Happy Pi Day, everybody! I may or may not have scheduled this post specifically for today in honor of Dess.
Previously on Midnighters: Touching Darkness: Rex and Melissa are touching not-like-that-except-exactly-like-that. Jonathan and Jessica, on the other hand, are talking about touching exactly like that. Meanwhile, Dess has uncovered the existence of another midnighter, who has also just been fucking around for the past 15 years and decided to appear now because now is when the plot of this novel is happening.
At school, Jessica tells Dess about the fight last night. She adds that she promised Rex she’d ask Constanza about her family today, and Dess suggests that Constanza’s family lives out in Broken Arrow, instead of Bixby, which is why Melissa’s never sensed them.
“Okay, I’ll ask her.” Jessica smiled. “Hey, all that map stuff you’ve been doing is paying off.”
Dess returned the smile. “You’d be surprised.”
I LOVE THESE TWO.
Rex and Melissa roll up, and Jessica is reminded of the weirdness with Constanza’s address last night. She tells Dess about how she and Jonathan were totally lost, but then Constanza’s address randomly popped into their heads. (“Random?” A puzzled look came over Dess’s face, as if there was something on the tip of her tongue. Jessica suspected she was about to get a lecture on the deadly sin of using math terms loosely. I LOVE THESE TWO x2.) Dess seems like she’s about to say something about Madeleine, but then she doesn’t.
Constanza tells Jess about her family: the Grayfoots are Native American and got chased out of Bixby by white families who wanted to make money in the oil boom. Her grandfather in particular was the one who lived through it; he absolutely hates Bixby and refuses to even drive through the town. All of this went down about fifty-something years ago, and Jessica notes that that’s when the lore ended. She wonders if part of the animosity is that the white midnighters fucked over the Native Americans who were already fighting darklings here, and muses that the real story is probably somewhere between “the Grayfoots are evil murderers” and “the Grayfoots have never done anything wrong” — Jessica wondered if the Ladies’ Anti-Tenebrosity League had ever invited any Native Americans to its ice-cream socials. Well, Jessica’s given the racial aspect of this more thought than anyone else has, so good for her. Constanza wants to know why Jessica is so interested in her family, and Jessica makes up a story about seeing Ernesto around town. Constanza gushes that Jessica should totally meet him properly — he can give her a ride home from school today! “And he’s a total babe, isn’t he?” Constanza, that is your COUSIN.
The midnighters go to lunch and we switch into Melissa’s POV. She’s suffering through the noise of the cafeteria, and she decides to experiment with turning her music off and letting the noise in instead of fighting it. She dramatically takes off her headphones, expecting everyone to be shook by her progress. Everyone is listening to Jessica’s recap of Constanza’s family history, though, and Melissa gets mad that they’re paying attention to Jess instead of her. Oh, Melissa. Rex chimes in with his news about the Aerospace Oklahoma runway, and Jessica says that her mom might know something about it.
Melissa stopped listening and wondered if anyone was going to bring up the really big question about last night: How the hell had Jonathan and Jessica found their way to Constanza’s?
Like…if you want to talk about it so bad, why don’t you bring it up, Melissa? She doesn’t, of course, because she’d rather just sit there and be judgmental. Jonathan points out that they know the Grayfoots, the halfling, and the runway are all connected somehow, but they still aren’t sure how. Rex suggests that they all break into Constanza’s house together to look for more clues, and they agree to get together on Friday night.
After lunch, Rex frets to Melissa that everyone in school is talking about the vandalism to Constanza’s house; the Grayfoots must know it was the midnighters. He worries that the Grayfoots are going to try and jump either him or Jessica soon. Melissa suggests that Dess can help locate the runway, and Rex starts emoing that Melissa will have touch Dess just like she touched Jonathan and Rex won’t be special anymore except he’s already not special because Melissa touched Jonathan first and eventually Melissa snaps at him to stop freaking out about who she is or isn’t touching. She adds that “[t]hat time with Jonathan sucked, all right?” You know, if the sex metaphor hasn’t whacked you over the head enough times already.
