Laura and Grace Snider are both in low spirits when they are left with no dates for the Spring Dance. Feeling that Grace is underappreciated by Isaiah Edwards, Caroline use memoirs of her courtship with Charles to provide her friend with strategies to make Isaiah jealous, and Laura decides to use the same strategy on a boy she wants to be invited by.
Tropes:
- Gone Horribly Right: Grace and Laura's efforts to make their respective targets jealous backfire in different ways:
- Grace makes her interactions with Doc Baker look like he's courting her in front of Isaiah, but rather than encouraging him to invite her to dance, it only makes him furious and poor Doc Baker almost gets punched in the eye when he thinks he caught them kissing (he was actually examining her eye and she wasn't even trying to make Isaiah jealous at that point).
- Laura uses Willie to make Henry Henderson jealous, but instead he thinks she and Willie are dating and starts keeping away from her.
- No Guy Wants to Be Chased: Subverted. When Laura decides to be honest with Henry Henderson and admits that all her moments with Willie were attempts get his attention because she was pursuing him to invite her for the Srping dance, he's actually flattered that she did all that on account of him and accepts her invitation.
- Operation: Jealousy: Caroline suggests to Grace that she use another man to make Isaiah jealous. She picks Doc Baker and makes innocuous interactions between them look like courtship in front of Isaiah, and it goes as well as you'd expect.
- Laura overhears her mother's suggestion and tries the same thing with a boy she wants to be invited by to the dance.
- Unwitting Pawn: Poor Doc Baker is used by Grace to make Isaiah jealous, and doesn't even realize that.
