The super nice thing about these recaps is that there’s no news to frantically keep up on. Except for news that happens in the comments. It seems a fair number of you are building an elaborate conspiracy theory in which this is Lady and The Tramp human AU fanfic. I don’t know how I’ll ever recover from typing that sentence.<\/p>\n
I’ll add a disclaimer here that if I don’t point out a specific typo or error in a quoted passage, it’s not in the actual text. It’s just my butterfingers and I’ve overlooked it in the spellcheck.<\/p>\n
Familiar faces filled the seats of our favorite lunch table.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Then everyone is sitting wrong.<\/p>\n
America sat on one side of me, Finch on the other, and the rest of the spaces were picked off by Shepley and his Sigma Tau brothers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So, the scene is set. We’re going to meet some of Shepley’s other friends, like…<\/p>\n
“Hey, Brazil,” Shepley said, greeting the man sitting in front of me. His olive skin and chocolate eyes offset the white Eastern Football hat pulled low on his forehead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Okay. First of all, my assumption is that his name is Brazil because he’s from Brazil. From his description, we can guess that he’s a person of color. Not just from his dark eyes and brown skin, but from the fact that his physical features are described using food references and a comparison to the color white.<\/p>\n
Now, moving on from that, let’s talk about the fact that this book sounds like an Army movie. America, Brazil, Shepley, Mad Dog…it sounds like they’re going to team up to fight the fucking\u00a0Predator.<\/em><\/p>\n
“You’re sittin’ in my chair, Brazil.”<\/p>\n
Brazil turned to see Travis standing behind him, and then looked to me, surprised. “Oh, is she one of your girls, Trav?”<\/p>\n
“Absolutely not,” I said, shaking my head.<\/p>\n
Brazil looked to Travis, who stared at him expectantly. Brazil shrugged and then took his tray to the end of the table.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Are we supposed to be swooning over Travis’s lack of manners here? My assumption is that I’m supposed to be turned on and impressed by his toughness, but he just keeps coming off as childish.<\/p>\n
“What is that?” I asked, unable to look away from his tray. The mystery food on his plate looked like a wax display.<\/p>\n
Travis laughed and took a drink from his water glass. “The cafeteria ladies scare me. I’m not about to critique their cooking skills.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Wanna know how I know this was originally set in high school?<\/p>\n
The thing that gets me is, if you look up the author’s bio, she went to like three different colleges. It’s not like she has no idea about the college experience.<\/p>\n
Of course, everyone notices that Travis is paying attention to Abby.<\/p>\n
Travis’s behavior piqued their curiosity, and I subdued a smile at being the only girl they had seen him insist on sitting with.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I promise you’ll never, ever get tired of hearing about how\u00a0differently<\/em> Travis treats Abby.<\/p>\n
But I’m a notorious liar.<\/p>\n
There’s a biology test after lunch, but America says she hasn’t had time to study because she spent all her time telling Shepley that Abby wouldn’t sleep with Travis.<\/p>\n
The football players seated at the end of our table stopped their obnoxious laughter to listen more closely, making the other students take notice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
HEY EVERYONE LOOK HOW INTERESTING ABBY IS! LOOK! SHE’S SOOOOOOOO INTERESTING!<\/p>\n
There’s a brief conversation about how Abby is definitely never going to sleep with Travis and imperil America’s relationship with Shepley, and then Travis asks Abby if she studied for the biology test.<\/p>\n
“No amount of studying is going to help me with Biology. It’s just not something I can wrap my head around.”<\/p>\n
Travis stood up. “C’mon.”<\/p>\n
“What?”<\/p>\n
“Let’s go get your notes. I’m going to help you study.”<\/p>\n
“Travis…”<\/p>\n
