Khanh the Killjoy

“Go on,” he says. “I like it rough.”
Double ugh! I’m suddenly acutely aware that I’m straddling him—wearing a micromini and heels, no less—and I can’t roll off him fast enough.
“You’re sick, you know.”

Meet your main characters! She's a brainless cheerleader and he's a stalker!

This book is a cesspool of insipidity into which there is no return. It makes much-reviled works of art like Twilight read like the fucking Magna Carta.

It has:

1. A stupid, shallow, bitchy cheerleader stereotype, which wouldn’t be so bad except that it’s the fucking main character who is...

2. Too-stupid-to-live syndrome. Despite the fact that she has the 3rd highest GPA in school. I see no evidence of it

3. A love triangle between an asshole jock and a creepy (but hot) stalker. The sad thing is that I’d pick the brainless asshole jock over the stalker. Guess who she’ll end up with! Gasp! Shock!

4. A view that females should be submissive within a relationship
5. No true, equivalent female friendship.

We’ve been best friends since the first grade, and he’s just some guy. Some sickeningly hot, captain-of-the-football-team guy.

...which they proceed to fight over. *slow clap*

Really, this book is just fucking horrible.

The Summary:

I’m almost at the lip of the dining room entrance when, at the last minute, I lop off half the mountain of mashed potatoes. (I don’t want people thinking I’m eating my feelings.) And then I make my way to the Pretty People table.

Indigo (“Indie”) has the perfect life. She is the *hair flips* cheerleader in the school squad. She’s blond-haired, with the perfect body. She’s in a group of the Pretty People (seriously, that’s what they call themselves). She’s got the 3rd highest GPA in school despite the fact that we nary ever see her (perfect) ass touch a classroom chair. She’s dating the most perfect, gorgeous jock in the entire school. So what if her mom’s a batty Wiccan? Indie’s still got it made. She and the girls on the Cheer squad have got it made. For many of them, this is the pinnacle of their lives.

She launches into an inspirational pregame speech about precious high school memories and the importance of showing off our hot bods while we still have them.

Indie? She’s the perfect combination of booty, beauty, and brains. The latter is highly debatable, given what will happen next.

She is the envy of the girls at school; her only rival is best-frenemy Bianca who secretly desires the hunkalicious Devon, but it’s all good, because Devon only loves Indie, I mean, out of all the girls in the world, Devon chose Indie to take to a Jay-Z* concert.

Devon could have brought anyone in the world to that concert and he chose me.

*Watch the name-dropping in this book. There will be many. Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s bullshit Maybelline.

Life is good. Until theLeather Jacket guy almost lands on her car in a bloody splat, and what’s weird is that he’s holding a scrap of paper with her address on it.

What makes it weirder is that he shows up at school several days later to make fun of her during a cheer routine in a school football game. What a fucking charmer!

At first the guy looks like he’s trying to hold back, but then he bursts into laughter again—a full-bellied, brace-your-stomach fit—and I get the distinct impression he’s laughing at me.

But it’s just this one time, right? There’s just no way he’s…following her, right?

A chill ripples through me.
He followed me.

Well...

The light from a streetlamp etches shadows into his laugh lines and makes his smirk look sinister. He pushes off the wall.
“Don’t come any closer.”

Weeeeeeeeell...

“Oh, I’m sorry. Am I not handling the news that you’ve been stalking me as well as you’d hoped?”
He grins.
“And why are you following me? That’s pretty creepy, you know.”

But what the hell, YA heroines were never known for their intelligence, anyway.

And speaking of intelligence, it doesn’t run in the family. Apparently, there is this SUPER SECRET SPECIAL BIBLE. Not the, like, Holy Bible, but the WITCHY BIBLE. Her mother is obsessed with it, and mommy wants to keep it a secret SOOOOOO MUCH that she:

1. Tells her daughter about it constantly and reminds her of how important it is

2. Keeps it in her fucking store instead of, say, A FUCKING SAFE IN A HIGH-SECURITY BANK

Leather Jacket dude is Bishop, stalker extraordinaire. Apparently, Indie is special, she could be a witch! (they have 2 sets of recessive genes). Will they be able to train Indie to be a witch long enough to protect her? Will they be able to stop gazing lovingly into each other's eyes before Bishop shoves her from a ledge in order to force her to learn to fly?

