Mutual Assurance
| Mutual Assurance | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Chapter | 101 of 129 (list of chapters) |
| Published | March 2, 2018 |
| Page count | 6 |
| Major characters | Mike, Paulo |
| Minor characters | Daisy, Katie, Stacy |
| Locations | Roseville High School, Roseville neighborhood |
| Collected in | Volume Seven |
| Chapter navigation | |
| ← High Expectations | Escape Route → |
| Read chapter | |
After the blow-up in High Expectations, Mike leaves school braced for Paulo’s payback. What he gets instead is a hug, a tearful apology, and an invitation to dig his old video games back out of storage.
Synopsis
Mike shuts his locker with Daisy’s words still rattling around his head: their friends “shoulda done more for him back when.. You know.. Lucy.”[1] He walks off alone under a dark grey sky, and stops short when he finds Paulo standing in his path.[2] Mike figures he has retaliation coming, and sneers that Paulo has surely been waiting all day for the chance. He never gets to finish the sentence, because Paulo pulls him into a tight hug.[3]
Paulo keeps his arms around Mike as he apologizes. He admits he’s always taking things too far. Seeing Mike this angry scares him, because Mike doesn’t get that mad for nothing, and he doesn’t want to take all those second chances for granted anymore. “I want to be better.. so please don’t give up on me.” By the time Paulo pulls back, both of them are in tears. He laughs at himself for getting so earnest.[4]
Mike tells him not to be embarrassed, then works up an apology of his own for hitting him. Paulo asks if they’re cool, Mike says yeah, and that’s that. Paulo does insist the conversation never happened, though the strongest threat he can muster is that he’ll “.. be very disappointed in you” if Mike blabs.[5]
Paulo asks if Mike is busy and invites himself over to Mike’s place to play games like they used to. Mike hesitates before saying he packed all that stuff away, but Paulo insists that they pull it back out. He tells Mike that he’s too mature and needs to slow down and have fun like the rest of them. Mike brightens. “Only after I finish my homework!” The two walk off side by side.[6]
Character dynamics
- Mike and Paulo: Paulo admits that he has taken things too far many times, while Mike has continued to give him “that second chance”. He apologizes and says he wants to do better.[4] Mike had left Paulo’s nose bloodied at the lunch table in High Expectations,[7] but Paulo is the first to apologize. Mike then apologizes for the punch, and Paulo accepts.[5] Paulo later tells Mike that he’s too mature and invites him over to play games like they used to.[6]
- Mike and Lucy: Mike and Lucy do not interact on-panel. At his locker, Mike recalls Daisy saying that they should have done more for him during an unfinished reference to Lucy, then stares into space.[1] After reconciling with Paulo, he slips back into the same faraway look until Paulo gets his attention.[6]
Trivia & observations
- Veronica’s commentary under the opening page calls the chapter “an intermission that isn’t really much of an intermission and might as well be considered an epilogue” to High Expectations.[1]
- Four panels on the second page show Mike walking and then facing Paulo under heavy clouds, without dialogue. Veronica’s entire commentary beneath it reads “Still overcast.”[2]
- Mike’s yellow umbrella has been with him since the start of High Expectations, folded and unused under a sky that stays grey across both chapters.[8][1]
- Veronica confirmed on Tumblr that the brown dog chatting in the hallway background as the chapter opens is the flower dog from the friendship-rose scene in Take Heart.[1][9][10]
- This chapter provides the first mention of Mike having packed his games away. Earlier scenes show his discomfort with them. In December he admitted to Lucy that he’d mostly stopped playing because his games are “only good with two players”,[11] and in Model Girlfriend he threw one across the room rather than let Sandy see it.[12][6]
Related chapters
- High Expectations: This chapter continues directly from the lunch-table scene, where Mike slammed Paulo’s face into the table over his phone. Daisy’s words in the flashback are quoted verbatim from her apology to Paulo at his locker afterward.
- Leaving Home: After an earlier fight over Lucy, Paulo approached Mike with an unreadable expression. Paulo had thrown the punch that time, and he ended up sobbing while Mike comforted him.
- New Year’s Resolution: Much later, Mike tells Paulo that he has put the consoles away “again”. The word suggests that the consoles came back out at some point after this chapter, though it does not show when. Mike also tells Paulo that the games still remind him of Lucy.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Chapter 101: Mutual Assurance, page 1
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Chapter 101: Mutual Assurance, page 2
- ↑ Chapter 101: Mutual Assurance, page 3
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Chapter 101: Mutual Assurance, page 4
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Chapter 101: Mutual Assurance, page 5
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Chapter 101: Mutual Assurance, page 6
- ↑ Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 13
- ↑ Chapter 100: High Expectations, page 1
- ↑ Chapter 81: Take Heart, page 22
- ↑ “Ask response on the flower dog cameo”. 2019-01-17.
- ↑ Chapter 68: December, page 18
- ↑ Chapter 94: Model Girlfriend, page 36