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girlofpreyPairing Post
Book - Freeze Tag by Caroline B. Cooney: Megan/Lannie
Hello. A while ago I said I was thinking about doing a thing where every fourth week instead of doing a film pairing picspam I would do either a post about a non-film/non-visual pairing, or a picspam for a film I like but don't have a pairing for. That was a while ago when I was still (two weeks in) doing these posts every week, but I'm trying to get back on track and I decided to do the non-film pairing one. You're getting this a day late because yesterday mostly involved sleeping until 4pm, trying to get up and get wash and dressed and cram in at least two meals before midnight, and then watching Comic Relief for most of the night. And I don't really want to put it off till next week again. So. I'm doing it today.
Freeze Tag is a book I bought when I was a teenager, from the Point Horror range, which I used to read a lot of around that time. People who know me very well will probably be unsurprised to hear about that. Anyway, the pairing is probably a lot more to do with things I made up in my head than things that actually happen in the book - I only really started considering it is as a pairing a good possibly 10 years after last reading the book, when I was thinking about pairings, and femslash pairings I might have. I reread the book a few weeks ago to make this post, and it really is not as good as I remember it being. This is VERY MUCH not a rec. But I still quite liked the pairing, and I wanted to talk about it anyway. And it's the only pairing I've done any sort of prep for at all. So this is what I'm posting about. Also, this is a pretty fucked up pairing. Just in case you were wondering, or haven't learned to generally expect that from me.
So. Freeze Tag is basically the story of a few kids who live on a street in America called Dark Fern Lane. Namely, Meghan Moore, the Trevor family children West, Tuesday and Brown, and Lannie Anveill.
The only picture I can provide you with for this pairing is the book cover, but I do quite like it, so here it is.
Anyway. The book starts out with the kids as young kids, Meghan's 10 and I think Lannie is 9, and it's from Meghan's point of view, as ever. They're all hanging out in the street, but it's pretty obvious there's a bit of a divide in the street. And it's pretty obvious they're not that happy about hanging out with Lannie. Meghan especially.
""Suppose," said Lannie dreamily, "that you really could freeze somebody."
The setting sun seemed to shine right through Lannie, as if she were made of colored glass and hung in a window.
Lannie's eyes, as pale as though they had been bleached in the wash, focused on Meghan.
Meghan gulped and looked away, queerly out of breath. If she kept looking into Lannie's eyes, she would come out the other side.
Into what?
[...]
Meghan tried to ignore Lannie. This was not easy. Lannie always stood as close to you as a sweater, trying to take your share of oxygen." (pages 1-2)
Meghan on the other hand, adores the Trevor family. She's best friends with Tuesday, has a crush on Tuesday's older brother West, doesn't mind their much younger brother Brown, and is constantly expecting pink lemonade, brownies, and all kinds of treats from the Trevor's kitchen, and seems to be very often correct to expect that. She dislikes Lannie because Lannie scares her. Tuesday shortly invites Meghan over to a sleepover at her house that night. Meghan accepts. Lannie informs them that she'll be coming too. Tuesday says she can only have one person to sleep over at her house. Which they all basically know is a lie. Meghan is torn.
"Meghan wanted to do the right thing, the kind thing, and have Lannie sleep over, too, but Lannie was too scary. Meghan never wanted to be alone in the dark with Lannie Anveill. Lannie never made any noise when she moved. When you thought you were alone, the hair on the back of your neck would move in a tiny hot wind, and it would be Lannie, who had sneaked up close enough to breathe on your spine." (page 6)
So no-one says anything, and Lannie doesn't get to sleep over. She makes her anger about this pretty explicit.
""I hate you, Meghan Moore," said Lannie." (page 6)
Meghan is kind of upset that Lannie hates her, particularly, when it's Tuesday who's not letting her sleep over. But she also understands it, because she knows that Lannie loves the Trevors the same way that Meghan loves the Trevors. Lannie can't hate Tuesday, because she wants Tuesday, and she hates Meghan for being the one chosen, who gets to go over and play with them and be their friend.
Anyway, so Lannie hates Meghan. She's not happy with the set-up in general. Then night falls, and Lannie tells them, Meghan, Tuesday, West and Brown, that they're playing a game of Freeze Tag, in which she is it. They all run off, and Lannie runs around "freezing" them. But Meghan, last to be frozen, knows something's not right and notices that the others are all freezing really well, and in slightly impossible positions. Then Lannie gets to freeze her, and Meghan realises the truth, that Lannie really can freeze people, into statues, for as long as she wants to. Lannie leaves them all frozen for a bit, then comes back and unfreezes West. Then she unfreezes Tuesday, and Brown. But she says she's not going to unfreeze Meghan, because she hates Meghan. West basically has to beg her to unfreeze Meghan, and she only does so after he promises he 'will always like her [Lannie] best'.
Then we get into the main part of the story, which is when Meghan is 15, West is 17, and Lannie is 14, and they're all in highschool. In the intervening years, West has fallen head over heels in love with Meghan, and Meghan, who's always had a crush on him, accepts this graciously, and they're a really solid couple. They've basically forgotten or repressed what happened on their street all those years ago, and barely think much of Lannie when she comes up to them to tell them/West that it's time for him to live up to his promise. But then she starts freezing people, just to remind them what she can do, and they're forced to remember and start dealing with it pretty quickly, which is what the rest of the book is about.
As I've said, it's not a great book. It's pretty trashy in the way a lot of gimmicky ("Horror", "Romance", etc) teen books probably were. But for a teen book, it does what it sets out to do pretty effectively, and is genuinely pretty chilling (no pun intended). Meghan and West, and later Meghan, West, Tuesday and Brown are in a pretty impossible situation, because no-one but they know about Lannie's power, no-one would probably believe them if they told them, and if anyone did believe them, Lannie has made it clear she'd just freeze them anyway. When Meghan and West first come to terms with what Lannie can do, and what she wants from them, Lannie comes pretty close to freezing Meghan just because Meghan makes her angry. Later on she basically threatens to freeze Meghan if West doesn't stay away from her, she does freeze West and Meghan when she catches them together, and she threatens to freeze Tuesday if West doesn't do as she says. And when eventually they decide to just stand up to Lannie, with Meghan and West continuing to stay together, they have a little face-off in the street one morning with West, Meghan, Tuesday and Brown all setting off to go to school together as Lannie comes out of her house. And Lannie quite calmly just walks over and freezes a bunch of elementary school children who are waiting for the bus down the street. So there's pretty much nothing they can do. They have to do what Lannie says, or she'll genuinely kill people.
