Fearless Read-Along: Chapter Twelve

The scene in Beware of Dog I'm currently working on is seriously kicking my butt, and taking a little hiatus didn't really help! Fun! So! Here we go with Chapter Twelve. 

This chapter highlights the fact that, though Ava and Mercy are both a part of the Lean Dog sphere, their daily lives and daily challenges couldn't be more different. We see Ava set off for a party at the local abandoned haunted hangout, Hamilton House. And we see Mercy absolutely lose his cool and threaten Jasmine back at the clubhouse. 

Mercy:

“Understand this, too: I’d be perfectly within my rights to crush your windpipe right now. My boys out there, they’d help me chuck you in the river and not say a damn thing about it. You do not ever, ever, question a member like you just did. You do not ever suggest what you just did about Ava Teague.” He flexed his fingers the tiniest amount. “Got it?”

I wrote this scene knowing full well that it was going to make Mercy look bad. I knew there would likely be readers who had a big problem with what happens, but was willing to take any potential heat for it for two reasons. One: it's one of those reminders that this is an outlaw club. They're not bike enthusiasts looking to make the world a better place (though all of them do develop a slightly more philanthropic side in later books as the Abacus plotline unfolds). They care about their women, but women outside the club do not get the full-scale MC protection and respect treatment, as we see in Price of Angels with Holly. And two: since the beginning I wanted to draw a distinct line between Mercy's intense love of his chosen family, and those he sees as a threat to it. Unfortunately for Jazz, here, she's also serving as a foreshadowing breadcrumb for Mercy's mother, Dee. Mercy has a very complicated relationship with women in general, and you throw in that immaturity/arrested development of his, and things can go sideways. He's a much-loved, and I think truly loveable character...but I never backpedal on his psycho front. 

Ava:

“I heard you,” Ava said as she righted herself, her hands curling into fists. “But I don’t think whatever just fell out of your mouth counts as English.”

Rereading this chapter, I was reminded of a reader email I received years ago. It wasn't disrespectful or rude, but the reader requested that I write older, more mature heroines, because she found she couldn't identify with young women Ava's age. I have two thoughts about this.

1) I can for sure see someone aging and maturing past the point of wanting to read about teen and young adult drama. I certainly have no desire to read a Babysitter's Club book these days. But my perspective is that it's much easier for an older reader to look back on their own younger years and find sympathy and empathy for a younger character - we've all been teenagers with teenage problems - than it is for a younger reader to understand the mindset of an older character. I mean, I've had the personality of a middle-aged man my whole life, but that's not true of most people, I don't think. I also think that, within the context of a novel written for adults, POVs from younger characters can help to create a fully realized world and set up future stories for years to come. Arya Stark is eight at the start of A Game of Thrones, and I don't think anyone could say they didn't understand and empathize with her as a character just because she was a child. I will forever maintain that no mature, together, self-possessed forty-something woman with a career could have EVER had anything like a relationship with Mercy. Meet-cutes, dates, mature conversations...nope. Not for Mercy. Ava had to be young, which means that Ava's having to deal with young people challenges. 

2) I think anyone who attended high school can understand what it's like to not be a part of the "in" crowd. Unless you were in the "in" crowd, in which case you think high school was, like, totally awesome. Ava's rivalry with Mason and co. is obviously exaggerated, and it needs to be given Ava's family and background. The enemy has to feel nasty enough to counterbalance her own nastiness. I never had a target on my back in the way that Ava did, but I wasn't pretty, wasn't cool, and I got picked on. I tried to keep my head down and I had a small, tightknit group of friends who helped make it all bearable, but I feel like Ava's school struggles have a certain universal quality to them. My high school really did have a "best body" senior superlative in the yearbook. Yuck. 

To get a little meta about it: Ava's trouble at school in the novel serves as a microcosm of the trouble the MC deals with in the wider world. Like her dad, and Mercy, and even Maggie, Ava eventually decides that since she's never going to be accepted, she's at least going to make sure she's feared. But at seventeen, there's a part of her that still wants to belong - hence going to the party in the first place - because she's not yet certain if she can truly belong in the MC world the way she wants to.