- Joined
- Jan 3, 2015
If you're so dead set on failing, why are you still here?
حلال Connor Bible - Everyone's Favorite Molly Ringwald loving, adoption hating, aspiring writer and bellybutton fucker
- Thread starter Null
- Start date
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2014
Because your life sounds pretty sweet? Literally billions of people would kill/die to have your life. You have supportive parents who pay for all of your needs and education, you have food and a roof over your head and internet access, and you can go out and make a name for yourself if you actually want to. I'm not usually one to use the "poor starving African children" argument, but yeah. Your life is pretty great compared to theirs.
- Joined
- Sep 9, 2014
Probably because you're a moron.
- Joined
- Oct 1, 2014
Not with that attitude, you won't.
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2013
How about you're still alive? How about the fact that you're not dying in the streets of a third-world country? Or better yet, how about the fact that you're privileged enough to be a raging NEET on the Internet?
- Joined
- Oct 29, 2013
I have nothing to live for. Don't bother pulling the "third-world country" shit on me, because every nation is a third-world nation.
- Joined
- Sep 17, 2014
>implying there aren't fates worse than death, such as being Connor
- Joined
- May 25, 2013
@Connor
If all you're going to do is be a passive-aggressive little cunt and disagree with everyone's posts, fuck off. No one wants you here.
If all you're going to do is be a passive-aggressive little cunt and disagree with everyone's posts, fuck off. No one wants you here.
X
XH 502
Guest
kiwifarms.net
Here's a question @Connor : what do you want from us? What do you gain by coming back here every night?
- Joined
- Sep 17, 2014
That doesn't make any sense what the fuck are you talking about
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2014
nah son, you just retarded.
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2015
Now you're starting to sound like Marijan. I thought you were better than this.
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2014
Uh-oh, watch out my Kiwis-in-arms, Connor is going around rating all of our posts "Disagree," "Dislike," or "Dumb." Especially the ones that beg him to improve himself. CLEARLY this is the man who swore to us that he would do everything in his power to improve himself this year!
- Joined
- Sep 27, 2014
This is the stupidest shit I've ever read in my life that wasn't posted by Fuckbot 5000.
- Joined
- May 25, 2014
Today I learnt that America is in the same economic shape as North Korea. And that you were born at the top of the fucking idiot tree, and hit every branch on the way down.
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2014
Obviously.
Being deep & nihilistic like the spergy little edgelord he is.
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2014
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2013
Apparently I have arrived just in time.
LUNCH
The bifocals
Drink!
were resting near the knobs of the sink as Eva scrubbed her face.
That’s a strange focus (no pun intended) to open an ostensibly emotional scene. Nothing an inanimate object is doing is ever more interesting than what your character is doing.
Also I am not entirely sure, but I think “knobs” is a regional term. I mean, I’m Southern like Connor, and I still call them “handles.” I’m not invested enough to research the West Coast term for “the thingies on the sink you turn to make the water come out,” so I’ll let it slide, but I will say this is exactly the sort of fiddly, insignificant detail that some regional reader will always call you out on—and why it’s good to have a regional beta reader to check these things.
Setting down the cheap paper towel,
I don’t know why this habit of focusing on precisely the least important detail of any given object bothers me, but it does. I can recall several things about cheap high-school bathroom paper towels—their roughness, the fact that they both look and smell like damp paper sacks—but their cheapness is something I take for granted. Aren’t all paper towels cheap? Why focus on that? It’s like the author’s pissed they didn’t spring for the premium brand. Budget cuts, dude!
she found herself gazing at the girl in the mirror again.
Not this again!
It was a filthy habit, she reminded herself. Simply looking at herself was enough to make her vomit. In fact, the first thing she did as she stepped into the girl’s bathroom was rush into a stall and fire away into the bowl. It was her only way of reacting, and it was visceral. What Pickens had said was cutting and vicious.
We were there, remember? We saw how nasty what Pickens said was. Now I want to see Eva reacting to that nastiness.
But it’s true, Eva thought.
Wiping the sweat from her brow, she left the bathroom, and suddenly there was a force pressing up against her moving body. Readjusting herself and her bifocals,
Drink!
Also that thing where the verb “readjusting” applies to both “herself” and “her bifocals” in different senses? That’s called a zeugma. I paid $55K to learn that, but I’m giving it to you for free.
she saw that it was Lilith Grant.
There's a disease spreading in bad fiction. I like to call it "akinesthesia," or "Bella Swan syndrome," in which fictional characters seem to have no awareness of their physical bodies. Symptoms include characters suddenly "noticing" or "discovering" they are doing completely normal activities such as holding their breath, touching an object of symbolic significance, walking, or even hearing a scream that they suddenly realize is their own, but there's a mild subset of the illness in which character are compelled to describe mundane physical activities in ways that look good on a page but fall apart once you attempt to imagine anyone actually doing them.