But at the same time, it's often a pretty good study on the (likely, as far as I'm aware, and explained through fantasy) effects of emotional abuse and neglect on a child. It's made pretty clear that Lannie's parents don't really care about her. In the initial chapter, Meghan talks about how most parents on Dark Fern Lane buy the houses as a "first house" while saving up to buy a second, but Lannie's parents aren't saving up to buy a second house, because they spend all their money on cars, which is all they seem to care about. Lannie's parents split up at some point after the first chapter, and her dad leaves the house and gets a new girlfriend, who talks about how people have said she shouldn't expect to love Lannie for at least a few years, so she's not surprised she doesn't, right in front of Lannie. And Lannie's mother remarries a young guy called Jason, who gets a new dog for the family that both he and Lannie's mother seem to like more than Lannie. Meghan has a little flashback about it:
"How attractive everybody was! The fine strong stepfather! The magnificent cars! The lovely fluid Irish setter! Meghan had been awestruck. Her own family was dowdy and dull.
Jason, laughing happily, had hugged the dog.
"He's never hugged me," said Lannie." (page 48)
Lannie freezes the dog almost immediately, by the way. Lannie's mother died not long after that, so Lannie went to live with her father and his girlfriend. But one day Lannie's father's girlfriend turned up again with Lannie, saying Lannie's father had left them, so Lannie was Jason's responsibility now. So Lannie ended up living with a stepfather who barely cared about her.
"Lannie stayed. Jason continued to lead his own life. Lannie always seemed to have clean clothes and a recent shampoo. But that was all she had." (page 51)
But Lannie's also genuinely pretty frightening. Her mother died in a car crash, while Lannie was in the car, and on the day Lannie confronts West and Meghan and freezes the girl at school, Meghan works out that Lannie probably froze her mother, causing the crash. So you really do feel sorry for Lannie, but at the same time understand why everyone's afraid of her.
Meghan doesn't really treat Lannie very well, as I've said. And partly that's because again, Lannie is genuinely creepy, and then later genuinely frightening. But Caroline B. Cooney also makes it clear that it's because Meghan is quite young, and teenagers are kind of dicks.
"Meghan herself had everything: two parents who lived together and loved her, neighbors who included her, a boy who worshipped her, and a school in which she was popular and successful.
Meghan did not analyze these things. She did not ask why she was so lucky, nor worry about the people who were not. She was fifteen, which is not a particularly kind age. It's much better than thirteen, of course, and greatly superior to fourteen, but age sixteen is where compassion begins and the heart is moved by the plight of strangers." (pages 25-6)
I'm not sure I agree with Caroline B. Cooney there, but it's nice that she makes a point that Meghan doesn't care about people and things the way maybe she ought to do, and gives some sort of explanation for her behaviour. The book also serves as a, not always exactly subtle, story about how Meghan is growing up, and comes to realise that the perfection and excitement she likes is not always the best thing to be involved in, or even the best thing for her, and that you at some point should probably start taking responsibility for or at least notice of the bad things happening around you. This comes in the form of her slight disillusionment with the Trevors, which may or may not have been happening before the later part of the story even started. When Lannie first comes to remind them of her powers and the promise West made to her, Meghan can see in West's eyes that he basically just doesn't want to deal with it, and she's sort of immediately disappointed in him. Although she sort of represses that and berates herself for thinking that for a bit. She also finds Tuesday's reaction to being a cheerleader and therefore super-popular a bit strange. And when Lannie forces West to dump Meghan and start dating her, and Meghan almost can't stand to be around the Trevors anymore or it's to dangerous for her to do so when Lannie is around, she ends up having to spend more time with her own parents, who she always felt were dull and nagging compared to the Trevors, and she starts to realise maybe she's be doing them a massive disservice all these years.
"But I never wanted to be here, thought Meghan. I always wanted to be over at the Trevors'. What was the matter with me? Home was wonderful. Why was I so sure theirs was more wonderful?
"Mom? Did it ever bother you that I spent so much time at the Trevors'?"
"Oh, yes. It bothered your father more, though. I knew you needed the company. You're very sociable. You like noise and people. There aren't enough of us here, and your father and I are too quiet for you. It used to hurt Daddy's feelings terribly that the instant we finished dinner you'd bolt out the door and go to the Trevors', where things were fun."
"Did it hurt your feelings?"
"In a way. I always wished the neighborhood kids would come here for a change. Sometimes I'd stock up on Popsicles or candy popcorn or jelly doughnuts and hope I'd be the one who got the kids, but I never was." (pages 102-3)
And from that, it helps her understand a little more about Lannie, and why she is the way she is.
"She knew with stab of understanding that she had been able to spend such huge amounts of time at other people's houses because she had known absolutely that her parents would love her anyway. She had been safe doing anything at all. Safe in love.
And Lannie ...
What had Lannie been?
Unsafe.
Without love. Without even a molecule of love.
Unsafe.
If you are not brought up in the safety of love, thought Meghan Moore, you yourself become unsafe. It is unsafe to be near Lannie. She is as dangerous as a collapsing bridge or a caving-in cliff. All because of love." (pages 103-4)
Sadly, that last paragraph doesn't have Meghan instantly rushing to be compassionate and nice to Lannie. But I wanted to include it because, while it's a bit heavy-handed, it's probably one of my favourite parts in the book.
