We return to the story of a bunch of angsty emo teens — three goths and two normies — who have to fight crime together in a secret hour that only they can see. Previously: Jessica Day moved to Bixby, Oklahoma, and everyone thought that she was too normie to have a superpower. Being a YA protagonist, she turned out to have the best power of all, and now the evil creatures that they fight in the alternate frozen dimension hate her the most and want her dead. (Before you ask, this series predates Persona 3 by two years. )
I think this book is my favorite of the trilogy? The second book tends to be the best in any trilogy anyway, largely because it doesn’t have to deal with any of the introductory stuff of the first book, and it doesn’t have the inevitable anticlimax ending of the final book. After introducing all the messed up midnighters, this book digs more into their relationships with each other, their family lives, and what it would actually be like to have a superhero team made up of kids with nothing in common. It’s excellent.
Once again, the cover I linked at the top has long been replaced by this second edition, and the current third edition looks like this:
Both covers are supposed to feature Melissa, who I think gets the absolute least physical description of all the midnighters, so I guess it doesn’t really matter what the cover model looks like. Once again, any reference to the actual plot of these books is totally absent from the cover.
Anyway, we pick up about a week after the last book ends. Jessica Day has moved to Bixby from Chicago, and is finally adjusting to her new hometown. She was all nervous about moving to a new town and starting a new school and getting eaten alive by the eldritch beings that inhabit an alternate dimension — we’ve all been there — but now she has friends and a superpower that can kill the eldritch beings, so she’s in a good mood. She finds a quarter in her room and flips it just as the secret hour arrives, suspending it in the air when time freezes.
Jonathan, the team acrobat (has jump powers, basically) is Jessica’s kind-of boyfriend, and comes by to pick her up every night. They meet up to go bouncing all over town, literally, and eventually come to rest on a roof somewhere. They banter a bit about an upcoming physics test — Jonathan’s acrobat power has the side effect of making him really good at physics, much like Dess’s polymath power makes her really good at trig, and Rex’s seer power makes him really good at history (and Googling stuff). Sucks to be Jessica and Melissa, I guess. Jessica grumbles that physics is full of hard formulas and homework. Do I relate to Jessica just because she’s really bad at math? It’s entirely possible. Anyway, Jessica asks Jonathan if it’s possible for a coin to be flipped in the air and freeze right at the top of its arc, and he says no, it’s physically impossible. Jessica tries to argue the point, using the coin in her room as a reference, and Jonathan’s like, “Nuh-uh, the laws of physics say so!” They’re both being dumb about this. You’re in an alternate dimension where the rules of physics don’t apply!! This entire argument is pointless!!
Jessica thinks that she hasn’t kissed Jonathan all night, and invites him back to her room to look at some coins, if he’s picking up what she’s putting down. Jessica is totally the instigator in her relationship with Jonathan, and it’s kind of interesting, since she’s pretty insecure and clingy in other ways. So they fly back to her house, but before Jessica can get in Jonathan’s pants, he points out that a man is outside her house. They realize it’s a normal person and he’s taking pictures of Jessica’s window. They understandably freak out at all the implications of this, but can’t think of anything to do besides act normal. Jonathan hustles Jessica back into her house, then hops up onto a roof to watch the guy when the hour ends. Uh…how is he going to get down from there?
Midnight ends, and Jonathan realizes that he has no way of getting down. He’s like, “This was a bad idea.” Heh. He notices that the guy is taking quick exposures on his (film!) camera, trying to catch any changes at midnight. After the stalker drives off, Jonathan manages to fall off the roof, injuring his ankle in the process. He realizes he’s now stranded in Jessica’s neighborhood and has no way of getting back to his house because they live in the suburbs and lack adequate public transit and walkability. Jonathan briefly considers sleeping over in Jessica’s room (scandalous!) but eventually decides that it’s not worth the risk — you’ll recall that she got grounded for sneaking out with him in the last book — and he hobbles off into the night.
Across town, Dess wakes up from a dream about satellites orbiting the earth. She muses that she’s been having a lot of weird dreams lately — so much so that she’s slept through the secret hour a bunch of times — and she thinks it has to do with her new geography project. Ever since finding out in the last book that Bixby sits at the intersection of 36 N/96 W, she’s been investigating if there’s more geographic oddities related to midnight. For example, apparently Melissa’s mindcasting is stronger or weaker depending on where she is (this has never been mentioned before), and Dess thinks there must be places where normies can slip through from normal time and see the secret hour. She’s been working on mapping the secret hour, such as it is, for a few weeks, but it’s hard without any data. Dess doesn’t want to ask any of the other midnighters to help — she feels left out by how Rex/Melissa and Jessica/Jonathan are hooking up, so she wants to have her own project away from the rest of them.