For fuck's sake, bumping into another person does not feel like a "force pressing against [one's] whole body." It feels like colliding with a large, hot, solid object.
Since this story seems to be leaving me all the heavy lifting anyway, I'm going to pretend that Lilith really was pressing her entire body against Eva's like a creeper on the subway.
Lilith Grant. Jesus Christ.
“Are you alright, Eva?” Lilith asked.
Eva’s reaction was a mixture of the quizzical and the alarmed.
Lose the definite articles. They're useless here. Also, "quizzical" seems a little light-hearted for what's going on here. I suspect Connor just did a thesaurus hunt for "puzzled" and this word looked like the best Scrabble hand.
There she was, emotionally unkempt, physically unattractive, standing before the goddess of Los Angeles Central High.
Drink!
A goddess, huh? I wonder what she looks like. But I’m sure the story will give us a full description!
“Yeah, I’m fine, Lil. I’m fine. I was just taking a breather in the bathroom.” I was doing much more than that, she thought.
“You look like shit,” Lilith said. Her voice had an element of concern for it. Ninety-nine percent of the time, Lilith Grant ignored or brushed aside students who didn’t come from money, simply examining her brown locks in a handheld mirror or texting her posse. The funny thing was, Eva never saw her in a group of other kids. Not once.
The most popular girl in school never actually hangs out with anyone. Yes, this is exactly how popularity works in a typical high school.
(And if she doesn't hang out with anyone, who the hell is she texting?)
“Rich” and “strange” were two things that came into her mind whenever she saw her walking down the hall in the red blazer that she always wore. Blood red, Eva noted.
Richest, most popular girl in school wears the same jacket every day. Yes. This is precisely how I remember high school to be. Please, do go on. I can all but hear the rubber soles squeaking on the gym floor as I read.
Spoiler: Lilith Grant turns out to be our serial killer. So the blood-red jacket is FORESHADOWING. Or perhaps SYMBOLISM. Take your pick.
“Hey, what can you say? Shit happens,” Eva replied.
Lilith laughed. Eva was scanning her from top to bottom through the bifocals,
Drink!
very rapidly. She felt awkward, a skeleton talking to a goddess, but she hid it with a quick smile that beamed from her bee-stung lips.
“Bee-stung lips” is a descriptor commonly applied to collagen lip enhancement, which would seem more of a rich-goddess Lilith thing, but the unclear antecedent makes it seem as if it’s Eva who now has bee-stung lips, which is strange since we haven’t heard such a detail before and Eva’s been mostly described as kinda skinny and stringy.
Eva let out a forced giggle. She isn’t noticing. I think that’s a good thing.
“Would you mind if you come to lunch with me?” Lilith asked.
Not only is that dialogue just on this side of grammatically correct, who talks like this? “Would you mind coming to lunch with me?” or “Do you want to come to lunch with me?” or “Would you care to come to lunch with me?” if you’re absolutely committed to being insufferable.
Come to lunch with Lilith Grant? That’s suicide.
“Y-yeah, of course. I’ve got nothing better to do, and I’m all caught up on my assignments,” Eva responded. Eva, what the hell do you think you’re doing?
“We can talk as we walk,” Lilith said. “I don’t bite.”
###
There is no reason to insert a scene break for what amounts to two characters walking from one end of a hall to another. It’s especially egregious considering the last section ended with “we’ll talk as we walk,” implicitly promising the reader that we would get to hear their conversation. Even having them walk side-by-side in awkward silence would have been more interesting than completely skipping the whole thing.
In fact, the only reason I could think of for a break is that the author was simply too lazy to invent a conversation. And I even bet I know why. "What do girls talk about, anyway? Make-up? Boys? Periods? I don't know anything about any of that, and I'm not interested in learning."
Eva and Lilith came to a stop outside the cafeteria door. They both motioned towards the handle.
“Let me open it,” Eva said.
“Nah, allow me.” Lilith said back.
“It’s okay, I’ll open it.”
“I insist, Eva. I’ll open it.”
And an Alphonse-and-Gaston routine breaks out!
Er. You guys go google that. I’ll just be over here being old.
Eva stepped back as Lilith open the door, and all of a sudden
STOP USING THIS PHRASE.
noise surrounded Eva.
It wouldn’t even be all of a sudden, unless these doors are completely soundproof. You’d hear the noise as you approached, and then it would be full volume when you opened the door. I mean, obviously I am only judging by how human hearing works in the real world; I’m not a goddamn literary genius like Connor. It is entirely possible their lunchroom is in a bank vault.
There was laughing, chatter, cell phones ringing. Stepping in behind Lilith, Eva took notice of some wealthy looking kids at one table eyeing her.
Should be hyphenated: “wealthy-looking kids” not “wealthy, looking kids.” Though they are wealthy and they are looking at her so what the hell do I know? Nothing. I know nothing any more. This story has single-handedly blotted out ten years of higher education.