Rex won’t let it go, and Melissa seethes internally about how annoying his jealousy is, and how much she hates jealousy in general.
Okay, I’m sorry, but I have to do this again:
Like, I appreciate that there is very little bullshit romantic drama in these books — no love triangles or cheating or overwrought love confessions. But it’s also annoying that the narration keeps explicitly telling the reader that Melissa is above being jealous, because she clearly is not. And honestly, it’s not even always romantic — there’s some slight hinting that Rex is interested in Jessica in the first book, but it gets dropped pretty quickly. Melissa’s jealousy of Jessica actually seems to be more fear that Jessica is stealing her friends: she seethes every time the other midnighters pay attention to Jessica instead of her; her internal narration continually mocks Jessica for not fitting in with them, even though Rex and Dess don’t seem to care, and Jess never makes fun of the midnighters for being different, either.* Melissa’s a total hypocrite, and it would be a perfectly interesting aspect of her character if the narration ever bothered to acknowledge this. It would be a great character arc if Melissa realized that she too feels these petty emotions that mortals feel, but apart from one throwaway line later on, she never does.
*In the interest of not being too biased in Jessica’s favor, Jess does pretty frequently think that the midnighters are weird, but just as equally, she always catches herself and feels guilty, and she never says anything harsh out loud.
ANYWAY. Melissa adds that she doesn’t want to touch Dess anyway, and Rex bitters that she might have to touch Dess whether she wants to or not. Melissa’s like, “I bet I won’t.” And yet, I bet she will (reprise).
At the Day house, Jessica makes up with Beth and offers to introduce her to Jonathan someday. Then she asks her mom if she can sleep over at Dess’s house on Friday, as Dess lives closer to Constanza’s house. Beth immediately mocks Jess and Dess’ rhyming names, which was a saving throw by Scott Westerfeld after he changed Jessica’s name from Gillian and didn’t check to see if it sounded like any existing character names. Jess tries to wheedle information about the runway out of her mother, who implies that it’s being built because of 9/11: “[T]hey’re building more now because extra runways are really important if…well…if you suddenly have to land every plane in the country all at once. You know?” Ah, the mid-2000s.
Dess goes to see Madeleine again. She tries to needle Madeleine about not lifting a finger to help the midnighters for the past 16 years, but Madeleine snipes that she already created them, so what more does Dess want? Dess is like, “Excuse?” and Madeleine explains that Rex is the only one of them naturally born at midnight, and that’s why he’s a seer. The rest of them were only born at midnight because Madeleine mindcasted their mothers to push at the exact right moment. I…what, so she was out here making Jonathan’s mom give birth at midnight all the way in Pennsylvania*? If she hasn’t influenced the birth of every other midnighter on the planet, then shouldn’t the vast majority of midnighters also be seers? Whatever.
Madeleine adds that she also influenced Jessica and Jonathan’s families to move to Bixby: how else could five superpowered teenagers have ended up in the same small town at once? “This is a dust bowl, Desdemona. It has never been populous.” I mean, Tulsa is no NYC, but it’s not some kind of underpopulated wasteland — it has nearly a million people in its metro area, and Bixby itself has actually doubled in population in the last 20 years. Also, the dust bowl was in the western part of the state, not the east, where Tulsa is located. Okay, all that aside — I do actually think this is a very neat way of explaining that coincidence. Points awarded for the idea, points deducted once again for the severe lack of Googling that went into this series.
(*Speaking of, this book forgets that Jonathan is from Philadelphia and says that he’s from Pittsburgh instead. Pittsburgh is literally on the other side of the state from Philadelphia.)
Dess snarks that she wouldn’t want to waste Madeleine’s “sixteen-year investment”, and Madeleine chirps that they just have to cut off the Grayfoots’ connection to the darklings, and everything will be fine. Anathea is dying in the halfling body, so they’re going to try to make a new halfling with Rex — but if Jessica can burn the place where halflings are made with “fire” (read: her flashlight), then they won’t be able to. Dess realizes that the halfling site is somewhere around the Aerospace Oklahoma runway, and that’s why the Grayfoots are trying to stop it from being built. Madeleine’s like, “Nailed it,” and then Dess is like, “Wait, if you knew all this, then why didn’t you just tell me?” Just kidding, she doesn’t say that last bit, but she should have, considering that the whole ending of this book could’ve been avoided if the midnighters were just a couple weeks’ faster on the uptake.
