It’s All in the Mind

From Candypedia
It's All in the Mind
Chapter103 of 129 (list of chapters)
PublishedJune 1, 2018 (2018-06-01)
Page count22
Major charactersLucy, Mike, Sue, Daisy
Minor charactersAmaya, Carol, Ellen, Chris
LocationsRoseville neighborhood
Collected inVolume Seven
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Lucy’s quiet walk home from taekwondo turns into a curbside reckoning with Sue’s guilt, Mike’s lurking, and Daisy’s envy. One bombshell living arrangement and one scream later, the afternoon still has a gut-punch left in it.

Synopsis

Lucy has gone back to taekwondo, and Mike trains at the same studio. She breaks boards with a flying kick while he sweats through the session.[1] Outside, Carol and Ellen catch up. Lucy just wants everything to be normal again, Carol explains, and Ellen mentions how lonely Mike has been since his girlfriend’s visit.[2] Lucy asks to walk home alone.[3]

She doesn’t get far before Sue flags her down from a curbside, where she and Amaya are showing off a three-dollar garage-sale skateboard.[4][5] Sue’s smile fades as they catch up, and she asks to vent for a minute.[6] She has been blaming herself for everything since the school play, her scheme to force Mike and Lucy back together. Lucy won’t say whether the transfer was all that happened, but tells Sue she couldn’t have known, and that it doesn’t matter anymore. Sue hugs her in tears. Lucy’s arms stay at her sides.[7]

Sue is partway through pitching Lucy on rejoining the lunch table when she suddenly hollers “YO, MIKE I SEE YOU.” at the shrubbery.[8] Mike gets flushed out insisting he wasn’t stalking. Then Daisy pops out of hiding too, having followed them from the dojo with her ice cream.[9] The way she sees it, if Abbey could get through her birthday party without fighting Paulo, then Lucy and Mike can surely manage a lunch table.[10]

Lucy snaps that she would rather stick with Augustus, then adds, “He lives with me now.”[11] It’s a debt she’s repaying, nothing romantic, and she rounds on Daisy with a lecture. The boy who cornered her when she was alone and vulnerable is no friend.[12]

Daisy pleads that it’s just nice to feel wanted sometimes, then turns her hurt on Lucy. Nobody ever wants Daisy, she shouts, while Lucy only has to exist for everybody to cling to her.[13] Lucy protests that she never wanted any of it, until it finally erupts out of her: “I NEVER FUCKING WANTED IT!!”[14] The page that follows has no dialogue at all. Lucy trembles and cries, then wipes her eyes and examines her hand.[15]

Once she’s calm, Lucy explains that she owes Augustus far more than a place to stay, and makes Daisy promise to understand that what he did wasn’t good. Sue’s last lunch-table pitch gets a no as well, since Lucy would rather settle for “the creep” than spend 45 minutes being glared at by Mike.[16] Left alone with Mike on the sidewalk, Daisy offers that at least he’s still got Sandy. “I wish,” Mike answers. “It’s been weeks.”[17] He heads home, and Daisy discovers her ice cream has long since melted.[18]

Character dynamics

Sue falls backwards off the skateboard with her legs in the air as the skateboard flips above her.
The three-dollar skateboard claims its first victim.
  • Lucy and Daisy: Daisy tells Lucy that people cling to her without any effort on Lucy’s part. Lucy has warned Daisy about her choice of men before, and once again tells her to stay away from Augustus.[19][11] Daisy agrees to heed the warning, but after Mike leaves she stands alone with her melted ice cream.[16][18]
  • Lucy and Mike: Mike trains at the same studio as Lucy and follows her home from behind the bushes. She acknowledges him with a cool “It’s a free country.”[20] Her parting shot about his lunchtime glaring tells him she has registered his hostility all along, and it visibly stuns him.[16]
  • Lucy and Sue: Sue has carried her guilt about the play since Lucy left (she broke down about it, drunk, back in Happy Hour).[21] Sue finally apologizes for the play, and Lucy tells her that she couldn’t have known what would happen. They are soon teasing each other again.[7] When Sue invites Lucy back to the lunch table, however, Lucy promises only to think about it and declines by the end.[8][16]
  • Mike and Daisy: Daisy tries to cheer Mike by reminding him that he still has Sandy. Mike replies that Sandy has not spoken to him in weeks.[17]
  • Mike and Sandy: Ellen still describes Sandy as the girlfriend whose visit left Mike lonely, and Mike has let everyone go on believing it.[2] Only in the quiet aftermath, phone in hand, does he admit to Daisy that the relationship has been nothing but silence for weeks.[22][17]