“Now I see why I’m the caboose,” Eva said dryly.
“You want anything from the kitchen?” Lilith asked.
Another who-talks-like-this moment. I’m actually starting to hope that maybe Lilith really does talk in this facetious overformal manner and that it will be presented as a consistent character trait to permanently stamp her as Other and make the reader suspicious of her, but I’m pretty sure it’s just a bug, not a feature.
“No.”
“Neither do I,” Lilith said. “Just between you and me, the food here tastes like road kill.”
“I’ve eaten my share of that here,” Eva remarked. “I’ll wait for you over there,” she said as she gestured towards an empty table. Lilith nodded, and went on to get some road kill.
Maybe having lunch with Lilith Grant isn’t going to be as bad as I thought.
Taking a seat at the unoccupied table, Eva looked around her. Los Angeles Central High
Drink!
was a diverse school in many different ways. Of particular note to her were the cliques. To get anywhere in this school, Eva thought, you have to make a name for yourself, somehow, some way. Some people just don’t give a rat’s ass how they do it. They really don’t.
…Connor, was this book written for grown-ups? Because for something you’ve flouted as a dark psychological thriller, it spends a lot of time exploring topics already thoroughly covered by the Sweet Valley High series. Cliques are bad! Teachers are so unfair! Unpopular kids sure do have it rough!
And it doesn’t even explore these subjects in a particular insightful way—it just says “cliques are bad” as if this is a self-evident fact we readers are meant to nod along with. What cliques exist here? Has Eva ever interacted with them?
I am particularly confused by the idea of “get[ting] anywhere in this school,” since, to my knowledge, the only place one is intended to get in high school is graduation. Granted, high school was a long time ago for me and it could be that times have changed and kids are now using high school to network for valuable future employment connections. But here, the idea of success in high school in any but an academic sense is really irritating and juvenile to the adult audience that is this novel’s presumed demographic.
The very notion of a popular girl like Lilith letting a mutant like her share a lunch was an oddity. Eva, in her cynicism, thought it was probably part of an elaborate con, a mind game.
Then why are you still sitting here? Run before someone drops a bucket of pig’s blood on you!
Lilith was good at those. She had to have stepped on quite a few toes to be the queen of the school.
The true mystery was not in the act, but in the motivation. Cheryl had always told her that there was almost always a reason why people did the things that they did.
NO SHIT, CHERYL. Unless you’re fucking Pinkie Pie, not a lot of people do things because omg lol so random. Why does this book persist in speaking in clichés, aside from the attempts at being oh so deep and insightful?
Wait. Never mind. That's exactly why it does it.
Almost, Eva thought. The abyss had a habit of tainting the past. Looking through the glass windows, Eva saw that it was still raining heavily. The angels were still crying, and they were just getting started.
For the record, L.A. gets on average fifteen inches of rain per year. The local meteorologists are freaking out by now.
“How are you feeling today, Eve?”
Not too good, Mom.
“Why?”
I’d hate to say this, but I don’t feel good most of the time. Maybe even all the time. I wish I were happy.
“The only person that can make you happy is yourself, Eva. I’m just a mother, and a guide.”
I see.
“Eva?” a voice asked.
Eva turned to see that it was Brian Hicks again. Oh, shit.
“Who are you talking to?” Brian had a look of worry come across his face.
“Nobody, really. It’s a nasty habit of mine, talking to myself.” Eva let out a weak laugh.
“I talk to myself, too.”
“Really?” Eva was surprised. Her eyes widened behind the bifocals.
Drink!
“Yeah. To tell you the truth, I don’t have many friends either.”
“How did you know I don’t have many friends?”
“I guessed.”
“You’re a very perceptive young man, Brian Hicks.”
“And you’re a very studious young lady, Evangeline Elliot.”
Um. Some evidence of that, please? So far we haven't even seen her crack a textbook, and the last time you saw her, Brian, she was skipping class.
“Please,” Eva responded. “Call me Eva. I never did like Evangeline. I thought it was corny. Blame my mother.”
Sorry, Mom.
Lilith was walking away from the trough with her road kill.
“Look, Brian, I’ll have to talk you later. That fine?”
“Yes, definitely. I’ll see you some other time, then.”
Brian left just as Lilith took a seat. For a second, Eva thought she saw the two eye each other. She wrote it off as coincidence.
“Looks like you had a visitor,” Lilith said.
“Yeah, but just for a bit.”
“You know what I think? I think that a single moment can make a world of a difference. Not just moments, but choices, actions, things we say. That kind of matters. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I don’t know how to respond to that,” Eva said.
Neither the hell do I, Eva. That observation came right the fuck outta nowhere.
“Actually, I kind of think that they don’t, most of the time.”
“What makes you say that?” Lilith asked.
“You know, I come here five days a week, looking for a way to improve myself. That’s what school is for, I think. Improving kids.”
