* Photo credit to The Closet *
I find this cover horrifically boring, especially for a title that ends in an exclamation point. Is a picture of Jess’s squishy little heart-shaped face the best James Mathewuse could dream up? Here, some cover options, any of which would’ve been more interesting than this one:
• Jessica looming over some poor bastard with an arched, evil eyebrow
• Elizabeth looming over some poor bastard with a condescending look of pity
• Steven Wakefield looking like a robot
• An ugly-ass dude whom every girl in town thinks is a fox
• Someone on the brink of tears
• Todd Wilkins looking 40 years old
• Jessica and Elizabeth fellating their own godforsaken lavalieres
• Two former friends staring hatefully at each other
• Elizabeth shopping for barrettes
• Jess and Lila Fowler punching each other in the face over some guy
• A porn ‘stache
Eric Parker, a TV talk show host, is coming to Sweet Valley to pick one lucky, ordinary, “well-rounded” student from SVH for a live taping of his show “Growing Up in America.” Both Jess and Lila think they have the interview all sewn up, although Jess starts to get worried that she’s too shallow when she starts filling out the application. Har har! Liz suggests Jess write an Oracle article for some well-rounded street cred and Jess does, and it’s sort of charming to picture Jess “typing energetically with two fingers, pausing every ten seconds or so to correct a mistake.”
Her article is called “The Worst Dates of My Life” and she barely goes through any effort to disguise any of the names. This is a high school paper, so why is Mr. Collins not putting a stop to this? I suppose he’s too busy chiseling peepholes in the girls’ bathroom to realize that students are using school communications to malign the shit out of each other (i.e., “I thought it would be fun to go parking in [Bruce Patman]s] black Porsche—until I discovered he kisses like a dead jellyfish!”].
Anyway, Jess’s article has everyone in stitches, including spaz-in-chief Penny Ayala, who deems Jess’s story “perfect as it is.” This makes Liz jealous: None of her stories were ever perfect as is! “What was the point … of being the supposedly literary twin if Jessica could write just as well as she could?” So Liz decides to become more well-rounded herself by giving up writing and becoming a junior park ranger at Secca Lake. This is hilar. And stupid. But enough about that Wakefield: She ends up quitting the ranger program in the end anyway. The Oracle needs her too much!
Lila and Jess attempt to sabotage each other during the finals, but Jess winds up being picked with Lila as her alternate. Naturally, Jess can’t resist rubbing it in Lila’s face, so Lila recruits Bruce Patman, who’s already pissed that everyone’s making jellyfish jokes at his expense, to help her ruin Jess’s chances of being on TV. Bruce is so foxy when he ne’er do wells, and Lila must think so too: She and Bruce totally make out, their adrenaline pumping thanks to their own evilness! (“Lila acted as if kissing her accomplice were simply a necessary part of the scheme.”) Their plan: Bruce calls a fancy boutique that’s an hour away from Sweet Valley as “Detective Tapnam” to warn them of a hot, blond, teenage shoplifter, and when Lila takes Jess’s purse and abandons her at the store while Jess is trying on clothes, Jess runs out after the car in her unpurchased garment and immediately the cops pounce on her. Oh, dear! What to do, what to do?
The solution: Twin Powers, activate! Liz refuses to let Lila go on the show as Jess’s alternate so she goes on national TV herself, pretending to be Jess. When Jess finally makes her way back to Sweet Valley and sees the interview, she actually tricks herself into believing that it really was her on TV. And she throws Lila’s keys up in the rafters as payback, and Lila blames Bruce for everything and publicly declares that he does smooch like an invertebrate. An insult to jellyfish everywhere.
Other Notes:
- The narrative always says that the Wakefield family has christened Jessica’s turd-brown room as “The Hershey Bar.” However, I’ve never heard one of them say so in the dialogue. Show, don’t tell, ghosties!
- Liz reads her history textbook and the daily paper out by the pool. Nerdface.
- LOL @ Lila’s reaction to kissing Bruce: “How could she have done it? She didn’t even like him. Nobody did!”
- More grossness: Bruce, in his own defense re: the article, says, “It’s not like Wakefield was such a hot date herself,” to which John Pfeifer replies, “You’d have a hard time convincing anybody of that. She’s of the prettiest and most popular girls in school.” Why does pretty + popular = hot date? Barf.
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