Fade Away

Fade Away
Chapter	67 of 129 (list of chapters)
Published	September 19, 2011 (2011-09-19)
Page count	6
Major characters	Tess, Paulo, David
Minor characters	Mike, Abbey, Daisy, Sue, Lucy, Jessica
Locations	Roseville High School, Silvershore Islands
Collected in	Volume Three, Omnibus 1
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Tess starts her final year worried that her friends will forget her once they’ve all moved on. Then she sits down to a suspiciously fancy lunch table, feels a hand grab her thigh, and gets a much nicer surprise than she was expecting.

Synopsis

Tess opens her final year of high school alone at her locker, head down and in a gloomy mood. As she walks, her memories drift back over her high school years: she’s been an uncertain freshman with long brown hair, a pink-streaked bully who left Jessica in tears, and eventually the senior at the head of the freshmen’s lunch table. She decides she made plenty of mistakes but ended up with good friends anyway. A memory of prom night with Paulo surfaces too, and that one she shakes out of her head. She just hopes her friends won’t forget her when they move on.

At lunch, Tess finds the table strangely dressed in a white cloth, while David polishes a glass and explains, “Tablecloths are for fancy restaurants! So now we’re fine dinin’!” Then a hand shoots out from under the table and grabs Tess’s thigh. She yanks up the cloth to find a blushing Paulo, who crawls away insisting his hand slipped. Tess grabs his tail and starts tearing into him.

Mid-rant, Tess stops short. David, Sue, Mike, Abbey and Daisy are all crouched under the table with six gift boxes, and everyone shouts “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TESS!!” Tess covers her mouth and cries. She’s fine, she assures the others once they’ve taken their seats, just not used to having friends who would do this much for her.

The party barely gets going before David realizes Tess is now eighteen while Paulo is only fifteen. He spends the rest of lunch grilling Paulo about the age gap, even asking whether he wants to report her to the police. Paulo protests that he’s dating Jazz anyway, which David decides is even worse, since he just saw her “riding a TRICYCLE!” (It was Paulo’s bike, and Paulo was on it.) Tess watches the squabble from a distance, chin in her hands, smiling to herself.

Character dynamics

It turns out Paulo wasn’t the only one hiding under the table.

• Tess and the friend group: Tess is the older girl the group adopted back when she first asked to sit at the freshmen’s lunch table in Enter High School, and she has never quite believed the friendship runs both ways. The surprise party finally puts that worry to rest. When she admits she isn’t “used to having friends who would do this much” for her, Mike points out that they aren’t used to friends who fly them out on vacation, either.
• Tess and Paulo: Theirs is the romance the two of them boxed up at junior prom, when Tess turned Paulo down over their age gap. The memory still stings enough that she has to shake it out of her head in the hallway. By the end of lunch, though, she can watch him hotly defend his relationship with Jazz and come away smiling.

Trivia & observations

• Tess’s opening thought, “So this is my final year…”, repeats her thought from the first day of school in A Distance Apart word for word.
• Veronica originally planned for Abbey to fly into a rage when David shoves Paulo and Daisy apart near the end, with Sue holding Abbey back, but cut it as too convoluted. In her commentary, she adds, “Let’s just say those antics are happening off-screen!!!!!”
• Veronica insists that the missing shading on the flashbacks’ background characters was deliberate, adding “IT WAS INTENTIONAL OKAY.”
• Lucy appears only in the flashback montage and is nowhere to be seen at the actual party. The chapter never explains her absence.

Related chapters

• Love My Way: The prom memory Tess shakes off comes from this chapter. Paulo confessed his feelings at junior prom, Tess turned him down over their age gap, and the two shared a tearful kiss before agreeing to stay friends.
• Pillow Talk: The bullying flashback restages what Tess owned up to at Daisy’s sleepover. In her punk days she invented the rumors that ruined Jessica’s freshman year, then pinned her to the lockers and left her crying in the hallway.
• Class of 2008: Tess’s senior year ends as she graduates and says her goodbyes to the group she was so afraid would forget her.