Lilith placed a cigarette between her lips, a lighter already in her hand.
After having a school nurse offer a student heroin, a teacher accuse a student of murder, and the upcoming scene in which another teacher masturbates to death in front of his class, I shouldn’t really be bothered by a student smoking in the school cafeteria. But I am. You can’t even light a cigarette in a dive bar these days without a server magically manifesting at your table to tell you to take it outside (I’ve actually used this trick to summon servers for the check when they can’t be flagged down). This just doesn’t happen in a school, no matter how shitty. If things have reached this point, it’s also reached the point of the state stepping in and shutting down the facility.
“It can be a fucking jungle, if you ask me.” Breathing smoke, she continued, “But yeah, it’s worth coming here.”
“Yeah,” Eva said, adjusting her bifocals. “Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot,” Lilith said as she took the cigarette out of her mouth.
“Why did you invite me to lunch with you?”
Lilith didn’t reply. Instead she was looking down at the gray of the table, with a coldness that was sudden and unexpected from a girl that was positively beaming in those photos in the school paper. This is straight out of a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits rerun.
I have seen people use this precise fucking description so many goddamn times and it's never once been accurate--and it's almost always used by people who have never watched a single episode of either. The Twilight Zone has become cultural shorthand for "strange, inexplicable, spooky things are afoot!" but to me, it's usually shorthand for "thing I would rather be watching right now."
Under the table, Eva scratched her leg hard, and the sharpness proved her wrong: she was still in the real world.
“I wanted to know what it was like to talk to you,” Lilith finally said, gesturing her head towards the table populated by the rich kids.
“I figured,” Eva said. “Sometimes I want to get away from this.”
“I know the feeling,” Lilith said.
###
Another conversation between these characters that gets glossed over because the author ran out of things for them to say.
DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS, GUYS?
Remember how we were all complaining about Connor's rude habit of simply leaving a conversation when people are not talking about something that interests him? HE EVEN DOES THAT WITH HIS OWN CHARACTERS. When they stop talking about the sort of pseudo-philosophical bullshit he likes, he abandons them! How did we not see this all along? FORESHADOWING!
Back to the story: Lilith is going to be a major player soon, and this was to be our introduction. This was her moment to catch our interest. So what did we learn?
After lunch, Eva found herself staring at the clock of the following class.
"The clock of the following class" is another awkward phrase with implications the author probably didn't intend; it makes it sound as if there's a clock specifically marking off minutes for this class, separately from time in general. Unless Eva is in fact in an alternate universe, we don't want that. "In the class following lunch, Eva found herself staring at the clock."
Time had slowed down to an almost unbearable level for her.
Me too, sister.
No need to specify "for her"; we recognize we're in her POV now.
Voices became muted by an inescapable aura of silence, even as mouths moved. Eva was within her own head, and she wanted to escape.
I've only spent four sentences in your head, and I want to escape. Is this scene going to have a point? Did anything trigger this introspection?
Face down, eyes pointed upward, she scanned the room around her. There was a fly on the whiteboard, at the front of the class.
No need for a comma in last sentence.
It was an appropriate symbol of her life’s decay. Wherever there was light, there was darkness.
NO. We are the audience. We're the ones who get to decide what's symbolic or not! You do not jump up and down and point and announce, "Look! There's my symbolism! Let me tell you what it means!"
And in this case it's not even an appropriate symbol for what you're telling us it's symbolic of. The whiteboard would remain white regardless of whether or not there was a fly on it.
The elongated hand on the clock’s face was edging closer to five. Two-thirty.
But you just said it was edging toward five--oh. You meant the minute hand. This story is so confusing that I literally just forgot how an analog clock works. Well done, Connor.
The time for escape was nearing. That meant doors flying open, crowds. A recipe for disaster. I swear, one day, I’m going to be carried out of here on a stretcher. I really mean that.
FORESHADOWING!
The oppressive atmosphere was edging her to a precipice. If she fell from it, she would be disposed to what her father and other shrinks called a breakdown, or in her words, going apeshit. There was no necessity in making a melodramatic scene right in her desk.
Oh, why stop now?
Also, "necessity" is misused. Get your grubby little fingers off that thesaurus.
She gulped every few seconds, and she had heard a muffled crack of thunder. There were no windows in the classroom, but she could tell that outside, the tears were probably carrying Noah’s ark.
At this, the seventh or eighth time that Connor has insisted on dragging out this euphemism for rain, I let out such a loud sigh that the Husbando asked me from the next room if anything was wrong. I shouted back, "EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS WRONG."
For Eva, simply existing was a struggle. She had yet to fine anything valuable, anything remotely salvageable among the ruin. She feared it was futile, but at the same time, dreaded the answer to her question: “Why?”
Suddenly, the dismissal bell rang, and Eva got out of her chair with the other students like an automaton, something that teachers like Pickens would want her to be. Just a machine that does what its programmed to do.
