December

December
Chapter	68 of 129 (list of chapters)
Published	October 3, 2011 (2011-10-03)
Page count	39
Major characters	Mike, Lucy, Augustus, Sandy
Minor characters	Paulo, Daisy, Abbey, David, Sue, Mr. Noodles, Haley, Chris, Ellen, Jasmine
Locations	Roseville High School, Mike’s house, Sandy’s house, Roseville neighborhood
Collected in	Volume Three, Omnibus 1
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A paired essay assignment throws Mike and Lucy together for an afternoon, and over a few rounds of video games it almost looks like the old friendship might come back. Then a text from Sandy arrives, and Mike says everything he’s been holding in for years.

Synopsis

The last assignment before winter break is a paired World War II essay, and Mike talks himself straight into trouble. He interrupts Mr. Noodles’s roll call to complain about being “Stuck with Lucy. As usual.” As it turns out, Noodles had actually paired him with Sue — but since Mike made a fuss, now he really is stuck with Lucy.

The library is where Lucy’s real state of mind comes out. Augustus needles her about letting Mike walk all over her. Lucy asks how he copes with rejection, and admits she’s “about ready to give up on everything.” Augustus has made his peace with Daisy not wanting him, he tells her, because even from a distance, he knows she’s happy.

The afternoon thaws anyway. Lucy’s puffed-cheek “thinking face” catches Mike off guard, and he cracks up despite himself. Back at his house, she throws a controller into his face and bullies him into a few rounds of Super Boxer Champions. After three years of losing, she finally trounces him, and the two of them end up laughing together like the bad year never happened.

Mike’s phone buzzes just as they agree to one more round. He reads a long text and tears up, smiling. Then he sours and tells Lucy she should get going. She refuses to leave without an explanation, and Mike finally blurts it out: “SANDY’S COMING TO VISIT NEXT WEEK!!” Lucy collects herself and says she’s glad someone can make him happy again. To Mike, that sounds like she thinks he wasn’t happy already.

Mike grabs Lucy by the shoulders and lets years of resentment out. He doesn’t want her as a friend, and he screams “I HATE YOU!!” through tears. He has never been her friend at all, he says, and Sandy helped him understand that. Over years of phone calls shown in unmarked flashbacks, a younger Mike cheerfully reported Lucy’s smacks and slaps, and a horrified Sandy eventually decided she didn’t like Lucy at all.

He announces he’s leaving the lunch table in January, and he’s sure Daisy, Abbey, Paulo and David will follow him. When Lucy protests that Paulo wouldn’t leave her, Mike scoffs that Paulo doesn’t even love her, that nobody does. “You’re a parasite.”

When his mom arrives, Mike snaps out of it and runs off downstairs to share the news. Lucy sits alone in his room until she’s sick into his trash can. Her eyes land on his unattended phone. When Mike returns, she’s holding a plastic bag and answering in monosyllables. The whole essay, she says, will be in his locker. He checks his phone, finds it untouched, and relaxes. Lucy slams the front door and throws the bag into a dumpster. As she runs crying through the blizzard, Augustus’s words replay: “It’s from a distance.. but I know she’s smiling.” The final panel is Mike at his open locker, looking down at the finished essay.

Character dynamics

Lucy’s “thinking face” finally gets a laugh out of Mike.

• Mike and Lucy: Mike and Lucy’s friendship ends for good here. It was already broken in practice — Mike rejected Lucy’s confession in A Distance Apart and has refused to be her “babysitter” ever since. Even so, Lucy walks into the essay assignment still hoping to patch things up, and for one video-game evening it looks like she might. That same evening, after Sandy’s text arrives, Mike renounces the friendship entirely, insists it never existed, and announces he’s leaving the table. Lucy leaves without a word and finishes the essay alone.
• Lucy and Augustus: Their recess bickering turns into something much closer to trust. Augustus is the only person Lucy tells how bad things have gotten. His answer is cruel at first and then genuinely kind, and it’s his line about Daisy smiling from a distance that follows Lucy into the blizzard at the chapter’s end.
• Mike and Sandy: After years of long-distance devotion, Mike and Sandy are finally headed for an in-person reunion, with Sandy’s visit confirmed by Mike’s mom and marked on the calendar for December 21st. In the flashbacks, Sandy’s dislike of Lucy goes back years, to phone calls where she cried over every bruise Mike shrugged off.
• Lucy and Sandy: They never meet here, but Just Beautiful reveals what Lucy did with Mike’s unattended phone. She texted Sandy that Mike would be better off without her and asked Sandy to take care of him. Sandy kept the message and tried to make Mike read it when he assumed the worst about her visit.

Trivia & observations

Years of resentment come out all at once.

• The “thinking face” sequence wasn’t part of the original plan. Veronica’s commentary says she added it after counting the chapter’s pages, since “It’s not like Mike and Lucy became friends out of nowhere…”
• Mike finds his phone exactly where he left it and assumes Lucy never touched it. In Just Beautiful, it turns out she used it to text Sandy before leaving, then put it back. Sandy replied right away, but nobody answered.
• Lucy’s small talk on the walk to the library contains the comic’s first mention of Haley, and Veronica declared the spelling “Haley” canon on the strength of it. Haley herself had already appeared on-panel in the background of A Distance Apart.
• This is Chris’s first appearance in the series. Veronica’s commentary explains that Mike had a baby sister in her childhood version of the comic, and she ties the gender flip to her own childhood worries about sibling mortality.
• Augustus calling Mike “green eyes” revives the nickname Alejandro’s gang coined for him back in Confrontation.
• Lucy’s video-game victory turns the tables on Gaming Rivalry, where three in-story years earlier Mike was the one doing all the winning. She admits she “spent a few nights practicing”, and Mike ribs her that it only took her three years.
• Veronica’s commentary confirms that the plastic bag Lucy carries out is her vomit, cleaned up rather than left behind.
• The “You’re a parasite.” page broke 1,000 comments, a site milestone that Veronica’s commentary on the following update calls “PRETTY AMAZING”.
• Veronica has confirmed on Tumblr that the much later chapter Line in the Sand was intentionally written to mirror this one, calling the pair “two nightmare sibling chapters”. Augustus even quotes the parasite line back at Mike there.

Related chapters

• Another Shoulder: Mike’s “I told you once already” points back to this chapter, where he first told Lucy he wasn’t going to be her babysitter anymore. It’s also where Lucy spent the night with Paulo, the “dumb rebound” Mike sneers at.
• Just Beautiful: Sandy visits on December 21st, and Mike finally learns what Lucy did while alone with his phone. She texted Sandy that he would be better off without her and asked Sandy to take care of him.
• Love Again: Lucy attempts suicide years later in this chapter’s flashback, and in her last thoughts beforehand she calls herself a parasite, in Mike’s exact words.