High Expectations

From Candypedia
High Expectations
Chapter100 of 129 (list of chapters)
PublishedDecember 19, 2017 (2017-12-19)
Page count30
Major charactersMike, Paulo, Lucy, Daisy, Sue, Abbey, Jasmine, Augustus
Minor charactersDavid, Amaya, Mina, Cassidy
LocationsRoseville neighborhood, Roseville High School
Collected inVolume Seven
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One hundred chapters in, BCB marks the occasion with its ugliest school day yet. Mike slams Paulo’s face into a lunch table, Sue gets screamed at for caring, and Lucy tells her old friends exactly where they stand.

Synopsis

Mike walks to school in the pouring rain, and the buzz from his phone turns out to be nothing but a flash flood warning, displayed over a background photo of Sandy from when they were kids.[1] Up ahead, Lucy is laughing under Augustus’s red umbrella. In class, Mike watches her chat with their friends until he can’t stand it, then sends Sandy a short “Actually, don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”[2]

Lunch starts sweetly, with Daisy surprising Paulo with a sprinkle-topped chocolate pudding cup.[3] Paulo spots Abbey staring at the two of them, and Abbey stalks off without a word.[4] Jasmine chases him down and refuses to let him near her table in that state.[5] Once he’s cried it out, she assures him that looking out for his friends doesn’t make him a bad person, and that he isn’t his “crappy dad”.[6]

Back at the table, Mike quickly loses patience with Paulo. Paulo panics that Abbey will attack him, and Mike coldly tells him to shut up and stop acting like a victim. When Paulo notices how tense Mike is, he keeps trying to get him to talk. Mike ignores him in favor of his phone.[7] Paulo snatches the phone and holds it out of reach.[8] Mike slams his face into the table, then takes the phone back and walks out, leaving Paulo with a bloody nose.[9]

Sue runs after Mike, but he bitterly asks why everybody suddenly cares about his problems.[10] Sue eventually asks whether the problem is Sandy and mentions the call Paulo says Mike is still waiting for. Mike explodes in her face, screaming that nobody ever had faith in Sandy and that everything was always about Lucy.[11][12] Sue keeps her calm. She tells him “You’re so.. unpleasant now.”, refuses to be spoken to that way, and walks off.[12]

Paulo, meanwhile, has fled the cafeteria to cry himself out by the empty track.[13] Around the corner afterwards, he finds Lucy and Augustus laughing together on the grass, and charges in swinging.[14] Lucy blocks the punch with her forearms, shielding the cowering Augustus.[15] When Paulo brings up what Augustus did to Daisy, Lucy calls Daisy’s feelings his problem now and tells him to take a hint and leave her alone.[16][17] Paulo tells her he loves her and that he waited for her. Sobbing, he asks why she didn’t just stay gone.[18][19] Lucy doesn’t relent, but once he walks away crying, she’s the one left staring after him.[20]

The day ends at the lockers, where Daisy insists that nobody deserves to be hit, whatever Paulo thinks he did to earn it.[21] He grumbles about catching Lucy on the oval with “that jackass”, then freezes when Daisy asks who it was. Just some freshman, he claims, nobody he recognized.[22] He rallies with a thumbs-up and a “I got you, right? Bros before hoes!”, and Daisy beams before punching his shoulder for calling Lucy a “hoe”.[23]