Oh no! Our heroine is danger of succumbing to the pressure and becoming a mindless robot who like, gets out of chairs when the bell rings and does her homework and never Questions Authority!
I wasn't going to post this, but...
I don't even feel like pointing out that improper version of "its," or to say that is should be "it was," for fear I shall reveal myself as a tool of the monolithic Grammar Regime.
As she walked out, she noticed on the lockers the word EMPTY was written.
Multiple times.
It's all just so, like, hollow, man, y'know? Hollow like an empty metal school locker with EMPTY written on it multiple times. It makes me feel so disconnected, but still kinda deep and profound for making that connection, you know? I am the locker. Yeah. We're all the lockers.
Jesus wept.
Not even going to bother rearranging those last two sentences into something resembling standard English because THEY HURT ME SO GODDAMN MUCH.
Suggestions: Again, consider combining this chapter with the previous one so that the school day becomes one complete, self-contained narrative. And for fuck's sake, finish conversations.
The bifocals
Drink!
were resting near the knobs of the sink as Eva scrubbed her face.
That’s a strange focus (no pun intended) to open an ostensibly emotional scene. Nothing an inanimate object is doing is ever more interesting than what your character is doing.
Also I am not entirely sure, but I think “knobs” is a regional term. I mean, I’m Southern like Connor, and I still call them “handles.” I’m not invested enough to research the West Coast term for “the thingies on the sink you turn to make the water come out,” so I’ll let it slide, but I will say this is exactly the sort of fiddly, insignificant detail that some regional reader will always call you out on—and why it’s good to have a regional beta reader to check these things.
Setting down the cheap paper towel,
I don’t know why this habit of focusing on precisely the least important detail of any given object bothers me, but it does. I can recall several things about cheap high-school bathroom paper towels—their roughness, the fact that they both look and smell like damp paper sacks—but their cheapness is something I take for granted. Aren’t all paper towels cheap? Why focus on that? It’s like the author’s pissed they didn’t spring for the premium brand. Budget cuts, dude!
she found herself gazing at the girl in the mirror again.
Not this again!
It was a filthy habit, she reminded herself. Simply looking at herself was enough to make her vomit. In fact, the first thing she did as she stepped into the girl’s bathroom was rush into a stall and fire away into the bowl. It was her only way of reacting, and it was visceral. What Pickens had said was cutting and vicious.
We were there, remember? We saw how nasty what Pickens said was. Now I want to see Eva reacting to that nastiness.
But it’s true, Eva thought.
Wiping the sweat from her brow, she left the bathroom, and suddenly there was a force pressing up against her moving body. Readjusting herself and her bifocals,
Drink!
Also that thing where the verb “readjusting” applies to both “herself” and “her bifocals” in different senses? That’s called a zeugma. I paid $55K to learn that, but I’m giving it to you for free.
she saw that it was Lilith Grant.
There's a disease spreading in bad fiction. I like to call it "akinesthesia," or "Bella Swan syndrome," in which fictional characters seem to have no awareness of their physical bodies. Symptoms include characters suddenly "noticing" or "discovering" they are doing completely normal activities such as holding their breath, touching an object of symbolic significance, walking, or even hearing a scream that they suddenly realize is their own, but there's a mild subset of the illness in which character are compelled to describe mundane physical activities in ways that look good on a page but fall apart once you attempt to imagine anyone actually doing them.
For fuck's sake, bumping into another person does not feel like a "force pressing against [one's] whole body." It feels like colliding with a large, hot, solid object.
Since this story seems to be leaving me all the heavy lifting anyway, I'm going to pretend that Lilith really was pressing her entire body against Eva's like a creeper on the subway.
Lilith Grant. Jesus Christ.
“Are you alright, Eva?” Lilith asked.
Eva’s reaction was a mixture of the quizzical and the alarmed.
Lose the definite articles. They're useless here. Also, "quizzical" seems a little light-hearted for what's going on here. I suspect Connor just did a thesaurus hunt for "puzzled" and this word looked like the best Scrabble hand.
There she was, emotionally unkempt, physically unattractive, standing before the goddess of Los Angeles Central High.
Drink!
A goddess, huh? I wonder what she looks like. But I’m sure the story will give us a full description!
“Yeah, I’m fine, Lil. I’m fine. I was just taking a breather in the bathroom.” I was doing much more than that, she thought.
“You look like shit,” Lilith said. Her voice had an element of concern for it. Ninety-nine percent of the time, Lilith Grant ignored or brushed aside students who didn’t come from money, simply examining her brown locks in a handheld mirror or texting her posse. The funny thing was, Eva never saw her in a group of other kids. Not once.
The most popular girl in school never actually hangs out with anyone. Yes, this is exactly how popularity works in a typical high school.
(And if she doesn't hang out with anyone, who the hell is she texting?)
“Rich” and “strange” were two things that came into her mind whenever she saw her walking down the hall in the red blazer that she always wore. Blood red, Eva noted.