And then! Dess looks at the goth ballerina doll she keeps on her desk, who she’s named Ada Lovelace: “Yeah, I wish you could help me too,” she told the doll. But the real Ada was long dead (for 153 years, in fact)…
Ada Lovelace died in 1852, placing this book squarely in 2005. Let’s break out some mood music:
For context, Kanye West said that George Bush doesn’t care about black people sometime during the midnighters’ first week of school. Also, this would make Rex, Melissa, and Jonathan born in 1989, and Dess and Jess born in 1990. Rex, Melissa, and Jonathan are the same age as Taylor Swift!
(A minor quibble I have is that the dates all the events fall on actually line up with the 2003 calendar, but whatever. )
Dess decides to go peek at her dad’s oil drilling maps again. We get more details about her home life: her dad’s implied to be a kind of manual-labor, beer-drinking, football-watching, cigarette-smoking kind of guy, who wanted a son instead of a daughter. I can only assume he has layers, though, given that he also settled on the name of a lesser-known Shakespearean character for his child. Anyway, Dess’s dad also has a temper — she panics that he’s going to catch her going through his stuff, although he doesn’t seem physically abusive, just prone to flipping out.
Dess goes to look through his map drawers, ignoring the remote controls on top: Dess had done her parents’ taxes and paid their bills for them since she was a kid, but she did not do VCR manuals. Who still owned a VCR in 2005? They started releasing movies on DVD in like 2000 (in tandem with VHS, but still).
Although now is a good place to bring up that it’s heavily implied that the midnighters — except Jessica and maybe Jonathan — are suburban/rural poor, and Bixby in general is portrayed as a blue-collar oil rig town where most residents can’t afford new technology. Whether or not that’s true of IRL Bixby is another story, but it’s a novel way of portraying YA protagonists, who are generally middle-class or rich. Anyway, Dess goes through her dad’s stuff, and finds a GPS device. She realizes that this is what she’s been dreaming about — she’s been having visions of the satellites that send GPS signals — and the GPS is all she needs to get data for her project. She decides to steal it and risk her dad’s temper. For a minute she wonders why she dreamed about GPS when she didn’t even know that her dad owned the device, then she’s like, “Eh, whatever,” because thinking about it too hard now would ruin the surprise later.
The next day, Jessica is understandably freaked out by what they saw. Jonathan calls and tells her that the guy was taking pictures of her window, and Jessica sighs that she has to go tell Rex about it. For some reason, she decides to go over to his house, instead of just like…calling him. Jonathan offers to come with her, which weirds Jess out as Jonathan and Rex hate each other. Jonathan says that Rex’s house is not a place Jess wants to go alone, and Jessica reflects that despite bonding with them over the whole “seeing a secret dimension” thing, she’s never actually hung out with any of the other midnighters and she doesn’t know anything about their personal lives. They also never discuss anything besides midnight over the course of all three books, either. Like, what were their thoughts on the second season of Lost?
Jessica sets off for Rex’s house, and is creeped out to see that it’s all run-down. Jonathan is waiting for her, and Jessica’s like, “Oh thank God, I didn’t want to have to deal with the socioeconomic differences between me and Rex alone.” Then Rex’s dad stumbles out onto the front porch, and he freaks them both out: he appears to be semi-senile; he’s really aged-looking and keeps shouting about his “babies.” Jonathan and Jessica both think this is weird, but then Rex pulls his dad back inside, and he’s like, “Ignore what you just saw! What’s up dudes?”
Jonathan and Jessica tell him about some rando stalking Jessica — Jonathan reveals that the guy was trying to take multiple rapid exposures at exactly 12:00, probably to try and catch any movement from Jessica’s room. Rex asks if they exposed the film in the camera. Ha! I love every mention of technology in these books. He’s way blase about the possibility of someone knowing about midnight, and when questioned, tells them that midnight used to be an open secret in Bixby. He takes them to his room to show them some historical papers he has — Jessica continues to be weirded out by how run-down Rex’s house is inside, too; and we find out that the “babies” his dad was referring to are spiders that he kept in an terrarium, although it’s empty now. File this away for later.
Rex shows them a bunch of documents about how fighting darklings used to be a community effort — everyone in town knew about midnighters and supported them. Jessica snarks to herself that Rex probably has a moodboard somewhere that’s like, “I miss when people went on real dates and drank milkshakes and seers ran the entire town.” At some point in 1956, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. All the lore stopped, and of course, our gang of protagonists are the only midnighters around anymore. Jonathan and Jessica note that her stalker looked too young to be alive in 1956. Rex says that Melissa is coming over later, so they’ll poke around and see if she senses anything new. In the meantime, he tells them to be careful: whatever got the original midnighters, it took them all out so quickly that it was never recorded in the lore. So Jessica used up one of her ungrounded days and hauled ass all the way to Rex’s house just to be told to “be careful.” I swear.
Melissa comes over that night, but instead of driving around looking for Jessica’s stalker, she and Rex experiment with touching. Not like that, but also kind of like that, given all the subtext about mindcasting. Melissa’s gotten it into her head that she wants to try sharing minds with Rex again, for whatever reason — probably because a new girl moved to town and is stealing all his attention, which is never explicitly said but is pretty obvious considering how Melissa reacted to Jessica in the last book. It’s mentioned that Rex and Melissa did share minds once, accidentally, when they were kids. It freaked them both out so badly that they never tried it again, until now.
