CLASS WITHOUT CLASS
“No, you can’t die from depression,” the school nurse grumbled.
With her bifocals on, Eva could see the world with clarity, in more ways than one.
What does this even meeeeeeean? Are her bifocals magic?
Looking straight at the middle-aged nurse with ebony skin and tired looks, she held no doubt that she didn’t care in the slightest.
I'mma ignore the racism and just point out that this sentence is confusing as shit. I don't know who's looking and who doesn't care. The writing has actually gotten worse since the last chapter and the last chapter was at bare minimum competency as it stood, but at least it was largely clear who was doing something at any given time.
Looking at the middle-aged nurse, with her ebony skin and tired looks, Eva could see that the woman didn't care in the slightest.
Not only is this a poorly written sentence, it's a pointless one, and another example of telling-not-showing. Based on the nurse's dismissal of Eva's complaint, we can already see that she doesn't care. The only new information we get is a very basic description of the character, and the most important information there is that she's black...so I guess I can't ignore the racism after all. This sentence exists solely to inform the reader of a minor, unlikable character's race.
Fuck you, Connor.
“What about kids who die from killing themselves? I mean, I wouldn’t kill myself. Not at all, that’d be terrible.” Eva’s voice was like a silenced machine-gun going off, low and quick.
This simile brought to you by someone whose only experience with silenced firearms comes from Bruce Willis movies. However, it's the closest thing to an original image we've seen in a while. Too bad that, like many phrases Connor seems to believe are evocative, it falls apart if you peek beneath the surface.
“Look, bitch, you need to get laid,” the nurse blurted suddenly.
“What?” Eva responded, obviously stunned by the nurse’s attitude.
"The fuck is this?" The Knife asked rhetorically, clearly not intending for anyone to actually answer her because of how obvious it was that she was referring to the text, which was in English, a language she knew well.
At least I thought I did. I thought I knew English well, but I must have been mistaken, since I've never seen it used in quite this way before.
“You heard me, bitch. Get some dick, eat another girl out… you know what else?” The nurse moved her swivel chair towards a cabinet, opening it. “Smack or crack?”
Eva didn’t respond.
“Fuck you, Elliot. Get the fuck outta my crib.” The venomous syringe in the nurse’s hands ejaculated into the air under the flickering fluorescent light.
…Connor, have you ever met a black person?
Black people have made amazing strides for equality and dignity in our culture and, while the struggle is by no means finished, they can now be found at every level of society. They are your neighbors and coworkers. Your congressmen and teachers. They own homes and business, raise families, and seek life, liberty, and happiness just as you or I do, and they run the full gamut of human emotions and experiences. In short, they are literally fucking everywhere and I can't see how you have gone this far in your life without encountering one. Yet this character assures me that either you have never met a black person or else you are really fucking racist.
Without a word, Eva stepped into back into the main office of Los Angeles Central High.
Drink!
The name of the school has already been established, but this is a particularly unwieldy place to mention it again. You don't really even need to clarify that she's in the main office at school, since we already have enough context (visiting school nurse, main office, the fact that she just arrived at school at the end of the last chapter) to make that assumption. WHY DO YOU KEEP TELLING US SHIT WE ALREADY KNOW?
Sometimes, it was an appropriate response to school life to get away from it all. She came for advice, and instead ran into the same ugliness that she had seemingly escaped from.
Do you mean to tell me she did not expect this? Was it this nurse’s first day or something? Because I know damn well that if my school nurse was a jive-talkin’ black lady who casually offered heroin while recommending therapeutic cunnilingus, every student there would talk of nothing else. At least until she was fired. Which she would be. Almost immediately.
A vicious cycle.
THE MEEK SHALL NOT INHERIT was scribbled on the wall in blood-red aerosol, in addition to other cheerful phrases.
