Study Buddy

Study Buddy
Chapter	77 of 129 (list of chapters)
Published	July 10, 2013 (2013-07-10)
Page count	20
Major characters	Paulo, Rachel, Daisy, Jasmine
Minor characters	Abbey, Sue, Mike, Tess, Jessica, David
Locations	Rachel’s house, Daisy’s house, Roseville neighborhood
Collected in	Volume Four
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Paulo wakes up in Rachel’s bed and spends the rest of the day paying for it. Daisy’s study party gathers the grieving gang in one bedroom, and Jasmine walks through the door at exactly the wrong moment.

Synopsis

Paulo wakes up beside a peacefully sleeping Rachel and immediately starts screaming. Rachel greets him warmly and shrugs it all off as a harmless one-night stand. He hides under her blanket, trembling, and whispers “I’m so sorry Lucy”. Then he bolts, declaring the whole thing a mistake. Left alone, Rachel just grins.

Out on the snowy sidewalk, Paulo runs into Daisy and finally apologizes for yelling at her outside Lucy’s emptied house. She forgives him with tears in her eyes, and the two head to the library to study for midterms. Watching Paulo mope over his textbook, Daisy lights up with a bigger idea and suggests a study party to cheer everyone up. Paulo figures sharing the misery could be a decent distraction.

The party gets off to a grim start. Daisy arrives with armfuls of soda to find eight of her friends sitting in gloomy silence, and her desperate offer of tutoring gets exactly one raised hand, Paulo’s. Across the room, Sue quizzes Mike on WWII flashcards, then leans in and asks whether he had anything to do with Lucy being gone. He admits he “might have been a bit.. reckless”, and Sue strangles him with his own scarf.

Rachel, meanwhile, won’t accept Paulo treating her like a shameful secret. She slides over to help him with math, and when he asks whether they should even be talking, her easygoing front cracks: “So all I’m good for is a quick lay?” He grovels, she forgives, and soon she’s lounging in his lap and calling him a dork. With Rachel still in his lap, Daisy opens the door for one last guest. Jasmine, Paulo’s recent ex, freezes in the doorway.

Once the party winds down, Paulo works up the nerve to talk to Jasmine, and it goes about as badly as it could. His small talk lands on the sorest spot available, asking whether she’s off to practice. When he apologizes for how things ended, Jasmine tells him she’s glad they broke up. She looked up to him once, but these days she finds him “really immature”, and waiting for him no longer seems worth it.

Rachel is the one who stays with him at the end of it all. Paulo calls it the worst day of his life and cries that he wishes Lucy were here, because she’d tell him to suck it up. Rachel holds him. “You take as much time as you need.” The two of them walk off down the snowy street.

Character dynamics

Daisy’s last-minute guest arrives at the worst possible moment.

• Paulo and Rachel: Rachel is casually affectionate, but she’s genuinely stung when Paulo treats their night together as something dirty. When he asks whether they should even be talking, he sees her angry for the first time. Once he grovels his way back into her good graces, she settles into teasing, hands-on affection, far more patient than she lets on. Her closing promise to give him all the time he needs over Lucy is sincere, too — Veronica’s commentary confirms Rachel cares about Paulo and wants to be supportive.
• Paulo and Jasmine: Their split in Ten Seconds to Midnight felt mutual enough at the time, but Jasmine makes it final here. She has had time to think, and the girl who once looked up to Paulo now finds him immature and not worth the wait.
• Mike and Sue: Sue has been in the dark about why Lucy left, and here her suspicion lands squarely on Mike. His mumbled admission tells her he’s involved without telling her what he actually did — the tirade he unloaded on Lucy in December. Sue won’t hear the whole story until his drunken confession in Happy Hour. For now, she settles for the scarf.
• Paulo and Daisy: Paulo and Daisy patch up their old friendship after his grief-fueled outburst in Breaking Up. They fall right back into their usual rhythm, with Daisy fussing over his studying and Paulo the only person at the party willing to accept her help.
• Abbey and Daisy: Abbey’s devotion to Daisy comes with a jealous streak where Paulo is concerned. The framed childhood photo of Paulo and Daisy on her desk sends him into a quiet panic, and he hastily asks for some English help of his own to pull her back to his side of the room.

Trivia & observations

Sue tests the durability of Mike’s scarf, with Mike still in it.

• Veronica’s commentary reveals the strangling scene was originally written for Ten Seconds to Midnight, “after everyone was freaking out about Mike’s scarf,” but she forgot to include it there.
• The “quality scarf” Sue admires mid-strangle is the blue one Sandy gave Mike in Just Beautiful, while Tess’s neglected “very expensive” present dates back to Left Behind.
• Veronica calls Daisy “easily the hardest character to colour”, since her fur turns yellow easily, and was pleased with how the library pages came out.
• Per Veronica’s commentary, Jasmine got an invitation because she’s “now Daisy’s friend”, and inviting her anyway “shows how careless Daisy can sometimes be.” The two of them go back to Daisy’s sleepover in Pillow Talk.
• Paulo’s practice question is a rerun. He asked Jasmine the very same thing in Carry Me, and got told she’d quit violin back then, too.
• Veronica says Jasmine “smacked all those insecurity buttons with a sledgehammer”, and adds that her relationship with Paulo “never really felt that romantic”, something she puts down to Paulo trying so hard to be respectful toward her.
• Paulo’s tearful “She’d tell me to suck it up” is true to the real Lucy. She tells Mike “Oh, suck it up” on-panel. Paulo himself once borrowed the line while giving her advice.

Related chapters

• Leaving Home: Paulo takes the news of Lucy’s departure hard the night before. Its final page shows him waking up in Rachel’s bed on the very morning Study Buddy opens.
• Breaking Up: The gang finds Lucy’s room emptied out there, and a grieving Paulo screams at a tearful Daisy outside the house. His sidewalk apology here is for exactly that.
• Happy Hour: Sue doesn’t let her suspicions rest. Three chapters later she corners a drunk Mike at Rachel’s party and finally hears what he said to Lucy, while Paulo and Rachel keep growing closer.