Sweet Valley University #7: Good Bye to Love

Lila Fowler hasn’t been mentioned a whole lot in this series, so I got excited when I realized she was *finally* coming back. After dealing with Jessica’s whiny, bratty side for too long, I’m ready for someone who can put her in her place. Lila was supposed to attend Sweet Valley University, but the summer before, she went to Italy and stayed with her aunt.

She met Tisano, a count and fell head over heels in love, within a week of course. They got married, she became a countess and only occasionally wrote her best friend back home. Then he dies in a jet skiing accident and her parents come to Italy to get her. She’s now auditing classes at SVU until she can register the following semester.

Jess gives Lila a tour of campus and shows her the Theta house. Bitchy Alison is there and makes a comment about how a “widow and divorcee” with really liven up and the house and I just had to laugh. I would like to know why Alison always has so much power when she’s vice-president and the president is rarely mentioned, but whatever. Lila makes a comment right back because it turns out Alison is a huge klepto, but no one at school knows.

Steven was ordered by the court to help Mike, which doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. He was charged with attempted murder and assault, but the charges were dropped. So what did they charge him with that made him do this? He’s basically Mike’s maid: he goes to his apartment, cooks dinner, cleans, does the laundry and then leaves. He can’t stop bitching about everything and Billie ends up leaving him.

Liz is so crazy in love with Tom that she pretty much never leaves him. All they do is wander around campus, make out in random places and ignore everyone/everything else. Todd keeps calling because she promised to do a story on the school not taking any responsibility for the athlete favoring thing, but she keeps blowing him off. He eventually turns to Alex because she’s all depressed over her boyfriend Mark leaving and they start drinking too much. See where this is going?

Jess turns into Liz, studying all the time and rarely going out. She even memorizes a poem that Liz left lying around, which will come in handy later. Then she runs into James Montgomery on campus and he’s a super hunky pre-med major and frat boy, who just happens to be a friend of Bruce Patman’s.

Bruce actually gets a story here, which makes me think that whoever wrote it must have wrote some of the old Sweet Valley High books. He just got his hands on a $10 million trust fund and runs out to buy his first plane. He keeps bragging about how great it is and Lila puts him in his place. She and her husband had a custom made plane and she has her own pilot’s license, so basically anything Bruce can do, she can do better.

Lila gets a little depressed, trying to play the perfect college student when she still feels like a widow. Bruce is the one person who expresses any feelings or emotions for her about what happened and reminds her that he knows what it feels like to lose someone you love because of Regina Morrow dying. Instead of thanking him, she gets pissed off because she was married and that’s real love, not a high school fling. Of course you could argue that Bruce and Regina were together longer…He even calls later to invite her out flying with him.

Liz freaks out because her and Tom have a special anniversary planned. It’s their “big” one-week anniversary and it bothers me that it’s only been a week and they’re already acting like a married couple. Tom is upset because a bunch of stuff happened with Todd that was never wrote in the books. Like Todd got drunk and stood outside Liz’s window, he followed them around campus one day and interrupted a date. This could have been a whole book! So she doesn’t want to do anything to disappoint him, but she has to read a poem at a poetry slam for her English class the same night as their date. Luckily Jess agrees to do it, as long as Liz buys her two new dresses.

She shows up at the poetry slam, does an excellent job and everyone believes that she’s Liz. All she can think about is going home and changing into better clothes, but then James pops up. He was at the slam and wants to know why she’s pretending to be Liz. She gets all excited because that means he really likes her.

So Jess and James go out for coffee and he kind of asks her out for another date (I told you!), but she hesitates because of Mike. He tells her that he knows she’s married and she tells him that their marriage will be annulled. She finally decides to spend more time with him, but that she’s not really ready for dating. Give it another book…

Liz and Tom have a great date, but she gets all worried when he wants to take her home because things are moving too fast. Hey, you exchanged “I love you’s” before you even had your first date, so what do you expect? Eventually they spend the night together, but she makes it clear that nothing can happen.

Liz finds an official looking letter for her twin and passes it along. Turns out that it’s the letter saying that her marriage is annulled. Liz is all excited because that means it’s over, but Jess still feels indebted to Mike. She goes to visit him once, but then runs away because she hears her brother inside.

I’d like to point out that her marriage was annulled in about a week, which isn’t even long enough to file the paperwork! The “trial” happened right around the time that Liz and Tom got together so we’re supposed to believe that crippled Mike wheeled himself to the court, filed the paperwork, signed the papers, got a copy to Jess, had her sign them and had a judge rule within a week. Sure. Plus, why would it even be annulled? They were married for like 2-3 months, lived together and slept together.

Anyway…Billie decides to forgive Steve and drops off Chinese food for them one night. Steven is starting to think that Mike is having a change of heart because he actually says thank you one night and seems to be trying harder. He goes into the kitchen to wash dishes and a few minutes later, starts feeling woozy. The pilot light went out, but the gas is still on and it’s slowly filling the apartment. Just as he tries to warn Mike, he passes out on the floor…