fresh meat, page 78

and so the scene is over. let's see what i want to say about it...

let me mention some small dialogue edits first:
the page was initially written to end with kim asking sugar why she doesn't come to check-in, either, and sugar saying, "tired. too tired."
i changed this because i wanted to set up frankie. she's not exactly a key player, but adds a factor of believability and continuity. this also canonizes that sugar is gay in some capacity, although she will say she is a lesbian explicitly later, because i don't want people bickering over whether my lesbian characters are actually bi or not. the other thing is that kim would have to make a pretty large assumption that sugar is in her check-in group to begin with; she was meant to be, but she was written out of every scene because of the tiredness. kim would have no way of knowing this, and while she COULD ask the question, she could also just not.
the other edit is sugar was originally written to say, "i thought about them, too." in panel 15. the most obvious reason i changed this is because it wasn't clear who "them" was, even if the logical leap made sense temporally -- what kim said about thinking of people's faces occurred only maybe a minute ago to the characters, and sugar is a character who is prone to speaking in that way. more importantly, the reason i changed it from past tense to present tense is to imply that sugar sees the process of attempting suicide as ongoing, rather than a thing she did in the past, alluding to drop-out's content... fitting for a line that's tying to the climactic scene in that comic.

anyway, you can see here that tabitha's response to kim is not meant to offer relief or closure for the audience, even if tabitha is attempting to offer closure to kim. we can assume that tabitha isn't necessarily lying here, but isn't confident about what she says. this is, maybe, her sense of worthlessness in full swing to protect her from the less palatable options she has for her reaction. despite the doubtful glance to the floor as she says it, she doesn't pad either of those assertions with a "probably"; she is confident she isn't important enough to be remembered.
i did not think there was anything that tabitha could say that would be definitely satisfying. she is not in a position that can be sutured up and start to heal right now. the most realistic reaction from tabitha was to freeze and panic. more to the point: rhetorically, doubling down instead of resolving her situation here asserts that whatever tabitha thinks the best way to free herself is not going to be the solution kim needs.

the scene ends by pulling away from the situation and starting to let the ambient antagonism of the ward dominate; reasserting the lack of privacy and autonomy with sugar sitting outside of her room's locked door in a blanket on the floor, hearing everything a few doors down between these two, with the same staff member who just locked her out kicking out tabitha moments later, etc.
the close on sugar also indicates the end of her arc is coming up soon. sugar's arc is interesting, because she's a constant in the story, with no ambiguous hope for discharge based on behavior, but she's also the character who has an entire story already written about her 6 years after this one. this means that most of her arc is non-obvious to a reader who hasn't read drop-out, and that, for an "arc," she doesn't change much at all.

that's all i have to say about this page, i think. wow, the comic's really getting long! [choked sobbing]

EDIT: wait, there was something else i wanted to note. while this scene seems to add to the hopelessness of the comic, there are definitely beats that simply imply something is changing through repetition. one example is that kim cries in the same position that she cried after the phone call with her mother, but here she's given comfort afterwards.