Dess leaves, feeling all salty that Madeleine manipulated her into existence and is now hijacking her whole map project. Nevertheless, she admits that being a midnighter is pretty fun and she wouldn’t have wanted to be a normie, so she agrees to let Madeleine touch her again. Madeleine gives her some information to “protect” her, should Melissa ever try to touch her. We’re not told what it is, but thinking about it makes Dess vomit because it’s so fucked up. Ooh, was it Melissa almost letting Jessica die on two occasions? Or Melissa mindcasting her parents into submission? Or Melissa tweaking her teacher’s brain? The possibilities of her behavior are endless!
We cut to Friday. Rex is preparing to go to the Constanza’s and bittering about how he has to do everything around here. He frets a bit about sneaking around his parents — he already drugged his dad to keep him quiet, which the narration eerily implies that he does with frequency, but he’s worried that his mom might drop by for a visit. We find out that Rex’s mom left the family after his dad’s accident, which occurred when Rex was about twelve — the same age Jonathan was when his mom left, which is kind of an interesting parallel between the two of them.
Rex hears a car pull up outside, and then sees that [t]here were two vans in the street, their side doors rolled open and disgorging figures in dark colors. Six or seven of them, moving quickly in the darkness, spreading out across the lawn, surrounding the house. He realizes that they’ve cut his phone line and panics that he is about to get kidnapped for real. He runs around the house, looking for hiding places: He crouched again, remembering all the times he’d had to escape his father’s wrath, all the tricks he’d known before the accident. There’d been a way out onto the roof through his bedroom window…Then Rex remembered the crawl space under the house, where his dog Magnetosphere had always slunk away to be cool in summer and finally to die.
He decides to escape through the bathroom window and crawl under the house, but before he can run, he remembers that some of the lore tiles are still in his room: Rex sighed. He couldn’t endanger Jessica to save himself. Aw, Rex cares. I bet Melissa would’ve left the tiles in there on purpose.
Rex goes back to take the tiles and also takes a minute to leave a mind-message for Melissa in his room. This eats up precious time, and the Grayfoots manage to break into the house. Rex escapes out the window, but they get into his yard and capture him anyway. Rex manages to throw the lore tiles under the house before they knock him out, thinking that, whatever happens to him, at least Jessica will be safe. If I can’t have Jessica/Dess, Rex/Jessica is the other star-crossed goth/prep pairing that this series should’ve been brave enough to go for.
Melissa pulls up to Rex’s house later and is annoyed that he’s not outside waiting for her. She goes into his house and sees that the door’s been broken and she’s like, “On second thought, maybe something bad happened.” She tastes the mind-message Rex left in his room and realizes that the Grayfoots got him.
Oh, and Melissa’s outfit for this excursion: Melissa knelt, her long dress gathering in a velvet pool around her. SHE’S WEARING A FLOOR-LENGTH VELVET DRESS TO FIGHT DEMONS IN THE DESERT. Melissa has zero room to be clowning Constanza’s fashion decisions, honestly.
Meanwhile, Jessica and Dess are having fun making weaponry together. I LOVE THEM x3. We roll back a couple of hours before Rex’s kidnapping, to when Jessica first goes home with Dess. Jess is cutely nervous about having a sleepover with Dess, which again, I adore the realism of: Jess acknowledges that she doesn’t know that much about Dess’s personal life, and frets that she’s not sure if they have enough in common to spend the entire night hanging out without it getting awkward. It’s such a wonderfully teenage concern, and I love that the books mention it. Honestly, Scott Westerfeld could’ve chucked out most of the adventure plot from this series and made it almost purely about the midnighters learning to get along, and I would’ve eaten it up.
