Left Behind

Why is Lucy the way she is? Tess wants to know, and Mike is willing to tell her everything — for the price of a warm house and some cocoa. A childhood's worth of history later, Mike walks home with a brand new scarf.

Left Behind
Chapter	26 of 127 (list of chapters)
Published	October 20, 2006 (2006-10-20)
Page count	6
Major characters	Mike, Lucy, Tess, Paulo
Minor characters	Yashy, Sandy, Flower Girl
Locations	Tess's house
Collected in	Volume One, Omnibus 1
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Synopsis

On a cold autumn walk, Lucy smacks Paulo flat for hitting on her, and Tess wonders whether something happened to make her this way. Mike offers to tell Tess everything if she takes him home out of the cold. Soon he's settled at Tess's house in a borrowed scarf and begins the story of Lucy.

Mike's story starts in preschool, where Lucy only ever wanted to play with his toys. Kindergarten split them into different classes, and a ribbon-wearing girl invited Lucy to play Pretty Princess Adventure. Lucy drove a toy car over the dolls and got banished from the group. Rejected by the boys too, she spent playtime alone.

Lucy's taxi service charges ten bucks a ride to the castle.

First grade put them back together, and though Mike wanted his clingy rival gone, he always gave in. At lunch one day Lucy said she wasn't lonely anymore — "We're friends, right?" — the first time Mike really saw her smile. Then Sandy arrived, Mike fell head over heels, and Lucy spent the whole year isolated, resolving not to need anyone. On her first day of middle school, older strangers cornered her with catcalls. Badly shaken, she refused Mike's help and cracked her knuckles, the beginning, Mike says, of the Lucy Tess knows.

Back in the present, Tess calls young Mike a real jerk but tells him to keep the scarf. Walking home, Mike finds Paulo still lying where Lucy left him. Paulo puts two and two together and radios, "Calling all girls. We got a cheater on the premises. Over." A mob of furious girls chases Mike off as Paulo cackles that this never gets old.

Character dynamics

• Mike and Tess: Tess is still fairly new to the group and can't get Lucy to say a word about herself, so Mike becomes her way in. He trades the whole history for shelter from the cold, and she repays him with cocoa, a bean bag chair, and eventually the scarf itself, upgraded from a loan to an outright gift. By the end of the visit the two are proper confidants.
• Tess and Lucy: Tess starts the day with no way to find out what made Lucy so guarded, and ends it knowing more of her history than anyone else in the newer crowd. The shift is entirely one-sided, though, since Lucy herself has no idea anything changed.
• Mike and Lucy: Nothing changes between them in the present. What the chapter does instead is lay out their whole shared history for the first time, from preschool rivalry to first friendship to the Sandy-era rift and back. Mike's own summary is a generous one: "She has other friends now, even if she wouldn't ever admit to it."

Trivia & observations

• Veronica's commentary under the first page says Tess threatening to kick Paulo's ass was inspired by a Pchat with Lily, which she used to develop Tess's personality.
• The scarf has a long life ahead of it. Mike wears it to Tess's Christmas party in Feline Festivities, keeps it until Sandy swaps it out for a blue one in Just Beautiful, and years later Tess teases him for no longer wearing the present she picked out. The commentary under the final page frames the gift hopefully, wondering whether "the orange and yellow scarf can make him.. happy? Maybe?"
• This is the only time Yashy's origin is shown on-panel. Veronica has said the pets were inspired by wanting Lucy to hold cute little animals, like Misty's Togepi in Pokémon and the baby Yoshis in Super Mario World.
• Flower Girl has a background cameo in the kindergarten flashback, chronologically her earliest in-story appearance, though her publication debut came in Pep Rally.
• Per Veronica's commentary under the second page, the original version of the chapter spelled "Kindergarten" as "Kindergarden", a mistake editors later corrected.
• All six pages went up on the same day, March 22, 2010, rather than page by page.

Related chapters

• Flirting with Disaster: The very next chapter is this one's companion piece, with another childhood flashback filling in Lucy and Paulo's history, including his arrival as a new student in fifth grade. That puts Paulo around for about a year before the middle-school turn Mike describes here.
• Feline Festivities: Mike returns to Tess's house for her Christmas party wearing the scarf she gave him in this chapter, and admits he was too cold to pay attention on his first visit. It's also Lucy and Yashy's first look at the mansion.
• Unfulfilled Fantasy: The third-grade Sandy era gets a full chapter of its own here, told from Mike's side, right down to the goodbye that this chapter covers in half a sentence.
• A Difficult Choice: The girl-mob cheater gag got its start in this chapter, with Paulo whipping up a crowd against Mike. By this chapter's final page it's an acknowledged running bit.