Previously on Midnighters: Touching Darkness: Someone’s trying to kill Jessica (again, some more), and Melissa was going to let it happen (again, some more). Rex and Melissa found a darkling cult house and discovered that a human-darkling hybrid exists that they somehow never saw in the whole 16 years that they’ve been wandering around the secret hour.
Before we get into the recap, though, I just wanted to share that I was googling the current (3rd) edition of the books, and realized that not only did they YA-ify the covers, they also have new blurbs that try really hard to make the books sound like Twilight. The one for The Secret Hour in particular really wants to fool you into thinking that Rex is a Dangerous Supernatural Love Interest, with Jessica as his hapless human girlfriend:
As the new girl at Bixby High School, Jessica Day expected some unwelcome attention. What she didn’t expect was to feel an instant connection to a stranger in the corridor…
Who is this boy dressed in black? And why can she feel his eyes following her wherever she goes?
Full disclosure: A shameful part of me kind of ships Rex/Jessica, so I’m actually a bit tickled by this acknowledgement of the YA-romance-esque tilt their relationship had in the first book. But also, LOL at the description of Jessica having an “instant connection” with Rex. I mean, if that’s how you want to describe “she helps him out after seeing him get brutally bullied for being a goth”, sure.
Anyway, to the rest of the book: the next day, everyone at school is gossiping about a CRAZY EVENT that happened the other night: a house was broken into and totally vandalized, and the perpetrators somehow managed to do it all in complete silence and disappear at the stroke of midnight. Constanza relays this news to Jessica, who’s like, “Wow, that sounds totally crazy and not at all like something me or my friends would do.”
Jessica elects to spend study hall with Dess so they can discuss the rumors, under the guise of doing trig homework. Constanza’s like, “Ooookay,” and Jessica notes that Constanza’s starting to side-eye Jessica joining the school goth clique. It’s because Dess is her goth gf, Constanza! Jess awkwards out of explaining it — “Dess isn’t really that bad,” Jessica said quietly, and immediately hated herself for putting it like that. Aw. I love the realism of Jessica’s friendship with the other midnighters: she doesn’t consider them “her kind” of people and clearly wouldn’t be hanging out with them if it weren’t for the whole midnight thing, but she’s not a bad enough person that she agrees with bullying them, and she seems to genuinely think of at least Rex and Dess as friends.
Jess and Dess talk about the rumors swirling around school, which Dess initially shrugs off until Jessica points out that Rex and Melissa haven’t shown up today. One of the rumors was that there were twelve knives stuck in the door — which is because the 13th was Melissa’s and she took it with her, but Jess and Dess don’t know that — and they gulp that Rex and Melissa might’ve gotten eaten last night.
They meet up with Jonathan at lunch and muse over what might’ve happened. Dess sighs that she’ll call Rex and Melissa on the school pay phone(!) and storms off in a huff. Jess is like, “What’s her deal?” and Jonathan is like, “She’s mad because she’s the only one without a love interest, duh.” Jess wonders if she and Jonathan are worth being jealous over, given that Jonathan only holds her hand at midnight but barely acknowledges her when they’re at school. She’s all emo over the unofficial status of their relationship, although she’s at least self-aware enough to realize that they have bigger concerns right now. (Not self-aware enough to not obsess over it for the rest of the series, though.)
Dess comes back and says that no one answered at Melissa’s, and Rex’s dad is of course useless for information. Jessica says that Rex’s father’s condition is pretty sad, which makes Jonathan and Dess clam up. Dess mentions that Rex’s dad has been senile ever since she’s known him — apparently due to some vague “accident” — but she hints that back when he was healthy, he was abusive in some way. She tells Jess to “Ask Rex about the spiders under the house sometime.” Yeah, just ask your classmate whom you met two weeks ago about his traumatic childhood. Tactful.
Dess and Jonathan go off to Rex’s house to investigate — they invite Jessica along, but she’s afraid of getting busted for skipping class. Rex and Melissa are both at Rex’s house, and Melissa appears to have slept over, which immediately weirds Dess out. They tell Dess and Jonathan about the midnighter-darkling creature (hereafter called the “halfling”) and the stalkers (hereafter called “darkling groupies”). Dess is freaked out by this, but she’s more freaked out by the way Rex and Melissa seem weirdly close to each other. Heh. Prioritize, Dess. Jonathan, at least, is a little more focused and wants to know where these stalkers have come from, since they just popped up in this book with no preamble. Rex and Melissa don’t know, but they’re operating under the assumption that they’re connected to whoever killed all the midnighters the first time around. Melissa muses that they must know how to hide within midnight, because the location of the house meant that she could barely mindcast in there.
