Episode Report Card Niki: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Scarlet Letter Jacket
By Niki | Season 1 | Episode 3 | Aired on 10.04.1999
Away from Karen, Lily snaps, "How can she not know, with the way you're acting?" Naomi apologizes and says she wouldn't have gone over at all if the popcorn fiasco hadn't forced her to do so. Karen watches their arm-waving exchange with some interest. Lily heads off to find Grace, and Karen catches Naomi's eye. She leaves the booth to ask Naomi "what the hell's going on here." Naomi spins around, desperately seeking a dart or candy-apple stick to impale herself on.
Now Soliloquy Lily is kvetching that her friend started saying terrible things about her: "That I was throwing myself at Robby. That I was calling him at home. I didn't eat for a week."
Lily's wandering the empty halls of the school, calling out for Grace. She passes the classroom where Grace is huddled behind the teacher's desk, wiping at her tears.
Soliloquy Lily remembers how she confronted Deb in the locker room, and how horrible it was with Deb screaming at her in front of everyone. "She had this look on her face like I was a monster," Lily recounts. "And she never spoke to me again."
Karen seethes up to Rick, who's toweling off after his dip in the tank. "Your daughter has much too good an arm," he laughs. She doesn't. She growls, "You can do whatever you want with your life, but if you put me in a situation where everyone on the entire planet knows my business before I do, and makes me the subject of general conversation, then the least you can do is let me in on the joke!" With a punctuating glare, she walks away. Rick stares after her, wondering if it was something he said.
After commercials, we find him rushing after Karen in the parking lot. She tells him to forget it, but he insists he just wants to explain. She's not interested. "I don't want you to leave," he says. "I'm not leaving!" she snaps, throwing open the hatchback on her van. "I left the pies in the back in the sun," she grumbles, grabbing at them. She starts walking back to the carnival, flatly saying, "I'm happy you have a life." Rick trails after her, starting to explain that "this all just started --" Karen spins and cuts him off: "Oh, clearly this has been going on long enough for every woman in this school to be giving me worried looks!" Rick tries to apologize, and she snaps that she doesn't want him or anybody else to be sorry. Use the pie! Hurl it! She says he should have just told her, and let that be the end of it, but he's incapable of having the hard conversations and hurting people and "god forbid someone should be mad at [Rick]!" Her words find their mark. Karen looks at him looking at the ground and then says, "These are melting," before spinning on her heels and carrying her pies off to the bake table. I really wish she had thrown one.