Off Campus: The Score Review and Recap

Time for another review and recap, but this time we are finally able to talk about the ever-popular Dean Heyward-Di Laurentis. The Score by Elle Kennedy is the third book in the Off-Campus series and is the story of Dean Di Laurentis and Allie Hayes (Hannah’s best friend from book 1). From my understanding, this book is the most well-known right after The Deal. If you feel like you need a brush-up on the first two books in the series, feel free to check out my recaps for The Deal and The Mistake. So without further ado, let’s get into it!

Non-SPoiler REview

The Score by Elle Kennedy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Allie Hayes has no interest in Dean Di Laurentis, notorious hockey star and player across campus, but when she breaks up with her boyfriend and ends up at his apartment, things get out of control fast.

Allie and Dean are honestly the most college couple to every college couple. I respect that this book doesn’t hold back and places these two unlikely characters together smack at the beginning of the book. This book is for all the girls in love with a bad boy (Jess Mariano fans, I’m looking at you). One note about this book, at least compared to The Deal and The Mistake, is that it feels very relationship driven vs plot driven. In The Deal, I feel like there is a higher emphasis on Garrett’s hockey career, and The Mistake focuses on Logan’s stress over his future, but The Score seems to have a different balance of this. I feel like the corresponding side plots are just that: on the side (not that this is necessarily bad, it just felt off compared to the trend set up from the first two books).

Like all of Elle Kennedy’s books, this book is fast-paced and addicting with a dual POV that keeps you flipping the page like your life depends on it. I found it interesting to read about how Allie is entering into a relationship after just breaking up with her long-time boyfriend, Sean. The tension is unmatched, and this book has my favorite scene in the whole Off-Campus series. I seriously can’t wait to see how Stephen Kalyn and Mika Abdalla bring these characters to life. A lot of my main notes and criticisms of this book revolve around big-time spoilers, so I won’t write them here (if you want to read those thoughts, check out my blog for all the unhinged details), but the bottom line is that this book is a solid four stars and a core pillar of the Off-Campus series.

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SPoiler ZOne

We will now be diving into the full recap of The Score. This is a recap of the entire book and WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS. So if you haven’t finished the book yet, I implore you to go finish before you read the rest of this post. You have been warned…

Allie Hayes and her boyfriend Sean just broke up for the fourth time, and this time she is determined to get over him. When Sean starts to be pushy, urging her to get back together with him, and declares that he is on his way to her apartment, Allie freaks out and high tails it out of there. So, she calls her bestie Hannah, who tells her to crash at her boyfriend Garrett’s house. Garrett and Hannah, along with Logan and Grace, are heading out of town, but they tell Allie to just crash at the house for the weekend with Tucker and Dean.

Dean Heyward-Di Laurentis. What a guy. He misses his friends’ texts telling him that Allie is coming over and is less than pleased with the situation since he is already hanging out with some girls. Allie enters the scene and kills Dean’s vibe, so he kicks the girls out and is left alone with Allie, since Tucker is also out.

The two end up watching a movie and smoking a joint as Dean snatches Allie’s phone so she won’t be tempted to call her ex. Allie explains that Sean was very controlling and that they wanted different things in life, which led to their relationship falling apart. As graduation drew closer, Sean kept shutting down Allie’s dream of becoming an actress, saying she would never make it anyway. Through all this, Dean keeps flirting with her shamelessly, despite Garrett and Logan warning him to keep his hands off. 

That night at the bar with his friends, Dean notices how hard it’s raining and texts Allie to tell her to stay inside for the night. He ends up calling her to give a weather update and slips out that he wants to sleep with her again because he hasn’t been able to get her out of his head. Allie just hangs up. 

Allie likes strings-attached, committed relationships, and, as such, she feels weirdly guilty after her night with Dean. When Sean calls again, begging her to give him another chance, she admits that she slept with someone else, wanting to be honest about the situation. However, Dean can’t get that girl off his mind and keeps trying to convince her to see him again.