Dess gets all hype over the idea of getting data for her project and totally forgets about trying to keep it a secret. She starts babbling away to the others about her dreams about satellite data and how the coordinates of Bixby must mean something and she’s been trying to map the hour and SHE JUST NEEDS A PARADIGM. Aw, she’s so cutely geeky here. Dess wants to go to the darkling house right away, and Rex and Melissa sweatdrop. They’re like, “That’s totally not necessary! Melissa shared some of Angie’s thoughts with Rex, so we can just like, write it down for you! We definitely don’t need to go back to that house!” Dess once again zeroes in on the idea of Rex and Melissa sharing thoughts, and starts obsessing over whether or not they’ve been touching-not-like-that-except-exactly-like-that. Then, since Rex and Melissa are being cowardly custards about it, Dess and Jonathan go off to the darkling house together.
In the car, Dess is all like, “Can we discuss Rex and Melissa touching-not-like-that-except-exactly-like-that?” Hilariously, Jonathan genuinely thinks she’s referring to sex at first, and they have an endearingly teenagerish dance-around of the topic:
“Sure. The trauma thing was part of it.” Dess was nodding to herself. “But there was more.”
“Like what? What more could there be?”
“So you know what I mean.”
[…]
“You’re nuts,” Jonathan said. “No way.”
“True. No possible way. It’s more complicated than that.”
He snorted. “I can’t imagine anything more complicated than THAT.”
She snickered, then said, “You know they did…once.”
Jonathan looked at her with alarm. “Did what?”
“Not THAT.”
Hee. Dess corrects him that Rex and Melissa have tried to share minds once before, and Jonathan’s like, “Wow, having done it myself, 0/10 would not recommend doing it again.” Dess is like, “OMG, that’s right, you touched Melissa at the snake pit!” Then she adds, “Rex must hate you for that.” Hee. Jonathan reflects that he now knows that Melissa is genuinely miserable as fuck, and he feels kind of bad for her despite what a dick she is. Dess says that according to Rex, mindcasters in the olden days were able to control their abilities and in fact helped pass on midnighter news and that kind of thing; he doesn’t know if Melissa’s total inability to deal with her power is an anomaly or what. She adds, “But he’s always wanted to find out if she can learn to tolerate it.” There’s something weirdly…I don’t know, controlling about that line? It kind of sounds like Rex is willing to run experiments on Melissa, or wants to push her boundaries in ways she might not consent to. The books never quite go there — and while Rex and Melissa are fucked up, their relationship isn’t that dark — but that line is weird.
Anyway. They pull up to the darkling housing development but are turned away by security guards. Jonathan is all salty over having to defer to authority figures, and Dess snarks that he should’ve introduced them all like, “How about, ‘Just taking my new girlfriend to meet my daddy? We’re fixin’ to get us married.’” Hee. You know, this series does not do enough with the fact that it’s set in Oklahoma. Do you know how many people wearing cowboy hats I saw when I went to Tulsa? (Okay, like three. Which is still more than I ever expected to see in a relatively urban area.)
Since they can’t just drive up to the house, Jonathan offers to get Dess’s coordinates for her. She’s cutely protective over her little geostationary device and threatens to break Jonathan’s face if he loses it. Jonathan’s acrobat power allows him to see angles and flight paths even in daytime, and he can see a way to jump the fence and get into the development. Jonathan goes to the house and captures its coordinates, then gets the idea to look in the mailbox and see who might be at the address. He steals an envelope (that’s a federal offense, Jonathan!) and then nearly gets caught by the security guards but then he doesn’t. He makes it back to the car and hands Dess her coordinates, and she kisses him on the cheek in thanks. Er…
Watch your boyfriend, Jessica.
Anyway, Jonathan looks at the envelope he stole and sees the name of the house’s owner on it. He groans that Jessica is not going to like this.
