* Photo credit to The Closet *
Liz looks like she’s being poorly portrayed by Paris Hilton in some office-based episode of The Simple Life while Jess hovers around her, looking like she had ten bricks fall on her head. Why did she think to leave the house in that sweater? And just where are they? Do not tell me they are still interning at the Sweet Valley News! THEY ARE! But that’s not really important in this story. Not that anything ever is.
Lila Fowler brings back a Ouija board from Europe (because one was so hard to find in a Sweet Valley toy store?) and she and Jess become obsessed with it. Liz laughs at them for believing in them and publicly humiliates Lila for being stupid, and Lila obviously gets pissed. And of course Liz is too good to apologize (“I didn’t think she’d take it so personally”), because she’s totally right about this sort of thing, you know. But Lila is actually enraged and wants to get back at Liz, and manages to recruit Jess into tricking Liz into believing the Ouija board is real by having it “predict” information that will come true. They cajole Liz into playing with them and the board declares that some concert will postponed for a week (Lila had an inside scoop on the matter), and Liz gets all spooked and turns into a believer.
But the embarrassment of Liz doesn’t stop there! The Ouija board is like crack for Liz and she needs to consult it all the time. (I can’t believe they devoted more than half the book to this premise.) In a move orchestrated by Jess and Lila, the Ouija board tells Liz that Bruce Patman is secretly dying (of either the plague or leprosy, the girls never actually decide), and Liz totally buys it and suddenly decides to devote her life to being kind to poor Bruce. She’s such a lame-o. She makes everyone promise not to bring it up to him yet she parades around like something’s obviously up and insists, “It’s a secret!” Anyway, Bruce totally thinks she’s hitting on him until Jess tells him that Liz is only being nice to him because she thinks he’s on his death bed, a fact he finds hilarious and decides to milk for all it’s worth. Then Liz’s boyfriend Jeffrey French comes home from summer camp to surprise Liz, and he and Bruce totally have a penis war for her affections, and she’s all Quinn from Daria about it.
So one night, Liz delays a date with Jeffrey in order to go rush off to the tennis courts to meet Bruce, who called her up to say that, thanks to his terminal illness, he’s contemplating offing himself. Lila tells Jeffrey where Liz is, and it turns out that the whole Ouija board thing started as Lila’s insane, elaborate scheme to get Jeffrey for herself. Jeffrey shows up at the tennis courts and sees Liz all over Bruce (in sympathy!), and of course “all she could think about was that [Jeffrey] had deliberately ignored her request to wait for her at home and that he had shattered a special, deeply personal moment between her and Bruce.” Are you seriously kidding me? Bruce admits he’s been lying to her to get her to sleep with him, and Liz is like “OMG I’m so stupid!” which is nothing we didn’t know, and she runs away from the scene she created and the three teens eventually wind up in the Utility Room with the town bomber and his crates marked “TNT.”
Oh, right—I guess this is where the “thriller” part actually comes in, only on the last twenty pages. You see, a paranoid schizophrenic named Donald Redman escaped from the mental institution where he was put after trying to blow up his mom and pop with a homemade bomb. What’s his next great plan? Why, blowing up the Sweet Valley High football stadium, of course! It’s because the school expelled him from kidnapping a beautiful blonde who, wouldn’t you know it, is resembled greatly by Elizabeth Wakefield, who just so happens to be babysitting for his sister! I’m projectile-vomiting over here. Anyway, there are bomb scares complete with fake sticks of Looney Tunes-style dynamite all over town, blah blah.
Then Lila and Jess consult the Ouija board, which tells them that Liz is in danger at the stadium, so they round up the cops and go to the school, where Bruce somehow manages to get the bomb away from Redman and runs away with the terrorist on his heels while Jeffrey and Liz suddenly develop magic knowledge of how to deactivate bombs. Then there’s a horrible explosion anyway! But Bruce is still alive, you guys, even though he comes back with his hair singed. It turns out Redman got the bomb away from him and ran away cackling as he blew up. I’m dying.
Other Notes:
- “Are the Droids playing tonight?” Jeffrey asks at the “Be True to Your School” event. Dude, do you have to even ask? To further prove what nerds The Droids are, lead singer Dana Larson is like, “So, just to make sure you don’t forget what being in school is like, we’re going to play a song of ours called ‘A-Plus.’” Hurl!
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