Trivia & observations

Lucy leans forward with clenched fists and shadowed eyes, screaming "I NEVER FUCKING WANTED IT!!" while Mike, Daisy and Sue look on.
Lucy has heard quite enough about how easy she has it.
  • The studio sign reads “Master C.C. Onion’s Tae Kwon Do,” and the instructor is a dog, a wink at Chop Chop Master Onion, the karate master from PaRappa the Rapper.[2]
  • Veronica’s commentary under the first page notes the class is “part of the reason lucy and mike are pretty good at fighting.”[1]
  • Lucy wasn’t ignoring Sue’s shouting from across the street. Deaf in one ear, she genuinely couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from, and Veronica later confirmed as much on Tumblr with “No she can’t hear lol.”[4][23]
  • “The creep” is Lucy’s own coinage for Augustus. She first threw a “Fuck off, creep” at him long before it became his nickname among her friends.[24] That also means her big scream here isn’t her first on-panel swear, though it is comfortably her loudest.[14]
  • Per a later Tumblr answer from Veronica, Lucy’s “I owe Augustus way more than a place to stay” is about as much as anyone in-comic ever hears of what he actually did for her.[16][25]
  • Per Veronica’s commentary, Lucy’s callout was originally scripted to land on an actively angry Mike, who would then realize what his own face was doing. She changed it so he’s simply shocked instead.[16]

Related chapters

  • Love Again: Augustus saved Lucy’s life in this chapter, and her parents took him in that same evening — the debt and the living arrangement she finally says out loud here.[26][27] It’s also where Abbey dumped Daisy in the cafeteria, the breakup that has her “two weeks single” here.[28][9]
  • Model Girlfriend: Sandy’s surprise one-day visit, the one Ellen brings up outside the dojo, happens in this chapter. It ends with Sandy in unexplained tears and a hastily patched-over “I love you!!” text, which is exactly where things still stand when Mike admits he hasn’t heard from her in weeks.[29][2][17]
  • Witch Hunt: Sue keeps up her lunch-table campaign there (“And the creep, I guess”), and Sandy finally calls Mike after weeks without contact.[30][31]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 1
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 2
  3. ↑ Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 3
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 4
  5. ↑ Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 5
  6. ↑ Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 6
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 8
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 10
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 12
  10. ↑ Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 13
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 14
  12. ↑ Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 15
  13. ↑ Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 16
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 17
  15. ↑ Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 18
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 16.5 Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 19
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 17.3 Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 21
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 22
  19. ↑ Chapter 61: Pillow Talk, page 56
  20. ↑ Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 11
  21. ↑ Chapter 80: Happy Hour, page 17
  22. ↑ Chapter 103: It’s All in the Mind, page 20
  23. ↑ “Ask response on whether Lucy could hear Sue”. 2019-12-14.
  24. ↑ Chapter 61: Pillow Talk, page 7
  25. ↑ “Ask response on who knows what Augustus did for Lucy”. 2019-12-21.
  26. ↑ Chapter 95: Love Again, page 36
  27. ↑ Chapter 95: Love Again, page 45
  28. ↑ Chapter 95: Love Again, page 17
  29. ↑ Chapter 94: Model Girlfriend, page 9
  30. ↑ Chapter 105: Witch Hunt, page 8
  31. ↑ Chapter 105: Witch Hunt, page 38
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