Back at school, Jess emos over the fact that Dess and Jonathan have ditched her (and that Dess is macking on her boyfriend in his car, not that Jess knows that). She frets that, since she didn’t go along to Rex’s house, the other four midnighters might have had fun without her and decided to ditch her permanently. Aw! Like I said: I find Jess to be really realistically insecure and I love her for it. I know a lot of people think she’s boring or find her clinginess annoying, but honestly, as a teenager, I too spent a lot of time worrying that my friends liked each other better than me. Jess is #relatable.
It’s also interesting that, despite Jessica’s normie-ness, she…actually spends a lot of time chasing the goths’ approval and friendship. I know when these books were published, prep-on-goth bullying was widespread, but Jess isn’t truly a mean person, nor is she even particularly judgmental. I do wish the series was a little more explicit about that quality of hers, because I think it’s actually a strong character trait — she’s pretty open-minded and is really the only one who genuinely tries to forge connections with all of the other midnighters.
Constanza meets up with her and notes that Jess seems bummed. “Oh, u know, just practicing my sadness because I’m part of Goth Motion now,” Jess doesn’t say. She decides to unload a little on Constanza — not about the whole secret hour thing, of course, but she tells her about how Jonathan won’t hold her hand in public and that probably means he won’t ask her to prom 🙁 Constanza offers Jess a ride home so they can continue this talk. She complains that they never hang out anymore, since Jess spends all her study hall time with Dess because they’re in love. Constanza is condescending about the midnighters once again, and Jess tepidly defends them once again: Jessica sighed. “Dess is pretty cool, really.” Of course, she couldn’t imagine having a conversation about Jonathan’s hand-holding phobia with Dess. And forget Rex or Melissa. HA! My kingdom for Jessica trying to talk to Rex about her relationship problems with Jonathan.
Constanza advises Jess to hold on to all her grudges with Jonathan until he does something really bad, then bring up all her issues with him at once. Passive-aggression is the key to making a relationship work! On the other hand, as Jessica thinks, it’s true that complaining every time Jonathan doesn’t hold her hand will probably just seem whiny. Of course, it doesn’t matter since Jessica doesn’t take this advice anyway. Just as Jessica and Constanza are leaving, Jonathan and Dess pull up. They look totally freaked out, and Jessica’s like, “Sorry, I gotta go…do goth shit, bye.”
We cut to nighttime. Presumably in the intervening scenes we didn’t get to see, Jonathan told Jessica everything they found out, and Jessica is now super paranoid that she’s going to get kidnapped and murdered. She’s covered up all the lights in her room and put a stopper under her door, and now she’s just waiting for midnight to fall. She hears a noise and freaks out, but it turns out to just be her little sister, Beth. Beth notes her fear and asks, “Who did you think I was?” to which Jessica says, “No one. Just some r*tarded serial killer in pajamas.” I mention this just because I straight-up forgot how common “r*tarded” was as an insult in the mid-2000s until I reread these books. Yikes. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Scott Westerfeld meant to be malicious — again, this was an incredibly common word to throw around in 2005 — but it’s mildly hilarious that he’s got this skeleton in his closet, considering that he’s part of the YA crowd that is always like “BE BETTER” every time someone missteps on Twitter. Glass houses, my dude.
Beth needles Jessica about how she’s noticed that Jessica has clearly been sneaking out and getting up to weird shit. Jess is about to get mad at her for being all up in her business, but Beth says that she’s actually worried about Jessica: Jess never snuck around or lied to her before, and now she’s apparently afraid of someone finding her in her room. Her new goth friends and boyfriend could be psychos for all Beth knows! I mean, that’s not far off the mark where Rex and Melissa are involved.
Jess emos that she and Beth used to get along and share things, and she briefly considers telling Beth about midnight — she would be able to prove it, after all, by disappearing or moving in front of Beth’s eyes. And if Beth was in on the secret, then someone could help her cover up her shenanigans with her parents. This is…actually all a pretty decent argument, but then Jess is like, “But then the plot would fall apart, so no.”
So instead of telling the truth, Jess locks Beth inside her closet until midnight comes. Ah, older siblings.