Character dynamics

Paulo holds a chocolate pudding cup above his head against a sparkling background, saying "I can't believe it.. I've been blessed with a bountiful feast..".
One sprinkle-covered pudding cup, and Paulo’s day briefly looks up.
  • Mike and Paulo: The sniping between these two is nothing new. Paulo needles Mike, but he also repeatedly asks what is wrong. Mike then slams Paulo’s face into the table.[8][9] Paulo waves it all off afterward with “I deserved it”, and Daisy won’t hear of it.[21]
  • Mike and Sue: Sue is one of the few friends who still follows Mike into the hallway to ask what is wrong.[10] Sue asks whether Sandy is the problem. Mike turns on her as soon as she mentions Sandy. She keeps her calm through the screaming, tells him plainly that he’s become unpleasant, and refuses to be spoken to that way.[11][12]
  • Paulo and Lucy: Paulo has been carrying his feelings for Lucy since before she left.[19] When he confesses, Lucy tells him to take a hint and leave her alone. Paulo walks away crying. At the carnival, Lucy turned Paulo down. This time, she says she owes him nothing and does not care. She also rejects his claim that she and Daisy are friends.[24][17][18] After Paulo leaves, Lucy stares after him with a troubled expression while Augustus watches her.[20]
  • Abbey and Jasmine: Jasmine blocks Abbey from reaching her table and takes away his lunch tray.[5] When Abbey cannot finish explaining what being wrong about Paulo would mean, Jasmine tells him that he is not his father.[6] By the time Paulo passes their table again, Abbey is laughing along with her friends.[25]
  • Paulo and Daisy: Daisy brings Paulo his favorite pudding and consoles him at the end of the day.[3] Abbey stares at them over lunch and then walks away.[4] Paulo pledges his loyalty to Daisy at the lockers. He also lies about who Lucy was with, concealing Augustus’s identity from Daisy.[22][23]

Trivia & observations

Lucy blocks Paulo's punch with her forearms while Augustus cowers behind her with his hands raised over his face.
Paulo swings at Augustus, but Lucy gets there first.
  • This is BCB’s hundredth chapter, and Veronica’s commentary on the opening page doesn’t undersell it: “This one’s gonna be a doozy.. as it honestly should be because it’s the 100th chapter of BCB!!”[1]
  • Page 5 went up on Veronica and Oliver’s fifteen-year anniversary, which Veronica notes makes their relationship “literally the age of a lot of BCB characters”.[4]
  • Page 25, right in the middle of Lucy rejecting Paulo’s love confession, was published on Valentine’s Day 2018. The commentary under it reads simply “Happy Valentine’s Day!”[18]
  • Veronica says she kept reading Lucy’s “I don’t care anymore” in Haruko’s dub voice from FLCL, calling it “the right kind of annoyed apathy”.[17]
  • Answering a fan ask, Veronica confirmed that when Abbey later sneers at Mike about “that stunt he pulled with your phone” in Time Out, he means Paulo grabbing Mike’s phone here. She figured “such a violent physical reaction in a cafeteria would get people talking”.[26][27]
  • The authors have pointed to this chapter as an example of how Augustus’s past abuse of Daisy resurfaces in the group’s minds “as soon as they see Augustus”. It’s the first thing Paulo throws at Lucy on the oval.[16][28]

Related chapters

  • Mutual Assurance: Paulo catches Mike at his locker, the yellow umbrella from this chapter still in hand, and apologizes for taking things too far at lunch.[29][30]
  • After You: When Paulo mutters that he “got the point last time”, he means the Ferris wheel at the carnival, where Lucy first turned him down after coming back.[20][24]
  • Cut Short: The text Mike sends in class, “Actually, don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”, is word-for-word the last message he sent Sandy in that chapter, where his texts to her went unanswered.[31][2]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 1
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 2
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 3
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 5
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 6
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 9
  7. ↑ Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 11
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 12
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 13
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 14
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 20
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 21
  13. ↑ Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 17
  14. ↑ Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 18
  15. ↑ Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 22
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 23
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 24
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 25
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 26
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 27
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 28
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 29
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 30
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 Chapter 97: After You, page 22
  25. ↑ Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 16
  26. ↑ Chapter 108: Time Out, page 2
  27. ↑ “Ask response on the phone incident Abbey mentions”. 2026-01-11.
  28. ↑ “Ask response on Augustus and Daisy’s history”. 2024-09-28.
  29. ↑ Chapter 101: Mutual Assurance, page 1
  30. ↑ Chapter 101: Mutual Assurance, page 4
  31. ↑ Cut Short, page 2
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