They touch hands and it’s very dramatic — Rex discovers that Melissa is miserable having to hear everyone’s thoughts all the time and she has to live with a ton of creepy knowledge about how darklings think. He’s completely freaked out by how bleak her mind is. Would you say that he’s…touching darkness? HA HA HA. Anyway, Melissa pulls away and is like, “Well, that was terrible.” Rex tries to be upbeat all like, “Hey, the first time is always terrible!” just in case you’re missing the metaphor here. He still thinks they can make it work — maybe they can graduate to non-metaphorical kissing one day! — but Melissa’s pessimistic given how badly it went. Nevertheless, she’s taken the opportunity to finally tell him — via telepathy — about someone thinking about kidnapping Jessica at the end of the last book. We find out that it’s been about a week since then, and Rex is like, “Dude, you went a whole WEEK without telling anyone that someone’s stalking Jessica?” Melissa bitters that she didn’t say anything because Jessica Day wasn’t her problem anyway and blah blah she hates preps and normies and all the sheeple that live in Bixby. 3edgy5school.
Melissa hears the kidnapper’s thoughts again and follows him to a nice housing development on the edge of town. Rex notes that the area is covered in midnight marks, which they both find weird: darklings hate human habitations, especially new ones. They find a particularly darkling-y house, which they figure must be the stalker’s. Melissa notes that he’s driven off in a hurry, so the house is empty, and they go in to look around. They note that the house doesn’t seem inhabited at all, although someone must be paying the phone bill: The two large front rooms were empty except for a portable phone. It sat lonely on a windowsill, its cord winding across the blank expanse of carpet, a demonic red eye showing that it was recharging.
(By “portable phone”, do they mean…a cell phone?)
Upstairs, Rex finds a bunch of tiles with lore symbols written on them. He and Melissa are confused: only seers can naturally read the lore symbols, and on top of that, this of course requires someone else to have known about midnight and made these tiles. Like the house, darklings have touched the tiles, which also throws them off, because even written language is too newfangled for darklings.
As they look at the tiles, Melissa suddenly mentally hears the stalker coming back to the house, just as he actually pulls up. She’s weirded out that she wasn’t able to hear him until he was just outside, when her mindcasting usually has better reach than that. Do you think maybe Dess’s map shenanigans are about to cross over with everyone else’s adventures soon? Anyway, Rex and Melissa run and hide, and they hear a man and a woman (“Angie”) enter the house. Midnight falls, and Rex and Melissa go to see what they’re dealing with — they confirm that the man matches the description of Jessica’s stalker; they don’t recognize Angie at all. They realize that a bunch of darklings are about to be at the house in a few minutes and Rex wants to run, but Melissa wants to stick around and try to extract thoughts from the stalkers — particularly Angie, who appears to be the mastermind. Creepy. Rex runs to get some weaponry while Melissa reads their thoughts. When he gets back, Melissa is in a state: whatever she’s sensing is so fucked up that she’s shaking and crying, which is pretty bad considering what an edgelord Melissa is. (I’m not even being sarcastic; Rex actually thinks this, although not in so many words.)
Rex and Melissa run for the house across the street and break in, improvising weaponry out of all the steel household objects. They barricade themselves in the computer room (remember those?), and Rex fortifies the door with knives — or tries to, anyway; the knives run out at twelve and he panics that the door will attract darklings now. Not to worry, though, because Melissa is carrying around a knife and throws it into the door from across the room. You know how teenagers have amazing knife-throwing skills. From across the street, they watch a darkling arrive at the stalker house: A human torso seemed to be submerged into the creature’s flesh, and a half-visible human face stared glassily from its emaciated chest. Spooky! Melissa tells Rex that the darkling is able to think like a human because it’s been melded with a midnighter. Spooky! (x2) Rex is like, “That is FUCKED UP” and then a bunch of darklings attack them. Rex worries that they’re gon’ die, but Melissa promises that they’ll survive this night and she’ll touch him again to show him what she learned from Angie. Rex is like OKAY! because this is the closest he’s probably ever going to get to second base. Or first, for that matter.
They manage to fight off all the darklings and get into Melissa’s car just as midnight ends. They speed off into the night, and Melissa tells Rex to get some poison. Rex is like, “Okay, I know we’re emo, but we’re not THAT emo.” Melissa tells Rex that the midnighter inside the darkling is dying, and they’re probably going to try to replace her with one of our protagonists soon. And if they need someone that can read the lore symbols, that means they’re going to kidnap a seer, aka Rex. Rex is like, “Oh.”
Up next: Everyone discusses Rex and Melissa touching not-like-that-except-exactly-like-that. Jessica isn’t sure she wants to be publicly associated with Goth Motion.
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