Would have added something to hear what those phrases were. Oh well. I’ll make some up: “ATTENTION, STUDENTS: YOU ARE TRAPPED IN A WORK OF HISTRIONIC JUVENILE LITERATURE. ESCAPE WHILE THERE’S STILL TIME.”
This was the reality of an inner city school,
No, it’s not. It’s really, really not. Especially not Los Angeles Central High School.
This, for the record, is the real Los Angeles Central High:
This is their auditorium:
And their pool:
And their library:
Research FAIL.
and Eva was sickened by it. She had heard that the barrios were much worse.
Yeah, some of the barrio schools don't even have swimming pools! Oh wait...
This is Garfield High School, a predominantly Latino school smack-dab in the middle of the barrios of East L.A. It's also most famous as being the setting for Stand and Deliver. Today, it's not a great academic school, but it's on the higher side of the average curve--in fact, last year it scored higher than the predominantly white small-town high school I attended. It's also not a slum. Because Stand and Deliver happened thirty years ago and life isn't always like the movies and shit changes, culero.
You know, I don't want to blame this on racism. I'm assuming this is the product of being a young, sheltered teen from a podunk southern town whose sole knowledge of Big City Life comes from watching big dumb gritty action movies from the 80s. Our choices here are either "racist" or "too lazy to do the six minutes of research," and I'm of the opinion that you should never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
She was uncertain of that. She had seen her fair share of sleaze in between class periods.
Eva returned to the class that she had to step out of, which was Ms. Pickens’s.
Oh my god, that sentence is so unnecessarily convoluted. “Eva returned to Ms. Pickens’s class.” There. Done.
As soon as she stepped into the door, she was greeted by a thin-looking woman with blonde hair and a shark smile. That was Ms. Christine Pickens.
Again, there are so many ways of combining that into a single, simpler sentence that I literally cannot list them all without bogging this critique more than it already is. All I will say is that this doesn’t need to be two sentences. Also we’ve already been informed that this is Ms. Pickens’ classroom, and we can assume that any adult woman in a classroom is likely to be the teacher and WHY ARE YOU MAKING THIS HARDER THAN IT IS? WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO YOURSELF? TO US?
“Ladies and gentlemen, our very own basket case has decided to come back.” Pickens’s voice was disgustingly self-assured, almost mocking.
She’s not almost mocking. She is mocking. And in spite of how the author seems to think that inner-city schools are already so god-forsaken that the staff can get away with offering heroin to students, in real life, this woman is courting disciplinary action.
Eva resented that,
NO SHIT. Who wouldn’t resent that? Why are you telling us the most obvious thing about her reaction in the most boring way possible?
but said nothing about it. She couldn’t do anything about the laughter of the students either.
“Hello again,” Eva replied. “I had to step out. I was having a bit of a headache.” She didn’t.
You just said she said nothing. Now she’s making an excuse. She obviously thinks she can do something about it if she’s even making the attempt.
“Why don’t you have a seat, Ms. Elliot?” Pickens outstretched her hand and pointed towards an empty seat towards the end of the class. Pickens, from Eva’s knowledge and experience, had a habit of placing her least favorite students in front of the wall.
This little paragraph just has a lot of confusing language that isn’t bad so much as it is unclear. “At the end of class” is a phrase more commonly used to denote the end of a class period, as in “See me at the end of class,” as opposed to “the back of the class.” Her hand gesture is also described unnaturally. She’s outstretching her hand and pointing when the natural gesture would be to outstretch one’s arm and point, or to simply gesture with an outstretched hand without pointing. “Against the wall” might be clearer than “in front of the wall,” which carries implications that she actually makes them face it. And I think we could do without “Eva’s knowledge and experience.” Either “knowledge” or “experience” is sufficient; both seem redundant.
Without a word, Eva walked and sat herself down into her desk.
“So, students, where were we?” Pickens asked.
Another student raised his hand. “Mr. Hicks,” Pickens replied.
I’m very confused why this dialogue was broken into two lines. I’m even more confused as to why Pickens “replied” to a silent hand-raising.