Dean gets called in to talk to the head hockey coach, where he is introduced to the new defensive coordinator. Turns out Dean already knows the man. Frank O’Shea was Dean’s high school coach, and the two of them don’t have the smoothest history. The two have a staring contest, nod at one another, and agree not to talk about the past. However, O’Shea still seems to harbor some resentment toward Dean for dating his daughter, Miranda, in high school, because he changes the starting defensive line-up by splitting up Dean and Logan, and, to make matters worse, he requires that Dean volunteer to help coach a 7th-grade hockey team. Cue Dean calling Allie again and once more asking her to sleep with him. She hangs up once again. 

Surprise, surprise, the hockey team is pissy after losing another game. Dean and the squad are all going to head to the bar, but when Hannah drops that Allie is at home sulking, Dean politely excuses himself to go visit her. Allie got another call from Sean, who told her he ‘forgives her’ for sleeping with someone else. Allie doesn’t want to get back together with Sean, and she doesn’t appreciate his ‘forgiveness’ when they were broken up, and she didn’t necessarily do anything wrong. Dean invites himself in and ends up joining Allie on the couch, where she is watching her French soap opera, since she is trying to learn French, on the condition that he doesn’t hit on her. 

Allie and Dean end up watching the show for hours, even though they don’t fully understand what is happening (since it’s in French). Allie confides to Dean that she has no intention of getting back together with Sean and wants to move on with her life. Dean hypes her up and says she needs to stop texting him and stop engaging with him. 

Dean goes to help coach the 7th-grade hockey team, the Hurricanes. He is more of an assistant coach alongside their main coach, Coach Ellis. When Dean notices that one kid stays after practice, he questions Ellis and learns that Robbie, the kid, and his little sister, Dakota, hang around for an extra hour while they wait for their mom to pick them up. Since he has nothing better to do, and has actually enjoyed himself, Dean stays with the kids and even helps Dakota with her homework. 

Soon after, Dean invites Allie to go to the bar with him and the hockey squad, and while she is initially hesitant, she was going out with her friends anyway, and they have nowhere else to go. The second she arrives, Dean starts messing with her and texting her suggestively while Allie tries hard to pretend she is not affected. He goes so far as to get the DJ to play “I Want You To Want Me” by Cheap Trick. Allie rebuttals with P!nk’s “U and UR Hand” and goes to dance with her friends, leaving Dean in the dust. But he is still watching and keeps texting her. 

Allie realizes that she can’t keep this up and that she needs and wants the distraction, so she texts Dean and agrees to meet with him. Needless to say, he comes over, they get it on, and then they talk, which is a new one for Dean. Feelings! How scary! Allie admits that her mom died of cancer when she was little, and that’s just been her and her dad, who struggles with MS. Dean confirms that he was your classic prep school kid growing up, but he has sympathy for this girl he is growing attached to.

After Allie and Dean have a moment in the bathroom, Logan barges in and almost catches them. Allie hops up and hides in an instant, just barely managing to avoid Logan. Allie confides that she doesn’t like the whole sneaking around concept, but she still doesn’t want to tell anyone. They have a clarifying conversation in which they confirm their exclusivity. Allie knows that it’ll end eventually, so she asks Dean to just let her know when their fling is over. 

Allie has a crappy day as rehearsal for her play. One girl kept forgetting her lines, and it made the day miserable. In her frustration, her first thought was to text Dean to vent, which she does. But once she does, she begins to overanalyze the whole situation. She tries to rationalize to herself that just because they are sleeping together doesn’t mean their relationship means anything. Allie knows she leans toward relationship territory, and she is trying to adjust her expectations. 

That night, Allie gives Hannah a call, and Hannah reveals she is at the bar with the hockey squad, where some girl is getting up and personal with Dean. Given that they just had a conversation about being exclusive, Allie is fuming and gets all glammed up and goes out to the bar, intent on making Dean miserable and jealous. She meets Hannah at the bar with the guys after winning their first game in a hot minute, and when Dean sees her, he is noticeably irritated because she is getting eyes from all across the bar. 

