Casey accompanies Gen to a boisterous house party attended by many of their classmates. When Casey complains that she is not dressed for the occasion, Gen instructs her to shake out her hair and proclaims that she is now ready.

Inside the house, Gen sets Casey up to chat with a hockey player named Kyle and runs off to make out with her boyfriend, Brian. After initially charming Kyle with some skating-related banter, Casey notices a young man using a zipline to swing down from a balcony. When Casey uses her physics to predict the young man's crash landing, Kyle is disgusted with her intelligence and leaves abruptly.

Immediately, a group of popular girls ridicule Casey for babbling until Teddy shows up and announces that he think babbling is "cool." Teddy chats with Casey about being Tina's son, and and Casey shows off more physics by opening a soda can with a plastic spoon. Then Casey stumbles into bucket of ice, prompting off-camera peers to label her a "klutz" and a "dork," but Teddy observes that Casey just can't keep off the ice.

While it is easy to fault Casey for her annoying voice and tendency to ruin everything, credit must be given where credit is due (as opposed to credits, which rarely show up when they are due), and it is impossible not to side with Casey as she arrives at the house party and astutely sizes it up: "This doesn't look like a movie." In fact, we could not have said it better ourselves.

This chapter also raises the confusing issue of Gen's social status: on the one hand, we have observed that Gen is strictly bound to her training schedule and discouraged from spending time with her boyfriend, and she has also stated that she never gets to watch television or enjoy weekends with her friends EVER. On the other hand, we have also observed that Gen is the most popular girl in school, dating the captain of the football team, and whose "queen bee" status entitled her to sneer in Casey's face all summer just for being good at science. Further complicating matters, of course, is Gen's developing involvement with Casey in a more "innocuous words in quotation marks" sense.

In terms of this latest matter, Gen's date with Casey represents a new and playful step in their relationship. While Casey is initially upset to find something different than the traditional dinner and a movie she was expecting, this appears to be a clever ploy on Gen's part to help Casey metaphorically let her hair down, indicated by Gen literally helping Casey let her hair down before going inside. Despite the downness of her hair, however, Casey continues to flounder socially as she is totally out of place in a world with no regard for physics -- and without physics, chaos reigns, as demonstrated by the zipline rider crashing violently through the window. In this world, Casey's scientific predictions only confuse and repulse her new male friend, although it is hard not to sympathize with Kyle as he flees madly from the prospect of more scenes with Michelle Trachtenberg.

Teddy, on the other hand, is more than happy to spend his time getting to know Casey, perhaps because his presence at this house party is even less explicable than Casey's, seeing as he's not one of the "cool" kids -- not least because he's not even a student. In fact, Teddy is a janitor who thinks Casey Carlyle is the bee's knees, possibly making him one of the least cool people in town. As a fellow outsider, however, Teddy is an ideal match for Casey; certainly, he is even more of an outsider than the popular girls who make fun of Casey, even though one of them is wearing baggy overalls over her halter top and might be 30 years old.

Nevertheless, Teddy's presence at this party does confirm one crucial fact about the events of this chapter: it's all part of Gen's teasing love game with Casey. The viewer recalls that Gen allegedly only invited Casey as her date tonight so she could act as her cover. But Teddy specifically states that his role at these parties is to act as Gen's cover -- and seeing as he is here tonight, the only logical conclusion is that Gen has lured Casey here for a reason other than reluctant necessity.

-- Casey, slow rolling from within the film