“I believe we were discussing the concept of schadenfreude, Ms. Pickens.”
- What fucking class is this?
- Who fucking talks like this?
- For such a shitty school, this appears to be quite a sophisticated curriculum.
Clearly, this is Interior Narrative Symbolism Class, where the entire lesson plan revolves around whatever subject would be most pointed at the time.
Or, y'know, it's just bad writing.
Brian Hicks peered out of the corner of his eye towards Eva as he said this. He was seated a couple of rows ahead, to the right. Eva gulped, and scratched her shoulder with her cheek.
Eva’s made this particular gesture of rubbing her face against her shoulder a couple of time now. It’s fine for a character to have a signature gesture, even an unusual one, it’s just…I’ve never seen anyone do this in real life? At least, not in circumstances where their hands were otherwise free. It puzzles me.
Her eyes were transfixed on the back of Brian’s head. It was slick and chocolate in color,
I am literally uncertain if this is a white guy with slick, chocolate-brown hair or a black guy with a shaved head. Since he hasn't offered her heroin or told her to get the fuck outta his crib, I'm going to assume he's white.
and he gave his nape a scratch
DOES EVERYONE IN THIS CLASSROOM HAVE LICE?
as Pickens returned to her lecture.
“To recap what we’ve covered in Eva’s absence, schadenfreude can be described as the joy at the suffering of others--”
Eva couldn’t believe it.
Me neither, sister. I’ve taken graduate level classes in European literature where we never even mentioned the concept of schadenfreude in passing, much less devoted an entire meeting to it.
Joy. From the moment she walked in here on the first day of senior year two months before, Eva felt as if she was a sitting duck, a walking bulls-eye for Pickens.
In fact, I’m a target for a lot of people, she thought.
Every day I come here, every day I walk down the hallways or even when I go to the bathroom, I’m moving on tip-toes. For every reason, for no reason, I’m a target. Maybe I deserve to be one. Maybe I’ve always deserved to be a target for other people because I didn’t do jackshit when my mom died in the water and this blonde bitch is getting on my fucking nerves
Time seemed to dilate, slow down.
Time can dilate? Is this Doctor Who?
Eva could almost hear the voice of her mind echo through her
Ears I can’t get her complaining and moaning out of my ears I can’t get him out of my sight out of my sight and the laughter is still going on like a broken record
This method of illustrating a character’s internal monologue is a stylistic device popularized by Stephen King. A lot of people learn it from King and attempt to reproduce it. Poorly. Even King’s laid off it in the past decade or so because it’s so overused and ripe for parody.
Suddenly, the bell indicating it was time for lunch rang.
Another weird, unnecessarily awkward sentence. “Suddenly the lunch bell rang” or even “Suddenly the bell rang for lunch.” This is like someone overexplaining lunch bells to someone unfamiliar with the concept: “In my country, schools are often equipped with electronic bells which ring to signal events such as lunch or the end of the school day.”
The students began packing up and making their way towards the cafeteria. All of them, except Eva Elliot.
I honestly do not understand the decisions made for this chapter. It’s as if the reader is so terminally clueless that he needs to be informed that students who hear a lunch bell will then head toward the cafeteria. I can handle that train of logic, Story! You don’t have to nudge me toward it!
Why are you using her full name? We figured that out last chapter. Stop telling us. know why he's using it: because it sounds more ominous and important. I wish this book would stop thinking about how things sound and concentrate on what they mean. The things it thinks sound good are so very often meaningless or ridiculous.
Brian stopped for a moment at the doorway, looking at her before stepping out.
He looked at me. He really fucking looked at me.
That might mean something if the author had deigned to describe the exchange as something more than "looking." For all we know, you might have a booger hanging out of your nose.
At that moment, it was just Pickens and Eva. Eva was still seated.