But the relationship between Meghan and Lannie isn't just a growing understanding of her on Meghan's side. It's also pretty clearly a rivalry between the two of them, up to a point. You may have got a sense from some of the quotes that Meghan and Lannie are unusually focused on each other. The theme that the Trevors are what Lannie wants, but Meghan is who she hates/cares about upsetting, is one that's often carried forward. There are parts about Lannie suddenly looking at Meghan with an I've-got-something-you-want smirk, as though they're locked in a genuine popularity battle, instead of a slightly hellish supernatural situation. And Meghan. Well. Her concern over Lannie's powers and focus on/knowledge of her is sometimes a little alarming. When I was studying Gothic Literature at University, there were a number of themes that I liked, and one of them was the idea of "homosexual panic". It's a concept that gets aimed at or turns up in (depending on your interpretation) a lot of things like vampire literature or other chase or claustrophobic-type narratives with a main male character, and is apparently the feeling by a character that another man/male knows everything about them, everything they're doing, and can see into their mind and understand them in ways they even can't. This is not a textbook definition, I should add. It's just what I vaguely remember. And on rereading Freeze Tag, it seemed to be turning up in spades. Meghan feels "stripped" by Lannie's looks. There's a lot of mention of the fact that - when Meghan's not shouting at Lannie, occasionally because of panic - as I quoted from the initial chapter, Meghan finds it hard to look at Lannie. There's also a separate paragraph about how whenever Meghan liked anyone (boys, from the context), she found it hard to look at them or talk to them, except for West. But whether or not we were meant to LINK THOSE TWO THINGS TOGETHER, I DO NOT KNOW. But on the first day Lannie reminds Meghan and West about her powers and what she wants from West, after Lannie makes West drop Meghan off at home and drive off with her, we get this scene:
"She got out of the garage, up the stairs, into the safe more open dark of the living parts of the house. She turned on no lights. She did not want Lannie Anveill, across the street, to see that she was home.
Although of course Lannie always knew.
And Lannie, who could materialize anywhere, anytime, Lannie might suddenly be leaning against the wallpaper right here in this room, with her little chuckle of ice and snow.
It was a matter of will not to turn on the lights and make sure that the corners were empty. Lannie isn't here, Meghan told herself. I'm not going to be a baby and panic." (page 67)
So. Yes.
Anyway. So, things go on. Meghan, West, Tuesday and Brown see no way out, and West is forced to keep dating Lannie, and Meghan has to sort of stay away from them, largely. She starts to feel sorry, or sorrier, for Lannie, but wishes Lannie didn't start having things in her life by taking away what Meghan has. But then West and the Trevors start to act a bit funny.
""No," said West meditatively. "I think Lannie has to be ended."
How little emotion lay in his voice. Lannie must be ended." (page 133)
West talks about all the ways he'd thought of trying to kill or destroy Lannie, including possibly killing himself along with her. Meghan is not really up for that. She makes it pretty clear in the book that she thinks Lannie is evil, but she doesn't want to actually kill her, whatever Lannie has done. Eventually West stops talking to Meghan about that stuff, but Tuesday and Brown think it's because maybe he really is in love with Lannie now. So they have to start making their own plans.
""Well, there's no helping [Lannie's stepfather Jason, who's been frozen] now," said Tuesday. "And probably no helping West either. We have to look out for ourselves."
The popcorn stuck in Meghan's throat.
"So the question here is," said Brown, rubbing a popcorn against the side of the bowl to slick up extra butter and salt, "how do we end Lannie?"" (page 148)
Meghan still is not up for it.
Time goes on, no-one ends Lannie, West keeps going out with her, Meghan keeps going over to the Trevors' house to hang out with Tuesday. It seems like they're never going to get out of the situation they're in. And then we get the ending. I should say now, MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING BELOW. IF YOU HAVE ANY INTEREST IN READING THE BOOK AND DON'T WANT TO KNOW, LOOK AWAY NOW.
And, by the way, I LOVE the ending. So one day a few weeks after everything has happened with West, Tuesday, Brown and Lannie, after a few days or a week or so of heavy snowfall, Meghan is over at the Trevors' house hanging around with Tuesday. Then eventually someone comes to the door, and it's Lannie, looking for West. Tuesday tells her that West isn't in, but that he's going to work on his truck straight after school. We've heard a lot about the truck over the course of the book, it's an old truck that West is fixing up, in some spare land/woods behind their houses, and it's still pretty beat up, the engine doesn't run, the seats are all messed up and the doors don't even open from the inside. So Tuesday tells Lannie to go down to the truck and just wait for him there. Which Lannie does. Meghan and Tuesday continue to hang around together, and eventually it's dinnertime at the Trevors', which Meghan helps cook and then stays for. West is also there again, and Meghan ends up sitting next to him at the table. They finish dinner and it's time for dessert. Then West's mother suddenly asks then, if it's over between West and Lannie, if he and Meghan are back together.
"I forgot Lannie! She's still waiting for him down in the truck! Meghan swerved to look at Tuesday, so Tuesday would give West the message. Certainly Meghan didn't want to deliver it. She was as full of happiness as the night was full of dark. She didn't even want to utter the name, because it would break her happy spell like an icicle hitting the pavement.
Both Tuesday's eyelids went down slowly, in a sort of double wink. How like Lannie she suddenly looked. Hooded, evil eyes. Eyes that had seen terrible things. Eyes that had seen through to the other side.
"Lannie's out of the picture," agreed Tuesday. She, too, smiled broadly. She met West's eyes and now his smile came out. Meghan could not move. Out of the corner of her eyes she checked Brown. No smile had ever been wider." (page 162)
Meghan is pretty chilled by this behaviour, but she doesn't say anything. Mr Trevor decides they should finish off the meal with ice-cream, and Meghan goes to get it out of the freezer.
"So cold in there. How chilly the boxes of vegetables and desserts must be. Meghan shut the door, leaving the cold boxes to their dark frozen lives. They had to lie there until somebody wanted them. They had no exit without human hands. There were no handles on the insides of refrigerator doors.
Handles.
