Seeing Stars

Seeing Stars
Chapter	120 of 129 (list of chapters)
Published	April 15, 2024 (2024-04-15)
Page count	26
Major characters	Lucy, Augustus, Paulo, Carol
Minor characters	Jordan, Mike, James, David, Abbey, Daisy, Sue, Courtney, Flower girl
Locations	Lucy’s house, Roseville High School, Roseville neighborhood
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Lucy can outrun a lot of things, but not her own dreams. The nightmares are back, the starry sky won’t stay out of her school day, and everyone who tries to help gets bitten for it. Augustus, for his part, keeps asking anyway.

Synopsis

Something is chasing Lucy through a maze of brick alleyways under a dark, starry sky. She runs until she trips, cracks her head against a dumpster, and huddles among the garbage bags as the long shadow falls over her. Then her alarm cuts in, and she wakes in bed with tears pricking her eyes. The whole chase was a dream.

Downstairs, her mom, Carol, is quietly fishing for information. She tops up Augustus’s juice unasked and presses him on whether Lucy is really doing okay, which he flatly declines to entertain. At the sink, Carol explains why she wants to be kept informed: “So I can know enough to do the right thing next time,” When she realizes she said it aloud, she recovers by offering to bake everyone cookies.

Lucy herself comes down with her ears back and bags under her eyes, insisting her sleep was “Good enough!” She keeps the act up all morning. Abbey, David, Daisy, Paulo and Sue each greet her between classes at school, and she barely registers any of them. Panel by panel, the page background darkens into the nightmare’s starry sky.

Augustus tries his luck at lunch. Sitting with Lucy against the school wall, he asks point-blank whether the nightmares are back. Lucy recites that dreams don’t mean anything, so everything is fine. Then Mike and James’s distant voices carry over from the running track, and Lucy goes rigid. She didn’t hear Mike, she tells Augustus. She simply knows he’s there, and it’s okay. When Augustus presses once more, Lucy turns on him. She calls him boring and says, “I missed when you were a creep.” Augustus backs off with a quiet apology, then spends the rest of the meal glaring hard in Mike’s direction.

After school, Paulo catches Lucy alone at her locker to ask for advice. He wants her read on his movie outing with Daisy and David, since she’s “a real bullshit detector.” As Paulo talks, Lucy loses track of his words. They dissolve into illegible scribbles, and the hallway drains into starry monochrome. When Paulo calls her name, Lucy yells at him. She tells him to go ask Daisy himself and to just get married already for all she cares. Paulo mutters an apology and quietly retreats while she storms off swearing. Once she is alone, Lucy admits that her outburst was uncalled for. She resolves to find out what’s wrong with “her” tomorrow, without identifying whom she means.

As night falls, a row of houses passes from colorful dusk into monochrome darkness across a wordless page. Then Lucy is running through the alleys again, the walls warping around her. This time the maze dead-ends at the dumpster. Cornered, she slowly turns to face the source of the massive shadow looming over her, and three more shadows close in around it. The chapter ends there, inside the dream.

Character dynamics

Paulo’s big question, as Lucy hears it.

• Lucy and Augustus: He is the one person who knows what her nights actually look like. He has lived with her family since Love Again, and he watched her wake from the last round of these nightmares in person. That is why his lunchtime question comes with an “again” attached. Lucy answers his concern by jabbing at the creep he used to be. Augustus quietly apologizes and backs off, then glares toward Mike for the rest of lunch.
• Lucy and Paulo: Paulo trusts Lucy’s judgment enough to bring her his problem with Daisy, since he considers her “a real bullshit detector,” The last time he appealed to her this directly, in Double Down, his pleading set off the same starry dissociation. This time Lucy yells at him over the movie outing, and Paulo leaves after a small apology. Later, she admits that her outburst was uncalled for and plans to find out what is wrong with the person she calls “her.”
• Augustus and Mike: The two never exchange a word. Lucy goes rigid because she knows Mike is nearby. She later says she did not hear him, and Augustus turns to stare in his direction. He ends the meal glaring after Mike.
• Carol and Augustus: Carol directly asks Augustus for information about Lucy for the first time. Over breakfast, she asks whether Lucy is okay and whether she is keeping secrets. She then asks Augustus to tell her if something is wrong. He deflects her questions and gives no answer to the request.

Trivia & observations

The shadow turns out to have company.

• Veronica’s commentary at the start of the chapter announced BCB’s return to a three-days-a-week schedule, after New Year’s Resolution ran one page a week.
• The Kickstarter for the comic’s seventh print volume launched during the chapter’s run and was funded right away. Per the commentary, its rewards included an Augustus plush and a Lucy figurine whose head pulls off to reveal a USB drive.
• The chapter is bookended by nightmare sequences in which the only sound is Lucy’s panting. The dusk-to-night time-lapse between the school day and the second dream has no words at all either.
• Veronica’s commentary relates the panel where Paulo’s speech decays into scribbles to her own trouble concentrating. Lucy, she adds, is “normally pretty good at concentrating! She’s just getting a lot of little reminders today.”
• Veronica also confirms Lucy took in more of Paulo’s problem than her glazed stare let on: “She was paying more attention than expected!”
• Mike’s offhand admission that he skipped eating isn’t new. Back in Track Meet, Paulo was already accusing him of starving himself.
• Flower girl, who handed out the friendship roses in Take Heart, turns up in the hallway background just before Paulo approaches Lucy.
• Asked on Tumblr why Paulo would bring a delicate question to Lucy of all people, the authors explained that the group still runs on its childhood picture of an “aloof, snarky, indifferent and abrasive” Lucy, and that shifting that reputation is on her.

Related chapters

• First-Degree Burn: A few chapters later, Lucy dreams of the same dead end again. Still panicking, she sees the four shadows step into the light one by one.
• Escape Route: Lucy has an earlier nightmare in the same alley. She wakes hyperventilating with Augustus right there to see it, which is how he knows to ask whether the dreams are back.
• Rain Check: Lucy makes good on her hallway resolution there. She corners Daisy over her somber looks and ends up brokering the overdue conversation between Daisy and Paulo.