2024 Nostalgia Re-readathon | SVH #109: Double-Crossed

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Are wedding bells ringing for Jessica?

Jessica Wakefield is engaged! Now that she's put a stop to the wedding between Sue Gibbons and Jeremy Randall, Jessica has the love of her life all to herself. Or so she thinks. But when she catches Jeremy in a secret embrace with his ex-fiancee, Jessica gets suspicious...Is Jeremy as perfect as he seems?

Lila Fowler, the richest girl in Sweet Valley, has finally found the perfect guy. Robby Goodman is gorgeous, funny, and sophisticated. There's just one problem. He's poor. Will Lila's plan to make Robby into a millionaire save their love, or end in disaster?

Thus starts the second half of this miniseries - we've moved from Scandal to Deception. We're also onto another ghostie, and the suspicion that all five of these books may have been written simultaneously grows, because there are inconsistencies that just don't make sense.

So here we are in the aftermath of Jessica's dramatics at the wedding. Whereas Liz was leading her off page at the end of the last book, here she is staying at Fowler Crest, laying low not only from Sue and Jeremy, but from her family as well. It appears that there is some implication that the Wakefield parents told Jessica not to return to their house because poor Sue was still staying with them, so she's highed off to Lila's instead. The Wakefield parents are furious with her, feeling she has totally lost control of herself and needs to be sent away to an all-girls' boarding school in Washington state for a bit of military-style discipline. Mr Wakefield also wants to charge Jeremy with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and I ask you - is that truly the best he could do? I know S.E.X. is verboten in the SVH iteration of this series, but really?? And he somehow thinks if he sends Jessica away that she won't find a way to be with her man anyway? He obviously doesn't know this daughter very well!

Jeremy contacts Jessica at Lila's and asks her to meet with him, to which she happily replies that she will. They are off to meet in secret (of course), and once there, Jeremy proposes to Jessica with the ring she picked out way back in Book #107. He almost immediately pleads with her to keep their engagement a secret (of course) which she happily agrees to. He tells her that he's going to Costa Rica for a couple of weeks to work on a Project Nature project, something that will assist him in being transferred to the LA office so he can get away from Sue. Jessica loves the idea of having a secret engagement, at least for a little while. She insists on seeing him off to the airport, and brushes aside the fact that he can't give her any contact info for Costa Rica. She even allows him to persuade her to *not* watch him board the plane, telling her it would be too painful. He promises that once he returns from his research trip, they will announce their engagement to the world.

Jessica can't keep her secret for long, spilling the beans to Lila, who tells Caroline Pearce, who proceeds to tell the entire world (of course). The fall semester of school has started, and Elizabeth hears the news from Caroline at lunch one day. She is stunned, as are Enid and Todd. Elizabeth has had a hard time with Jessica gone from the house, and of course has no idea what to do with this news, considering Sue is still staying with them. It doesn't take long for the news to spill over to the Wakefield parents, who accelerate their plans to put Jess in boarding school. A priceless quote from Liz on their parents' reaction is this: "For the first time in their lives I think they're actually embarrassed by what's happening." After all the shit that Jess (and Liz) have pulled throughout the series, this is what shames the Wakefield parents? Just...wow.

Anyway. Of all people, Sue seems to be taking the news of her ex's new engagement the best - at least, until she overdoses on sleeping pills and has to be rushed to the ER to have her stomach pumped. Even Jessica is shaken by this turn of events. She tries to call Jeremy but he never answers the phone, only returning her messages later. Even Lila tries to point out that this exact thing happened the last time she covered for Jessica, suggesting that perhaps Jeremy is not where he says he is or doing what he says he's doing, but Jessica dismisses this possibility from her mind. She's in love, dammit!

We get our first POV scenes from both Jeremy and Sue, and it becomes even more obvious that these two are up to no good. Jeremy's wanton evil ways are on display as he smokes and drinks in some dark, dank room who knows where, receiving the messages from Jessica from the friend whose number he finally gave her. Sue is going out for long bike rides and walks, and even confesses to Elizabeth that she lied about having a terminal blood illness. Much to impy's chagrin, there is no mention of this being a huge betrayal, or weirdness, or the circumstances of Tricia Martin's tragic death to be had. Liz even forgives Sue for the colossal lie, though she starts to become a bit suspicious of her.

