* Photo credit to The Closet *
Jess is a total hottie patottie on the cover. The dude—the psychopathic, eponymous surfer named Christopher—looks a little like Sean Penn, and definitely not hot enough to compete with A.J. Morgan. More SVH logic for y’all.
A.J. is going to Texas for a family reunion from Wednesday to Sunday and Jessica practically gasps in a paper bag because she doesn’t know how she can bear not seeing him. (I think it’s safe to say that Jess wouldn’t be good in a long-distance relationship.) After he leaves, Jess pisses off all her friends with her moody-ass moods and they abandon her on the beach, where she meets Christopher and is all turned on by his mysterious intensity. He pays her compliments, impetuously buys her all of a street vendor’s roses, and does her lips up right. Jess is in a whirlwind of romance—until she dumps him on Sunday right before A.J. comes back.
I would just like to take a moment to point out that there is NO two-boy weekend in this story! Just like All Night Long, this is a total gyp. When A.J. is away, Jess is with Christopher. When A.J. returns, Jess is with A.J. and the weekend is over! This should be called, like, Different Boy at a Time Weekend. Okay, no, that sucks, but it’s closer to the truth.
Jess mopes around and does lots of sighing and muttering and pining for her romantic weekend with Christopher. She doesn’t even really care much for A.J. anymore—she just wants to be his date to some Citizen’s Day Ball where somehow he’s king for writing an amazing essay and thus she’ll be queen and the whole shebang is a really big deal and Jess wants to be on the news. Well, she might wind up on the news in a body bag, so we think, when Christopher keeps calling and calling, and when he finds out that Jess never told A.J. about their torrid passion, he lets out an evil snicker! Eep! This is why teens shouldn’t dry hump boys they hardly know.
A.J. wants to sell his truck, and who should show up to take a look at it but Christopher. He pretends he doesn’t know Jessica, who’s about ready to blow her freaking brains out. It works out so that Jess has to go with Christopher on a test drive alone—huh? Not cool, A.J. I can’t think of anybody’s boyfriend letting them get in a car alone with a total stranger. Acts like these are during which serial killers are bred! He speeds around, threatening Jess and begging her to love him and it’s Vanilla Sky all up in here. She agrees to go out with him just to get him to stop being mentally ill and he cheerfully drives her back to A.J.’s. Call the cops! Then again, all the SVH students are smarter than the Sweet Valley cops, so I guess that’s out.
Liz goes to the mall with this kid she’s a Big Sister for (chalk up another for St. Liz) and Christopher stalks her because he never knew Jess had a twin. (Jess wanted him to think that she was “unique.”) And Liz doesn’t want to deal with him: “If there was one thing she was not in the mood for, it was being nice to a pest.” Jess breaks down that evening and spills the story to her dear sister, and Liz says the only thing left to do is confess her evil deed to A.J. but Jess doesn’t want to because that means he’d dump her and she won’t get to be queen of the ball. Oh, God. What an idiot. Liz even asks if being famous at the ball is more important than losing A.J.—you think it wouldn’t be, considering she was overhauling her entire personality on his behalf.
Jess lies—shock!—to get out of her forced date with Christopher because it was arranged on the same night as the Citizen’s Day Ball. But of course Christopher shows up and thinks Liz is Jess, and she puts herself in the hands of a loony by letting him because she doesn’t want him to eff up Jess’s precious coronation. But then Jeffrey French shows up at Jess’s side, saying that Liz went off with “some guy,” and Jess frets about what to do because soon she and A.J. will be taking the stage. Now I’m no Liz fan, but she IS risking her life so her sister can have a night of undeserved attention, and it IS all Jess’s fault…
Meanwhile, Christopher is PULLING A KNIFE on Liz and stuffing her in the trunk of a car yet I feel that even these events will not influence Liz to keep to herself from now on. It’s then that Jess telepathically knows that Liz is in danger. She stops Christopher by flinging herself in front of his car and he’s all “WTF” (cuz he didn’t know she was a twin, you see). Jeffrey pummels Christopher (I love boys in rumpled formal wear beating on each other) and the last thing Christopher utters before passing out is “Jessica.” How tragic! Then he gets whisked away to therapy, never to be heard from again.
Jess returns to the overrated dance, where A.J. is still reading his winning essay to the crowd (“We don’t need a space-age, futuristic world, because the one we live in is so great”), and Jess is oh-so-proud of him, but then she causes a big scene by refusing to get on stage with him, making A.J. get down and talk to her only to have her dump him, saying she’s a commitment phobe. Way to wait to the last second to do the “noble” thing. But A.J. is such a good dude, he insists on her having the crown, and she accepts on the behalf of what they had and they both sob the whole time. Barfaroo.
Ah, A.J.—we hardly knew ye. Peace, dude.
Do Ned and Alice not realize that some dude is phone-stalking their daughter? What am I saying—of course not; they’re Ned and Alice. They didn’t even know Liz nearly got kidnapped for the trillionth time. Maybe they were at another exciting game of bridge. Call social services tout suite!
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