Middle Aged Slumber Party #14

Christopher Pike's Slumber Party: Chapter Six

Hello, friends.

Welcome to the fourteenth installment of my deep dive into Christopher Pike’s Slumber Party, in which Lara and Percy finally make out, gross.

Not a whole actually happens in this chapter—I think we’re lining everything up for the finale???—so I *think* I’ll be able to recap everything in one go. WE’LL SEE!!

Want to start from the beginning?

Chapter One: Part One. Part Two. Part Three. Part Four.
Chapter Two: Part One. Part Two. Part Three.
Chapter Three: Part One. Part Two.
Chapter Four.
Chapter Five: Part One. Part Two. Part Three.

Subscribe to follow along, re-read the book if you’re feeling it, and for SURE, please tell me all about your memories of reading this way back when.

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Scholastic Point edition of Christopher Pike’s Slumber Party

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The outside thermometer read minus-ten degrees. Fortunately the wind had abated considerably, although Percy maintained that the storm was merely catching its breath. Both of them wore nifty flashlights that hung around their necks, clearly illuminating the width of the path and the unrelenting falling snowflakes. Beyond their circle of light, the frozen landscape was a Twilight Zone background prop.

—Slumber Party, Christopher Pike

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Scene One: Back at the scene of the (maybe) crime

NIFTY, LOL. What year is it again?

Also, Percy is now a meteorologist? He’s so good at so many things, maybe he should be dating Nancy Drew instead of Lara.

Anyway, they make their way to the scene of Dana’s (maybe) immolation and Lara digs down into the new snow to reveal the curved disk of ice—ice that is speckled with the flakes of ash that Lara is sure are Dana’s remains. Or, well, if we’re being specific: Dana’s cremains.

She gets going about spontaneous human combustion and pyrokinesis again, which Percy largely pooh-poohs:

“I think you have a vivid imagination, but I don’t supposed that’s what you want to hear. Even from an occult point of view, you’re standing on — forgive the pun — thin ice. You’re conveniently mixing pyro-kinetics and spontaneous human combustion. They’re separated phenomena.”

…sorry to get all Down With Percy again, buuuuut he’s been Fully Skeptical all along, and somehow ALSO apparently knows the rules of all this stuff even though he doesn’t believe in it? It’s like saying Nessie isn’t real but ALSO how many kids she has? It seems like a whole have cake/eat it too attitude to me, I dunno.

They talk about how he’s the only one she DOESN’T suspect (sigh), and THEN:

Percy scared the hell out of her by suddenly catching fire! But no — God, her heart was going to burst — he had merely lit a flare.

And he DID IT ON PURPOSE… TO BE FUNNY???

Ugh. So turdly.

And somehow THAT’S what leads into their make out session???

LARA I DESPAIR OF YOUR LIFE CHOICES

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For all his class, his confidence, he seemed touched. He tossed the flare aside. “I’m going to kiss you.” He put his hands on her shoulders and leaned forward. Lara closed her eyes, tilted her head back, and waited. And waited, feeling like Scarlett O’Hara. She ventured a look. Percy was worried.

—Slumber Party, Christopher Pike

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Scene Two: In which Lara and Percy make out, and it is gross

OF COURSE Scarlett O’Hara is her go-to romantic heroine. OF COURSE.

Okay, I’m MOSTLY going to spare you from the next few pages—both because it’s just as insipid as you’d imagine and because I don’t want to start barfing again—but I will share a few things.

One: Percy is worried? Because Lara is in high school. Which, like, MY DUDE. If that was a concern, maybe you shouldn’t have been drinking with her, let alone gone over to her (friend’s) house? Points to Lara (I guess???) for logicking him into her way of thinking by pointing out that it’s ten degrees below zero and it’s not like they’re going to get naked.

Two:

Hadn’t a poet said that talk of death was the most potent aphrodisiac?

LARA. STOP IT.

Three:

“I’m just glad you didn’t bite my tongue off.”

“Could have done worse,” she smiled, amazed at her own nastiness. Good old honorable Percy didn’t get the joke.

AUUUUUUUUUGH MY BRAIN MY EYES WHERE’S THE BLEACH

Before they split up—Percy to head back to the lodge and Lara to go back to the house—he gives her a flare gun and explains how to use it. He also REFUSES to take her phone number… because he already got it (and her address, wtf, stalker) from Oakland Information. He also thinks she’s hilarious and cute when she looks disappointed, so they’re totallyyyyyy building a great foundation to a super-healthy relationship.

He makes some noise about skiing her back to the house, but she talks him out of it—partly because it’ll be hard to make him leave again and partly because she’s thinking more and more that there is DANGER at the house. (Which, like, GOOD GRIEF, LISTEN TO YOUR GUT, DUMMY, IF YOU’RE WORRIED YOUR PARTS MIGHT ACCIDENTALLY FALL ON PERCY’S PARTS YOU CAN SLEEP ON A COUCH AT THE LODGE OR SOMETHING THERE ARE OTHER OPTIONS THAN GOING BACK TO THE (possible) MURDER HOUSE.)

After he leaves, she digs a chunk of particularly dark ice out of the disc, puts it in her pocket, and heads back.

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If the wind hadn’t been at her back, she wouldn’t have made it. By the time she sighted the house, her lungs were on fire and her leg was saying not another step. Except for a dull orange glow spilling through the living room windows, the house was dark.

—Slumber Party, Christopher Pike

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Scene Three: Back at the house

Lara returns to the house to find Nell on the couch in the living room. Still no Dana, phones are down, Rachael is asleep, Celeste is in her room with the door locked. No mention of Mindy, but I assume she’s still passed out.