I want to scream at him. Tell him he’s a jerk for waiting so long to catch me, but then I become hyperaware that we’re face to face, that the length of our bodies are pressed together, and I don’t say any of those things.

Will she forgive him? Of course.

Indie is just another word for boring:

And Bishop said cheerleaders aren’t smart.
Except that maybe he’s right. Because wasn’t this—the social suicide of being seen at a party with Paige—what I was just trying to avoid?

The only thing that prevents Indie from being your standard Mary Sue is the fact that she is hot shit, and she knows it. In most YA books, we have a Mean Girl Queen Bee trope. In this book, the Indie IS the Queen Bee. As previously mentioned, she is beautiful, she is popular, she is the envy of all the girls and the object of desire for the boyz, being one of the aforementioned cheerleaders who’s not shy about her body, as mentioned by the awesome second part of the love triangle...

“Oh, right.” Bishop nods sagely. “Forgot you flashed your ass to half of Los Angeles earlier. Not shy at all.”

She is the epitome of the shallow, self-absorbed cheerleader who cares about nothing but her reputation and popularity.

It didn’t make sense to me that she didn’t want to be popular.

She thinks everyone’s exactly like her. Indie feels like everyone in high school has one goal in life: that of popularity. It doesn’t matter who her friends are, she will step over them and abandon them in her way to the top. Indie likes her throne. She wants to maintain her place in the school status quo, and it takes the biggest fucking event ever to get her to snap out of her bullshit, and no, I don’t have any sympathy with her for it.

She is the kind of person who doesn’t give a shit about her friends---unless they’re popular, like fellow Queen Bee Bianca. Her other childhood “friend” Paige isn’t so much as a friend as a convenience. There to be used when needed. She has no consideration for others, she sees nothing wrong in using others – after all, Indie is the queen. Other people exist only to serve her ladyship.

Indie is a submissive girlfriend, as smart as she claims to be, as popular as she is, she sees herself as an extension of her hot, super-popular boyfriend Devon. She goes out of her way to be pleasant to him, she makes out with him and lets him kiss her and grope her because it is her duty as a girlfriend. It is a stupid fucking submissive attitude that sends the wrong message to young women. You do not OWE your boyfriend anything, much less your body.

Too Stupid To Live:

“Well, I’m not just going to let him get away, am I?”
“Nooo,” she says, throwing as much sarcasm into one word as humanly possible, “you definitely want to run toward the ax murderer.”

The third-highest GPA in the school. This is what we have, ladies and gentlemen. She thinks nothing of letting a weirdo who might have broken into her house INTO her house. She thinks nothing of following weird creepazoid into the dark. She trusts whom she shouldn’t. Indie acknowledges her own idiocy while never attempting to abate it.

It would be dumb to get out of the car. Worse than dumb: idiotic. But I’ve come this far already, and I can’t imagine the grocery list of bad decisions I’ve made to this point being for nothing

This is her book, so naturally, she lives. If it weren’t, we’d be reading a tragic headline about GIRL FOUND DEAD IN DESERTED RAVINE IN HOLLYWOOD.

The Romance:

I’ve never wanted to be kissed so badly, so of course this would be the time Mom pops into my head—the Mom from the theater with the knife in her temple. The guilt from the car ride comes crashing over me like a tidal wave. How can I be doing this?

Because there's nothing more romantic than getting into a romantic moment while thinking about your dead mom!

Oh, here we go again. Another love triangle, and one of whom is my most reviled trope of all, the stalker. Oh yeah, but he has an excuse to stalk her. That makes it all better, right? That makes it fucking less creepy, right? That gives him the right to be a fucking asshole to her, right? How about fucking no?

Bishop is a fucking creep. He makes fun of her because she is a cheerleader. He mocks her scantily-clad cheerleader clothes and her cheers. He laughs at her stupidity. He thinks it’s just fucking fine to be condescending to a girl whom he is supposed to protect.

"I was starting to think you ride the short bus to school.”

And his words of romance are just legendary. Shakespeare's got nothing on this dude.

“Oh, come on,” Bishop says. “He’s obviously really stupid if he’d choose that chick over you.”
“Shut up,” I mumble.
“I mean it,” he says. “She’s so obvious. Blond hair, big tits. It’s really lame. Even if her tits are pretty nice.”
I groan.
“I’m kidding! They’re just mediocre.”

The stalker trope is not ok. A creepy, patronizing asshat is not ok as a love interest, and I am so fucking sick of this shit.