payment page
Summary
Chapter 26: The Uniform Doesn’t Make the Woman, But It Sure Does Bring Out the Insecurities
Grace is anxious about her first day at Katmere and struggles to choose what she’ll wear. The last rolled-up note from Jaxon was yet another enigmatic quotation, this time from one of Anaïs Nin’s journals. Uncle Finn unexpectedly visits, checking on Grace's sprained ankle and providing her with her school schedule. The girls head to the cafeteria, where they sit down in the elaborately decorated dining hall, and Jaxon unexpectedly joins them at their table.
Chapter 27: Ten-Degree Weather Gives a Whole New Meaning to the Cool Kids’ Table
Jaxon sitting with Grace and Macy draws a lot of attention, making Grace stumble over her words. Macy is visibly astonished. The rest of the members of the Order also join them, and Jaxon’s friend Mekhi introduces himself and offers to walk her to her next class. Jaxon intervenes, telling Mekhi jokingly to back off, and indirectly introduces Grace to some of the other boys, Liam, Rafael, Byron, and Luca. They leave the cafeteria together, and Grace notices the deference with which the other students all treat Jaxon. When she asks him about it, he tells her it’s nothing, but she can tell he’s being evasive.
Chapter 28: “To Be or Not to Be” Is a Question, Not a Pickup Line
Grace’s mood quickly changes from dreamy to annoyed when she realizes that the major reason Jaxon walked her to class was so she would avoid Flint. After class, Flint catches her as she walks over to the art studio, and prods her about why she uses the phrase “bite me” as a retort to one of his jokes. Flint then tells Grace about the system of tunnels underneath the school, explaining that they’re a good way of getting between campus buildings in the winter weather. They take a shortcut through one of the tunnels, although Grace feels unexpectedly nervous as they enter.
Chapter 29: With Friends Like These, Everyone Needs Hard Hats
The tunnels are much more like a dungeon than any kind of modern architecture, decorated with unsettling sculptures resembling bones and a chandelier that’s made of skeletons. Grace doesn’t want to press on, but Flint insists: Lia then abruptly joins the pair. Grace starts to feel even more uncomfortable from the tension and dislike between the two. Before anything can come to a head, all hell breaks loose as a violent earthquake begins.
Chapter 30: "You Make the Earth Shake Under My Feet…and Everywhere Else Too"
Lia, Flint, and Grace are all scared into action, as they’re stuck underground during what quickly begins to seem like a serious seismic event. They run through the tunnels toward the art studio, Flint dragging Grace behind him to speed her up. They make a rapid exit, but a furious Jaxon quickly confronts them on the other side of the door. Jaxon tells Lia and Flint to get lost and focuses on Grace. She’s very annoyed by what she sees as his persistent jealousy and his controlling choices.
Analysis
In this section we start to see a lot more of Grace’s struggle with her own identity, particularly in Chapter 26, where her worries over her choice of uniform becomes a metaphor for her larger battle with fitting into Katmere. These feelings are all tangled up with her homesickness and her grief over losing her parents. The somber conversations Grace has with her Uncle Finn also touch on this grief, underscoring the way it creeps its way into even the happiest moments of her life. Grace feels stuck in a loop of worrying about Jaxon and wondering what she’s supposed to do next, especially in the context of her new, daunting environment.
Jaxon and Grace's relationship takes some important steps forward in these chapters. At this point, it seems as though Grace believes that Jaxon actually has feelings for her, though she's still not entirely sure where those feelings are heading. He feels protective of her, but a lot of the time she resents this protectiveness because she feels that he's trying to limit her behavior. This protectiveness manifests in ways she likes (sending her breakfast, texting her regularly) and ways she hates (telling her what to do, carrying her when she wants to walk). The scene where Jaxon comes to visit a bedridden Grace in her room is yet another moment of intense but unsatisfying sexual tension between the two. It seems almost too easy for things around them to interrupt any moment of intimacy, especially as Jaxon immediately leaves any situation in which he feels spooked. Grace feels thoroughly frustrated with his tendency to disappear, but this is balanced by her growing desire to spend as much time with him as possible. She can tell that Jaxon and Macy are concealing something important from her, but neither of them will explain what’s actually going on beyond the vaguest suggestion.
Katmere Academy starts to exert itself as a setting important enough to qualify as a character in this section. Underneath the castle are a warren of tunnels, which Flint tells Grace is there to make travel between buildings easier in the vicious Alaska winters. Grace discovers and first makes use of these tunnels at the same time when she begins to get a solid sense of the maze of secrets and lies that she’s bumping up against at Katmere.
The castle’s hidden passages aren’t a welcoming finished basement, but actually a frightening dungeon where the décor is made of human bones. Rather than letting herself be frightened away, Grace steels herself and enters the tunnels with Flint and Lia when she needs to use them to get to class. This journey through the tunnels in Chapter 29 represents Grace's deeper probing into the Academy's mysteries, and her pushing her own boundaries so as to feel less fearful. Even the unsettling, skeletal art installations and the frightening earthquake in the tunnels don’t deter her from taking the steps she knows she must in order to fit in at her new school. The last thing she wants is for Lia and Flint to think she’s a wimp.
Now that she has been at Katmere for a few days, Grace is starting to pay real attention to the school’s social hierarchies and to try and place herself somewhere useful. Nobody is making it easy for her, however, aside from Macy. The contrast between her charged interactions with both Jaxon and Flint and the easy intimacy she shares with Macy makes these non-familial relationships with boys seem dramatic and almost silly. That is, until Grace sees Jaxon again and inevitably falls under his spell. Grace is not unaware of the overawed and deferential reactions of other students to Jaxon’s presence. Macy has already informed her that he is the most popular boy at Katmere, but Grace wonders if there’s more to it than social clout.