“Get your ass up, Pidge. You’re gonna ace that test.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’m so happy this passage is in here because it gives me a chance to talk about one of my favorite things: things that seem nice but are actually super controlling. This happened all through the\u00a0Fifty Shades of Grey<\/em>\u00a0series and I’m going out on a limb and guessing it happens all through this book. Since both of them are super popular, they inspired countless other authors who wrote the same tropes, either knowingly or unknowingly. Basically, these authors liked what they read, wanted more, and wrote it. So, a certain pattern of character behavior emerges in all of them: heroes who don’t just\u00a0think<\/em> they know what’s best for the heroines. They\u00a0know<\/em> they know what’s best for the heroines. The heroines, for their parts, tacitly accept this. They might grumble and protest but ultimately they give in and then later are\u00a0grateful to the heroes for bossing them around in the first place. And readers are expected to understand that the hero really does know what’s best for the heroine and that the heroine really doesn’t have a clue how to do anything on her own. It plays into the fantasy of having a man solve all of a woman’s problems. That’s all it is, just magnified under the type of microscope NASA would be responsible for building.<\/p>\n
In this case, we’ve got Abby. She’s having lunch and chatting with her friends. Travis decides that she’s done doing that now because he’s going to make a grand gesture. And, of course, Abby goes along with it. Because he’s doing something that will help her, we’re meant to think of him as generous and caring toward her, when in reality he just told her he was going to help her, rather than asking if she even wanted his help in the first place.<\/p>\n
They go back to her room and he quizzes her over the study guide.<\/p>\n
“…and somatic cells use mitosis to reproduce. That’s when you have the phases. They sound sort of like a woman’s name: Prometa Anatela.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A woman in\u00a0this<\/em> book, maybe.<\/p>\n
I’m going to enter “bonding over mitosis” into the evidence that this might have been a\u00a0Twilight<\/em> fanfic. Although, unlike Travis and Christian Grey, when Bella told Edward not to call her Isabella, he actually listened and corrected other people, too.<\/p>\n
Travis walks Abby to her class and she asks him how he plans to tutor her and train for his fights at the same time.<\/p>\n
“I don’t train for my fights. Adam calls me, tells me where the fight is, and I go.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
“I’m just naturally violent,” isn’t exactly what you want to hear from the love interest of a book. Unless you’re one of the millions of people whose bells ring until the clangers break at the merest whiff of toxic masculinity. In which case, I got nothing for ya.<\/p>\n
At the classroom, they run into a new character:<\/p>\n
“Parker,” Travis nodded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Writing Tip:\u00a0<\/strong>You can’t nod dialogue. There needs to be a period after Parker.<\/p>\n
Parker’s eyes brightened a bit when he looked to me, and he smiled. “Hi, Abby.”<\/p>\n
“Hi,” I said, surprised that he knew my name. I had seen him in class, but we’d never met.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Travis tells her that Parker is one of his frat brothers, and the revelation that Travis is in a frat surprises Abby. For some reason. That makes no sense.<\/p>\n
“Sigma Tau, same as Shep. I thought you knew that,” he said, looking beyond me to Parker.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yeah, I would assume that she knew that, too. Since she eats lunch with the Sigma Tau guys and hangs out with the one her boyfriend is dating. So, here’s another thing that Abby somehow missed, despite her close proximity to Travis’s circle of friends and his fame around campus.<\/p>\n
“Well…you don’t seem the…fraternity type,” I said, eyeing the tattoos on his forearms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Maybe not at Liberty or Brigham Young, but I can walk into a frat house today, throw a dart, and hit a guy with a tattoo. And it’s going to be a super douchey one, too.<\/p>\n
Turns out, Travis’s dad and his brothers are all Sigma Tau members, so it was a legacy type of deal. I’m not sure why we need to know this, at this time, because the conversation abruptly ends with Abby going into the class and America catching up to her. America asks how things went with Travis, and we get some serious characterization inconsistency. WHEE!<\/p>\n
I shrugged. “He’s a good tutor.”<\/p>\n
“Just a tutor?”<\/p>\n
“He’s a good friend, too.”<\/p>\n
She seemed disappointed, and I giggled at the fallen expression on her face.<\/p>\n
It had always been a dream of America’s for us to date friends, and roommates-slash-cousins, for her, was hitting the jackpot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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