Episode Report Card Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Barefoot At Capefest
By Wing Chun | Season 3 | Episode 11 | Aired on 01.11.2000
On another part of the beach, we re-join the conversation in progress. Ethan is telling Jack, "After the train ride, I thought for sure you'd ask for my number." Jack says, "Yeah, well, typical paranoia set in. What can I say?" Ethan says he figured as much. Jack asks why Ethan didn't ask for his number, and Ethan smugly replies, "Because I could. It's more important that you learn to ask; you're the newbie, remember?" Uh, whatever you say, Queer-Gon Jinn. GOD, could this guy be any more condescending? I'm thinking he can't. Jack mumbles, "Yeah. Newbie. Uh, the barely-out gay kid soon to have his heart broken, right?" "Good recall!" says Ethan. Jack says there's not much he's likely to forget about that conversation: "That was a first for me." Incredulously, Ethan asks, "That was your first time talking to another gay kid?" Jack says that it was, "unless you count the internet," WHICH WE DO. Ethan says, "I...I don't." Well, of course you don't, jackass.
Jen struggles "comically" with the tent. Some guy walks by holding such a tiny piece of food in his hand that it's impossible to tell what it is until Jen demands to know where he got it, and he points up the beach to another guy who's "a genius with a veggie burger." Like it takes any skill to barbecue a veggie burger. They only come in two states -- Hot and Not Hot. It's not like you can master the skill of cooking a veggie burger blue rare or medium well. Whatever. We then hear the voice of the veggie burger genius exhorting his fellow Capefesters to "get 'em while they're hot" (see? Hot), and Jen abandons the tent to go get her some. Of course, the veggie burger genius is Henry "Freshman" Parker. Without looking up, he asks, "Would you like your bun toasted?" and Jen replies, "I thought you'd never ask." He turns his puppy-dog eyes skyward and says nothing. "Hey," she beams, and he pouts, "Hey." She admires the crowd he's managed to assemble, and he tells her he doesn't have time for small talk, and asks if she wants a burger or not. She looks momentarily taken aback, but quickly recovers her composure and says that she does. He fusses with the grill, continuing not to look at her, and she asks him if he'd mind helping her with her tent. He looks at her. She grins back at him far too widely. Yeah, he's the guy you should get to help. Henry stares at her some more, and then tells some guy behind him to take over the grill for a minute.
As they stroll through the camp area, Jen remarks that Henry never told her he was a vegetarian. He replies that she never asked. Finally catching her snap, she says, "Do I detect a note of ambivalence in seeing me?" He doesn't seem ambivalent to me; he seems to have decided pretty definitely that seeing her is a bad thing, but anyway he says, "That would be correct." She asks if there's any particular reason for that, which is spectacularly disingenuous of her if you ask me, and apparently if you ask Henry too, because he says, "You mean besides the fact that you led me on for the sole purpose of crushing me underfoot?" Jen looks stricken, and says, "That's not true, Henry, and you know it." Henry says, "You could have fooled me." Jen asks what he means, and Henry says, "Don't tell me that you're not taking some small satisfaction in...being on the requited side of unrequited love." Jen says she thought they agreed to be friends. "Friends?!" Henry spits. "You haven't even noticed, have you?" "Noticed what?" Jen asks. Henry loses it: "That we haven't spoken in over a month! For the past four weeks I've been giving you the silent treatment and it hasn't even registered on your radar screen! Hell, I could have fallen off a cliff ten thousand feet for all you care...You know what? You can put up your own damn tent!" She really had that coming -- not for refusing to go out with him, but for playing up to his veggie burgers like none of that other stuff happened.