Tickets Please

Tickets Please
Chapter	129 of 129 (list of chapters)
Published	March 25, 2026 (2026-03-25)
Page count	36
Major characters	Mike, Lucy, Sue, Paulo, Amaya, Daisy, Abbey, Sandy
Minor characters	Ellen, Haley, David, James, Carol, Daisy’s mom, Jordan, Matt, Augustus, Rachel
Locations	Mike’s house, Roseville High School, Daisy’s house, Lucy’s house
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Amaya has the last two tickets to the only preview screening in the state, and Sue would sooner sit on them than let Paulo have one. Meanwhile, Mike is running on no sleep at all, and Lucy’s evening ends in the basement.

Synopsis

Late at night, Mike does homework while Sandy vents over speakerphone about her mother’s smothering new rules, sighing that she’s never going to live Francis down and that she doesn’t know if anyone trusts her anymore. Mike, wrung out, barely listens; prompted for his cue, he manages an “I trust you.” In class the next morning he sits alone, watches Paulo, David and Sue crowd around Lucy’s desk, and smiles to himself: “Everything’s normal again.”

At lunch, Lucy talks herself into sitting with Sue and Amaya, muttering that it’s for Augustus. Amaya has the last two tickets to a preview screening of “The Tall Towers of King Street”, and her theater is the only one in the state showing it. Sue claims them and invites Lucy along. Then Paulo asks for them, revealing that he’s most of the way through the first book. Sue refuses out of pure spite. She and Paulo shout at each other until Lucy proposes an after-school contest to decide who is the more well-rounded person.

Paulo flattens Sue at arm wrestling and pull-ups, and Lucy nearly proposes a footrace before Sue explodes, “Lucy, I’m in CRUTCHES!!” When Paulo takes the trivia round too, Lucy rules him the more well-rounded of the two, and Sue boils over. Paulo meets her outburst with surprising calm, telling her she’s allowed to hold resentment toward him and that all he can do is show his remorse through his actions. Lucy chalks the change up to someone being a good influence on him, and that someone is Mike.

Amaya hands the tickets to Sue anyway, and everyone starts drifting off. Then Sue calls them back and holds out the envelope. “Take it, Paulo. You won it fair and square.” She admits she only wanted the tickets to spite him, and that she needs to get over herself a little.

That evening, Paulo drives the tickets straight to Daisy’s house, where Daisy is home sick with a fever. He offers them as an incentive to rest up. Overwhelmed, Daisy blurts out an “I love you” in the middle of a coughing fit and leaps into his arms. Paulo kisses her on the lips, and a second later she shoves him away, shouting “WAIT I’M TOXIC”. Paulo just laughs and asks her to do it again.

Carol welcomes Lucy home. When Lucy says Mike wasn’t among the friends at the park, Carol answers with a single cold “Good.” Lucy insists Mike is staying away like he said he would, and she shouts her mother down outright at the mention of “the boy at that school.” Lucy eventually accepts Carol’s offer of a girls’ night.

On her way back downstairs, Lucy follows a faint buzzing into the basement. Augustus’ phone is rattling away on his dresser, unanswered, in his dark and empty room. On the final page, Lucy stands over it, ears back and fists trembling.

Character dynamics

Daisy remembers the fever a moment too late.

• Sue and Paulo: Sue’s grudge against Paulo goes back to his nastier days, and he acknowledges it outright rather than argue the point. She grabs the tickets purely to deny him, loses the contest anyway, and watches him answer her meltdown with patience instead of gloating. By the end she’s handing the envelope over unprompted, naming her own spite for what it was, and resolving to “get over myself a little.”
• Paulo and Daisy: The two have been boyfriend and girlfriend since Rain Check, and they’re still keeping it quiet around Abbey in particular, who has no idea. At lunch, Paulo muzzles Abbey to protect the secret. Later, he flatly turns James away from the spare ticket. At Daisy’s house, Paulo is doting but firm about her resting, while Daisy overflows with gratitude. It’s also their first on-panel kiss on the lips. Their confession ended with a hug, and their first date ended with a kiss on the cheek.
• Lucy and Carol: Mother and daughter are still walking on eggshells around each other. Carol is fiercely protective of Lucy where Mike is concerned, and she has spoken with his mother before. Lucy resents that interference. Carol’s offer to check in with Ellen again finally sets her off. Carol lets her guilt show when she adds “If you don’t still hate me.” They calm down enough to agree on a girls’ night.
• Abbey and Paulo: The long thaw between the two keeps going, with the old hostility softened into friendly ribbing. They arrive at lunch mid-conversation, Abbey turns out to share Paulo’s new taste in books, and he even finds himself siding with Paulo against Sue (“Wow, I agree.”).

Trivia & observations

The phone keeps buzzing, and Lucy doesn’t pick up.

• Amaya never gets a single line rendered, and the table answers her anyway. James calls it out twice (“How are you guys getting all this information..”), and Veronica’s commentary jokes that Lucy and Sue are “bilingual.. they know English and Amayese”.
• Veronica confirmed on Tumblr that the trivia round “was not rigged”. She wrote two questions for Sue, two that Paulo could plausibly know (one through David’s Danger Throat obsession, one through Jasmine and Twilight), and one general question, though she admits the Danger Throat one reads ambiguously in hindsight.
• Veronica has also weighed in on the Sue and Paulo dynamic, saying the two “just find each other annoying!”, with Sue bringing a “busybody snipey element” and a habit of complaining about Paulo behind his back.
• Per Veronica’s commentary, Lucy deliberately sits on the side of Sue that makes her harder to hear. Lucy’s deaf left ear was spelled out back in Show and Tell.
• Mike’s contented “Everything’s normal again” echoes what Carol once said of Lucy in It’s All in the Mind: “I think she just wants everything to be normal again.”
• Paulo trouncing Sue on a Danger Throat question revisits an old sore spot. In the book-exclusive Critical Eye, he was scandalized to learn she’d never heard of the franchise (“Have you been living under a rock…?!”).
• Veronica’s commentary calls Mike’s messier look “super cute” and more fun to draw, before adding “please eat a burger, that doesn’t look good on you actually”.

Related chapters

• Made Fresh: The chapter directly before this one, and where Paulo and Daisy go on their first date. It ends with Lucy frozen outside Augustus’ door while his phone buzzes unanswered, the same phone she finds buzzing here.
• Line in the Sand: Lucy rejoined the lunch table there while Mike was shut out of it. Her muttered “It’s for Augustus.” traces back to that chapter, where she tells David she’s been wanting Augustus to spend time with his other friends for months.
• Third Wheel: Abbey gives Paulo a book there, and Paulo groans, “So I really gotta start reading books now? Dammit!” A few chapters later, he turns up most of the way through a fantasy novel. It’s also where he and Daisy agreed that Abbey, specifically, is the one who can’t know about them.