CHARACTER
How to Make Friends with the Darkby Kathleen Glasgow

Lupe Hidalgo

Lupe Hidalgo

Quick Facts

  • Role: Senior, star softball player, initial antagonist-turned-ally
  • First appearance: Zero Period, where she mocks Tiger’s unicorn shirt and closeness with her mom
  • Affiliations: Eugene Field High School; Mr. Jackson’s Grief Group
  • Key relationships: Tiger Tolliver; Crash Hidalgo (brother); Breisha Walters (girlfriend); Mae-Lynn Carpenter; Taran & Alif Parker

Who She Is

At first glance, Lupe Hidalgo is the school’s sleek, unapproachable queen bee—athletic, beautiful, and cruel. Tiger sees her as an eclipse: glamorous shadow, impossible not to stare at even as it burns. But that dazzle is armor. Once the Grief Group reveals her brother’s death, Lupe’s presence comes into focus: she isn’t just a bully, she’s a portrait of concealed Grief and Loss, weaponizing meanness to keep people from seeing the fracture lines. By the end, she embodies raw, unsentimental truth-telling about pain—an unlikely anchor of Resilience and Survival and the hard-won, sideways care of unexpected Friendship.

Personality & Traits

Lupe’s defining tension is between performance and pain. She curates invincibility—perfect eyeliner, perfect swing, perfect detachment—yet when the mask slips, she speaks about grief with bracing clarity. Her meanness is real, but also a shield and a language she knows how to wield. As she slowly lets the Grief Group see her, that sharpness becomes honesty, and then, selectively, protection.

  • Bullying as armor: In Zero Period, she ridicules Tiger’s unicorn shirt and calls out her mom’s texts—public humiliation as control when her own life feels uncontrollable.
  • Commanding beauty: “Mean and beautiful” with “black wings” of eyeliner; Tiger experiences her as an “eclipse,” a force that overshadows rooms and people.
  • Popularity and pressure: A scholarship-bound athlete who moves with automatic superiority, radiating the certainty others project onto her.
  • Grieving and vulnerable: In the arroyo, she admits her brother Crash died by suicide—her silence cracks into a confession that reframes her cruelty as grief.
  • Blunt honesty: She refuses platitudes, telling Tiger grief is a “Grand Canyon” hole—pain will not be fixed by group exercises.
  • Emerging loyalty: In the arroyo and during community service, she shows up—snappish, unsentimental, but steady. The girl who pushes away also stands guard.

Character Journey

Lupe begins as a one-note antagonist: the glamorous tormentor who makes Tiger feel small. Her sudden appearance in Mr. Jackson’s Grief Group detonates that stereotype. The arroyo scene—booze, sand, and confessions—reveals the truth: Crash’s suicide carved a silence into her life that she has filled with sharp edges. From there, she and Tiger keep colliding: the reckless Jellymobile joyride and crash, the shared consequences, the strange solidarity of kids punished for grief they can’t control. Lupe never becomes soft; instead, she becomes legible. By the detention center goodbye—“See you, sis. Stay cool.”—their dynamic has flipped from predator/prey to a wary siblinghood. The girl who once used power to isolate now uses it to witness someone else’s survival.

Key Relationships

  • Tiger Tolliver: Lupe targets Tiger early, mocking her clothes and closeness with her mother. In the Grief Group, they recognize mirrored losses. Lupe’s caustic honesty—sometimes cruel, often clarifying—helps Tiger name pain; Tiger’s presence lets Lupe be seen without performing. They don’t become sentimental friends, but something tougher: co-survivors who choose, at critical moments, not to leave each other alone.

  • Crash Hidalgo: Crash’s death by suicide is the crater around which Lupe orbits. It explains her anger, her defenses, and her isolation—she believes her grief is unlike the others’. Speaking his name out loud is both confession and defiance, turning private devastation into a bond she can finally share.

  • Mae-Lynn Carpenter, Taran & Alif Parker: Their arroyo gathering is messy, funny, and painfully honest—teenagers making a ritual out of survival. With them, Lupe learns a different kind of team: not softball precision, but imperfect mutual care, where truths sting and still hold.

  • Breisha Walters: The breakup compounds Lupe’s loneliness. It adds a layer of romantic loss to familial grief, deepening her volatility and underscoring how quickly her “popular girl” life has hollowed out.

Defining Moments

Lupe’s arc is punctuated by scenes that peel back performance to reveal motive, then rebuild that motive into solidarity.

  • Bullying in Zero Period

    • What happens: She mocks Tiger’s unicorn T-shirt and her mom’s messages: “Aw, your mama checking up on you again?”
    • Why it matters: Establishes Lupe’s public persona—power through humiliation—so the later reveal lands with force.

  • Joining the Grief Group

    • What happens: Lupe walks into Mr. Jackson’s circle.
    • Why it matters: The shock reframes her character: perfection has a crack; cruelty has a source.

  • The Arroyo Confession

    • What happens: She tells the group Crash died by suicide—quiet voice, “Bang, bang” at her temple.
    • Why it matters: This is the key that unlocks her; she names her grief and allows others to witness it, shifting her from adversary to participant.

  • The Jellymobile Accident

    • What happens: Lupe and Tiger, drunk and desperate, steal the Jellymobile and crash it.
    • Why it matters: Recklessness becomes communion; consequences bind them together and force a shared path toward accountability.

  • “See you, sis. Stay cool.”

    • What happens: At the juvenile detention center, she offers a soft, almost familial farewell.
    • Why it matters: The line seals their transformation—snark recoded as care, antagonism into chosen kinship.

Essential Quotes

Lupe Hidalgo is an eclipse. She slides over everything like a glamorous shadow, and even though you know it’s going to hurt, you look anyway. Analysis: Tiger’s metaphor fuses beauty and threat, suggesting Lupe’s power is both spectacle and obscuration. It anticipates the reveal that Lupe’s glow is a cover for darkness—and that looking at her means confronting pain, not just envy.

“Don’t you remember?” she asks. “The three?”
She looks down, kicks the sand with her sneaker. I can barely hear what she says next, her voice is so quiet.
“The kids who died. By suicide. One was mine. My brother. Crash.”
She slowly raises two fingers to her temple. “Bang, bang,” she whispers. Analysis: The staging—kicked sand, lowered voice—shrinks Lupe from untouchable to human. The stark “Bang, bang” rejects euphemism, forcing the group to meet grief on its brutal terms and marking the first time she invites anyone inside her loss.

“But the thing you need to realize is that no matter what the Walrus Jacksons tell us… you are gonna walk around for the rest of your life with a huge hole in your heart. Like, Grand Canyon big, girl.” Analysis: Lupe refuses therapeutic scripts, offering a version of care that begins with truth, not comfort. Her metaphor reframes grief as landscape—immense, permanent, navigable but never closed.

“This doesn’t mean I like you, by the way! You’re still dirt on the bottom of my shoe!” Analysis: The insult functions as a defensive joke, a way to maintain persona while she’s actively bonding. It captures her transitional state: affection disguised as abrasion.

Lupe stands up. She looks down at me sadly.
“See you, sis. Stay cool.” Analysis: The tenderness is understated, stripped of spectacle. “Sis” acknowledges chosen family; “Stay cool” preserves her voice. Together, they mark the completion of her shift from isolating power to protective kinship.