Going too Far (50-99)

Summary
After her first night assisting Officer After's job, Meg found out that he was a guy who graduated from her school, who sat in the same Spanish class as her last year and who is only nineteen years old. Tiffany realized it first and then told Meg when they all encountered at the hospital. Officer After nodded after Meg asked for clarification and she realized she was way wrong about him being forty with a wife and five kids. His real name is John After but people often called him Johnafter in high school. After staring at his picture in the yearbook and seeing how much he changed himself during police academy, she realized she had a crush on him. However, things went a little downhill the next night on the job when John told Meg that he picked her to do the police work with him under the program because she reminded him of the girl that died earlier on the same railroad tracks Meg was rescued from. He told her that both of them thought they needed a boy to show them life knowing he is nothing but trouble and they won't admit it to themselves. Meg screamed at him and released herself from the police car. They had a brief talk and then headed back to searching for criminals which was easy to do since Meg had a 'brilliant criminal mind' and knew where the criminals would hid themselves.
During this section, Meg also met John's High School friends who invited her to a party which John disapproved of and became irritated when Meg said yes, she would be there. He is trying to protect her, but Meg only wants to play by her rules.

Quote
"He turned to me with his arms crossed on his chest. Which of course he should not have done, because I knew exactly what that meant. He felt vulnerable" (Echols 80).

Reaction
Once Meg found out that Officer Meg was only nineteen she started to realized how vulnerable he was. She continued to notice and note every move he made that made it clear that he was vulnerable. When he crossed his arms against his chest, I guess that symbolizes that his heart is fragile and that he can't afford to get it broken by this blue-haired criminal who is only a year and a half younger than him. Maybe that is why she thought also. Either way, she is good at figuring out people and their feelings, not only John's but other characters in the story also.

Going too Far (1-49)

Summary
This bildungsroman, Going too Far by Jennifer Echols, started out pretty weird. The narrator is a seventeen year old no-goodnik girl with blue hair and a crazy ambition. One night, she brought herself, her boyfriend and the top two highest GPA students at her school to a railroad track. Being a troublemaker, she influenced the two innocent students, Brian and Tiffany, into getting drunk and heading to a restricted railroad bridge to move their relationship to the "next level". She wore a low-cut shirt that read Peer Pressure on the front in order to lure her boyfriend into her desires. It was her way of ignoring the legendary story of the couples that were killed on that same railroad track a few years before when they decided to fool around over there. Fortunately, a police officer, named Officer After, had followed them to the bridge and demanded they come out after a few moments of messing around and drinking on the bridge. They came to realized that if they hadn't gotten away from the tracks, they would have been killed by the high-speed train that passed by after they were back on safe ground. The four teenagers were taken to the police stations where they were picked up by their parents. Meg, the narrator, however, stayed overnight at the jail since her parents did not care to come pick her up. The officer put her, Brian and Tiffany into a program called Powers That Be where they would spend the nights of their spring breaks observing ambulance, fire truck or police jobs (Meg's boyfriend, Eric, got away with it since his father is a lawyer). Meg was placed into the police assistant job so she was to follow Officer After around while he is doing his night shifts. The "sneaky shit" that ruined her spring break is now starting to be fun for Meg to follow around as she came to realize that he is "cute".

Quote
"The blood drained from my face and pooled around my feet. My heart sped up, pumping nothing" (Echols 41).

Reaction
Although the narrator Meg is a lunatic, she uses a lot of vocabulary words and literary devices. I often had to write words down to look up or reread a passage over to understand what she literally means. This quote stood out to me out of all of her figurative language because it was so easy to imagine. This quote uses personification because blood cannot drain from a place and then pool to another place. Well, it can, but not physically so therefore it is personification.