Jess and Jonathan meet up with Rex and Melissa at midnight to discuss the stalker situation some more. Why Dess wasn’t invited to this party, I do not know. Jessica notices that Jonathan is wearing a jacket — which he normally doesn’t do, as he doesn’t like things that restrict his movement. That anvil hurt a little. Jonathan says that if he gets stranded in her neighborhood again, he at least won’t freeze his ass off walking home. Jessica invites him to sleep in her room next time. Wow, Jessica is a lot more confident around boys than I was at 15. (Again, interestingly so, since the book often implies that she’s more sheltered, and thereby less self-assured, than the rest of the midnighters).
Although, admittedly, Jessica is also insecure to the point that she frets about looking too forward if she holds Jonathan’s hand (there’s like, a whole running subplot through this series where Jessica angsts that Jonathan doesn’t like her enough to hold her hand in the daytime, but she won’t actually just like, take his hand herself). So like…I don’t know why that freaks her out when she spends this entire book openly trying to get Jonathan into her bedroom. I feel like she’s skipped a step here.
Rex and Melissa are holding hands — Melissa is wearing gloves, but still — and Melissa is all upbeat and smiley. Jessica’s all, “Did she just get an entire personality transplant between yesterday and now?” Rex tells Jess that he stole some of the lore tiles, including the one with her name and power on them, so the darkling groupies won’t be able to talk about her behind her back. Jonathan muses that the danger still isn’t over, because the stalkers are normie humans, and Rex is like, “Yeah, and they’ll probably try to lure Jessica to them because she knows and trusts them.” Jessica’s like, “Say WHAT?” and Jonathan’s like, “Okay, Rex, you didn’t have to drop it out there like THAT.” Jonathan admits that the darkling house is owned by an Ernesto Grayfoot. Given the uncommon last name, he’s probably related to Constanza Grayfoot. Jessica does not like that at ALL, and starts bleating that it’s totally possible that there’s some other Grayfoot family from some other place that’s not Oklahoma. Everyone kind of stares at her until she’s like, “Okay, maybe not.”
Rex tries to push Jessica into getting information about Constanza’s family out of her. Jessica wails that she doesn’t want to use Constanza, because Constanza is her “only friend” in Bixby. Rex, Jonathan, and Melissa are all like, “What are we, chopped liver?” Melissa bitters that Constanza can’t possibly know what surviving the secret hour is like — the midnighters are the only ones who really understand each other, and that makes them each other’s only real friends. Well damn, Melissa, if you wanted to be besties with Jessica, maybe you shouldn’t have been all casual about letting her die last week.
I do like this bit a lot, though — again, these books are really realistic about what it would actually be like to throw a bunch of teenagers together to fight crime by night and go to school by day: Jessica’s embarrassed to be associated with the school outcasts; the goths don’t particularly want to hang out with a normie themselves. But they’re also carrying around a big secret that only the others can understand, and they are, ultimately, closer to each other than they want to be. It’s frustrating that the books never really do anything with this fascinating dynamic, and instead just revert to the status quo no matter what the midnighters go through together. In this scene, Melissa explicitly says Jessica is her friend, but then she immediately goes back to insulting her constantly, even in her own internal narration. Like…considering that all she does is make fun of Jessica’s personality, why is she surprised that Jess doesn’t really like her? Are we supposed to think that Melissa genuinely wants to be Jessica’s friend, deep down, but doesn’t know how to express it?
After that reveal, the midnighters split up. Jessica is all salty that Jonathan didn’t tell her about Constanza maybe being part of an ancient Oklahoma conspiracy. Jonathan’s like, “IDK, it just seemed kind of awkward to tell you on the way home from school.” Heh. Jonathan is so conflict-avoidant. Jessica keeps whining that she wouldn’t have reacted so badly if she had some time to think about it, which admittedly is fair enough. She goes on about how she managed to look like “a selfish b*tch diva” even next to Melissa. The book’s dedication to calling Melissa a b*tch at every turn is gross, although it’s not unrealistic for teenagers in 2005. Jonathan, for his part, is all like, “UGH, sorry, I GUESS,” even though Jess is pretty understandably upset that her only non-midnighter friend might be trying to kill her.