Allie jokes with Dean, asking who his ‘friend’ is, but he can’t explain it properly since they are talking in front of Hannah. When Allie goes to get a drink, Dean, feeling very territorial, is only a step behind her and works to fend off all the guys trying to buy her a drink (Allie glams up real nice) and asks what the heck she’s doing. This is when Allie realizes that Dean hasn’t been interacting/flirting with the girl, but that this girl threw herself at him and wouldn’t leave. Allie is mortified at herself and starts to question her entire relationship history, and wonders if she is just a co-dependent wreck incapable of being on her own. She is shocked by how attached she’s letting herself get to Dean and admits to him that she was freaked out when he was the first person she called. 

In this tangle of emotions, Allie storms out behind the bar where she and Dean get into a verbal sparring match. She got jealous and then got mad at herself for it, but Dean confesses he was jealous too, since all the guys at the bar were checking her out. Dean says this just means their fling isn’t over yet.

Ever since her conversation with Sean, Dean has been giving Allie the silent treatment, and she’s sick of it. She decides to investigate and go bug him at his hockey game, but when she pulls up, she finds that he’s been kicked out of the game. One of the guys on the other team baited Dean into throwing a punch, and since Dean already has a lot of pent-up frustration because of O’Shea accusing him of substance abuse and Allie meeting with Sean, it didn’t end well. Allie finesses her way into the locker room to talk to Dean, where she assures him that she is not back with Sean. She turned him down, which makes Dean unexplainably happy. 

Now Dean is getting tired of sneaking around and waiting for his and Allie’s schedules to align, so he invites her to come with him to Manhattan over Thanksgiving break. She is already heading there anyway to visit her dad, and Dean is simply offering her a ride and the opportunity to stay with him so they can have some time together uninterrupted. They drive up and have a little music battle via their song choices, and Allie says while they are up there that she plans to meet up with her ex from high school since they are still good friends. At long last, Dean finally fesses up to his relationship history with Miranda O’Shea.

Dean dated Miranda for around one year towards the end of high school, and when they got together, they were on the same page that the relationship would only last till the end of the school year. They were heading in different directions for college, and neither of them was interested in doing long distance. But as time went on, Miranda kept dropping hints that they would stay together and take their relationship more seriously. She was getting extremely clingy, and Dean was growing tired of it. So, at a party when she was nagging on him, Dean got pretty drunk and Miranda convinced him to sleep with her. Except, Dean didn’t know that it was her first time because Miranda lied when she told him she wasn’t a virgin. After the party, and Miarnda’s future talk got to be too much, Dean freaked out and ended it.

Miranda did not handle the breakup well. Turns out, she was struggling hardcore with depression (unbeknownst to Dean) and stopped taking her meds completely out of the blue. She started to change completely, and every time Dean would run into her, she would get super mad and start screaming at him. To make matters worse, she would call him, threatening to kill herself and blaming it on him. This continued until her dad, Frank O’Shea, pulled her out of school to get her help. Dean felt awful about everything and approached Frank one day after hockey practice, asking if he could get in touch with Miranda because he was worried about her. Instead, Frank punched him in the parking lot because his impression was that Dean was a drunk butthead who took what he wanted and dumped his daughter the second they slept together. Dean hasn’t had any contact with Miranda since. 

Upon their arrival in the city, Allie invites Dean to Thanksgiving dinner with her and her dad since his family isn’t in town. Dean agrees, against his better judgment, and the second he walks into the Hayes household, it’s clear her father isn’t impressed. Joe Hayes, the grouchy old man that he is, makes Dean feel incredibly insecure. Allie works hard to take care of him because he is a lot slower thanks to his MS, which is only going to get worse as he ages. After dinner, Joe falls and insists that he’s fine, but Allie goes commander mode and orders Dean to make her dad sit on the couch while she cleans everything up.

