Unspoken Rule

From Candypedia
Unspoken Rule
Chapter96 of 129 (list of chapters)
PublishedMarch 3, 2017 (2017-03-03)
Page count28
Major charactersLucy, Mike, Paulo, Daisy, Rachel, Augustus
Minor charactersDavid, Sue, Gym teacher (High School), Courtney, John
LocationsRoseville High School, Lucy’s house, Roseville neighborhood
Collected inVolume Six
Chapter navigation
← Test DummyCut Short →
Read chapter

Ships sink and ships launch over the course of a single school day. Daisy wins Paulo back, Rachel quietly lets him go, and Mike finally gets the conversation with Lucy he’s been working up to. Then Paulo turns up at her door on one knee.

Synopsis

Mike spends the early morning pacing a stretch of sidewalk on Lucy’s street, plainly working up the nerve for something.[1] Before he gets the chance, a door slams behind him, and Augustus and Lucy come out on their way to school.[2] Lucy spots Mike up ahead and sours, and Augustus dares her to whisper some sweet nothings while he’s in earshot. Her answer is a deadpan “I’d rather try to kill myself again.” Mike hears every word, and it flattens him for the rest of the day.[3]

At the lockers of Roseville High School, Daisy nervously checks that Paulo got the invitation to her birthday on Saturday, and gets a cold shrug about an extra work shift.[4] When she guesses he’s been avoiding her over what Abbey did, Daisy pours out an apology. She hurt his feelings, she misses him, and she won’t let their friendship end over it.[5] Paulo tearfully asks why it would even matter after he ruined things between her and Abbey, and Daisy shouts that she cares about him “SO MUCH MORE” than that.[6] Flustered half to death, he promises to try switching his shift.[7]

Rachel has been standing behind him the whole time. She tells him she’s noticed how busy he’s been, that she’s seen him with other girls, and that none of it matters now that Lucy is back.[8] When Paulo asks if that bothers her, she cuts herself off with “It’s not like we’re together.” and walks away waving.[9] Only once she’s alone does she let herself cry, telling herself it’s for the best.[10]

Gym class is dodgeball, and Lucy owns it. Mike braces for the old Lucy to come screaming after him, but she calmly joins Sue’s team and mows the other side down.[11][12] She pointedly throws past Mike to pick off everyone else, until the two of them are the only players left.[13] While Mike works himself from confusion into a screaming rage, she stretches, brushes her hair, and yawns.[14] When he finally whips a ball at her, she catches it without effort.[15]

On the walk home, Lucy stops mid-block and asks why Mike is following her.[16] He admits he wanted to talk things out, so Lucy calmly recites his own terms back at him. He has his girlfriend, he wanted her out of his life, and now she’s out of it.[17] He insists he was only venting back then, but when she asks what he did mean, he has no answer.[18] Lucy turns around with a smile and a raised middle finger. “I don’t fucking like you anymore, okay?”[19]

She’s still smiling to herself when she reaches her front door and finds Paulo posing against it, his cheek tufts freshly trimmed.[20] The carnival by the park ends this weekend, he explains. He gets down on one knee, takes her hand, and asks her out for tonight. Lucy wavers, softens, and sighs, “Hey, why not?”[21]

Character dynamics

Lucy leans back to dodge an incoming dodgeball, grabs another off the floor, and steps into a throw.
Lucy turns gym class into a one-sided dodgeball match.
  • Mike and Lucy: The two haven’t had a real conversation since Mike’s blowup in December.[22] Now that he finally wants to talk things out, Lucy has already decided where they stand.[17] Lucy answers him with his own logic. He has Sandy, he wanted her gone, and she’s gone, friends included.[17] Mike was the one who pushed her away. By the end of the walk home, Lucy has chosen the distance for herself and declared it to his face. She’s a good deal happier with it than he is.[19]
  • Paulo and Daisy: Paulo and Daisy have been estranged since she told him how disappointed she was in him over the phone in Golden Hour, and he’s been dodging her ever since.[23][5] Daisy’s heartfelt apology reconciles them, and judging by how flustered Paulo gets, his feelings run a fair way past friendship.[24]
  • Paulo and Rachel: Whatever the two of them have been, it never carried a label, and Rachel uses that to end it without a scene. She takes Lucy’s return as her cue to step aside, and she saves the crying for when Paulo can’t see it.[9][10]
  • Paulo and Lucy: Paulo is officially flirting with Lucy again. He skips final period to wait at her door with a fresh haircut.[20] Lucy, who can’t quite understand how he can even look past everything and talk to her, agrees to their first date anyway.[21]
  • Lucy and Augustus: Sharing a roof since Love Again has made them easy company, needling each other the whole way to school and parting warmly in the afternoon.[25][2] She’s openly proud of him for getting his SAT plans in order, “Back on track in less than a day!”[26]