There are no handles on the inside of the truck doors, either, thought Meghan Moore. Lannie cannot get out of the truck." (page 163)
Meghan realises that with the snowfall, and given that Lannie has no family left expecting her home, Lannie will freeze to death by morning and no-one will even look for her until the snow thaws. Meanwhile, West, Tuesday and Brown are all continuing on asking for what hot drink they want with their dessert. And then, in a scene that took much longer in the book than I remembered it doing, while Meghan is wandering around sort of numb she realises that no-one will look for Lannie because no-one knows she's there, except for West, Tuesday and Brown. And then she realises, that actually, no-one knows Lannie's there except for West, Tuesday, Brown, and her. And then she does some thinking, and spills her cider, and realises that it's her, as well as them, that's sitting by while Lannie dies.
And then after that we get the ending, which I'm probably going to end up quoting in it's entirety.
"Meghan Moore got up from the table. She walked to the back door. It was difficult. Her feet dragged and she bumped into the jamb. The doorknob did not fit her hand and the wind when she opened the door assaulted her.
She heard voices behind her, but they were Trevor voices. The voices of people to whom things came easily. The voices of people who expected things to work out their way. Meghan did not know if she still loved the Trevors.
The one I have to love most, she thought, is me.
If I don't love myself, I cannot go on.
The cold was no longer an enemy. Instead it woke her and embraced her with its demands.
This is what it means, thought Meghan Moore, to choose the lesser of two evils. Lannie is evil, but it would be more evil to stand aside and silently let her die.
Meghan had never gone through snow so deep, through darkness so thick. She found the truck by feel. She opened the door of the cab and Lannie fell into her arms.
Meghan helped Lannie to walk.
"Come in my house where it's warm," said Meghan.
Lannie said nothing.
Perhaps she was too cold to speak.
Or perhaps...she had waited all her life to come in where it was warm." (pages 165-6)
I love that ending so much. And I know that it is pat and super-moral and everything, but it was genuinely one of the first endings I think I ever read, definitely one of the first in the Point Horror series I think, that wasn't just about punishing the bad guys or destroying the evil. And given that the book is as much about neglect and the treatment of abused children as it is about supernatural powers and horror, I think it's a pretty lovely message to try to give. It's the main reason I still love the book even though it's really not great. I love that Lannie is how Meghan grows up. I love that it's all about Lannie terrorising Meghan a bit and hating her, and possibly taking West as much to take him away from Meghan as much as to get him for herself, and then Meghan has the chance to actually finally be rid of her, and doesn't, and saves her instead. Even though the fact the Trevor kids were at that point attempted murderers and that had clearly taken some of the sheen off them a bit for Meghan, I love that she absolutely made the definite choice between staying with them and having her boyfriend and her popularity and her life back, and she chose not ignoring the harm that would be done to Lannie to get it. And I just. Love it. As I say, a lot of it's pretty heavy-handed about the whole thing, but some of it's really great, and quite beautiful, and I love that that's the ultimate message. Even if you do think Lannie's pretty evil by the end of it. Would Meghan letting the Trevors' kill of somebody else be that much better?
As for the pairing, well, as I say, it's one that only sort of occured to me a year or two ago, when I was thinking about pairings and the story and things. But I do remember when I was younger, I think, dreaming up what would happen when Lannie got back to Meghan's house, and maybe ended up living with her. I mean, Meghan and Lannie are clearly a bit obsessed with each other, or overly-focused really. And that ending, for me, is pretty amazing. But most of the really beautiful stuff from the pairing sort of happens after the ending, in my head, for me. Like the part where Meghan takes her back to her house to warm up, and Meghan's parents are all over Lannie worrying about her and trying to take care of her, and Lannie is just not really saying anything because she doesn't know how to handle it. And maybe she ends up living with Meghan, and maybe she doesn't, maybe she ends up living across the street but Meghan starts including her in her family's trips, or coming over to make sure she's okay. Because she's already saved her life, so if she's also noticed that Lannie lives all on her own and no-one's ever loved her, maybe Meghan can step up and at least be a neighbor to her, or a friend, if Lannie will let her. And maybe that's not Meghan's job, but no-one else is going to do it, and Lannie doesn't really deserve to be left all on her own. And maybe Meghan has to step in to try to protect Lannie from the Trevors, or to defend her own decision to go save Lannie, or maybe she has to try to convince Lannie not to take revenge on the Trevors. And maybe Lannie doesn't take Meghan's sudden interest in her well, because she still hates Meghan, and it's not the same as the Trevors, she wanted the Trevors. And maybe she sort of is confused by Meghan's sudden interest in her and can't take about it, but doesn't resist it, and maybe she sort of clings to it, because oh God, a friend, someone who cares about her.
Mostly in my head I imagine them becoming each other's main friends, Lannie because she doesn't have any others or anyone else who cares about her, and Meghan because no-one else really understands about how she can be friends with Lannie. And Meghan has to sort of just try to be there for Lannie as she starts to understand about human relationships and emotions and people, and sort of try to get over the fact that she's killed people, oh God, oh God, because that just isn't going to help anybody, and they have to get over it and try to move forward, so long as Lannie isn't going to kill anyone else. And maybe Lannie's love for Meghan turns into a physical feeling really easily, or she just doesn't care about being gay, she loves Meghan. And maybe Meghan really, REALLY comes to love Lannie, when she understands just how deeply the lack of love in her life affected her. And maybe it ends really well, with Lannie coming to really genuinely, deeply love Meghan. And maybe it ends really badly, with Lannie come to love Meghan, and possibly Meghan's family, so much she just can't stand the thought of losing them, so she freezes them just to keep them with her. Oh god. And maybe one day, in the near or far future, someone hurts Meghan, and Lannie FREEZES THE SHIT OUT OF THEM, BECAUSE JUST NO. Or maybe one day in the near or far future, someone hurts Meghan or tries to hurt Meghan, and Lannie tries to freeze them, but she can't because she's known love now, and she doesn't have her power anymore. Oh.
So yes. That is the story of Meghan and Lannie, and why I love them. Rah.
