The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks Chapters 31-32 Summary

English Muffins

  • Just before Halloween, Alpha's mom demands that he leaves school for several days to go on a yoga retreat with her. 
  • This is, of course, not the ideal situation, seeing as how he has classes and all. Not to mention a secret prank with his secret society to pull off. 
  • As Frankie sits and listens to him complain about it at the cafeteria, she realizes that if he's leaving school, she can do something. The guy won't even have cell phones or the Internet. 
  • She pretends to be paying attention to the cafeteria antics (like Callum stuffing a bunch of English muffins into his mouth), but she's really strategizing about what she's going to do when Alpha is gone for days. 
  • Later, she goes online and opens a new Gmail account with the screen name TheAlphaDog. 
  • When she's in her room that night trying to figure out what to do with her new email address, Artie (Trish's boyfriend) and some of his friends stop by dressed up as girls. They ask for Trish because they want to borrow her bras for their costumes. 
  • Once they leave, Frankie sits down to begin her plan.

How to Get Through a Closed Door

  • Frankie the scholar writes another essay, which is about campus Ditch Day at the California Institute of Technology. 
  • The essay explores how weird traditions occur between the underclassmen and the upperclassmen. When the seniors ditch, the underclassman want in, and the upperclassmen want to keep them out. 
  • It also explores how the Caltech students critiqued their university by breaking its unwritten rules.