Double Down

From Candypedia
Double Down
Chapter114 of 127 (list of chapters)
PublishedDecember 8, 2021 (2021-12-08)
Page count62
Major charactersLucy, Mike, Paulo, Daisy, Augustus, Jordan
Minor charactersRachel, Matt, Jessica, Madison, Mr. Noodles
LocationsLucy’s house, Roseville High School, Roseville neighborhood
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A library study session leaves Mike with a kiss from Daisy and a secret to keep, while Paulo’s attempt to get Lucy to open up on the walk home boils over into something truly vicious. And that’s all before the flashback.

Synopsis

When the seniors’ van pulls up for Jordan in the morning, he asks Matt to take Augustus along too.[1] Augustus balks at leaving Lucy to walk alone, but she shoos him aboard and tells him to hang out with people his own age.[2] On her own, Lucy crosses paths with Mike. She braces herself as he approaches, but he passes her without so much as a glance, his eyes dull and shadowed.[3] She almost reaches out, but catches herself. “It’s none of my business.”[4]

After school, a whispered argument between Lucy and a stubborn Augustus tips Jordan into a panic.[5] He demands to know what happened, and Lucy cries that she’s never going to live it down.[6] Jordan’s answer is a hug: “You’re NEVER in the way, sis... Be as needy as you wanna be!”[7] She still won’t take a family escort after all that, so Paulo gets drafted for the walk home instead.[8]

Mike, meanwhile, has drifted through the school day hollow-eyed, rescued in history class only by a whispered answer from an unseen classmate.[9] He finds Daisy at the library that afternoon, thanks her for the whisper, and comes apart. He apologizes for years of taking her for granted,[10] then admits Sandy cheated on him with someone named Francis. “I cheated first.”[11] Daisy pushes back, and urges him to do something that makes him happy for once. Mike kisses her cheek, reasoning it makes him even with Sandy,[12] and Daisy answers by grabbing his face and kissing him properly.[13]

The walk home goes wrong almost immediately. Lucy dismisses Paulo the moment the others are out of sight, her palm lined with deep fingernail marks, but he won’t drop it.[14] Twice he offers to cut Mike off completely if she’ll just say the word.[15] When he keeps pushing, she shoves him away and finally screams it. “I disappeared for months because I tried to KILL MYSELF, you IDIOT!!”[16]

Paulo taunts her over all the times she came knocking at his door. Lucy slaps him across the face,[17] then walks off after telling him, “I only did it ’cause I felt sorry for you.”[18] Paulo is left crying alone in the snow.[19]

Mike, who lives in the same neighborhood, stumbles across him there and won’t just walk past.[20] Paulo snaps at him, then finds himself asking how to deal with people who can’t express their feelings. Mike admits he’s about the last person who’d know.[21]

On the night of the play, Paulo and Lucy have just had sex in the drama club dressing room. Lucy hurries him out before Sue comes looking for her.[22] Paulo insists they’ve got to talk after the show, because he really has to tell her something. She turns back to the vanity, and Mike’s voice comes from the door. “Lucy?”[23]

Character dynamics

Daisy, red-faced, grabs Mike's face and kisses him as his eyes shoot open in shock.
Daisy takes matters into her own hands.
  • Mike and Daisy: Daisy has spent years unable to shake her crush on Mike, even while dating Abbey,[24] while Mike has felt guilty for never returning her feelings. He also never apologized after lashing out at her.[10] At the library, he apologizes for both and tells her about Sandy’s cheating and his own. Daisy answers his getting-even kiss with a real one that “confirmed everything” about her changed feelings.[25] She teases him afterward and promises to keep the kiss secret.
  • Lucy and Paulo: Paulo starts the day insisting he doesn’t even like her anymore,[8] then spends the walk home pleading with her to lean on him. Lucy accuses him and their friends of pitying her, then responds to his taunts with a slap and a cruel dismissal. By the end Paulo is convinced she’ll never talk to him again.[26] The closing flashback returns to Paulo and Lucy’s dressing-room encounter after she says she only did it out of pity, leaving what she meant by ‘it’ unstated.
  • Lucy and Jordan: Jordan sees that something is wrong when Augustus worries over Lucy in the hallway. Lucy still does not tell him what happened, but he asks her to depend on him anyway, and she accepts his hug.[7]
  • Mike and Paulo: Barely an hour after offering to cut Mike out of his life, Paulo gets caught crying by him and finds he can’t shake him off. Mike stays with him. By the time they part, Paulo is laughing and teasing him again.[27] As Paulo walks away, his earlier offer to cut Mike off repeats in his thoughts.[28]
  • Augustus and the seniors: Until now, Augustus’s whole social world has been Lucy and her family’s guest room.[29] Jordan’s crowd changes that in a single day, with a ride to school, a mall invitation, and a great deal of theatrical pity over his idea of fun.[30]
  • Lucy and Mike: Not a word passes between them all chapter, and both work to keep it that way. She swallows the impulse to reach out,[4] and he passes her as if she isn’t there.[3] Even so, the chapter’s very last word is his voice at the dressing-room door: “Lucy?”[23]