Trivia & observations

Lucy smiles and raises her middle finger at Mike, saying "I don't fucking like you anymore, okay?"
Lucy makes her position perfectly clear.
  • Pages 27 and 28 debut Paulo’s redesigned look, with the tufts on his cheeks trimmed short. Veronica’s commentary says she’d wanted to change his design “for literally years” because his old hair “would create tangents around his neck”.[20][21]
  • Per a Tumblr ask, Veronica planned Unspoken Rule as the closing chapter of Volume 6 because it “ends on a pretty funny cliffhangery note”.[27]
  • Years later, Veronica described the chapter as “all about asserting that Lucy is being Totally Normal and everything is Wonderful and Great for her” while she hides the truth of her suicide attempt from the people around her.[28]
  • Veronica’s commentary under page 13 says writing the gym scene gave her “deja-vu to A Different Side”. That’s the chapter where Lucy really did scream “YOU’RE GOING DOWN, JERKFACE!!!” at Mike during a gym game, and it’s exactly the version of her he braces for here.[11][29]
  • David’s “Dodgeball Hard Mode!” revives a phrase of his own from Tread Carefully, where he announced “I AM WISHING GAME HARD MODE”.[30][31]
  • The gym teacher spends the entire class on hold hunting for her cable bill. By the time she calls the game, she’s still only the “SIXTY-FIRST valued customer in the queue”.[11][15]
  • The commentary under page 11 cheerfully tallies the damage, “two ships sunk in the span of a couple of pages, I’m on a roll!”[9]

Related chapters

  • Love Again: The previous chapter. Lucy returned to Roseville, and Augustus moved into her family’s guest room.[32][25] Its flashback shows the suicide attempt that Lucy’s morning quip refers to, and its cafeteria blowup is what left Paulo and Daisy estranged.[33][34]
  • December: Mike’s winter blowup, where he told Lucy they were never friends and called her a parasite.[22][35] Her “Not according to you.” on the walk home hands those words straight back.[17]
  • After You: Paulo and Lucy’s carnival date, from the fairground games to the Ferris wheel. The chapter opens Volume 7.[36]
  • Moments Apart: Daisy’s Saturday birthday party. Paulo makes good on his locker-scene promise, turning up at the party and telling Daisy his coworker was “DESPERATE for shifts”.[37]

References

  1. ↑ Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 1
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 2
  3. ↑ Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 3
  4. ↑ Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 4
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 6
  6. ↑ Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 7
  7. ↑ Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 9
  8. ↑ Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 10
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 11
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 12
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 13
  12. ↑ Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 14
  13. ↑ Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 15
  14. ↑ Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 16
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 19
  16. ↑ Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 22
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 17.3 Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 24
  18. ↑ Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 25
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 26
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 27
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 21.2 Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 28
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 Chapter 68: December, page 25
  23. ↑ Chapter 90: Golden Hour, page 28
  24. ↑ Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 8
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 Chapter 95: Love Again, page 45
  26. ↑ Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 21
  27. ↑ “Ask response on Unspoken Rule closing Volume 6”. 2017-07-02.
  28. ↑ “Veronica on Lucy masking her trauma in Unspoken Rule”. 2026-03-24.
  29. ↑ Chapter 37: A Different Side, page 4
  30. ↑ Chapter 96: Unspoken Rule, page 17
  31. ↑ Tread Carefully, page 1
  32. ↑ Chapter 95: Love Again, page 6
  33. ↑ Chapter 95: Love Again, page 36
  34. ↑ Chapter 95: Love Again, page 15
  35. ↑ Chapter 68: December, page 30
  36. ↑ Chapter 97: After You, page 1
  37. ↑ Chapter 98: Moments Apart, page 7
Retrieved from “https://candypedia.wiki/index.php?title=Unspoken_Rule&oldid=5364”