Book - Freeze Tag by Caroline B. Cooney: Megan/Lannie
Hello. A while ago I said I was thinking about doing a thing where every fourth week instead of doing a film pairing picspam I would do either a post about a non-film/non-visual pairing, or a picspam for a film I like but don't have a pairing for. That was a while ago when I was still (two weeks in) doing these posts every week, but I'm trying to get back on track and I decided to do the non-film pairing one. You're getting this a day late because yesterday mostly involved sleeping until 4pm, trying to get up and get wash and dressed and cram in at least two meals before midnight, and then watching Comic Relief for most of the night. And I don't really want to put it off till next week again. So. I'm doing it today.
Freeze Tag is a book I bought when I was a teenager, from the Point Horror range, which I used to read a lot of around that time. People who know me very well will probably be unsurprised to hear about that. Anyway, the pairing is probably a lot more to do with things I made up in my head than things that actually happen in the book - I only really started considering it is as a pairing a good possibly 10 years after last reading the book, when I was thinking about pairings, and femslash pairings I might have. I reread the book a few weeks ago to make this post, and it really is not as good as I remember it being. This is VERY MUCH not a rec. But I still quite liked the pairing, and I wanted to talk about it anyway. And it's the only pairing I've done any sort of prep for at all. So this is what I'm posting about. Also, this is a pretty fucked up pairing. Just in case you were wondering, or haven't learned to generally expect that from me.
So. Freeze Tag is basically the story of a few kids who live on a street in America called Dark Fern Lane. Namely, Meghan Moore, the Trevor family children West, Tuesday and Brown, and Lannie Anveill.
The only picture I can provide you with for this pairing is the book cover, but I do quite like it, so here it is.
Anyway. The book starts out with the kids as young kids, Meghan's 10 and I think Lannie is 9, and it's from Meghan's point of view, as ever. They're all hanging out in the street, but it's pretty obvious there's a bit of a divide in the street. And it's pretty obvious they're not that happy about hanging out with Lannie. Meghan especially.
""Suppose," said Lannie dreamily, "that you really could freeze somebody."
The setting sun seemed to shine right through Lannie, as if she were made of colored glass and hung in a window.
Lannie's eyes, as pale as though they had been bleached in the wash, focused on Meghan.
Meghan gulped and looked away, queerly out of breath. If she kept looking into Lannie's eyes, she would come out the other side.
Into what?
[...]
Meghan tried to ignore Lannie. This was not easy. Lannie always stood as close to you as a sweater, trying to take your share of oxygen." (pages 1-2)
Meghan on the other hand, adores the Trevor family. She's best friends with Tuesday, has a crush on Tuesday's older brother West, doesn't mind their much younger brother Brown, and is constantly expecting pink lemonade, brownies, and all kinds of treats from the Trevor's kitchen, and seems to be very often correct to expect that. She dislikes Lannie because Lannie scares her. Tuesday shortly invites Meghan over to a sleepover at her house that night. Meghan accepts. Lannie informs them that she'll be coming too. Tuesday says she can only have one person to sleep over at her house. Which they all basically know is a lie. Meghan is torn.
"Meghan wanted to do the right thing, the kind thing, and have Lannie sleep over, too, but Lannie was too scary. Meghan never wanted to be alone in the dark with Lannie Anveill. Lannie never made any noise when she moved. When you thought you were alone, the hair on the back of your neck would move in a tiny hot wind, and it would be Lannie, who had sneaked up close enough to breathe on your spine." (page 6)
So no-one says anything, and Lannie doesn't get to sleep over. She makes her anger about this pretty explicit.
""I hate you, Meghan Moore," said Lannie." (page 6)
Meghan is kind of upset that Lannie hates her, particularly, when it's Tuesday who's not letting her sleep over. But she also understands it, because she knows that Lannie loves the Trevors the same way that Meghan loves the Trevors. Lannie can't hate Tuesday, because she wants Tuesday, and she hates Meghan for being the one chosen, who gets to go over and play with them and be their friend.
Anyway, so Lannie hates Meghan. She's not happy with the set-up in general. Then night falls, and Lannie tells them, Meghan, Tuesday, West and Brown, that they're playing a game of Freeze Tag, in which she is it. They all run off, and Lannie runs around "freezing" them. But Meghan, last to be frozen, knows something's not right and notices that the others are all freezing really well, and in slightly impossible positions. Then Lannie gets to freeze her, and Meghan realises the truth, that Lannie really can freeze people, into statues, for as long as she wants to. Lannie leaves them all frozen for a bit, then comes back and unfreezes West. Then she unfreezes Tuesday, and Brown. But she says she's not going to unfreeze Meghan, because she hates Meghan. West basically has to beg her to unfreeze Meghan, and she only does so after he promises he 'will always like her [Lannie] best'.
Then we get into the main part of the story, which is when Meghan is 15, West is 17, and Lannie is 14, and they're all in highschool. In the intervening years, West has fallen head over heels in love with Meghan, and Meghan, who's always had a crush on him, accepts this graciously, and they're a really solid couple. They've basically forgotten or repressed what happened on their street all those years ago, and barely think much of Lannie when she comes up to them to tell them/West that it's time for him to live up to his promise. But then she starts freezing people, just to remind them what she can do, and they're forced to remember and start dealing with it pretty quickly, which is what the rest of the book is about.
As I've said, it's not a great book. It's pretty trashy in the way a lot of gimmicky ("Horror", "Romance", etc) teen books probably were. But for a teen book, it does what it sets out to do pretty effectively, and is genuinely pretty chilling (no pun intended). Meghan and West, and later Meghan, West, Tuesday and Brown are in a pretty impossible situation, because no-one but they know about Lannie's power, no-one would probably believe them if they told them, and if anyone did believe them, Lannie has made it clear she'd just freeze them anyway. When Meghan and West first come to terms with what Lannie can do, and what she wants from them, Lannie comes pretty close to freezing Meghan just because Meghan makes her angry. Later on she basically threatens to freeze Meghan if West doesn't stay away from her, she does freeze West and Meghan when she catches them together, and she threatens to freeze Tuesday if West doesn't do as she says. And when eventually they decide to just stand up to Lannie, with Meghan and West continuing to stay together, they have a little face-off in the street one morning with West, Meghan, Tuesday and Brown all setting off to go to school together as Lannie comes out of her house. And Lannie quite calmly just walks over and freezes a bunch of elementary school children who are waiting for the bus down the street. So there's pretty much nothing they can do. They have to do what Lannie says, or she'll genuinely kill people.