Trivia & observations

Lucy, red-faced and in tears, whips around and screams "I disappeared for months because I tried to KILL MYSELF, you IDIOT!!"
Lucy finally says it out loud.
  • The classroom whisperer’s identity was deliberately kept ambiguous, per Veronica’s commentary on the page that finally confirms it was Daisy.[31] The staging itself is borrowed from Lucy, who whispered Mike an answer in class the exact same way back in Aftermath.[9][32]
  • Veronica’s commentary on the classroom page admits she and Oliver argued over it. She wanted Mike’s anxious inner monologue spelled out, he thought the art carried it on its own, and they compromised by toning the monologue down.[9]
  • The seniors’ mall trip happens entirely off-panel. Veronica’s commentary calls it “too plot-irrelevant to depict” and admits she also just didn’t want to draw mall backgrounds.[33]
  • Daisy’s “You’re just too nice, Mikie” is something Sandy has told Mike word-for-word, in Witch Hunt and again during the breakup in Eternal Flame, which is why he takes it so badly.[34][35][36]
  • Per Oliver’s commentary, the starry sky that swallows the snowfall around Lucy mid-argument is a deliberate recurring visual. The same sky fades out of her dream on the chapter’s very first page.[37][38]
  • Parts of the Mike and Daisy library sequence were reworked by Veronica from an unfinished chapter about the two of them that Oliver had written.[39]
  • Veronica has said it wouldn’t be far-fetched for Paulo to have half-disbelieved Lucy’s admission in the heat of the moment, and that the attempt eventually becomes “a pretty open secret” among her closer friends.[40]

Related chapters

  • Curtain Call: The closing flashback takes place during the night of the school play shown there. Paulo’s backstage visit and his hurried exit past Mike are on-panel in that chapter, and the flashback’s final “Lucy?” is Mike arriving at the dressing-room door.
  • Eternal Flame: Sandy admits her feelings for Francis there and the relationship falls apart. Mike tells Daisy here that he is still angry about Sandy’s betrayal. It’s also where Lucy runs out of class in tears, the incident Paulo brings up on the walk home.
  • Love Again: Its flashback shows the suicide attempt Lucy screams about here, along with how Augustus came to live in her family’s guest room. Daisy and Abbey’s breakup, which she touches on in the library, happens there too.

References

  1. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 2
  2. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 3
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Chapter 114: Double Down, page 6
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Chapter 114: Double Down, page 7
  5. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 14
  6. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 15
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Chapter 114: Double Down, page 16
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Chapter 114: Double Down, page 19
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Chapter 114: Double Down, page 10
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Chapter 114: Double Down, page 25
  11. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 27
  12. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 32
  13. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 33
  14. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 38
  15. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 41
  16. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 47
  17. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 49
  18. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 50
  19. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 52
  20. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 54
  21. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 56
  22. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 60
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Chapter 114: Double Down, page 62
  24. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 28
  25. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 37
  26. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 53
  27. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 57
  28. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 58
  29. ↑ Chapter 95: Love Again, page 45
  30. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 4
  31. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 24
  32. ↑ Chapter 15: Aftermath, page 3
  33. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 21
  34. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 30
  35. ↑ Chapter 105: Witch Hunt, page 40
  36. ↑ Chapter 110: Eternal Flame, page 26
  37. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 44
  38. ↑ Chapter 114: Double Down, page 1
  39. ↑ “Ask response on unfinished chapters”. 2026-05-04.
  40. ↑ “Ask response on who knows about Lucy’s attempt”. 2025-12-03.
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