.”
And then just doesn’t give a shit about not knowing where her best friend mysteriously disappeared to at a carnival in the woods the previous night anymore.
“What was it like?” Vee pressed. “A peach kiss? A plum kiss? Or maybe an al-fal-fa kiss?”
Anyway, Nora and Vee go to Victoria’s Secret and Vee bitches out a Victoria’s Secret employee for offering a free measuring because she already knows she’s a D cup so FUCK YOU FOR TRYING TO DO YOUR JOB, WAGE SLAVE. Then Vee gets run over by a car or something.
Okay, I’ll explain, but I really wanted to write that without any transition at all. Nora thinks she sees the hooded figure that she thinks is following her again and tells Vee about it. Also, they can reasonably assume now that the figure is female (so maybe it isn’t Elliott, THERE GOES MY FAN THEORY). Vee comes up with a super logical plan that goes like this:
- Vee puts on Nora’s coat and umbrella and leaves the store
- The hooded person follows Vee
- Nora follows the unknown and possibly dangerous person who thinks they’re following Nora
- For some reason Nora does this in Vee’s car
- Nora drives past a cemetery and her umbrella hits the windshield and then suddenly she finds Vee moaning in the fetal position either on or by the road it is not very clear
I’m pretty sure you could remove every single one of those steps and get better results.
Chapter Eleven
Vee ends up in the hospital and needs surgery and can’t have visitors. Equally upsetting, Patch isn’t in school the next day.
Nora gets a note from Coach (who hasn’t said anything dumb in way too long and this is not okay) and has to go see the new school psychologist, Miss Greene, and it’s probably just coincidence that we have a new female character introduced right after we learn that Nora’s mysterious homicidal hooded stalker is female. Or, since this is Hush, Hush, it’s possible it’s just to have another character talk exclusively about sex.
“Yes, but you must be very lonely all by yourself at the farmhouse. […] Do you have a best friend? A boyfriend? […] You’re an attractive girl. I imagine there must be some interest from the opposite sex.”
First, how does Miss Greene know Nora is heterosexual? Second, why does everyone in this book always talk about sex? There must be Fall Out Boy levels of sexual frustration going on for everybody in this world.
The session is incredibly boring and not a super realistic depiction of counseling.
“I’ll make a note of your feelings in your file.”
But on the plus side, a school faculty member finally takes issue with how weird it is that Coach is more or less actively trying to set up Nora and Patch, and Miss Greene says she’s going to talk with him and set limitations on where and when they can meet. After that, Nora kills time until Vee’s visiting hours at the hospital to work on an article for the school eZine and I cannot tell you how depressing it feels to have to write “eZine” instead of “newspaper”. At a computer, she suddenly realizes she lives in the 21st century and can just Google Patch! And finds nothing. So she goes back to work and starts looking through old articles for inspiration.
Student Questioned in Kinghorn Prep Murder
Wait a second, there’s exactly one major character from Kinghorn Prep!
After eighteen-year-old Kjirsten Halverson’s body was found hanging from a tree on the wooded campus of Kinghorn Prep, police questioned sophomore Elliot Saunders, who was seen with the victim on the night of her death
Oh, man, things aren’t looking too good for Elliott! Good thing he hasn’t suddenly shown up behind Nora way after school hours all of a sudden!
“Find anything interesting?”
I jumped at the sound of Elliott’s voice behind me.
Ah! Scary! What if he… asks her out to dinner?
“Let me buy you dinner,” he said. “Isn’t there a diner just around the corner?”
Wait, this isn’t creepy enough. What if Elliott asked her again after she said no, but in a way creepier way?
“I’m not allowed to go out on school nights.”
“It’s called lying, Nora.”
Thank God. I was really sick of having that one normal character in this novel.
-knowing I’d be with Patch made me feel safe.
IT’s the Bad Book Recipe at play.
Take one Insecure Idiot (Normally a teenage girl), add Sexy Guy Who Creeps Everyone Out(supernatural being preferred, bonus if most characters lust after him), and a Scary Situation (preferably one where Sexy Guy gets to go macho and save the day). The Creepy/Scary will cancel the disgustingness of each other out, leaving II ready for delicious sexytimes.
It’s borderline painful, this shit it. Who the crap is reading this book and thinking “Oh! Now THIS is literature!”
Oh man. At first I was having traumatic flashbacks of my agricultural economics class from my first year of college but it was quickly solved by your offering of Hannah Hart. Yet again, the answer to college is liquor.
The supply line would not be a curved like in your graph example, it would be vertical. The supply does not curve because there is only one Nora period; there can never be an increase or decrease in the “production” of Nora. (The ability to produce is what causes the curve.) A change in demand would cause the price to increase or decrease, but the quantity of Nora will remain constant at one.
I have no idea where Vee was trying to go with that though. She was trying to make Nora look more valuable to Elliot by upping the creepiness of a stalker? Okay, that sort of makes sense in a really stupid way. P:
well I figured there was little to no actual economics at play here =P my guess was that she was trying to make nora look more desirable because others were interested in her, which, as you said, makes sense in a really stupid way
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he just mysteriously knows exactly where her kitchen is and all the knives and towels and stuff? oh, and because the big freaking knife he was using wasn’t BIG enough, he had to pull out an even bigger honking knife? how did Fitzpatrick even come up with Nora? there’s absolutely no flipping way that she actually thought her up in a clear state of mind
Tbh I thought the most hilarious – and the most dangerous and reveling scene is when Nora worries about Patch holding a knife and when this fear is then quickly replaced by embarrassment when she notices that her hair is in disarray, something that she finds much more troublesome: “I was halfway to panicking at the image of Patch holding a knife when something else caught my eye…My hair!” (121) I mean, of course. Being pretty is always more important than your personal comfort and safety.
What I find so dangerous about this how the fact that Nora’s fear of Patch is placed on the same level as her embarrassment over her hair – it underlines perfectly how violence is constructed as a normal part of their relationship.