Anyway, as with Rex, Jess is weirded out by Dess’s socioeconomic situation — Dess lives near a trailer park and her dad mostly ignores Jessica’s presence in favor of watching TV and drinking beer. (Dess’s mom is in the picture, but gets like two words of a mention.) Jessica mentions her computer at one point and Dess is completely blown away that Jessica is rich enough to own her own PC. God bless. I bet the Days have DSL instead of dial-up, too. Nevertheless, Jess discovers that she really enjoys making weapons with Dess, and she’s charmed by all the little antidarkling decorations that Dess has scattered around the house. Aw! Jess/Dess forever!
They spend a few hours soldering together when Melissa calls. She’s having a panic attack over Rex’s kidnapping, which in turn sends Dess into a panic attack over how to help without revealing Madeleine’s existence to everyone. She tells Jessica that she knows the Grayfoots are taking Rex to the runway, but she can’t tell Jessica how she knows this and she can’t give Melissa the information herself. Jessica’s like, “I mean, if I’m the one to tell Melissa to go to the runway, she’ll probably drive in the opposite direction just out of spite, but okay.” They call Jonathan and ask him to come over, and Dess tells Jessica that she can’t think about this conversation in front of Melissa.
Melissa shows up and wants to immediately drive off and find Rex, but Jess insists on waiting for Jonathan. This pisses Melissa right off, and she starts driving anyway, with Dess and Jess in the backseat. Jessica tells Dess that if she doesn’t make Melissa stop driving, Jess will tell Melissa everything. The barrier Madeleine put in Dess’s head is blocking her from remembering anything about the runway, and she’s like, “Everything what?”
Melissa senses that something is hidden in Dess’s mind and threatens to touch her to get it out of her. Dess panics and blurts out the “protection” Madeleine gave her:
“Just relax.” Melissa reached out.
“Or what?” Dess spat. “You’ll make me like Rex’s father?”
Jessica is like WHAT and Dess is also like WHAT, since she doesn’t remember Madeleine telling her that. They both realize that Melissa is the reason that Rex’s dad is senile: she tried to mindcast him and it went wrong. Melissa tells them that she only did it because Rex’s father was abusing him and she was trying to stop it. There’s kind of a weird whiplash in her tone here: she’s shocked when Dess brings it up and it’s implied that she feels guilty while she defends herself, but then she shrugs it off and casually says that she just didn’t know what she was doing. I mean, I don’t think Melissa needs to castigate herself for hurting Rex’s abuser, but it’s just not very consistent.
Jess and Dess are still kind of like, “You could feel worse about turning someone into a vegetable, Melissa” and Melissa tells them that Rex’s father wasn’t just beating him. He also used to make Rex stand still while his father’s pet tarantulas crawled all over him — these are the spiders that Rex’s dad called his “babies”, and this is why Rex has arachnophobia, as referred to in the last book. Melissa says that the first time she touched Rex, she saw all his trauma from the spiders, and that’s why it took her so long to try touching again. “Rex wouldn’t have survived if we hadn’t done what we did,” Melissa finally said.
I think this is a pretty fascinating turn in the midnighters’ relationships with each other: Dess has known Rex forever but never knew the full extent of his abuse; Jess basically met Rex two weeks ago and is suddenly getting his dark childhood secrets dumped on her while he’s not even there. As with all of the character development in this series, though, the narration blows by it pretty fast. Jess and Dess are like, “That’s crazy” but then the conversation quickly turns back to Melissa touching Dess. So Madeleine’s “protection” really only put Melissa off for about 0.5 seconds. Nice job.
Dess wants Melissa to touch her even less now. Jessica tries to defend her, but she’s too afraid of Melissa to actually intervene when Melissa reaches for Dess. Melissa manages to grab Dess’s face, and it’s just as gross as every time someone’s had to touch Melissa: violation, mind vomit, experiencing years of Melissa’s angst at once, blah blah blah. When it’s over, Melissa says that she knows where they have to go to get Rex.
Jonathan shows up and sees Melissa’s car spun halfway out in the road — good thing there’s no traffic in this town! — and panics that the darkling groupies have gotten them. When he gets closer, though, he sees that the girls are all still there:
“Melissa was splayed across the driver’s seat, head listing to one side. Jessica and Dess were crouched halfway down in the back, holding each other.”