When Dean and Sabrina got paired together for the final project, Sabrina carried while Dean barely did anything. Then, when the grades came back, and Dean got an A while Sabrina was given a B-, she got really suspicious. So Sabrina brought the situation to the professor’s attention, which caused them to regrade everything of Dean’s and found out that he should have been failing the course. The professor planned to look the other way since he was tight with Dean’s dad, but Dean demanded that he fail the course and retake it. But despite his plea, the professor let him pass the class, and Dean was pissed that he was being given rich kid privilege. He knew he had failed, and he thought it was only right that he retake the course. 

With this off his chest, Dean pulls Allie up to dance. The squad spends the night dancing all over the place until they literally drop. Beau is pretty drunk when they leave, and Dean doesn’t just want to dump him on his parents’ doorstep, so Dean and Allie bring Beau back to the penthouse to sleep off his hangover. Since Dean and Allie aren’t ready to hit the hay, Dean pulls out a fabulous surprise. He tracked down season two of the silly French soap opera on DVD and set it up for them to watch. Allie is thoroughly impressed because she had a ridiculously hard time finding season one in the first place. 

With their weekend in paradise coming to a close, Dean and Allie part ways in the parking lot back on campus. But before they go, they steal a quick kiss when they think no one is looking. Except one of Sean’s frat boy friends walks by, and Allie panics as she waits for the other shoe to drop because she knows without a doubt this will get back to Sean.

Sure enough, at 1AM, Sean starts banging on her apartment door, making a big scene. Hannah and Garrett are also present and try to take care of the situation and tell Sean to go away. Garrett confronts him directly as Sean begins to escalate things, so Allie takes a deep breath and lets Sean in so she can talk to him and get him to calm down. She knows that Sean would never physically hurt her, so Allie asks Hannah and Garrett to give them a moment in private.

Dean is there in an instant, roaring to know where Allie is and what happened. Garrett and Hannah fill him in a little, recounting some of the horrid things Sean said, and Dean is LIVID. He storms straight over to her room to see her curled up in tears, and his heart breaks. As Allie explains what happened, Dean feels incredibly protective and does his best to comfort her. 

Allie confesses that she doesn’t know if she can keep their fling up anymore. It is getting too confusing for her: sleeping together while not being together. Dean looks her straight in the eye and says, “We are together.” He doesn’t have any rhyme or reason for it, but he is not about to let it end. He’s not about to let her go, and so he holds her until she falls asleep.

The next morning, Hannah and Garrett wait outside the room with their coffee mugs, acting like parents catching their child sneaking in after breaking curfew. They start questioning Dean the second he emerges, and Allie struts out and declares the her and Dean are together, deal with it. With that stated, Hannah kicks the boys out and demands an explanation from Allie, who is just as shocked that Dean decided to commit. Allie relents that she has no idea where things are going, but Hannah reassures her, telling her to stop overthinking and just roll with it. 

Christmas break rolls around, and Allie heads home to visit her dad. While at home, her dad informs her of his disapproval of Dean. He says Dean is not long-term and doesn’t know how to handle setbacks or hardships. Allie tries to brush this off, but it lingers in the back of her mind. Nonetheless, when her birthday rolls around, Dean takes her to go to salsa dance lessons, which is really, really cute because she mentioned this casually very early on in their fling. AND HE REMEMBERS THE LITTLE DETAILS WHICH IS SO PRECIOUS.

But happy times can’t last forever. When Dean gets back to the house, his roommates corner him and tell him that Beau Maxwell died in a car accident. Beau was one of Dean’s best friends, and he is shaken hard. So Dean grabs the liquor and just starts drinking. Allie comes over the second she finds out and tries to comfort him. This continues on in the days that follow. Dean is struggling and doesn’t even manage to make it to Beau’s memorial, and he keeps trying to drown out the pain in alcohol. 

