Mary Weist is the gothiest goth who ever gothed. Every morning she wakes up thinking Jerry, her boyfriend, is alive. He’s not! Right after his funeral she bought a pack of cigarettes and now she sleeps all day, refuses to eat, chain smokes, and says things like “Life is dust.” “I love my pain. It’s all I have.” And, “I have to vomit.”
In typical Pike fashion, parents are dispensed with early as Mary’s folks head out of town. Mom worries about leaving Mary alone but Mary butts her ciggie in a potted plant and tells Mom she’s “looking forward to the solitude” because it gives her “time to grieve alone.” What parent wouldn’t be comforted?
“Her mother forced a smile. ‘What will you do?’
“Probably smoke all the time.”
“Mary.”
Mary held up a hand. “Don’t say anything. Jerry’s dead. But people do die. In fact, we all die. I’ll die someday. But today, I’m fine. If you call me while you’re away, I’ll hang up.”
Parents dispatched, she smokes a cigarette while brushing her teeth and flossing them simultaneously (“It was an experience”) then her best friend Savey Barker arrives in his matching leather pants and jacket to pick her up for Pamela Poole’s party. Mary wears a top which “showed off her breasts.” Waitaminute!?! I thought she was a pale and dour goth? No, you fool.
“Mary was certainly beautiful, but not in a traditional homecoming princess way. She was ethereal; her attraction seemed to spring from another dimension. Her eyes were such a dark blue they appeared black. She had copper-brown skin — inherited from neither of her parents. Her hair was the same color brown, unbelievably thick and wavy. Her body was virtually flawless. Some guy at school had snapped her picture and sent it to a New York modeling agency that wanted to see her immediately.”
Hahaha, New York Modeling Agencies, Mary is too busy smoking and brushing her teeth while flossing to bother with you. On the way to the party, Savey and Mary exchange Patented Christopher Pike Poisoned Banter:
“How long a set are you going to play?” Mary asked.
“Forty minutes max. Pamela’s not paying us.”
Mary lit a cigarette. “Not with money, you mean.”
Savey smiled. “She is awfully nasty to me these days.” He paused. “Do you think I should do her?”
Mary blew smoke. “Not if you want to pass your next blood test.”
“She’s not that bad.”
“She’s worse.”
Savey nodded. “You’re probably right.”
Also, Pamela has a mirror over her bed. I have never been to Seedmont, “a small rural town in northwest Idaho” but I will take it from Pike that this is exactly something an Idaho teen in 1995 would own, and that they would all sound like meaner versions of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday..
At the party, Savey’s band, The Cool Covers, play “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” then Savey gives out his business card to all the girls in the crowd. Ken, dead Jerry little brother, is obsessed with finding out how his brother really died, but Mary doesn’t want to tell him. What does Mary want?
“To stop breathing. To grow cold and lie perfectly still.”
No such luck, because Pamela and Ken want to hold a VIP seance afterparty. Pamela’s got a crystal ball with a silver dragon stand, a copper pyramid, a Ouija board, incense, and candles so they’re off to the races. They summon a seance spirit who’s “scared for them” and is drawn there indirectly by Jerry’s death. Using the words “yes” “no” and “mystery” it plays an annoying game of 20 Questions the upshot of which is:
a) reincarnation exists,
b) Jerry is being prevented from reincarnating by someone in this room,
c) something bad is about to happen.
Mary curveballs and asks the spirit whether this has something to do with something that happened “when you were in Ancient Egypt?”
Yes.
Somehow this is all it takes to convince Ken and Pamela that Mary killed Jerry. Savey takes her home and wants to make love to her, but instead she lies naked in front of her fireplace and he rubs scented oil into her butt for 45 minutes. He really wants her to roll over, but...
“If I turn over, we’ll make love, and I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
She spoke to the flames. “Because I have no love. We’ll make nothing, and we’ll end up feeling worse than before.”
Good old Mary!
Then she puts on her robe and drives to the cemetery where she lies naked on Jerry’s grave. Fortunately, “It did nothing to soothe her pain. It just made her dirty, and cold, and sick with perversion. She liked it.”
Turns out Mary’s dark secret is that she’s not such a goth after all. She cares! She urged Jerry to break into the school office after hours to see if she beat Pamela in the homecoming queen vote and she’s fully prepared to alter the vote if she lost. Pamela slept with everyone who voted for her, but Mary doesn’t need to have worried. Apparently, Pamela is ugly and terrible in bed because she lost the vote.