But at the same time, it's often a pretty good study on the (likely, as far as I'm aware, and explained through fantasy) effects of emotional abuse and neglect on a child. It's made pretty clear that Lannie's parents don't really care about her. In the initial chapter, Meghan talks about how most parents on Dark Fern Lane buy the houses as a "first house" while saving up to buy a second, but Lannie's parents aren't saving up to buy a second house, because they spend all their money on cars, which is all they seem to care about. Lannie's parents split up at some point after the first chapter, and her dad leaves the house and gets a new girlfriend, who talks about how people have said she shouldn't expect to love Lannie for at least a few years, so she's not surprised she doesn't, right in front of Lannie. And Lannie's mother remarries a young guy called Jason, who gets a new dog for the family that both he and Lannie's mother seem to like more than Lannie. Meghan has a little flashback about it:
"How attractive everybody was! The fine strong stepfather! The magnificent cars! The lovely fluid Irish setter! Meghan had been awestruck. Her own family was dowdy and dull.
Jason, laughing happily, had hugged the dog.
"He's never hugged me," said Lannie." (page 48)
Lannie freezes the dog almost immediately, by the way. Lannie's mother died not long after that, so Lannie went to live with her father and his girlfriend. But one day Lannie's father's girlfriend turned up again with Lannie, saying Lannie's father had left them, so Lannie was Jason's responsibility now. So Lannie ended up living with a stepfather who barely cared about her.
"Lannie stayed. Jason continued to lead his own life. Lannie always seemed to have clean clothes and a recent shampoo. But that was all she had." (page 51)
But Lannie's also genuinely pretty frightening. Her mother died in a car crash, while Lannie was in the car, and on the day Lannie confronts West and Meghan and freezes the girl at school, Meghan works out that Lannie probably froze her mother, causing the crash. So you really do feel sorry for Lannie, but at the same time understand why everyone's afraid of her.
Meghan doesn't really treat Lannie very well, as I've said. And partly that's because again, Lannie is genuinely creepy, and then later genuinely frightening. But Caroline B. Cooney also makes it clear that it's because Meghan is quite young, and teenagers are kind of dicks.
"Meghan herself had everything: two parents who lived together and loved her, neighbors who included her, a boy who worshipped her, and a school in which she was popular and successful.
Meghan did not analyze these things. She did not ask why she was so lucky, nor worry about the people who were not. She was fifteen, which is not a particularly kind age. It's much better than thirteen, of course, and greatly superior to fourteen, but age sixteen is where compassion begins and the heart is moved by the plight of strangers." (pages 25-6)
I'm not sure I agree with Caroline B. Cooney there, but it's nice that she makes a point that Meghan doesn't care about people and things the way maybe she ought to do, and gives some sort of explanation for her behaviour. The book also serves as a, not always exactly subtle, story about how Meghan is growing up, and comes to realise that the perfection and excitement she likes is not always the best thing to be involved in, or even the best thing for her, and that you at some point should probably start taking responsibility for or at least notice of the bad things happening around you. This comes in the form of her slight disillusionment with the Trevors, which may or may not have been happening before the later part of the story even started. When Lannie first comes to remind them of her powers and the promise West made to her, Meghan can see in West's eyes that he basically just doesn't want to deal with it, and she's sort of immediately disappointed in him. Although she sort of represses that and berates herself for thinking that for a bit. She also finds Tuesday's reaction to being a cheerleader and therefore super-popular a bit strange. And when Lannie forces West to dump Meghan and start dating her, and Meghan almost can't stand to be around the Trevors anymore or it's to dangerous for her to do so when Lannie is around, she ends up having to spend more time with her own parents, who she always felt were dull and nagging compared to the Trevors, and she starts to realise maybe she's be doing them a massive disservice all these years.
"But I never wanted to be here, thought Meghan. I always wanted to be over at the Trevors'. What was the matter with me? Home was wonderful. Why was I so sure theirs was more wonderful?
"Mom? Did it ever bother you that I spent so much time at the Trevors'?"
"Oh, yes. It bothered your father more, though. I knew you needed the company. You're very sociable. You like noise and people. There aren't enough of us here, and your father and I are too quiet for you. It used to hurt Daddy's feelings terribly that the instant we finished dinner you'd bolt out the door and go to the Trevors', where things were fun."
"Did it hurt your feelings?"
"In a way. I always wished the neighborhood kids would come here for a change. Sometimes I'd stock up on Popsicles or candy popcorn or jelly doughnuts and hope I'd be the one who got the kids, but I never was." (pages 102-3)
And from that, it helps her understand a little more about Lannie, and why she is the way she is.
"She knew with stab of understanding that she had been able to spend such huge amounts of time at other people's houses because she had known absolutely that her parents would love her anyway. She had been safe doing anything at all. Safe in love.
And Lannie ...
What had Lannie been?
Unsafe.
Without love. Without even a molecule of love.
Unsafe.
If you are not brought up in the safety of love, thought Meghan Moore, you yourself become unsafe. It is unsafe to be near Lannie. She is as dangerous as a collapsing bridge or a caving-in cliff. All because of love." (pages 103-4)
Sadly, that last paragraph doesn't have Meghan instantly rushing to be compassionate and nice to Lannie. But I wanted to include it because, while it's a bit heavy-handed, it's probably one of my favourite parts in the book.