Jonathan admits that the real reason he’s bitter is because this whole saga is revealing how useless he is: he can’t use his power in the daytime, so if the Grayfoots decide to murder Jessica anytime outside 12:00:00-12:00:01 AM, he can’t do anything about it. Even Rex, who basically has the power of Google-fu, is more useful than he is. Jessica reminds him that her power is the ability to turn on a flashlight, so they’re both about equally as helpful. They bond over their normie-ness and Jonathan gives Jessica a bracelet that belonged to his disappeared mom. This, uh, seems extreme given that they’ve been dating for all of two weeks. He tells Jessica that the bracelet’s name is “Acariciandote”, which is Spanish for “touching you.” (It’s a little closer to “caressing you”, but that’s a nitpicky connotation.) Jessica asks if Spanish works on darklings, and Jonathan laughs and calls her “gringa.” HEE! Although, I gotta say, what are the chances that fate picks a random girl from all of Chicago, and she turns out to be white?
Anyway, Jessica and Jonathan make up and he drops her off back home. Jessica pretends that she locked Beth in her closet so she could put the bracelet on to show her. Beth notes that Jess is all windswept from flying and she’s like, “So…you keep the bracelet in our backyard?” and Jessica’s like, “…yes.” Beth doesn’t really buy this but she lets it go.
The next day, Dess has used the darkling house coordinates to find the blockiest of all the mindcaster-blocking zones in Bixby. It’s a suburban house “not that far from where Jessica lived”. Dess muses that it looks like all the other basic houses in town, but she gulps when she sees that the tree in the front yard has been gouged by a darkling. Yes, this is the same house that Jessica rode past in book one. What are the odds!
Dess worries that she should’ve brought the other midnighters, but then decides to go on by herself: “[She] had worked for days trying to understand how coordinates bent the rippled surface of midnight, and this discovery was hers to make. Alone.”
Dess, this is exactly how teenage protagonists get murdered.
We then cut away to Rex and Melissa for ~suspense. Melissa is blasting “metal power chords” in her tape(!) player at the end of the school day, and one of the teachers asks her not to listen to music in the classroom. Melissa snarks to herself that she’s going to pay him a visit in the secret hour and presumably tweak his brain to let her listen to Nightwish in class. Not creepy at all! It’s a little weird that both Rex and Jonathan have seen into Melissa’s mind and all they’re on about is how ~damaged~ she is, and not like…that she’s a budding serial killer. Men, tbh.
After school, Melissa and Rex stalk Constanza Grayfoot. They watch her cheerleading practice and muse over how incomprehensible mainstream things like sports and cheerleading are. Melissa briefly recalls an image she saw in Angie’s mind of a road stretching into the desert, but she and Rex can’t work out what it could be for. She muses that touching Rex has really helped her control her mindcasting and has made her like, 50% less emo. Really? Because she’s just as douchey and judgmental as she was in the last book. Also, did touching Jonathan not give her the same, er, release? That doesn’t bode well for Jessica, assuming Jonathan ever takes her up on any of her invites to her room.
After that, we go back to Dess. She finds an old woman living in the mindcaster-blocking house, who introduces herself as Madeleine. She invites Dess in, and Dess sees that the house is full of steel weapons and old books and 13-themed things. She’s like, “So…you’re also a midnighter.” Madeleine is a mindcaster, specifically, and Dess is like, “Because we really need another one of those.” She realizes that Madeleine has been mindcasting maps and geographic data to Dess while she sleeps to get Dess to find her, and Dess is like, “Why now, at this convenient point after the series’ protagonist has arrived in town instead of like, any point during the last 15 years?” Madeleine just vagues that she’s tired of hiding and she’s pretty sure they (mainly Rex and Melissa) are going to get themselves killed one of these days.
Dess asks what happened to all the old midnighters. Madeleine tells her a metaphor-heavy but fairly clear story about how the oil boom brought new people to Bixby, and their close-knit community suddenly had to keep midnight a secret from outsiders, but new technology like air-conditioning and TV distracted adults from watching their kids play outside. With no one around to tell them to shut it, the younger midnighters started flapping their mouths about midnight to strangers, and eventually they spilled the secret to the wrong people. For some reason, Dess keeps derping that she doesn’t get why Madeleine is blaming air-conditioning for all her problems. She’s all like, “Omg, how could you stop fighting darklings just because of the TV?” Dess, the air-conditioning and TV are just examples of — never mind.
