Two unreliable narrators, dating

This is about Bryan Lee O'Malley's six graphic novels.

The surface reading is that Scott fights seven exes to keep a girl. A slightly better reading notices that Scott is a liar, or at least a heavy editor, and that most of what he believes about his own life is flattering and false.

The reading that actually holds is that so is she.

Everything the reader knows about Ramona's history comes from Ramona. She's the one who tells Scott about Matthew and Lucas and Todd and Roxie and the twins, and in most accounts she is essentially blameless. The stories still end with her using somebody, disappearing on somebody, or cheating. She narrates herself innocent and the events keep failing to cooperate.

Two people who do that, dating each other, exchanging curated versions of themselves. That's the book.

Take her accounts in order and watch what they're doing.

Matthew Patel was a week and a half in seventh grade, one kiss, and she used him and his powers to keep the jocks off her. She says it plainly, and it still comes out sounding like something that happened rather than something she did.

Lucas Lee asked her out ninety-six times, and they sat on curbs smoking for about a month. Her version is that she just dumped him. His version is that she dumped him for the next guy. This is the first time the record visibly splits, and the person who left without explaining is also the person who got to write the summary.

Todd was the rest of high school, the longest by far, the two of them being the bad kids together. In the books it ends because she didn't want to be tied down.

Roxie was her university roommate and her only girlfriend, and the entire relationship gets reduced to "just a phase." Roxie is still furious about it years later, and the fury is not about the breakup. It's about the sentence.

The twins she dated simultaneously, on purpose, and neither knew. There is no innocent framing available and she doesn't really attempt one.

Scott's editing is cruder and better documented, which is why it's easier to notice and why readers stop there.

His founding romantic memory is Kim being kidnapped by the boys of Benvie Tech and imprisoned there, and Scott fighting through all of them, defeating Simon Lee on a roof and throwing him off it, then rescuing her and asking her to be his girlfriend. The number of guys he fought through moves around depending on the telling.

What happened was that Simon, Kim's boyfriend in a relationship she describes as already fizzling, hugged her, and Scott punched him in the face. Kim broke up with Simon shortly afterward, on her own reasoning, about a guy she later calls kind of a dick.

Volume 6 reveals the memory was altered by Gideon Graves, who had been hiding inside Scott's head. It's why the Simon of the flashback looks so much like Gideon.

The Natalie breakup is a hole rather than an invention. The standard account is that she dumped him without warning at a New Year's party. A scene in volume 6 suggests the argument that ended it was started by a drunk Scott. Stephen remembers the drinking. Scott claims he doesn't.

And Knives is an omission, sustained for as long as he can manage it: he pursues Ramona without ending things with Knives, and Wallace has to push him into doing it.

Here's what makes the book legible rather than just murky. The narrators are unreliable. The story isn't.

The exes keep arriving, one at a time, and each one carries a version of events that doesn't match hers. Lucas contradicts her outright. Roxie's rage is evidence that "just a phase" was a lie about a real person's feelings. The twins are proof she can do something calculated and find it easy. They come in escalating order, they will not stop coming, and they are the only external check on the account Scott has been handed.

Which reframes what he's actually doing when he fights them. He isn't fighting seven men. He's fighting seven characters SHE wrote, while the actual people keep interrupting to say the script is wrong. He measures himself against her descriptions. He never once asks whether the descriptions are accurate.

The tidy version of this story would end with the two of them telling each other the truth. That isn't what happens, and the difference matters.

What happens is that each of them finally gets an accurate account of themselves.

Scott recovers what he actually did to Simon and apologizes to Kim for it. He confronts the part of himself he'd edited out, and Kim is the one who tells him not to destroy it, because destroying it would just let him keep forgetting. So he absorbs it instead. Then he earns the Power of Understanding by admitting he is no better than Gideon in how he has treated people.

Ramona names her own pattern out loud: she keeps moving because standing still makes her feel stuck, and what frightens her is not changing. That's not a confession to a partner. It's a diagnosis she delivers about herself.

Neither of those is an act of disclosure. Both are acts of reading your own file. And that's the precondition the whole series has been circling, because you cannot hand somebody an honest account of yourself while you're still the one holding on to the fake version.

The rule of this series is that what a story shows is not what it approves, and these books are unusually clear-eyed about their own leads. Scott's friends narrate his failures out loud in nearly every volume. Knives outgrows him rather than being won. Ramona is never presented as a prize or a mystery to be solved; she's a person with a documented habit of leaving, who says so herself.

What the surface reading loses is that the fighting was never the content. Seven duels, escalating, against people who exist to Scott only as descriptions, fought by a man who cannot accurately describe himself.

They don't fix each other. They each stop lying to themselves, at roughly the same time, which is the only thing that was ever going to work.