This is the weakest book in the series so far, as it focuses on Reeve's college experience of skipping class and putting Janie's deepest secrets and ugliest thoughts out live on the radio. As a boyfriend he just keeps getting worse, and as a character he has no real redeeming qualities. Other than his physical appearance, we don't even know why Janie likes him so much. Yes, he was physically there when she was in need of a friend, but the reader knows that while he was holding her and making sympathetic noises, he was really wishing she'd just shut up and take her clothes off already.

Spoiler

But she didn't, so he stripped her naked for an unseen audience instead and excused it by saying he'd never used any last names. Their breakup is ugly and difficult to witness, but I was thinking FINALLY the entire time. Finally, Janie is free to worry about herself and her parents and not where Reeve is or what he wants from her. Except that's not true. Janie very plainly tells him to leave her alone--no phone calls, no visits, tell the parents he met someone else so that they don't have to be hurt by the enormity of his betrayal, or worry about long lost Hannah hearing the story and showing up.

Of course all of these things fail. Hannah, or someone pretending to be her, has already called the station, and Reeve hung up on her, erased the tape, and told no one. Janie herself makes the decision to tell one set of parents because she can't carry the awful burden herself, but it's not the parents who live next door to Reeve. This allows Reeve to, as fucking always, ignore what Janie wants, what she needs, and call her incessantly to insist that she accept his apology. No matter how many times she hangs up on him, he just calls right back. And comes over to her house, forcing her to be friendly when she wants to kill him.

The saddest part of this is that Reeve, in a rare moment of self-awareness, refers to what he did talking about Janie on the air as rape. Yet he's incapable of seeing that by forcing himself on her afterwards, when she's made it so clear that just the sight of him in physically painful, he's not expressing sorrow, he's continuing the violation. This is a book about families, all the different shapes they can take and how hard they are to hold together, and in the middle of all these cautious people carefully trying to be kind, is useless bumbling unrelated Reeve, shoving his ego everywhere that he can't shove his dong, mind-fucking everyone in his endless quest to be the center of attention.

I sincerely hope the series ends with Janie grown up enough to cut him out for good. Even if he manages to grow and mature, nothing is going to change the past where he pimped her like a whore to all of Boston in exchange for popularity in his dorm. I'm pretty sure if Janie lets that slide I'll never forgive her.