by Rob Thomas
By "took notice" I mean he decided I looked like just the sort of sophomore girl to save him from his romantically uneventful high school existence. I was a cheerleader, and probably had that young, slightly bovine look that made me an easy mark. Plus, I was easy enough to find in the high school gym that summer, weaseling my way out of pyramids of questionable structural integrity, thereby hoping to avoid being involved in the type of catastrophic cheerleading accidents notorious in the South for transforming peppy little ponytailed girls into sullen, drooling paraplegics overnight.
After looming around the gym and the ice cream place for a few weeks, Mark asked me out, and soon, it was completely obvious we were meant to be together. We had so much in common! We laughed at the same jokes-his jokes, mostly-and we both really liked dogs, pizza, and Duke basketball. What's more (as if we needed more!), we both hated UNC basketball. But the most amazing thing was that we both totally loved Rush. If that wasn't a sign that we were starcrossed, I didn't know what was.
After three glorious months together, just as I was starting to pick out names for our offspring, Mark's best friend, who happened to be a blue-eyed, blonde-haired, six-foot-tall senior named Tammy, started to notice Mark's potential. Mark had always longed for Tammy, of course, but Tammy had always dated much more sophisticated, older guys-guys with apartments of their own, guys with mustaches, for Christ's sake. Tammy was totally over high school, and had been for years. She was as world-weary as they came.
But thanks to me, Mark was starting to look like a lot of fun. Like the star of a mediocre sitcom, he didn't seem all that charming or funny until you threw in a laugh track, cued to guffaw loudly at every single thing that came out of his mouth. My days as a wide-eyed optimist were numbered.
Sadly, the fall from grace of the soon-to-be-world-weary high school girl isn't quite as speedy as Veronica Mars makes it seem when she's having a flashback of a long-haired, more innocent Veronica. What we don't see are those long nights she spent face-down on her bed, crying her eyes out, or calling Duncan and whining, "Why? Whyyy?! ! !" We don't see her gazing longingly out the window of her chemistry class, like I did, seeing Mark and Tammy strolling by, hand in hand, her puffy blonde head of hair looming a full foot above his. I still remember that jittery, heavy feeling in my chest, like my heart was a coffee tin filled with nails. "How could he have turned his back on me like this?" I wondered, tears welling up in my eyes. It didn't make sense, even though Tammy was tall and blonde and had probably learned a great deal about sex from those men and their mustaches. "Could she possibly love Rush half as much as I do? Does she know every word to `Tom Sawyer' and `Red Barchetta'? There's no way she does! It's just not possible!"
But little did I know, I was beginning a very important journey, and without this first crucial step down the path to alienation and disillusionment, I would never get all of the deeply cynical outlooks and dysfunctional tics and bitter perspectives that I so richly deserved.
Some kids skipped this step. They entered high school full of skepticism and anger. Instead of leaping head-long into the arms of a senior (a senior who drove a Pinto, for God's sake) only to be dropped on their asses, they side-stepped the whole heartbreaking stunt, choosing to linger angrily in the parking lot smoking Marlboro Reds instead. I considered this a cheat. You can't just skip to the end! You have to chase all the lame, shallow stuff everyone else is chasing! Even if it's all empty and stupid and pointless and you just get dumped or end up with a roofie in your drink or all of the above, you're in high school. You have to join the herd, possibly getting stampeded to death along the way. You'll have plenty of time to pout and roll your eyes at the sad little conformist chumps when you're old and crusty and your pathetic offspring trundle off to high school.
Veronica didn't take any shortcuts to world-weariness, either. She didn't leave school one day a typical girl, and then show up the next day with a pierced tongue and a Sex Pistols T-shirt, her mind blown by having read Catcher in the Rye for the first time. She was once just as clueless as the rest of us were, which makes her all the more likeable and heroic. The long-haired, sweet-faced Veronica of the flashbacks, the one who was in love with the cutest guy in school, Duncan Kane, and friends with the coolest girl, his sister Lilly? She was everything our naive high school freshmen selves wanted to be: pretty, popular, and thrilled about every second of it. She climbed the mountain, and saw what was on the other side: cool parties at really big, expensive houses where they served kegs of beer and elaborate fruit punches and really tasty peach wine coolers.
If Veronica had skipped straight to the jaded stage, she'd be about as cool as that skinny, geeky kid who you never noticed until he showed up to school one day with a two-foot-high purple Mohawk, mumbling about how he doesn't care what anyone thinks of him because everyone is full of crap, they're all just conformist automatons who'll end up as bankers and lawyers and dumb housewives some day. He was right, of course, but it was tough to respect his superior attitude when he'd been rejected or teased or roundly ignored by those future bankers and lawyers and dumb housewives for years. In high school, everyone knows you can't make a really tasty peach wine cooler from sour grapes.
It wasn't years of rejection, but a succession of tragedies-boy friend Duncan dumped her, best friend Lilly was murdered by Aaron Echolls, Mommy bedded Mr. Kane then disappeared, Daddy lost his job as sheriff-that forced Veronica to face the ugly fact that life is filled with sadness, loss, and disappointments, and that it's pure foolishness to trust anyone, ever.