Richest, most popular girl in school wears the same jacket every day. Yes. This is precisely how I remember high school to be. Please, do go on. I can all but hear the rubber soles squeaking on the gym floor as I read.
Spoiler: Lilith Grant turns out to be our serial killer. So the blood-red jacket is FORESHADOWING. Or perhaps SYMBOLISM. Take your pick.
“Hey, what can you say? Shit happens,” Eva replied.
Lilith laughed. Eva was scanning her from top to bottom through the bifocals,
Drink!
very rapidly. She felt awkward, a skeleton talking to a goddess, but she hid it with a quick smile that beamed from her bee-stung lips.
“Bee-stung lips” is a descriptor commonly applied to collagen lip enhancement, which would seem more of a rich-goddess Lilith thing, but the unclear antecedent makes it seem as if it’s Eva who now has bee-stung lips, which is strange since we haven’t heard such a detail before and Eva’s been mostly described as kinda skinny and stringy.
Eva let out a forced giggle. She isn’t noticing. I think that’s a good thing.
“Would you mind if you come to lunch with me?” Lilith asked.
Not only is that dialogue just on this side of grammatically correct, who talks like this? “Would you mind coming to lunch with me?” or “Do you want to come to lunch with me?” or “Would you care to come to lunch with me?” if you’re absolutely committed to being insufferable.
Come to lunch with Lilith Grant? That’s suicide.
“Y-yeah, of course. I’ve got nothing better to do, and I’m all caught up on my assignments,” Eva responded. Eva, what the hell do you think you’re doing?
“We can talk as we walk,” Lilith said. “I don’t bite.”
###
There is no reason to insert a scene break for what amounts to two characters walking from one end of a hall to another. It’s especially egregious considering the last section ended with “we’ll talk as we walk,” implicitly promising the reader that we would get to hear their conversation. Even having them walk side-by-side in awkward silence would have been more interesting than completely skipping the whole thing.
In fact, the only reason I could think of for a break is that the author was simply too lazy to invent a conversation. And I even bet I know why. "What do girls talk about, anyway? Make-up? Boys? Periods? I don't know anything about any of that, and I'm not interested in learning."
Eva and Lilith came to a stop outside the cafeteria door. They both motioned towards the handle.
“Let me open it,” Eva said.
“Nah, allow me.” Lilith said back.
“It’s okay, I’ll open it.”
“I insist, Eva. I’ll open it.”
And an Alphonse-and-Gaston routine breaks out!
Er. You guys go google that. I’ll just be over here being old.
Eva stepped back as Lilith open the door, and all of a sudden
STOP USING THIS PHRASE.
noise surrounded Eva.
It wouldn’t even be all of a sudden, unless these doors are completely soundproof. You’d hear the noise as you approached, and then it would be full volume when you opened the door. I mean, obviously I am only judging by how human hearing works in the real world; I’m not a goddamn literary genius like Connor. It is entirely possible their lunchroom is in a bank vault.
There was laughing, chatter, cell phones ringing. Stepping in behind Lilith, Eva took notice of some wealthy looking kids at one table eyeing her.
Should be hyphenated: “wealthy-looking kids” not “wealthy, looking kids.” Though they are wealthy and they are looking at her so what the hell do I know? Nothing. I know nothing any more. This story has single-handedly blotted out ten years of higher education.
“Now I see why I’m the caboose,” Eva said dryly.
“You want anything from the kitchen?” Lilith asked.
Another who-talks-like-this moment. I’m actually starting to hope that maybe Lilith really does talk in this facetious overformal manner and that it will be presented as a consistent character trait to permanently stamp her as Other and make the reader suspicious of her, but I’m pretty sure it’s just a bug, not a feature.
“No.”
“Neither do I,” Lilith said. “Just between you and me, the food here tastes like road kill.”
“I’ve eaten my share of that here,” Eva remarked. “I’ll wait for you over there,” she said as she gestured towards an empty table. Lilith nodded, and went on to get some road kill.
Maybe having lunch with Lilith Grant isn’t going to be as bad as I thought.
Taking a seat at the unoccupied table, Eva looked around her. Los Angeles Central High
Drink!
was a diverse school in many different ways. Of particular note to her were the cliques. To get anywhere in this school, Eva thought, you have to make a name for yourself, somehow, some way. Some people just don’t give a rat’s ass how they do it. They really don’t.
…Connor, was this book written for grown-ups? Because for something you’ve flouted as a dark psychological thriller, it spends a lot of time exploring topics already thoroughly covered by the Sweet Valley High series. Cliques are bad! Teachers are so unfair! Unpopular kids sure do have it rough!
And it doesn’t even explore these subjects in a particular insightful way—it just says “cliques are bad” as if this is a self-evident fact we readers are meant to nod along with. What cliques exist here? Has Eva ever interacted with them?