Madeleine tells Dess that some kids in particular started going out to the snake pit to try and communicate with the darklings by shuffling around the lore rocks. They saw the rocks moving but couldn’t puzzle out the meaning, so they eventually kidnapped a seer (“Anathea”). They sacrificed Anathea to the darklings to create the halfling, who they communicate through. The humans established a symbiotic relationship with the darklings: the darklings can sense the earth and tell them where to find oil; the humans keep other humans away from the darklings’ hiding places. Dess cottons on that these humans are the Grayfoots. Oh snap!
Meanwhile, Rex and Melissa’s stalking has turned up absolutely nothing, and they end up just waiting outside of Constanza’s house before midnight. Rex is like, “We probably should’ve just done this in the first place.” Heh. They worry that they don’t have enough weaponry to get through the night, and Rex suggests calling Dess or Jess. Melissa is all salty over the suggestion of inviting other girls to their party. Rex, for his part, starts bugging that Melissa might have to touch Dess: this book introduces the idea that polymaths can instinctively locate coordinates; once Melissa gives Dess the numbers for the road in the desert that she pulled from Angie’s head, Dess will know exactly where to find it. I mean…coordinates aren’t hard; they can’t just write them down? Whatever. Rex is like, “First Jonathan, now Dess, does our metaphorical sex mean nothing to you?” Melissa snarks that “I wouldn’t think of besmirching your honor that way.”
They call Jessica and Jonathan for backup, because I guess none of them give a fuck about Dess anymore. Then they go into Constanza’s room after midnight falls, and Melissa and Rex make fun of her for trying on clothes: Melissa let out a laugh. “This is Jessica’s only friend?” She shook her head. “I don’t know why we bother trying to compete.” Oh, whatever. Like Rex and Melissa don’t spend hours looking for black clothing to match their ~aesthetics. Melissa stays to mindcast Constanza, while Rex goes to look through her dad’s papers for clues. He finds a petition to stop Aerospace Oklahoma — where Jessica’s mom works — from building an emergency runway in the desert, and he realizes that’s the road Angie was thinking about. He goes to tell Melissa, but she’s sensed a bunch of darklings coming and is panicking. For a moment, Rex thinks the halfling is coming, and he panics too: Fear clutched his stomach, like the time his father had pointed a loaded gun at him, dead drunk. Jesus.
Rex and Melissa have been relying on Jessica to show up and save them, but she and Jonathan are nowhere near Constanza’s house. Jessica doesn’t remember where Constanza lives — as she’s only been to the house like once, Rex — so she and Jonathan are bouncing around the freeway, trying to figure out where to go. Jonathan gets all snarky about how he doesn’t know where Constanza lives, either, because he’s not cool enough to sit at the cheerleaders’ lunch table. Jonathan, is now really the time to be ragging on the preps? Jessica is pissy that Beth — who took the phone call from Rex — didn’t give her the message until five minutes to midnight, leaving her no time to Google where Constanza lived. Jonathan’s like, “Maybe she’d be nicer to you if you didn’t lock her in closets.” Jonathan is clearly an only child.
Jonathan and Jessica both miraculously have a brainwave and remember where Constanza lives, and they race off to save Melissa and Rex. After the fight, they agree to reconvene tomorrow and discuss what they found. Jonathan tells Melissa that he and Jess were totally lost until someone dropped the location of Constanza’s house in their heads. Melissa says that it wasn’t her. Omg! Could it be the mindcaster who just appeared in this book? Way to not help anyone out when they were like, going to get eaten in the first book, Madeleine.
After her little tête-à-tête with Madeleine, Dess heads home. She muses that somehow, unlike Melissa, Madeleine’s a mindcaster who’s actually somewhat sane: Well, maybe not sane sane. There was the little matter of air-conditioning. Dess, she wasn’t saying that it was literally air-conditioning that — oh my God, whatever.
Anyway, in order to keep Melissa from finding out about her presence, Madeleine’s mindcasted a kind of barrier into Dess’s mind so that she won’t think about Madeleine while Melissa is around. The only way for Melissa to break the barrier down would be to touch Dess, to which Dess snarks that Melissa would never touch her anyway. And yet, I bet she will.
Up next: Melissa touches Dess, to the surprise of absolutely no one.
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