Wednesday Hickey of the Beast, 5/11/11

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Chapter 9

First, a minor note - for some reason, my chapter this week was stricken with extra hyphens - perhaps it's a pagination issue. There were places where words were broken by hyphens in the middle of a line; I assume in the original those would be at the end of the line. A little distracting.

So. At the end of Chapter 8, Becky collapsed as she began her presentation on Sirens. Here we see the classroom spring into action - Sarah catches Becky before Becky can hit the floor, the teacher, Ms. Saldiagga, takes over in the sort of calm and controlled fashion that we expect from teachers:

Springden—and maybe teaching in general—does a pretty good job training faculty to act calm, even when they're freaking out inside. When I was eight, one of the dorms caught fire—nobody got killed, but it was a near thing—and Mom was giving instructions and calling parents, totally cool. If I hadn't seen the size of the martini she drank afterwards, or the way her hands shook, I would've thought she wasn't worried at all.

A nice piece of exposition there - establishing the norm for the situation and that sort of thing. Connie knows that teachers react calmly to situations, and so she's a little freaked out - she can't gauge how bad the situation is based on how her teacher is reacting. Still, when Connie and co. leave the room, Becky is conscious and basically coherent.

There are some clues here - I think it's clear that Becky has a hickey of some sort; she's wearing a turtleneck, and Autumn (another friend) mentions that Becky has " been dressing like she's cold all the time." - that could easily mean high collars, hiding Becky's neck. The last girl, the one who vanished from Wednesday dinner, Connie mentioned that she was wearing a scarf, perhaps to hide a hickey. So, I think there's some connection there. And, unless Connie is a truly unreliable narrator, I don't think she had anything directly to do with this, and will probably be the one to stop it.


Connie's friends continue to seek some logical explanation for the connection between Connie's dreams and Becky's fainting. How long before it becomes clear that these logical explanation are totally wrong? I guess we'll have to wait and see.