I am particularly confused by the idea of “get[ting] anywhere in this school,” since, to my knowledge, the only place one is intended to get in high school is graduation. Granted, high school was a long time ago for me and it could be that times have changed and kids are now using high school to network for valuable future employment connections. But here, the idea of success in high school in any but an academic sense is really irritating and juvenile to the adult audience that is this novel’s presumed demographic.
The very notion of a popular girl like Lilith letting a mutant like her share a lunch was an oddity. Eva, in her cynicism, thought it was probably part of an elaborate con, a mind game.
Then why are you still sitting here? Run before someone drops a bucket of pig’s blood on you!
Lilith was good at those. She had to have stepped on quite a few toes to be the queen of the school.
The true mystery was not in the act, but in the motivation. Cheryl had always told her that there was almost always a reason why people did the things that they did.
NO SHIT, CHERYL. Unless you’re fucking Pinkie Pie, not a lot of people do things because omg lol so random. Why does this book persist in speaking in clichés, aside from the attempts at being oh so deep and insightful?
Wait. Never mind. That's exactly why it does it.
Almost, Eva thought. The abyss had a habit of tainting the past. Looking through the glass windows, Eva saw that it was still raining heavily. The angels were still crying, and they were just getting started.
For the record, L.A. gets on average fifteen inches of rain per year. The local meteorologists are freaking out by now.
“How are you feeling today, Eve?”
Not too good, Mom.
“Why?”
I’d hate to say this, but I don’t feel good most of the time. Maybe even all the time. I wish I were happy.
“The only person that can make you happy is yourself, Eva. I’m just a mother, and a guide.”
I see.
“Eva?” a voice asked.
Eva turned to see that it was Brian Hicks again. Oh, shit.
“Who are you talking to?” Brian had a look of worry come across his face.
“Nobody, really. It’s a nasty habit of mine, talking to myself.” Eva let out a weak laugh.
“I talk to myself, too.”
“Really?” Eva was surprised. Her eyes widened behind the bifocals.
Drink!
“Yeah. To tell you the truth, I don’t have many friends either.”
“How did you know I don’t have many friends?”
“I guessed.”
“You’re a very perceptive young man, Brian Hicks.”
“And you’re a very studious young lady, Evangeline Elliot.”
Um. Some evidence of that, please? So far we haven't even seen her crack a textbook, and the last time you saw her, Brian, she was skipping class.
“Please,” Eva responded. “Call me Eva. I never did like Evangeline. I thought it was corny. Blame my mother.”
Sorry, Mom.
Lilith was walking away from the trough with her road kill.
“Look, Brian, I’ll have to talk you later. That fine?”
“Yes, definitely. I’ll see you some other time, then.”
Brian left just as Lilith took a seat. For a second, Eva thought she saw the two eye each other. She wrote it off as coincidence.
“Looks like you had a visitor,” Lilith said.
“Yeah, but just for a bit.”
“You know what I think? I think that a single moment can make a world of a difference. Not just moments, but choices, actions, things we say. That kind of matters. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I don’t know how to respond to that,” Eva said.
Neither the hell do I, Eva. That observation came right the fuck outta nowhere.
“Actually, I kind of think that they don’t, most of the time.”
“What makes you say that?” Lilith asked.
“You know, I come here five days a week, looking for a way to improve myself. That’s what school is for, I think. Improving kids.”
Lilith placed a cigarette between her lips, a lighter already in her hand.
After having a school nurse offer a student heroin, a teacher accuse a student of murder, and the upcoming scene in which another teacher masturbates to death in front of his class, I shouldn’t really be bothered by a student smoking in the school cafeteria. But I am. You can’t even light a cigarette in a dive bar these days without a server magically manifesting at your table to tell you to take it outside (I’ve actually used this trick to summon servers for the check when they can’t be flagged down). This just doesn’t happen in a school, no matter how shitty. If things have reached this point, it’s also reached the point of the state stepping in and shutting down the facility.
“It can be a fucking jungle, if you ask me.” Breathing smoke, she continued, “But yeah, it’s worth coming here.”
“Yeah,” Eva said, adjusting her bifocals. “Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot,” Lilith said as she took the cigarette out of her mouth.
“Why did you invite me to lunch with you?”
Lilith didn’t reply. Instead she was looking down at the gray of the table, with a coldness that was sudden and unexpected from a girl that was positively beaming in those photos in the school paper. This is straight out of a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits rerun.
I have seen people use this precise fucking description so many goddamn times and it's never once been accurate--and it's almost always used by people who have never watched a single episode of either. The Twilight Zone has become cultural shorthand for "strange, inexplicable, spooky things are afoot!" but to me, it's usually shorthand for "thing I would rather be watching right now."
Under the table, Eva scratched her leg hard, and the sharpness proved her wrong: she was still in the real world.
“I wanted to know what it was like to talk to you,” Lilith finally said, gesturing her head towards the table populated by the rich kids.
