Clean Slate

Clean Slate
Chapter	93 of 127 (list of chapters)
Published	May 9, 2016 (2016-05-09)
Page count	12
Major characters	Jasmine, Abbey
Minor characters	Mina, Cassidy, Dylan, Katie
Locations	Roseville High School, Northern Highway
Collected in	Volume Six
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Jasmine signs up for Environmental Club, same as every year, and walks straight into the one classmate she can’t look in the eye: Abbey, the secretary she spent her freshman year pranking. Luckily, a year of highway trash duty leaves plenty of time to talk.

Synopsis

Jasmine is signing up for Environmental Club again, the way she does every year, and no amount of puppy-dog eyes will talk Mina or Cassidy into joining her. She walks into the classroom alone and freezes, because Abbey is already there, and he remembers her. Jasmine spends the first meeting in a quiet panic, sure he must hate her for the pranks she and Paulo pulled on him last year. Then the teacher announces the year’s project, and it turns out to be picking up trash along Northern Highway, all year long.

Out on the highway, saving the environment mostly means dodging Dylan’s trash-bag innuendo and getting beaned by soda cans flung from passing cars. Jasmine grumbles about missing a license plate, and Abbey recites it from memory. As more cans come flying, he calmly reads off each plate in turn. Jasmine ends up cowering behind him, and he stations himself between her and the traffic as a shield.

Safely sheltered, Jasmine works up the nerve to apologize for her freshman-year record: the bake sale money she converted into pennies, the keys she hid, and the new students she taught to call him “ASSEY”. Abbey chalks it all up as good practice for controlling his temper and assures her he doesn’t hate her, though he can’t resist a dig about her “questionable taste in men”. That’s all the invitation Jasmine needs. The two spend the rest of the shift roasting Paulo with dueling impressions.

When Abbey congratulates her for ending it, Jasmine goes quiet, then admits that despite everything she’s “still really glad we dated”, since Paulo taught her to relax and make time for herself. She hastily adds that she doesn’t want him back.

Jasmine ends the shift by getting even with Dylan. She borrows Abbey’s trash bag, holds two bags to her chest, and hits him with a flirty kissy-faced pose. The whole club dissolves into belly laughter.

In the closing scene, Katie walks up to a red sports car and finds a note weighed down with soda cans: “We are watching you. Reduce, reuse, RECYCLE. Much love, the trash ghosts”. She is appropriately horrified.

Character dynamics

Jasmine pays Dylan back for the trash-bag jokes.

• Jasmine and Abbey: Jasmine and Abbey become friends over the course of the chapter. Before this, their only history was Jasmine’s stint as the treasurer who made Abbey’s life as secretary miserable, and they hadn’t shared a scene since the pennies hit his locker floor. A year of highway duty gives her guilt nowhere to hide, and Abbey proves far more forgiving than she feared. By the end of the day they’re laughing at the same jokes, roasting the same ex, and pulling a prank together.
• Jasmine and Paulo: Jasmine softens toward her ex here. The last time she spoke about Paulo, she called him “really immature” and was glad they’d split. Now she can roast him for a whole afternoon and still mean it when she says the relationship did her good. Wanting him back, she insists, is another matter entirely.

Trivia & observations

• Per Veronica’s commentary, Jasmine “can’t talk smack for too long before the christian guilt kicks in”, which explains the double apology that interrupts her Paulo roast.
• Veronica’s commentary also reveals Jasmine’s favourite animal, the whale, in the middle of a “what a whale of a time” pun.
• The commentary under the apology scene teases that Jasmine should “apologise to the halloween kids as well”, pointing at Mischief Night, where she and Paulo spent Halloween menacing trick-or-treaters with a knife and a bloodstained kimono.
• A “JOIN environmental club!!” poster is already up in the school hallway during Table for One, one chapter earlier.
• Jasmine isn’t exaggerating about joining every year. Back in freshman year, the club sat on her packed schedule alongside treasury and softball.
• This is Dylan’s first appearance. Katie hasn’t appeared since Local Area, where she was last seen riding in a red convertible.

Related chapters

• Feline Filibuster: The origin of everything Jasmine apologizes for. Abbey’s term as the “tough secretary” begins here with him assigning Paulo trash pickup as a punishment, and the pennies prank happens on-panel, complete with Jasmine’s signed note in Abbey’s locker.
• Ten Seconds to Midnight: Jasmine and Paulo break up here, mutually agreeing to “see other people”. Her quiet moment with Abbey on the roadside is her finally making peace with that night.
• Love Again: Two chapters later, Abbey and Daisy break up, and it’s Jasmine’s lunch table he lands at. She’s already telling Mina to back off, since he’s taken.