Chapter 8, What do I do with all of this?

Recap:
Welcome back to our little book club. Last chapter was a big one; Meri went to Alaska with the family and Zero glowered about the fact, from a distance, while on a trip of his own. He barely pretended to care about the exciting details of her vacation but was pleased when Meri finally announced on camera that she wanted to leave the clan and do her own thing. When Meri returned to Las Vegas, the couple reunited by phone and fell in love all over again, for at least 5 seconds or so. Zero claims Meri snaps and demands they meet face to face and discuss where the Zero wants to take the relationship. For reasons no one understands, Zero refuses, only to eventually relent and agree to meet at Tropical Smoothie. However, when the time to meet rolls around, Meri is a no show and it looks like it's splitsville for these star crossed lovers.

Just a quick note- these final chapters are super short. Really, two of them are about three pages each. I'll try my best to get them all out this week!

Chapter 8:
The Zero is recounting the beginning of the month of September, again; he’s randomly decided that the reader needs three more chapters of this saga so those pages have got to come from somewhere and material is getting really thin. Even though his relationship with Meri has been in the worst spot it’s been the entire book he’s optimistic, “In between August and that first week of September 7th, I had so much hope.” Kay. Maybe he wrote Chapter 7 differently in his head than I read it- things seemed pretty darn hopeless.

He’s preparing, in nonsensical Zero fashion, for his Tropical Smoothie reunion with his lady love; he got a new haircut and bought a brand new suit. He got a new suit… to go to Tropical Smoothie- a sentence that has never been said by anyone in human history. Really, they make other articles of clothing for millionaires; suits aren’t like the uniform they have to wear everywhere, even though the author seems to think so. Hell, even Christian Grey managed to take off the suit when he went to stalk Anastasia while she was working at the hardware store. Take notes from the fictional, marginally superior, definitely sociopathic, controlling billionaires who have come before you. Zero also bought an engagement ring and popped it into his pocket to bring with him to the meeting. Sensing that proposing in the tackiest place imaginable would have provided Kate with much amusement and mirth, he dashes my hopes instantly by announcing, “I wasn't going to propose to her at Tropical Smoothie … I was going to propose to her later that night.” Just can't let a girl have a good time, can you. “If things went bad,” which they almost certainly would, “I was going to give her the ring because I had it inscribed and what could I do with it?” Hey it's engraved now, nothing you can do about that- might as well pitch it in the street. How this guy gets through life I'll never know.

Zero waiting at the old Tropical Smoothie- visual approximation

(Photo assistance provided by the lovely @netterrrr)

We already know that Meri doesn’t show up; Zero reminds us of this fact, “No call. No text. She was gone.” He maintains that, “And not gone because she was mad or didn't love me anymore. The very last time we talked she said 4 times that she did love me.” So she loves you so much that she cut you off without giving you any reason and then ditched you last minute without any explanation. Okay then. I really don’t understand the Zero’s frame of mind at this point, well, any point in the book really. I can't pinpoint what he feels Meri's reasoning is for any of this.

“So what do I do with all of this?” the Zero asks helplessly. Be an adult? Act like a man? I don’t know. Personally, if my pseudo fiancé changed their mind about our engagement on a dime and then stood me up for our scheduled meeting I would be bending heaven and earth to find out why. I would at least show up at their house; if you’re practically their fiancé that would be perfectly reasonable to do. If they ask you to leave, well then you leave; at least you’ll know you tried and you’ll know that it’s absolutely over. Call. Text. E-mail. Skype. Do something if you can’t talk to them face to face. Do anything. Living in this emotional limbo is just so silly and unnecessary. But if I’ve learned anything from this book it’s that, if it’s ridiculous and stupid, the Zero’s name is all over it; he opts instead to, “[cry] a lot. I was so lost.” Good job bro.