But the relationship between Meghan and Lannie isn't just a growing understanding of her on Meghan's side. It's also pretty clearly a rivalry between the two of them, up to a point. You may have got a sense from some of the quotes that Meghan and Lannie are unusually focused on each other. The theme that the Trevors are what Lannie wants, but Meghan is who she hates/cares about upsetting, is one that's often carried forward. There are parts about Lannie suddenly looking at Meghan with an I've-got-something-you-want smirk, as though they're locked in a genuine popularity battle, instead of a slightly hellish supernatural situation. And Meghan. Well. Her concern over Lannie's powers and focus on/knowledge of her is sometimes a little alarming. When I was studying Gothic Literature at University, there were a number of themes that I liked, and one of them was the idea of "homosexual panic". It's a concept that gets aimed at or turns up in (depending on your interpretation) a lot of things like vampire literature or other chase or claustrophobic-type narratives with a main male character, and is apparently the feeling by a character that another man/male knows everything about them, everything they're doing, and can see into their mind and understand them in ways they even can't. This is not a textbook definition, I should add. It's just what I vaguely remember. And on rereading Freeze Tag, it seemed to be turning up in spades. Meghan feels "stripped" by Lannie's looks. There's a lot of mention of the fact that - when Meghan's not shouting at Lannie, occasionally because of panic - as I quoted from the initial chapter, Meghan finds it hard to look at Lannie. There's also a separate paragraph about how whenever Meghan liked anyone (boys, from the context), she found it hard to look at them or talk to them, except for West. But whether or not we were meant to LINK THOSE TWO THINGS TOGETHER, I DO NOT KNOW. But on the first day Lannie reminds Meghan and West about her powers and what she wants from West, after Lannie makes West drop Meghan off at home and drive off with her, we get this scene:
"She got out of the garage, up the stairs, into the safe more open dark of the living parts of the house. She turned on no lights. She did not want Lannie Anveill, across the street, to see that she was home.
Although of course Lannie always knew.
And Lannie, who could materialize anywhere, anytime, Lannie might suddenly be leaning against the wallpaper right here in this room, with her little chuckle of ice and snow.
It was a matter of will not to turn on the lights and make sure that the corners were empty. Lannie isn't here, Meghan told herself. I'm not going to be a baby and panic." (page 67)
So. Yes.
Anyway. So, things go on. Meghan, West, Tuesday and Brown see no way out, and West is forced to keep dating Lannie, and Meghan has to sort of stay away from them, largely. She starts to feel sorry, or sorrier, for Lannie, but wishes Lannie didn't start having things in her life by taking away what Meghan has. But then West and the Trevors start to act a bit funny.
""No," said West meditatively. "I think Lannie has to be ended."
How little emotion lay in his voice. Lannie must be ended." (page 133)
West talks about all the ways he'd thought of trying to kill or destroy Lannie, including possibly killing himself along with her. Meghan is not really up for that. She makes it pretty clear in the book that she thinks Lannie is evil, but she doesn't want to actually kill her, whatever Lannie has done. Eventually West stops talking to Meghan about that stuff, but Tuesday and Brown think it's because maybe he really is in love with Lannie now. So they have to start making their own plans.
""Well, there's no helping [Lannie's stepfather Jason, who's been frozen] now," said Tuesday. "And probably no helping West either. We have to look out for ourselves."
The popcorn stuck in Meghan's throat.
"So the question here is," said Brown, rubbing a popcorn against the side of the bowl to slick up extra butter and salt, "how do we end Lannie?"" (page 148)
Meghan still is not up for it.
Time goes on, no-one ends Lannie, West keeps going out with her, Meghan keeps going over to the Trevors' house to hang out with Tuesday. It seems like they're never going to get out of the situation they're in. And then we get the ending. I should say now, MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING BELOW. IF YOU HAVE ANY INTEREST IN READING THE BOOK AND DON'T WANT TO KNOW, LOOK AWAY NOW.
And, by the way, I LOVE the ending. So one day a few weeks after everything has happened with West, Tuesday, Brown and Lannie, after a few days or a week or so of heavy snowfall, Meghan is over at the Trevors' house hanging around with Tuesday. Then eventually someone comes to the door, and it's Lannie, looking for West. Tuesday tells her that West isn't in, but that he's going to work on his truck straight after school. We've heard a lot about the truck over the course of the book, it's an old truck that West is fixing up, in some spare land/woods behind their houses, and it's still pretty beat up, the engine doesn't run, the seats are all messed up and the doors don't even open from the inside. So Tuesday tells Lannie to go down to the truck and just wait for him there. Which Lannie does. Meghan and Tuesday continue to hang around together, and eventually it's dinnertime at the Trevors', which Meghan helps cook and then stays for. West is also there again, and Meghan ends up sitting next to him at the table. They finish dinner and it's time for dessert. Then West's mother suddenly asks then, if it's over between West and Lannie, if he and Meghan are back together.
"I forgot Lannie! She's still waiting for him down in the truck! Meghan swerved to look at Tuesday, so Tuesday would give West the message. Certainly Meghan didn't want to deliver it. She was as full of happiness as the night was full of dark. She didn't even want to utter the name, because it would break her happy spell like an icicle hitting the pavement.
Both Tuesday's eyelids went down slowly, in a sort of double wink. How like Lannie she suddenly looked. Hooded, evil eyes. Eyes that had seen terrible things. Eyes that had seen through to the other side.
"Lannie's out of the picture," agreed Tuesday. She, too, smiled broadly. She met West's eyes and now his smile came out. Meghan could not move. Out of the corner of her eyes she checked Brown. No smile had ever been wider." (page 162)
Meghan is pretty chilled by this behaviour, but she doesn't say anything. Mr Trevor decides they should finish off the meal with ice-cream, and Meghan goes to get it out of the freezer.
"So cold in there. How chilly the boxes of vegetables and desserts must be. Meghan shut the door, leaving the cold boxes to their dark frozen lives. They had to lie there until somebody wanted them. They had no exit without human hands. There were no handles on the insides of refrigerator doors.
Handles.