Suddenly, a security guard burst into the office, demanded they put their hands on their heads, and when Mary refused, he pistol whipped her. Jerry lost it and attacks the guard who shot him in the arm. This caused Mary to lose it in turn and she attacked the guard and, in the struggle, managed to shoot both Jerry and the guard in the head. Ken and Pamela may be annoying, ugly, and bad in bed, but they’re right. Dark secrets!
Mary drives home from the cemetery, stopping only to spit on the security guard’s grave. At home, she receives a mysterious phone call that says, “Hello, Clareesh,” sounding like Hannibal Lecter with a lisp. Then she goes to bed and wakes up to discover:
“There was a flying saucer in the sky.
A big fat white one.
‘Oh shit,’ she whispered.”
Oh shit, indeed.
The only solution is a second seance, but Mary doesn’t have a copper pyramid, a crystal ball with a silver dragon stand, or a Ouija board so it’s back to Pamela’s where she explains her logic:
“We assumed we were talking to a spirit,” she tells Pamela. “But maybe we were talking to an alien.”
Also, she’s been dreaming about ancient Egypt, and we all know ancient aliens built the pyramids. The other kids take this in stride, except Pamela who accuses Mary of murdering Jerry again, and gets the city of Seedmont to agree to exhume his body in order to prove it. The next morning at school, a gorgeous new student named Tom appears and Mary and Pamela hook up to get the 4-1-1.
“It seemed that Pamela had magically forgotten that the previous Friday she had accused Mary of murder. Mary didn’t hold it against her, for the moment. She was curious about the guy.
“Does he have a cute butt?” Mary asked.
He does! What are accusations of murder between frenemies? A few paragraphs later they’re fighting over him, Mary slaps Pamela so hard her lip bleeds, gives her a “Later, bitch,” and takes Tom out for a massive Christopher Pike patented feast at Denny’s, then secretly follows him around town and sees him resurrect totally flattened road kill by blowing into its mouth and reinflating it. This new kid doesn’t just have a cute butt, he’s Jesus!
No, he’s an ancient Egyptian god!
No, he’s a space alien!
Maybe he’s all three?
Through a Christopher Pike patented dream sequences, Mary remembers that Tom is her alien friend, Klaxtor. The two of them observed humanity in pyramid times, then Mary turned her fourth density body into a third density body because humans amused her. She’s worshiped like a goddess and advances medicine and science and fixes gender inequality and even gets a human assistant named Pamela, I mean, Phairee. And she falls for an artist named Jarteen, I mean Jerry, I mean Jarteen.
But after 35 years, Phairee is aging terribly, especially her neck, and she stages a palace coup and threatens to kill Mary if she doesn’t reveal the secret to her hotness. Mary agrees in order to spare Jarteen’s life but the secret of eternal life turns out to be “All you need is love.” Annoyed that the path to immortality turns out to be a shitty Beatles song, Phairee dissects Jarteen alive, then hurls his corpse scraps into a tomb with Mary and buries her alive. Being immortal, this is pretty dismal for Mary.
Memories restored, Mary demands that Tom/Klaxtor bring Jerry/Jarteen back to life, threatening him with harsh language, “I’m a human being,” she shouts. “I’m not some fat-headed sack of gray potatoes like you.”
Klaxtor says she won’t hurt him because they made love the night before.
“That was nothing,” Mary shouted. “Human beings have sex with total strangers all the time. It’s part of the culture.”
Appalled at the sluttiness of the human race, Tom/Klaxtor digs up Jerry/Jarteen’s purtrid corpse (prompting Mary to vomit. Again.) and brings it back to life. Then he nopes right out of there.
“I have done too much. I can do no more. He is your problem now.”
Instead of being excited to be alive again, Jerry leaks embalming fluid through his stitches and moans that he wants to be dead. Why did Mary bring him back from the graaaaaaave? Everyone's a critic! But Mary has a brainstorm and realizes that he just needs some fresh human blood. She lures Pamela over, beats her unconscious with a hammer, and drains most of her blood into Jerry. Now he’s whining even louder so she takes him back to his grave and puts a bullet through his skull.
In an unexpected twist, the book restarts, only this time it’s Mary who died at the hands of the security guard in the school office and Jerry is the one at the seance. In a twist on top of a twist, it turns out that Mary is actually still entombed in ancient Egypt with only Jarteen’s mouse-nibbled corpse for company and this has all been a hallucination, and it appears that events are about to replay again, with Jarteen in the Mary role this time around because teenage existence is just an endless, infinite hell that repeats itself over and over and over again until you crave nothing but the sweet release of death.
She still beat Pamela for homecoming queen, though.