Paige gets all the swim girls together with giftbags and delivers this speech about morale and team spirit -- interrupting herself to bitch at Emily for looking in the bag, awesomely -- and finally Coach tells her to cut it short: " All righty all righty Paige, I'm sure everybody appreciates your gifts, but I want you swimmin', not shoppin'." That's how she talks, all the time. Coach is fucking great, as a character and performance, by the way. She reminds me of a lot of Betty Buckley in Carrie: Just so sweet, and so obviously brilliant, so willing to toe the line of professionalism in order to save your soul, so willing to punch a bully in her stupid face. She was one of my role models growing up, and I'm always so happy to echoes of that character in places. Anyway, Emily tries to apologize to Paige for her excellence, but she just Nurse Ratchets her shit on up outta there without even looking.
Get ready to get creeped out! (Or weirdly and suddenly invested in this creepy relationship! Or both, like me!) Aria comes into Fitz's classroom -- there's one hesher in the back row taking a makeup test, but does she care? -- and unzips her sweater to flash her underage... Necktie? It's oddly sexual and sets up a whole necktie sex thing between them through the rest of the day, and it's weird, but anyway she slips him the museum ticket and he's excited about it, because he's been teaching The Great Gatsby for the last six years and needs something new to talk about.
Ashley's not even picking up the phone at this point, which is too bad for her because Hanna's having one of her days where everything she says is fucking amazing. Coach tells her she was missed in PE and Hanna grins brightly, "I missed you too!" She tries to give her detention for skipping a bunch of times -- you'd think non-Hefty Hanna would have stopped doing that? -- and this is Hanna's response: "Excuse me, but my ankle is still throbbing. I don't know if you heard, but I got hit by a car!"
I don't know if you heard, that's just so great. So Coach is like, "Yeah, kid. I heard. But then I also saw you do a six-hour dance marathon with Mad Lucas, so I'm guessing you're all better." Hanna tries to say that this was a case of adrenaline like when a mom lifts a tree or Hummer for her babies, and Coach is like, "So is that how they got the car off you? Call your Supermommy and tell her you're coming home late this week." Coach does not have time for your shit. For none of it does she have the time.