#DessicaIsReal
Jess and Dess both make a break for Jonathan’s car. He’s like, “Shouldn’t someone stay with Melissa?” and they’re like, “Nah, fuck her.” As they drive, they fill Jonathan on all the drama that’s happened and he’s like, “Madeleine couldn’t leave her house for fifty years? I would feel so claustrophobic!” Is that all you’re taking away from this, Jonathan? Dess mentions that Madeleine is in trouble now that Melissa — via Dess — knows where she lives. She’s like, “We could always bash Melissa’s brains in to stop the information from getting out! Just kidding! Unless…?” Oh, Dess.
They drive off looking for the runway site — Jonathan is driving, Dess is navigating, and Jess is third-wheeling it in the back and clinging to Jonathan, which he’s a little weirded out by. This book has some undercurrents of Jonathan not being that into Jessica — partially because he’s not into the daylight world at all, but this book also slightly hints at more compatibility with Dess — but it never goes anywhere, so whatever.
Over in Jessica’s POV, she’s wibbling on about how terribly guilty she feels for letting Melissa touch Dess. I mean, she’s the only one who seems to be noticing how traumatized Dess is, so good for her. But then she mentions that she’s glad Jonathan is here, since he was also the only one among the midnighters who wasn’t crazy…The moments trapped in the car with a raving Melissa and a schizoid Dess, speeding away without him, had made Jessica pretty positive about that. Yikes. I’m a Jess apologist, but Rex and Dess have always been decent to her, and “schizoid” is a pretty callous way of describing how Dess’s mind was manipulated. Jessica, I love you because you are a prep who doesn’t bully the goth kids! Do not make me regret this!
Anyway, midnight is approaching, and they’re still not close enough to the runway to save Rex. They decide to floor it and try to brake as close to midnight as possible — mentioning the possibility that, since they can move when time is frozen, they might maintain their momentum when the car stops. This is exactly what happens: Jonathan brakes, then midnight falls, and Jess and Dess are both slammed against their seatbelts. Jonathan’s like, “I didn’t feel anything.” Hee. Jonathan takes both girls flying to look for Rex, and they see Melissa’s car in the desert. Jonathan and Dess immediately realize that Melissa didn’t brake in time and went flying through her windshield.
Melissa wakes up with a giant head wound. Jonathan and Jessica express concern for her, and she’s all like, “Ew, get away from me with your mundane emotions.” Is now really the time to be an edgelord, Melissa? Then she lifts her head to look at her car, and Jessica advises her not to move. Melissa gets all snarky about how she was totally just about to start dancing and Jessica is so dumb for telling her to stay still. Melissa, you literally just moved your injured — whatever.
Jonathan and Jess go to find Rex, while Dess stays behind to fortify a defense for Melissa. Melissa has the grace to feel just a little bad about what she did to Dess — and she actually manages to cotton on that this all started because Dess felt lonely, although she’s pretty condescending about it, as Melissa is wont to be. She mumblegrumbles that she’s sorry for invading Dess’s mind, she guesses, but it was for the greater good, so actually, she’s not that sorry. Dess is like, “Wow, thanks.”
Jonathan and Jessica save Rex, kind of. They arrive in time to burn the darkling body off of him, so Rex doesn’t end up trapped like the first kidnapped seer. He hasn’t been fully saved, though: the darklings have already made his mind half-darkling…somehow. The actual mechanics of the darklings’ powers, like how they managed to modify Rex’s brain and also put one hour of the day in another dimension, are never really explained. Anyway, after rescuing Rex, the three of them find Anathea, the first seer, who has been abandoned by the darklings. Sadly, they aren’t able to keep her alive to have a bunch of wacky time-traveling shenanigans (although that would’ve been a better ending to this series, if you ask me), and instead they can only comfort her as she dies. Before dying, Anathea tells them that “Madeleine Hayes” was the one who spilled the secret about midnight, and the Grayfoots kidnapped Anathea on her information.