Crisis management- Zero style

Zero is now in pity party mode; just picture him wandering around his condo in a bathrobe that he hasn’t changed for a week while sobbing hysterically and you’ve pretty much gotten the gist of this chapter. “I tried to get myself together,” he moans, “and just when I thought I would be feel better a song would come on that would make me think of her. Or I would be see something that I had in my house for her.” And when he thinks about Meri it’s like the break up just happened all over again, and he’s back to rocking in the fetal position. “I couldn’t take it,” laments the Zero, and he decides that the only way to deal with the pain in his heart is to move “back” to Chicago, even though he said he was living in Oklahoma City at the start of the book.

Before he can move, however, a family emergency springs up back in his birth state of Nebraska. He doesn’t describe the emergency or tell us who it involves specifically; I’m at a total loss because he’s whined that he’s an orphan with no living relatives at least three times in the book so far. Maybe they’re very distant relations? Who knows. Even though the family has just suffered some sort of terrible calamity, and would presumably be preoccupied by it, they start asking Zero about the things they’d seen in the press about his relationship with Meri. Zero feels obligated to these people he’s previously led us to believe were all dead and, “I confessed it all. I told them I had an affair with a married woman please forgive me.” He doesn’t stop unburdening himself there either; he starts confessing his sins to his childhood friends as well. His friends respond by being unbelievably self-righteous and displeased, “I lost some friends that I had since I was 10 years old turn their back on me. They said God doesn't forgive affairs.” Ouch, and to think of all the times you took the fall for them on the playground; guess that stop snitching thing really worked out for you.

Remember when you bragged about the stop snitching thing for a whole page? Kate does

So with a failed relationship and disastrous family reunion behind him, he’s back to his posh condo in downtown Chicago. He tries to move forward, “I buried myself into work and hanging out with my friends. I traveled a little and did the best I could to try and get over this,” but he just can’t shake his sense of loss. He says he begins to question everything in his life; “I felt so unlovable and absolutely worthless.” He sinks into a dark emo place where he stops talking about love and hope, or even talking much at all, and a nasty rumor crops up on social media that he had killed himself. And when his own "real-life" friends are saying things like "he's gone," or "R.I.P. Sam" it sort of seems like, if he didn't create the rumor himself, he definitely perpetuated it; it's basically what you'd expect a Sociopath to do in order to elicit a response from their victim or shock them into returning to the fold.

In mid-September the nasty, no good internet trolls are back and they start harassing the Zero, and his perma-sidekick Lindsay, to a greater degree. He suggests that these people are hypocrites, who previously called Meri terrible things, and are now giving her “false, fake, and photoshopped information that she was looking at.” Which, logically, wouldn't mean a thing to Meri. Presumably, though he doesn't say so, the trolls were telling her that he wasn't real, or even a male, and providing her with whatever evidence they had collected. If she'd pranced around Disneyland, gone to Hobby Lobby every weekend, and had sex with him, then this would just make her chuckle at the absurdity and nothing more. Meri is interested in what they have to say though; “because she gave them attention they continued to feed it to her.” Meri even passes the information on to her friends; Zero is chagrined that one of her good friends takes it upon herself to make her own anonymous Twitter account to bash him in defense of her wounded gal pal. Which, again, is not the reaction of someone whose friend's relationship just didn't pan out; is exactly the reaction of someone whose friend has been duped into believing their love interest was a hunky millionaire and turned out to be a female con artist. Lindsay then comes to the rescue and, “found out it was her and called her out on it. Soon after the woman deleted that account because it was spilling over to her real personal twitter account.”

At the end of the day, Zero would like us to feel very, very sorry for him and says, “The rumors got worse everyday and eventually lead me to lose clients, vendors, and a lot of projects that I wanted to bid on. My entire life, my name, everything was falling apart.” I could probably scrounge up an ounce of remorse for him if he'd done, I don't know... anything to defend himself or fix his relationship with Meri. Really, all he's done this chapter is cry, run away, and possibly fake his own death. Sucks to suck buddy.

The entire chapter in a single gif- visual approximation

He closes tearfully, “September was bad but what happened in October was worse.”

-Kate