Of course, this disillusionment is exactly what gives Veronica her power. Sure, she's a million things that every high school kid aspires to be: smart and scholarly but not overly concerned about grades, socially smooth but completely bored by the high school social scene, pretty in a completely unassailable way, effortlessly stylish, funny but never by pandering for laughs or attention, and openly scornful toward the popular kids but nice to the underdog. Her real appeal, though, comes from being totally over high school, because that offers her immunity from what everyone else thinks of her. Not only is she herself utterly without shame-you can only sink so low, after all, before you have to give up on dignity entirely-but she's armed with a heavy arsenal of witty retorts ready to launch at the slightest provocation. Considering the fact that the petty little skirmishes of the high school battlefield hinge on wisecracks and an ability to quickly shame your opponent into submission, Veronica's shamelessness and way with a comeback give her a major advantage over any and all opponents.
Shame is kryptonite to the high school kid, which is why the shameless fare so well in that environment. Those with the most power are always shameless: the kids who are totally over high school and therefore care the least about whether or not they're perceived badly, the kids who know how to appear unconcerned, and the kids who are far too dumb to have extra brain cells to devote to figuring out what anyone thinks of them.
That's why overconfident jerks, fakers, sociopaths, and morons do so well in high school; it's a bizarre microcosm that's extremely forgiving to the shameless. Not surprisingly, it's extremely unforgiving to those who are earnest, genuine, brainy, sensitive, and/or neurotic. Smart kids have the hardest time of all, of course: painfully aware of how they're perceived, prone to overthinking the most insignificant situation or conversation, likely to obsess or become neurotic over nothing, and worst of all, vulnerable to self-consciousness, secondguessing, and deep bouts of shame.
Veronica combines the intelligence and wit and wiles of the latter group with the shamelessness of the former, except her shamelessness arises from her world-weariness and alienation. And unlike the overconfident morons like Dick, who rule the school with their blunt weapons of blind aggression, selfishness, and disdain for all things humble and genuine, Veronica is aware of the disapproval of others, but remains immune to it.
After my heartbreak over Mark, the petty squabbles and power plays between kids my age seemed silly and insignificant. I had been involved in
a tragic story of love and loss, after all, which everyone in school knew about. They probably couldn't have cared less, of course, but that's not how it seemed at the time. At the time, it was like Romeo suddenly dumped Juliet for some fair-skinned tart down the lane, even though Juliet was really nice and clearly loved Rush way more than that flaxen-haired trollop! At the time, it was a tale of woe, and I was the victim, the sorry, sobbing wench left behind, clutching my hand to my heart. I was just like Veronica, walking in her white party dress to the police station to report being date raped-you know, except for the fact that Mark and I merely ate at McDonald's and made out on his parents' couch; I didn't lose my virginity until years later. But that's how I felt, just like Veronica did! Soiled, ashamed, besotted, befouled, adrift! A wanton woman, used up and cast aside like yesterday's flavor of wine cooler!
I had been so publicly rejected that, in order to survive, I had to forget what anyone thought. But who cared anyway? Once Mark and Tammy graduated and promptly broke up, the main players in my drama were gone. All that were left were just sophomores and juniors. What did I care what a bunch of second-ran Mercutios and Benvolios thought of my tragic plight?
But thankfully, as the years pass, that recklessness and world-weary angst give way to a more optimistic perspective-it really has to, unless you want to end up covered in lint, proselytizing about how pets are better than spouses. At some point, Veronica will be forced to move past it, too; she'll gather up her resources, reassess the events of the past, and get over it. Even after her best friend's murder, even after the roofie and the rape and the very public rejections, even after her dad lost his position as sheriff and her mom skipped town, even after the nasty stand-off with Aaron Echolls and that terrible moment on the rooftop when she thought her dad was dead, we trust that, as an adult, Veronica will be fine. Sure, she'll spend a few more years in this jaded state, rolling her eyes at the patheticness of belligerent frat boys and drunken sorority girls. And maybe it'll take a few years of therapy, in which she'll chuckle that Duncan Kane was kind of a bore anyway, or marvel at how ridiculous it was that she ever could have been attracted to a total jerk like Logan Echolls in the first place. Maybe it'll require Veronica to make some good, trustworthy friends who aren't likely to succumb to the charms of wealthy Neanderthals like the ones who ruled Neptune High. Maybe she'll have to fall in love with a really nice, generous guy-someone sweet and earnest, like Deputy Leo, but without the unsavory ties to the Neptune police department.
But for now? Veronica is astonishingly world-weary, and we love her dearly for it.
HEATHER HAVRILESKY grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and graduated from Duke University. In 1996, she and illustrator Terry Colon created "Filler," a popular cartoon that ran for five years on Suck.com, one of the Web's first pop culture magazines. She's written for the LA Times, the Washington Post, New York, Spin, BookForum, and NPR's All Things Considered. She is currently a TV critic for Salon. com and maintains the Rabbit Blog. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband Bill and their two dogs.
The publisher thanks Abigail Allen, Josette Covington, Meadow Fallon-Dora, Debra Holliman, Wai-Yin Kwan, Adam Levine, Sunil Patel, Carolyn Paterson, Christer Vindberg, and the rest of the staff of Mars Investigations: The (In)Complete Guide to Veronica Mars (www marsinvestigations.net) for their assistance in reviewing the manuscript.