Jonathan, Jess, and Rex fly back to where they left Melissa and Dess. Rex and Melissa cling to each other, and everyone else in the group are like, “So…you two are officially together, then.” Jonathan drives everyone back into town: Jessica is crying over Anathea’s death, Rex is shaking from his transformation, Melissa is freaking out about having to go to the hospital and letting doctors touch her, and Dess is being snarky about how Melissa could have brain damage. Jonathan thinks that he’s relieved that Jessica is here: He needed her touch, especially here on the salt flats, the flattest stretch of Flatland there was. After he spent the entire book being vaguely uncomfortable with her touching him after midnight? I don’t even know anymore.
The next day, Rex goes to visit Melissa at the hospital. He freaks out at how modern it is: now that he’s half-darkling, he shares their aversion to steel and the number 13 (which he actually now calls “the Aversion” in his narration). In addition to his seer vision, he now also has, like, darkling-vision, and can see “marks of prey”, meaning that pretty much everything humans touch is in focus to him now too. So he doesn’t need glasses anymore, which I guess is a minor upside to being turned into an eldritch horror.
He runs into Madeleine coming out of Melissa’s hospital room, who introduces herself as Melissa’s godmother. Rex is too jumpy to make much conversation, so he just lets Madeleine ramble about how guilty she feels over “what [she’d] done” and how she wants to get to know Melissa better now. Then she runs out of there, presumably before Rex can be like, “So just to confirm, you are in fact directly responsible for a mass murder back in the 1950s.” How is this not more of a local legend in town? Like, a whole bunch of townspeople disappeared overnight, and everyone was like, “That’s none of my business”?
In the hospital room, Melissa’s been stitched up and now has a bunch of scars on her face. (On the topic of their new #looks, Rex is mentioned as having buzzed all of his hair off, since Jessica burned it half off with her flashlight anyway.) She notes that Rex’s mind-taste feels more darkling now, and he starts getting all self-loathing about how she won’t be able to handle his ~twisted mind~ now. Melissa tells him that Madeleine taught her how to control her mindcasting, so she is no longer an angsty mess and doesn’t find the world — or anyone’s mind — overwhelming anymore. And yet, her narrative voice and perspective does not change at all in the next book. Anyway, she reaches out and touches Rex to calm him down, showing him that Madeleine has passed along a bunch of memories from the past generation of midnighters, so our five protagonists finally have some guidance re: figuring out what the fuck they’re supposed to be doing with their powers. Then Rex and Melissa make out, as we all knew they were going to do since like, chapter three of the first book.
We close out in Jessica’s POV the following midnight. She and Jonathan reflect on the events of the past couple of chapters — Jessica is still upset over not stopping Melissa from touching Dess; she very nearly calls what Melissa did mind rape, but doesn’t actually use the word. She wonders if Melissa ever messed with anyone else, like their parents, and Jonathan’s like, “Well, that would just be silly.” Jessica’s like, “I mean, there was that time my parents very uncharacteristically changed their minds about letting me go to a party because Rex wanted me to go,” and Jonathan’s like, “Stop saying words.”
Jessica tells Jonathan that she can’t stop thinking about Anathea’s death, and asks him to stay with her tonight. Jonathan agrees, and Jessica says that there’s just one catch:
“Hey, no problem. I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“No, you won’t,” said Jessica softly.
This isn’t super scandalous — they could just like, be talking about spooning — but a lot of YA of this era was much more oblique about sex than books now (there were full sex scenes in Strange the Dreamer; I clutched my pearls), and this book is so heavy with metaphorical sex that ending it with the literal act wouldn’t be out of place. On the other hand, Jessica and Jonathan are still having the same arguments about touching in the next book, which doesn’t really jive with their relationship progressing in this way.
Anyway, the catch is that he has to meet Beth first, as part of Jessica’s semi-futile attempts to make midnight and her daylight worlds less separate. Midnight ends, Jonathan pops through the window to greet Beth, and the book manages to get in one more use of the word “r*tarded” before it ends. Just in case you forgot this was 2005!
THE END.
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