Recap / Penny And Aggie The Ticket

"Hugging feels good. Children's TV taught us that. I'd forgotten."
— Aggie

Aggie's gentle, literature-nerd friend Duane Teague has a crush on Penny, but is too shy to act on it. When Aggie learns that he's the editor of the school literary magazine, and could therefore get her published, she falsely claims to be Penny's friend and promises to fix him up with her. Despite her conscience giving her grief for using Duane this way, she plants a concert ticket in Penny's locker, along with an anonymous note saying the sender will be "two rows down, wearing the red shirt and black jeans." Penny's best friend Sara Velte spots her doing this and thinks Aggie's secretly in love with Penny. Accordingly, Sara encourages the hesitant Penny to go to the concert.

At the concert, Aggie's plan backfires when Penny assumes another boy, seated in the same row as Duane and dressed like him, is her secret admirer, only for him to blow her off. Although disappointed, Duane appreciates Aggie's effort and asks her if she'd like to submit anything to the "lit mag." Aggie, her conscience still troubled, says he should be "unbiased" and refuse submissions from friends.

Tropes

• Art Evolution: Lagacé began in this arc to draw characters with more realistic body proportions. Compare Aggie's head/body ratio in Strip #2 to that in Strip #113 from the present arc.
• Blind Date: Aggie attempts to set one up for Duane and Penny.
• Canon Welding: The concert performer, Bit Fencer, is a character in Campbell's manga Divalicious.
• Divergent Character Evolution: Sara and Michelle first appear in "The Best of Enemies" as essentially interchangeable members of Penny's Girl Posse, both into boys and both contemptuous of Aggie in support of Penny. The present arc begins to establish Sara as not only a potential bridge between the title characters, but an outright shipper of them. It's also thereby the first chapter to foreshadow Sara's closet lesbianism.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel
  Aggie: So when does my shoulder devil show up?
  Aggie's Shoulder Angel: You don't get one. You know why? You are one! Shame! Shaaaaaaame!

• Love Letter Lunacy: Penny mistakes Aggie's letter on Duane's behalf as being from another, identically-dressed guy, while Sara mistakes the letter as being from Aggie directly.
• Mistaken for Gay: When Sara sees Aggie slipping Penny a note, and learns of its contents, she assumes Aggie is in love with Penny.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Bit Fencer is a stand-in for Britney Spears.
• Talk to the Hand: Duane says this to Aggie to dissuade her from flattering him.

• Vitriolic Best Buds: Aggie claims to be this with Penny, in response to Duane's pointing out that she constantly fights with her. The irony is that in a previous arc Penny and Aggie nearly did become friends, and that during the later arc "The Popsicle War," they do, while continuing to snark at each other, only now for the most part in good fun.