Dial Tone

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Dial Tone
Chapter91 of 129 (list of chapters)
PublishedJanuary 18, 2016 (2016-01-18)
Page count24
Major charactersMike, Lucy, Sandy
Minor charactersDaisy
LocationsRoseville High School, Mike’s house, Lucy’s house
Collected inVolume Six
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Mike’s first day of junior year opens with Lucy back in the halls of Roseville High School, sweet as sugar and completely wrong. It’s a nightmare in the literal sense, one that drags Mike through everything he’s buried, and waking up only trades it for Sandy’s answering machine, thirty-odd times over.

Synopsis

Mike’s junior year begins at six in the morning, with Daisy marching him toward an empty Roseville High School and chattering about SATs and honor roll.[1] Rounding a hallway corner, Mike collides with someone and lands flat on the floor. It’s Lucy, in a yellow sundress and her pink bow, smiling sweetly down at him.[2]

There is something deeply wrong with this Lucy. She greets him with Sandy’s pet name and insists, smiling, that they’re friends.[3] When she leans in to kiss his neck, Mike shoves her away in a panic.[4] She keeps telling him Sandy doesn’t care. Mike desperately denies it, and Sandy herself appears to answer him.[5] Dream-Sandy grills him about cheating and tells him flatly, “You’re not relevant to me anymore.”[6] The hallway then dissolves into a forest, and the leaves underfoot chant “Cheater” until they swallow him whole.[7]

Mike drowns, and it’s Lucy who hauls him back to the surface. On the shore, soaked and covered in bandages, she asks him why he hates her.[8] Blood starts pouring from her chest, and she smiles as she tells him, “I’m willing to die for you.”[9] Mike frantically presses his scarf to the wound, then finds the bloodstained knife in his own hand.[10] Sandy appears standing on the water.[11] When Mike wades out to beg, she points back to the shore, where Lucy lies dead.[12] Then she drives a hand through his chest.[13]

Mike wakes up, alone in his dark bedroom in the middle of the night. The whole first day of school, Lucy and all, was a nightmare.[14] He sobs into his hands, spots his phone, and calls Sandy. Her answering machine picks up, so he hangs up and dials again, roughly thirty times in a row.[15] His grief curdles into rage, and he hurls the phone across the room with a scream of “FUCK YOU!!” before collapsing back into bed.[16]

Crying into his pillow, Mike remembers the night he climbed through Lucy’s bedroom window in tears after learning Sandy had visited town and he’d missed her.[17] Lucy mocked him mercilessly until he snapped back that he knew she didn’t care and called himself pathetic.[18] Struck with guilt, she knelt down and sincerely comforted him. She told him Sandy was just busy, then added, “Believe it or not, idiot, but you’re worth fighting for.”[19] As Mike clung to her in a grateful hug, Lucy’s expression drained to something dull and distant.[20] The chapter closes on a black page with Lucy’s final word, “Whatever.”[21]

Character dynamics

Lucy, in a yellow sundress and pink bow, smiles down at the fallen Mike.
The last cat Mike expects to run into on his first day back.
  • Mike and Sandy: Mike’s whole sense of himself rests on the idea that Sandy still cares. That faith has little left to stand on. He came out of sophomore year reassured by the flowers she sent him.[22] The nightmare twists that same gift into proof he’s being managed, and a night of unanswered calls does the rest.[6][16] Nothing between them formally changes, since the real Sandy never appears at all, but Mike’s ability to keep the doubt buried is gone.
  • Mike and Lucy: Lucy is gone from Mike’s life, but what she left behind is still in his head. The dream version of her says everything he wants to hear and everything he feels guilty about. The flashback shows how things actually used to work between them: Mike would come to her in tears over Sandy, and Lucy would patch his faith back up while swallowing whatever it cost her.[17][19] Veronica’s commentary calls Lucy’s expression during that pep talk “a tragedy,” explaining that she jokes about Mike not being worth picking because she can’t let herself be vulnerable to a boy pining for another girl.[19]

Trivia & observations

Lucy's eyes dull to a detached, neutral stare as Mike hugs her tightly.
Cheering Mike up costs Lucy more than she lets on.
  • The dream’s two argument pages are drawn in pencil, in a grid layout. On the Lucy page, Mike’s scarves and bandages shift between past eras from panel to panel. The Sandy interrogation instead uses simplified character designs in the style of the early chapters.[23][6]
  • Dream-Lucy’s “Hello Maishul” borrows the pet name Sandy coined in Unfulfilled Fantasy, and the real Lucy has needled Mike with it before, back in Farewell, Middle School.[3][24][25]
  • The forest’s “Cheater” chant reprises Paulo’s chant from A Difficult Choice word for word. The commentary under the page jokes that “Paulo needs to knock that off.”[7][26]
  • In the nightmare, the characters wear clothes from Mike’s memories. Dream-Sandy wears the purple gown from the Just Beautiful fashion show, and Lucy’s body lies in the dress from Sue’s play in Curtain Call.[11][12][27][28]
  • Dream-Lucy’s “You wanted me dead.” points at a real line, Mike’s “Maybe it’d be fixed if she just died” from Just Beautiful.[9][29] The commentary defends that line as heat-of-the-moment venting, comparing it to a teenager yelling “I HATE YOU MOM.”[11]
  • The “dumb bonsai tree” Lucy sneers about in the flashback is Sandy’s parting gift from Hot Pursuit, left behind after the visit Mike missed.[17][30]
  • The authors have named Dial Tone among their favorite chapters, and Veronica has said dream-Lucy is “SO VERY out of character, because Mike has just completely misinterpreted so many of her actions.”[31]

Related chapters

  • Table for One: The next chapter picks up this same first day of junior year for real. Mike tells his friends he had a nightmare that started exactly like the day in front of him.
  • Just Beautiful: Most of the nightmare’s raw material comes from this chapter. Sandy walked the runway here in the purple gown, and Mike, at his very lowest, was the one who said of Lucy that “Maybe it’d be fixed if she just died.”
  • Eternal Flame: Much later, when things with Sandy actually fall apart, Mike spends another night listening to the same answering-machine greeting. Lucy’s “worth fighting for” reassurance from this chapter’s flashback also comes back to him word for word.

References

  1. ↑ Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 1
  2. ↑ Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 2
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 3
  4. ↑ Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 4
  5. ↑ Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 6
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 7
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 9
  8. ↑ Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 11
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 12
  10. ↑ Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 13
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 14
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 15
  13. ↑ Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 16
  14. ↑ Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 17
  15. ↑ Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 18
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 19
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 20
  18. ↑ Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 21
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 22
  20. ↑ Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 23
  21. ↑ Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 24
  22. ↑ Chapter 88: Class of 2008, page 1
  23. ↑ Chapter 91: Dial Tone, page 5
  24. ↑ Chapter 17: Unfulfilled Fantasy, page 4
  25. ↑ Chapter 18: Farewell, Middle School, page 4
  26. ↑ Chapter 22: A Difficult Choice, page 4
  27. ↑ Chapter 71: Just Beautiful, page 6
  28. ↑ Chapter 74: Curtain Call, page 26
  29. ↑ Chapter 71: Just Beautiful, page 19
  30. ↑ Chapter 20: Hot Pursuit, page 12
  31. ↑ “Ask response on the authors’ favorite BCB chapters”. 2021-03-01.
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