Lara mentions the accident, and Nell gets mad:

“My whole life’s been ‘after the accident.’ I don’t remember anything before then. Do you?

Lara took a chance. “I remember Nicole.”

“Do you really? I don’t think so. In fact, I know so.”

Which, like. Come on. Celeste HAS to be Nicole, right? Right???

Lara asks Nell why she hadn’t worn makeup over the weekend—which I still think is rude and presumptuous, like, focus on your own face, Lara—which leads to this exchange:

“You still hate me, don’t you?”

Nell dropped the poker, closed her eyes, held her breath for the longest time. “If it wasn’t for—” she began, cutting herself off quickly. A single tear formed slowly, rolled down her cheek, which remained as impassive as a mask. “The strangest thing is,” she whispered, “I don’t. I should, but I don’t. Now I feel — I feel nothing.” She shook herself, picked up the poker again, prodding the flames. “Go to sleep, Lara. It’s late.”

SAID IT BEFORE, WILL SAY IT AGAIN AND AGAIN UNTIL SOMEONE KILLS IT FOREVER. MY LEAST FAVORITE TROPE: WHEN PEOPLE ARE CLEARLY GOING TO SAY SOMETHING CRUCIAL AND THEN STOP SHORT, UGHHHHHHH

Lara heads upstairs. She wants to check it on everyone—and more specifically, to question them—but Mindy is, as expected, passed out, Rachael won’t open her door, ditto Celeste.

So she heads to her own room and sets the dark piece of ice on the desk under the heating vent, pulls her pants halfway down in order to start getting changed for bed, plops herself down on the bed to take a breather, and falls asleep like that:

Yet already she was sinking, gliding gently down a dark well with the promise of a wet bottom where all images of fire and ash would be washed clean. Rachael wouldn’t kill her. Nell didn’t hate her. Cal was far away. The colonel was a good guy. Dana was safe. Celeste wasn’t a second Carrie. The snowman had gone peacefully. All was well.

Wet bottom, ha ha.

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Lara awoke with a jolt, an alarm screaming inside her skull. Before she could even figure her location, she fell of the bed and smashed nose first into the floor. It was a fire alarm, and this was it, they were all going to burn.

—Slumber Party, Christopher Pike

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Scene Four: Lara FINALLY nopes out

It’s now 3am—she’s only been out for an hour and her alarm clock is going off because it’s still set for getting up early yesterday.

She’s got a splitting headache, but gets up to see what was in the ice… and when she does, she heads straight to the bathroom to barf her guts out.

IT WAS CHARRED BONE.

Finally, FINALLY, she is READY TO GET TF OUT. And she’s willing to leave everyone else behind, largely because she doesn’t trust a single one of them:

Lara stood slowly, pulling up her pants, ordering herself not to make a false move. Don’t flush the toilet. Don’t let anyone know you’re awake. Zip up your jacket. Get your gloves. Put on your shoes. Turn out the light. So far, so good. Her knee buckled. Pain, Lara, as if it was actually on fire. She stifled a cry of despair. She would never get down the mountain on this leg. The CB? Even if there was one, she would have to ransack the house to find it. A pyro murderer wouldn’t go for that. Had Cal really left? They’d all heard the door slam, but the house was big enough to hide him and his supply of napalm. The snowmobile in the basement! They keys were in the ignition! And Nell had said it was as easy as driving a car!

Good lord, 130 pages in, and NOW she starts acting like she’s seen a horror movie or two???

She sneaks out of her room and down to the basement—imagining all of the various horrible tragedies that are about to befall her, about how sad her parents will be—and looks for a weapon. The shotguns over the fireplace aren’t loaded, so she takes the fire poker. (This is, what, the third major moment with the poker? It seems like SOMEONE’S gotta get it with this thing eventually, whether they get brained or stabbed.)

She pauses at the basement door—which is ajar—and a good thing, too, because based on what she can hear and smell, someone is pouring kerosene.

She drops the poker, it clanks against the hot water heater, she jumps back, slams the door shut and locks it.

Whoever is in the basement runs up to the door and starts pounding on it, and Lara—still just wearing her sneakers—runs out into the night.

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Her chances were lousy. The storm had regrouped into a thousand vicious tornadoes. The flakes stinging her eyes were more painful than blasted sand. Nothing in her experience had prepared her to even imagine a blizzard of this intensity. With no light, no strength, no Percy. She was almost doomed to die. But she would not go back. Death was not always the same. Freezing was infinitely preferable to burning.

—Slumber Party, Christopher Pike

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Scene Five: Lost in the blizzard

Long story short: Lara almost gives up multiple times, continues imagining what her parents will do when her body is found, tries to fire the flare gun, can’t because her hands are so cold that her fingers won’t work, pees on her hands to loosen them up, shoots the flare, and then is rescued by a figure surrounded by a light so bright that for a second, she thinks it must be an angel.

But it’s not:

“Lara,” he said, staring down at her from an Olympian height of six feet. He was no angel. And she was not dead, though she suddenly wished that she were. 

It was Cal.

She remembered nothing else.

AND THAT, SAYS CHRISTOPHER PIKE, IS HOW YOU END A CHAPTER!!

Or if he doesn’t, he should, because points to him, it’s a great cliffhanger.

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Next up: CHAPTER SEVEN!!!

In the meantime, subscribe so that you don’t miss installments, let me know about your memories of reading (and watching!) horror as a tween and teen. I’m also always here if you’ve got recommendations.

Talk soon,
Leila