As Dean keeps getting worse and worse, Allie gets more and more frustrated. He hasn’t been to see the Hurricanes since Beau’s passing, and Allie is worried for him and for his future. So she visits the Hurricanes’ rink and chats with Coach Ellis, making sure that Dean will still have a position there when he recovers from his grief. While she’s at the arena, Allie runs into Dakota, who is heartbroken that Dean left and thinks that Dean hates her because she made him buy ‘girly’ skates. 

As time passes, Dean promises that he’ll be there on opening night for Allie’s play. She reminds him time and time again, and when he doesn’t show, it breaks her heart. After the play, she storms over to his house to find him high and partying with his friends, so she breaks up with him then and there. She tells him he needs to get his act together and that he can’t use his grief as an excuse for hurting everyone around him. 

Dean then makes a list of everyone he needs to apologize to and then makes the rounds. He apologizes to Hannah, the hockey team, Coach Ellis, the Hurricanes, Dakota, Beau’s sister, and even Miranda. Speaking with Miranda after all those years finally allowed him to get some closure on their relationship, which had haunted him for so long.

Allie has been making use of her time on her own and has reached the point where she is ready to take Dean back, but she finds that he is in New York visiting his parents. Then, she gets a call from her dad revealing that he fell down but tells her not to freak out or worry because he is fine and already got checked out. Allie, however, is not fine, so she calls Dean immediately and asks him to check on her dad. 

Dean pulls up to check on Joe Hayes, who is not pleased to see him. Yet, he knows that Dean is there on Allie’s orders, so he can’t do too much about it. So Dean waltzes in and stays the night. Allie’s dad reveals that her mom had her perfumer friend from France make a custom perfume for Allie when she was little (strawberries and roses). He says that her mom spoke French and always wanted Allie to learn, and Dean laughs and tells him about the French soap opera they’ve been watching to learn the language. This earns him a nod of approval from Joe Hayes. 

Upon Dean’s safe return, where he assures Allie that her dad really is fine, she says she is ready to get back together. Yay, happy couple! Then, just like Sean, Dean whips out two plane tickets to LA because he learned that Allie turned down a lead role for the Fox TV show, and he won’t let her give up on her dream. He explains that he bought the second ticket for her dad and that he worked through the details on what it would look like for her dad to move out there with her. Dean says that she shouldn’t have to give up her dreams just to stay close to watch over her dad. 

Unhinged Spoiler REview Rant

Okay. If you’ve made it this far, congratulations, you have unlocked my unhinged full thoughts, so brace yourself. 

I want to like Dean more than I do. I’m sorry! There are just too many things that make me uncomfy. From page one, Dean’s defining personality trait is his sex life. Every single thought he has revolves around sex, and it’s kind of hard to read. Additionally, the second Allie comes over, he starts hitting on her even when he was told not to! I get that he’s a joker and a flirtatious person, but the way he keeps urging Allie to get with him is unnerving. And frankly, it shows a lack of respect for his Logan, Garrett, and Hannah, who all told him to keep his hands off. Also, their first time was when they were drinking and pounding tequila?? That just gives me the major ick. 

Following their first hook-up, Dean is only continuing contact with her because he selfishly wants to manipulate her into sleeping with him again (which gives me weird vibes!). He comes over when he knows that she is upset (when they watch the French show for the first time) because he is obsessed with sex, and he is just trying to play on her emotions to get her to sleep with him again. Also, he’s only seeking her out because he has *malfunctions* and can’t be with anyone else because his body is only attracted to her??

Sorry not sorry for the rant fam. This book remains at four stars in my book, and it has my all time favorite Off-Campus scene: when Dean bursts in to check on Allie after Sean’s outburst. The Dean I fell in love with is the protective boyfriend who lets his girl cry into his hoodie. The guy that buys pink skates for a little girl he barley knows. And the man who remembers the tiny details and is willing to embarrass himself and take salsa lessons with her. I love Dean when he proves that he is more than the campus manwhore.

This concludes Unhinged Spoiler Review Rants with Kristina! Let’s get hyped for that amazon release in THREE WEEKS! AHHHHHHHH!!