Jessica attends a meeting of the SVH Video Club to support Amy Sutton's directorial debut (yeah, IDEK) and is shocked when she sees another video purporting to show SV's most romantic spots and a couple that looks eerily similar to Jeremy and Sue cavorting about in the background. She figures she's going nuts since its been so long that Jeremy has been gone, and he keeps giving her excuses as to why he can't get back any sooner.

Meanwhile, a new story has emerged about Sue, which will set up the rest of this part of the miniseries: apparently Sue is the heiress to a large frozen-dinner fortune, and her mother was still alive when she started dating Jeremy. Nancy Gibbons took an immediate dislike to Jeremy, and wrote her will such that if Sue married him, she'd lose her inheritance - it would go to Mrs Wakefield instead. However, if she didn't marry him and stayed away from him for two months, she *would* get the money. So it becomes clear that Sue and Jeremy decided to hit up the Wakefields for wedding planning help in order to stay close to them and the money, and perhaps to put into action the plan that covers the plot of the next book: Sue being kidnapped and held for ransom. But, now that Jessica's done them a favor and broken up the wedding, they are hedging their bets on the "staying away" clause. When Jessica catches them together at the Halloween party (as depicted on the cover), they put the kidnapping plan into motion.

So yes, Sue and Jeremy are totally still seeing each other ~in secret~ while Jeremy pretends to be working on Costa Rica, and Sue pretends to be getting over him and planning to return to New York. Finally, Jeremy does "return" to the Valley, just in time for the huge annual Project Nature Halloween party, to which he's invited all of SVH for some reason. Jessica believes its to announce their engagement, and continues to believe this right up until she stumbles upon Jeremy and Sue making out like there's no tomorrow in the woods. She confronts them and then leaves the party, even after Jeremy tries to chase after her. It was like - she was FINALLY putting all the puzzle pieces together and realizing that he's a huge jerk, only to crumble at the last moment for her feelings for him. He shows up the Wakefields' door with the pronouncement that Sue has disappeared, thus ending the book.

In the meanwhile, there are several subplots going on. Robby and Lila are still seeing each other, altho now it's been retconned that Robby is only 18 and has never attended college, even though he was introduced as 23-year-old Jeremy's college roommate buddy. The whole Lila pretending to be poor subplot from the previous book also apparently never happened. Here, Robby is excited to be showing some of his work at a local gallery, but Lila is concerned because she believes the gallery hasn't given him a fair contract. She enrolls him in a business course at SVU without telling him, and he gets angry with her for it. He eventually grudgingly accepts that it's probably a good idea to have *some* clue about the business side of artistry and attends the class, and he reluctantly tells Lila that she was right after all. He aldo decides to take a life drawing class at uni, and Lila gets angry when he tells her that he's drawing nude women (and men) as part of the class. She breaks up with him over this, but eventually they reconcile when Robby convinces Lila that she's the one he loves, and after Lila practices saying "I'm wrong" hundreds of times in the mirror so that she can say it to him without flinching.

The "wacky hijinks" subplot is that Todd has decided to get a new haircut, and to grow a mustache to accompany his New Look. The mustache completely grosses out Elizabeth, and she starts avoiding him because she can't bear to look at him. (Primal Liz Hear Me Roar from the previous two books is nowhere to be seen; she spends a lot of time feeling ashamed at being so shallow as to care about Todd's looks so much.) They eventually have a huge fight about it and break up, a scene that surprisingly takes place in Liz's bedroom. I don't recall Todd ever being allowed to be up there before, but here he is, shutting the door and everything, for "privacy" while they say some pretty horrible things to each other. Todd all but calls her a bitch for the way she's acting, and their second breakup in as many books is proving to be a very brittle end for these two. They eventually make up when Todd decides to shave the mustache and cut his hair so it'll grow back in his previous style.

A bonus sub-sub-plot is Winston being at the same barbershop as Todd and having his hair absolutely butchered, to the point where he basically has to shave his head to undo the damage. Poor Win! But he was rocking it at the party when he shows up as Jean-Luc Picard, LOL.

There's a lot going on here, very little of it good, and I just wanted to shake Jessica at the end and tell her to believe the man Jeremy is showing her that he is. Apparently it's going to take another whole book of nonsense for her to actually do this, and I don't know if I have the patience for it!