YES WE KNOW SHE WAS STILL SEATED BECAUSE YOU JUST TOLD US SHE DIDN’T GET UP WITH THE OTHERS JESUS I HATE THIS BOOK SO MUCH
Pickens walked slowly over to her desk.
“Why can’t you be more like your mother?” Pickens asked. “Don’t answer that. Let it sink in.”
Why are you even asking her this? What relevance could this possibly have? Even if the reason is that you’re a sadist, there’s still no context for this question.
And oh Jesus. I just got the joke. She's named Pickens because she's always "pickin'" on Eva. BOW DOWN BEFORE THE GREATEST SATIRIST SINCE SWIFT.
For Eva, it would sink in, alright.
It would sink right down in the abyss that is me.
My rational brain can't even accept that as a real sentence someone wrote. I just...HE WROTE THAT COMPLETELY SERIOUSLY. IT'S NOT EVEN A PARODY. HE EXPECTS PEOPLE WILL GIVE HIM MONEY FOR THIS.
“Goodbye, Mrs. Pickens,” Eva said as she rose from her desk.
“Why are you even in my class? Answer me that, Elliot,” Pickens said.
Because she’s clearly underage and so is legally required to continue public education until the age of eighteen or until alternative educational options are established for her? You're a teacher. You should know this.
“I thought I could help myself out by coming here,” Eva said back.
“Help yourself,” Pickens chuckled. “Shit, I figured.”
“Do you have a problem?” Eva asked.
“I have plenty,” Pickens said. “Your appearance, your performance, your intellect, everything… you’re not like her.”
All of this is so utterly without context that I'm going to make up my own backstory for Pickens: she had a huge lesbian crush on Eva's mother when they were both in high school, but then Eva's mom married Holden and Eva is now the living embodiment of Pickens' unrequited love. Hey, Connor rips off Silence of the Lambs, I rip off Harry Potter.
“She’s gone now.”
“That I know, very well. And with her any shot at contributing anything good to the world.”
“You know she killed herself, right?” Eva asked. She was choking up on the exterior, but burning inside.
“Don’t take me for an idiot, Elliot. I don’t play your games.”
This is completely disproportionate and ridiculous. We’ve gone from a teacher who merely dislikes a particular student—which happens—to a woman who is at best mocking a student for her mother’s death and at worst accusing her of murder. WE GET IT, STORY. EVERYONE IS MEAN AND HORRIBLE TO EVA FOR NO REASON. POOR EVA. But this goes beyond bullying and into caricature.
Without a word, Eva walked out of the classroom with her bag.
Misplaced modifier. This makes it sound like the classroom still contains her bag. “Without a word, Eva picked up her bag and walked out of the classroom.” And I am growing ever more concerned with the amount of times this story describes Eva as doing something “without a word.” I realize this is a silent, stoic character but for fuck's sake, vary it up a little.
Guys, this chapter so obviously calculated to try to manipulate the reader into outrage over the horrible injustice against its poor, pitiful, victimized protagonist that I'm just going to ignore that part. You know it, I know it.
What I will talk about is how the quality of writing has crashed from even the bare minimum of competency in the first two chapters. There, the writing was often juvenile, not incomprehensible. There are sentences here where I literally didn't know what the fuck was going on.
Knowing the backstory of this piece and how long it took to complete the fragment we currently have, I'm making a guess that his section was written at a completely different time than the other two--that it may have even been written before the first two chapters and was intended to open the story so that we would be plunged straight into Eva's misery-porn from the word go. Then, of course, Connor was so pleased to have anything concrete on paper that he didn't bother rewriting or revising the various sections so that the styles all matched up.
Also, racism!
Advice: This is a short chapter and there's no reason not to combine it with the upcoming chapter to make the entire school sequence into one single scene. Do some research before you open your fat mouth about what "real inner-city schools" are like, and tone down the villains until they resemble something like actual human beings because as of right now, this is a fucking cartoon and I cannot take it seriously.
