Ten Seconds to Midnight

Ten Seconds to Midnight
Chapter	73 of 129 (list of chapters)
Published	December 3, 2012 (2012-12-03)
Page count	30
Major characters	Paulo, Lucy, Augustus, Jasmine, Tess
Minor characters	Mike, Abbey, Daisy, Sue, Amaya, David, Rachel, Jessica, Jordan, Sam, Kevin, Molly, Janet, Augustus’s dad, Augustus’s mom, Sandy
Locations	Augustus’s house, Abbey’s house, Lucy’s house, Tess’s house, Old furniture place
Collected in	Volume Four
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It’s New Year’s Eve in Roseville, and everyone has something they’ve been putting off saying. Paulo finally admits he’s fallen for someone who isn’t his girlfriend, Jasmine beats him to their own breakup, and Augustus spots a lone figure standing on a rooftop ledge.

Synopsis

New Year’s Eve starts bleakly at Augustus’s house. Augustus rights a spilled bottle, walks past his snoring father, and lets himself out of a dark living room where both his parents lie passed out among the empties. His dad’s only send-off is a grumble about the open door. “Happy new year to you too,” Augustus offers, and leaves.

Over at Lucy’s house, her older brother Sam comes home to a warm welcome. It doesn’t stay warm for long. The family huddles on the couch over a plan for Lucy, a “big step” their mother fears will feel like abandoning her. Nobody notices Lucy listening from the staircase until she speaks up. “So do I have a say in any of this?”

Paulo, meanwhile, drifts through the party at Tess’s house, watching couple after couple. Tess reads his guilty face almost immediately. He cracks and admits he’s found someone other than Jasmine. Tess brings up their own prom night and presses him for an answer. After a long struggle, he admits, “Yes, I love her.” Tess tells him he knows what he has to do.

Augustus is wandering aimlessly through the snow when he glances up. There’s a figure standing on the ledge of a tall building’s roof. He tears up the stairwell in a panic and grabs the figure’s hand. It’s Lucy, and she’s infuriatingly calm about the whole thing. “Thought I was gonna jump?” she deadpans, insisting she wasn’t. Augustus shakes her anyway, which goes over badly. When he claims he doesn’t care, but knows people who would, she rounds on him: “Why does everyone have to decide what’s best for me?!” Augustus backs down, tells her to do what she wants, and goes to wait downstairs until she’s done.

Back at the party, Jasmine finally arrives. Paulo steers her toward a quiet hallway to tell her what he’s been working up the nerve to say, but she gets there first. “I think we should see other people.” Paulo bursts out laughing, because he was about to say the same thing, and the two collapse into relieved hysterics. When Jasmine works out that there’s someone else behind his decision, she only asks whether he’ll tell the girl how he feels. He says yes, and they part with a handshake. Then, alone in the hallway, Jasmine covers her face and cries.

As everyone counts down to midnight, Jasmine finds Paulo in the crowd for one gentle farewell kiss before slipping away. Paulo turns to the window and waits, but the girl he hoped to see never comes. “Maybe another day.” Across town, Augustus is still waiting at the foot of the building, and Lucy sits alone on the snow-dusted ledge, looking out over the quiet city.

Character dynamics

Augustus’s quiet walk through the snow comes to a sudden end.

• Paulo and Jasmine: A couple that ran on goodwill and hardly any actual time together, right to the end. Both of them reach the same verdict on their own, and the breakup itself is about as friendly as breakups get, all laughter, a handshake, and one farewell kiss at midnight. The evenness is partly an act, though. Jasmine, who framed the whole thing as a scheduling problem, cries alone against the hallway wall the moment Paulo is gone.
• Lucy and Augustus: Both of them insist there’s nothing here. She asks why he’d even care, and he answers flatly that he doesn’t. His panicked sprint up the stairwell says otherwise. When Lucy demands the right to make her own choices, he’s the only person in the whole chapter who actually grants it. Waiting downstairs until she’s done is the closest thing to trust these two have managed.
• Paulo and Tess: Paulo and Tess never quite became a couple after prom, but they’ve settled into something sturdier. Tess is the one person Paulo can’t bluff, and she uses their own history as the measuring stick, asking whether he loves the new girl the way he once said he loved her. He does, and more. Tess takes it gracefully and simply points him at what he already knows he has to do.
• Lucy and her family: They love her and they’re frightened for her. The trouble is that, whatever the “big step” is, they’ve been weighing it without her, and Lucy’s question from the staircase makes it plain she’s noticed being planned around.

Trivia & observations

Jasmine holds it together right up until Paulo is out of sight.

• Paulo never names the girl he loves anywhere on-panel. Veronica’s commentary does the honors, wishing readers “MERRY CHRISTMAS PAULOXLUCY” under the confession page and noting “i think we all know who paulo is talking about.”
• Per Veronica’s commentary, the midnight kiss is “probably their first kiss,” since Paulo and Jasmine had “a hilariously awkward non-physical relationship” the whole time they were actually dating.
• Her commentary also reveals Jasmine had privately hoped the two of them could get back together once her schedule cleared up, right up until she learned there was someone else. As Veronica puts it, “you can’t put a boy on layaway, Jasmine!”
• Veronica later confirmed on Tumblr that the family’s unspoken plan is Lucy’s school transfer, which had “been an option murmured about for a while and Lucy was quietly aware of it.”
• Page 1 is the first on-panel look at Augustus’s home and at either of his parents. His dad gets one grumbled line, while his mom spends the whole page asleep on the floor.
• Sam’s homecoming is his first present-day appearance in the comic. Until now he’d only shown up in flashbacks.
• Molly bets Kevin she can stay up until midnight. The countdown montage shows her fast asleep at the kitchen table, exactly as he predicted.
• Paulo apparently can’t confess love without swearing first: “Dammit, she’s perfect to me” here, and “Dammit, I love you!” to Tess on prom night in Love My Way.

Related chapters

• Curtain Call: Paulo follows through the very next chapter. He heads to Lucy’s dressing room after the school play to tell her how he feels, and she cuts him off with “Let’s make out.” Jasmine, meanwhile, greets him with a frosty “Did you have fun?” on his way out.
• Love Again: The flashback is set on this same rooftop, where Lucy attempts suicide and Augustus once again finds her, this time saving her life. The school transfer is also identified as the plan her family debates here.
• Love My Way: The prom night Tess brings up while grilling Paulo happens here. Paulo blurts out “Dammit, I love you!” to her at that prom, which is why she knows exactly what his confessions sound like when he means them.