There are no handles on the inside of the truck doors, either, thought Meghan Moore. Lannie cannot get out of the truck." (page 163)
Meghan realises that with the snowfall, and given that Lannie has no family left expecting her home, Lannie will freeze to death by morning and no-one will even look for her until the snow thaws. Meanwhile, West, Tuesday and Brown are all continuing on asking for what hot drink they want with their dessert. And then, in a scene that took much longer in the book than I remembered it doing, while Meghan is wandering around sort of numb she realises that no-one will look for Lannie because no-one knows she's there, except for West, Tuesday and Brown. And then she realises, that actually, no-one knows Lannie's there except for West, Tuesday, Brown, and her. And then she does some thinking, and spills her cider, and realises that it's her, as well as them, that's sitting by while Lannie dies.
And then after that we get the ending, which I'm probably going to end up quoting in it's entirety.
"Meghan Moore got up from the table. She walked to the back door. It was difficult. Her feet dragged and she bumped into the jamb. The doorknob did not fit her hand and the wind when she opened the door assaulted her.
She heard voices behind her, but they were Trevor voices. The voices of people to whom things came easily. The voices of people who expected things to work out their way. Meghan did not know if she still loved the Trevors.
The one I have to love most, she thought, is me.
If I don't love myself, I cannot go on.
The cold was no longer an enemy. Instead it woke her and embraced her with its demands.
This is what it means, thought Meghan Moore, to choose the lesser of two evils. Lannie is evil, but it would be more evil to stand aside and silently let her die.
Meghan had never gone through snow so deep, through darkness so thick. She found the truck by feel. She opened the door of the cab and Lannie fell into her arms.
Meghan helped Lannie to walk.
"Come in my house where it's warm," said Meghan.
Lannie said nothing.
Perhaps she was too cold to speak.
Or perhaps...she had waited all her life to come in where it was warm." (pages 165-6)
I love that ending so much. And I know that it is pat and super-moral and everything, but it was genuinely one of the first endings I think I ever read, definitely one of the first in the Point Horror series I think, that wasn't just about punishing the bad guys or destroying the evil. And given that the book is as much about neglect and the treatment of abused children as it is about supernatural powers and horror, I think it's a pretty lovely message to try to give. It's the main reason I still love the book even though it's really not great. I love that Lannie is how Meghan grows up. I love that it's all about Lannie terrorising Meghan a bit and hating her, and possibly taking West as much to take him away from Meghan as much as to get him for herself, and then Meghan has the chance to actually finally be rid of her, and doesn't, and saves her instead. Even though the fact the Trevor kids were at that point attempted murderers and that had clearly taken some of the sheen off them a bit for Meghan, I love that she absolutely made the definite choice between staying with them and having her boyfriend and her popularity and her life back, and she chose not ignoring the harm that would be done to Lannie to get it. And I just. Love it. As I say, a lot of it's pretty heavy-handed about the whole thing, but some of it's really great, and quite beautiful, and I love that that's the ultimate message. Even if you do think Lannie's pretty evil by the end of it. Would Meghan letting the Trevors' kill of somebody else be that much better?
As for the pairing, well, as I say, it's one that only sort of occured to me a year or two ago, when I was thinking about pairings and the story and things. But I do remember when I was younger, I think, dreaming up what would happen when Lannie got back to Meghan's house, and maybe ended up living with her. I mean, Meghan and Lannie are clearly a bit obsessed with each other, or overly-focused really. And that ending, for me, is pretty amazing. But most of the really beautiful stuff from the pairing sort of happens after the ending, in my head, for me. Like the part where Meghan takes her back to her house to warm up, and Meghan's parents are all over Lannie worrying about her and trying to take care of her, and Lannie is just not really saying anything because she doesn't know how to handle it. And maybe she ends up living with Meghan, and maybe she doesn't, maybe she ends up living across the street but Meghan starts including her in her family's trips, or coming over to make sure she's okay. Because she's already saved her life, so if she's also noticed that Lannie lives all on her own and no-one's ever loved her, maybe Meghan can step up and at least be a neighbor to her, or a friend, if Lannie will let her. And maybe that's not Meghan's job, but no-one else is going to do it, and Lannie doesn't really deserve to be left all on her own. And maybe Meghan has to step in to try to protect Lannie from the Trevors, or to defend her own decision to go save Lannie, or maybe she has to try to convince Lannie not to take revenge on the Trevors. And maybe Lannie doesn't take Meghan's sudden interest in her well, because she still hates Meghan, and it's not the same as the Trevors, she wanted the Trevors. And maybe she sort of is confused by Meghan's sudden interest in her and can't take about it, but doesn't resist it, and maybe she sort of clings to it, because oh God, a friend, someone who cares about her.
Mostly in my head I imagine them becoming each other's main friends, Lannie because she doesn't have any others or anyone else who cares about her, and Meghan because no-one else really understands about how she can be friends with Lannie. And Meghan has to sort of just try to be there for Lannie as she starts to understand about human relationships and emotions and people, and sort of try to get over the fact that she's killed people, oh God, oh God, because that just isn't going to help anybody, and they have to get over it and try to move forward, so long as Lannie isn't going to kill anyone else. And maybe Lannie's love for Meghan turns into a physical feeling really easily, or she just doesn't care about being gay, she loves Meghan. And maybe Meghan really, REALLY comes to love Lannie, when she understands just how deeply the lack of love in her life affected her. And maybe it ends really well, with Lannie coming to really genuinely, deeply love Meghan. And maybe it ends really badly, with Lannie come to love Meghan, and possibly Meghan's family, so much she just can't stand the thought of losing them, so she freezes them just to keep them with her. Oh god. And maybe one day, in the near or far future, someone hurts Meghan, and Lannie FREEZES THE SHIT OUT OF THEM, BECAUSE JUST NO. Or maybe one day in the near or far future, someone hurts Meghan or tries to hurt Meghan, and Lannie tries to freeze them, but she can't because she's known love now, and she doesn't have her power anymore. Oh.
So yes. That is the story of Meghan and Lannie, and why I love them. Rah.