“I figured,” Eva said. “Sometimes I want to get away from this.”
“I know the feeling,” Lilith said.
###
Another conversation between these characters that gets glossed over because the author ran out of things for them to say.
DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS, GUYS?
Remember how we were all complaining about Connor's rude habit of simply leaving a conversation when people are not talking about something that interests him? HE EVEN DOES THAT WITH HIS OWN CHARACTERS. When they stop talking about the sort of pseudo-philosophical bullshit he likes, he abandons them! How did we not see this all along? FORESHADOWING!
Back to the story: Lilith is going to be a major player soon, and this was to be our introduction. This was her moment to catch our interest. So what did we learn?
- She's a rich, popular girl who somehow has lots of friends but never hangs out with them.
- She's attractive enough to be thought of as a goddess, though all we know about her personal appearance is that she has brown hair and (possibly) bee-stung lips.
- She is surprisingly deep and thoughtful (although this is largely informed by having her say random, cheap, barely applicable aphorisms that the author assumes are vague and profound enough to be mistaken for insightful).
- She wears a Blood-Red Jacket of Foreshadowing and/or Symbolism.
After lunch, Eva found herself staring at the clock of the following class.
"The clock of the following class" is another awkward phrase with implications the author probably didn't intend; it makes it sound as if there's a clock specifically marking off minutes for this class, separately from time in general. Unless Eva is in fact in an alternate universe, we don't want that. "In the class following lunch, Eva found herself staring at the clock."
Time had slowed down to an almost unbearable level for her.
Me too, sister.
No need to specify "for her"; we recognize we're in her POV now.
Voices became muted by an inescapable aura of silence, even as mouths moved. Eva was within her own head, and she wanted to escape.
I've only spent four sentences in your head, and I want to escape. Is this scene going to have a point? Did anything trigger this introspection?
Face down, eyes pointed upward, she scanned the room around her. There was a fly on the whiteboard, at the front of the class.
No need for a comma in last sentence.
It was an appropriate symbol of her life’s decay. Wherever there was light, there was darkness.
NO. We are the audience. We're the ones who get to decide what's symbolic or not! You do not jump up and down and point and announce, "Look! There's my symbolism! Let me tell you what it means!"
And in this case it's not even an appropriate symbol for what you're telling us it's symbolic of. The whiteboard would remain white regardless of whether or not there was a fly on it.
The elongated hand on the clock’s face was edging closer to five. Two-thirty.
But you just said it was edging toward five--oh. You meant the minute hand. This story is so confusing that I literally just forgot how an analog clock works. Well done, Connor.
The time for escape was nearing. That meant doors flying open, crowds. A recipe for disaster. I swear, one day, I’m going to be carried out of here on a stretcher. I really mean that.
FORESHADOWING!
The oppressive atmosphere was edging her to a precipice. If she fell from it, she would be disposed to what her father and other shrinks called a breakdown, or in her words, going apeshit. There was no necessity in making a melodramatic scene right in her desk.
Oh, why stop now?
Also, "necessity" is misused. Get your grubby little fingers off that thesaurus.
She gulped every few seconds, and she had heard a muffled crack of thunder. There were no windows in the classroom, but she could tell that outside, the tears were probably carrying Noah’s ark.
At this, the seventh or eighth time that Connor has insisted on dragging out this euphemism for rain, I let out such a loud sigh that the Husbando asked me from the next room if anything was wrong. I shouted back, "EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS WRONG."
For Eva, simply existing was a struggle. She had yet to fine anything valuable, anything remotely salvageable among the ruin. She feared it was futile, but at the same time, dreaded the answer to her question: “Why?”
Suddenly, the dismissal bell rang, and Eva got out of her chair with the other students like an automaton, something that teachers like Pickens would want her to be. Just a machine that does what its programmed to do.
Oh no! Our heroine is danger of succumbing to the pressure and becoming a mindless robot who like, gets out of chairs when the bell rings and does her homework and never Questions Authority!
I wasn't going to post this, but...
I don't even feel like pointing out that improper version of "its," or to say that is should be "it was," for fear I shall reveal myself as a tool of the monolithic Grammar Regime.
As she walked out, she noticed on the lockers the word EMPTY was written.
Multiple times.
It's all just so, like, hollow, man, y'know? Hollow like an empty metal school locker with EMPTY written on it multiple times. It makes me feel so disconnected, but still kinda deep and profound for making that connection, you know? I am the locker. Yeah. We're all the lockers.
Jesus wept.
Not even going to bother rearranging those last two sentences into something resembling standard English because THEY HURT ME SO GODDAMN MUCH.
Suggestions: Again, consider combining this chapter with the previous one so that the school day becomes one complete, self-contained narrative. And for fuck's sake, finish conversations.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2013
I'm sure every starving kid in India would love to trade places with you.
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2013
This is what Connor actually believes.