* Photo credit to The Closet *
Oh, dear! Look at all the action we have happening on the cover. We have Sue Gibbons tied to a chair while some disembodied hands make what is surely a threatening call. On the right side, we have Liz, open-mouthed and looking all of twelve, while Jess hovers in the background, looking devious. That Jeremy guy looks like a total toolbox. Why is everyone losing their shit over him?
So Jess’s fiancé, creepy Jeremy, has returned to the Wakefield residence to announce that Sue’s been kidnapped. And everyone takes his word for it, because he’s proved so dependable so far. Jess totally forgives him for Frenching Sue during the Halloween party (because he’s just so beautiful!) and gets all indignant when Liz and Jeremy insist on searching for Sue in the woods in the dead of night without telling Ned and Alice that Sue is gone because, “They’d never let us go out at this hour.” I’m already shunning on page 11! They split up during the search and Jeremy finds Sue’s necklace—DUN DUN DUN! Because he yanked it off her throat when he went to visit her in the attic of the Nature Cabin! More DUN DUN DUNing!
Yes, the two lovebirds are in on this kidnapping ruse to get Sue’s TV-dinner inheritance for themselves. You’d think the Wakefields all had IQs of zero for not recognizing that Jeremy has something to do with it, considering the kidnapper asks for the exact amount of Sue’s inheritance (and then a little more to punish the Wakefields when they hire a detective). In fact, only Liz is the one who questions Jeremy and his motives, but what else is new? She’s part bloodhound anyway. But stupid me, I expected everyone else to be more suspicious of Jeremy thanks to his previous shady antics. Why they even let him in the house at this point is beyond me.
The twins get to stay home from school while Sue is kidnapped (because in California they don’t get snow days, dontcha know, so they have to settle for hostage days—and there are sure enough of them). Todd Wilkins and Lila Fowler freak out and assume that the Wakefields are being held hostage in their home because the twins were so cryptic on the phone. So they break into the Sweet Valley electrical plant to steal electrical workers’ uniforms and a truck in order to get into the Wakefields’ house and overtake the bad guy with flame-retardant spray. Whaaa? It’s unbelievably inane and it never goes anywhere—the most they do is bump into Jeremy running around outside the Wakefields’ house with a ski mask on. He’s the crappiest amateur criminal I’ve ever heard of. And STILL no one puts two and two together!
Anyway…Sue sits alone in the attic of the Nature Cabin, tied to a chair in the dark for several days and nights (“just in case,” according to Jeremy), and begins to have doubts about Jeremy, thank Christ. She’s seeing a new side to him that she doesn’t like! (BTW: Why did no one think to look inside the Nature Cabin? It’s so obvious! Any search would start there! Ugh, Jeremy is not even smart or careful about this at all and yet he’s totally fooling this idiot family and their hired dick, who can’t even trace a phone call.)
The kidnapper tells the Wakefields to send the twins (naturally) to deliver the money in a phone booth in exchange for Sue, and Liz and Jess videotape the whole shebang. They get Sue back, and everyone eats pie and congratulates themselves even though they let the kidnapper get away. Later that night, Sue goes outside to wait for Jeremy because he said he’d pick her up at eight, but then she realizes he’s not coming—he totally ditched her and went to Mexico alone!
But the joke’s on him, because the Wakefields gave him a bunch of counterfeit bills—that Jeremy had earlier sniffed while in plain sight. Why is no one onto him yet? Actually, by the end of the story, Jess is the one who starts realizing that Jeremy might be up to no good when she watches the video and sees the kidnapper wearing the obnoxious ring she’d given him—on his pinky!—that used to be her brother Steven’s when he almost got married to Cara Walker. Thank God, because Jeremy’s really stupid and it’d be unbelievable that the perfect Wakefields wouldn’t even have a clue.
Other Notes:
- Why do Ned and Alice consent to twenty-three-year-old Jeremy lounging around their house and sunbathing with their sixteen-year-old daughter? They sicken me. Ned, you’re a lawyer: get on this and start suing for statutory rape already!
- I did like the way Todd and Lila were forced to interact; it was nice to just let their personalities bounce off each other. Too bad I mostly skimmed that part.
- What the fuck could Bruce Patman’s 1BRUCE1 Halloween costume possibly have looked like?
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