53 pages • 1 hour read
Ned VizziniBe More Chill
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Jeremy sits in math class at Middle Borough High School in the town of Metuchen, New Jersey. He overhears Jenna Rolan, “the Coolest girl in class” (3), gossiping with her friend Anne about someone named Elizabeth. Jenna is making fun of Elizabeth, claiming that she is a “slut.” The teacher, Mr. Gretch, begins the roll call, and students respond to their last names by saying “here.” However, Jeremy’s last name is “Heere,” a homophone of “here,” so he responds with “present” instead (5). Jeremy thinks that he hears someone snicker at that, so he adds a tally mark to his daily Humiliation Sheet.
Chapter 2 Summary
Jeremy explains that he uses a system called Humiliation Sheets to “keep track of my social status in a concrete, quantitative way” (6). Whenever another student laughs at him, makes an insulting comment about him, refuses to acknowledge him, or socially rejects him in another way, he records a tally mark on one of the sheets. As the math lesson begins, Jeremy continues to eavesdrop on Jenna and Anne while observing the other students in the room. He watches his crush, a girl named Christine Caniglia, but then he overhears Jenna and Anne referring to him as her stalker. They claim that he wrote her a letter. Jeremy panics about this rumor because it is untrue. He spoke to Christine only once before and never wrote a letter. However, he was planning to give her a chocolate shaped like William Shakespeare at play rehearsal later that day. The math teacher, Mr. Gretch, interrupts Jeremy’s thoughts by asking him a math question he does not know the answer to, resulting in another Mortification Event on the Humiliation Sheet.
Chapter 3 Summary
At lunch, Jeremy sits with his friend, Michael Mell. Michael wears headphones constantly, allowing him to sit at any table he wants to in the cafeteria. Jeremy admits to Michael that he doesn’t think he should give Christine the chocolate because of the rumor about the letter. Michael encourages him to do it anyway, saying that it only matters what Christine thinks of him, and the chocolate Shakespeare is the perfect combination of her interests. He tells Jeremy to imagine how he will feel if he does not give her the gift and misses his chance. The conversation is interrupted by Rich, a bully who carelessly tosses Michael’s entire lunch tray into the trash can.
Chapter 4 Summary
Jeremy goes to play practice and talks with an acquaintance called Mark. Mark is playing a video game on his Game Boy that appears to involve shooting unhoused people while driving an SUV. Mark refers to the game as KAP, which stands for “Kill All People” (16). The play’s director, Mr. Reyes, assigns the students their roles. Jeremy will be Lysander, while Jake Dillinger, a football player, will be Demetrius. Christine is excited to receive the role of Puck, which Jeremy finds cute. Mr. Reyes assigns the girls to set up the chairs for a read through of the play, while the boys must elect someone to microwave his Hot Pocket in the teachers’ lounge.
Chapter 5 Summary
Christine and Jeremy sit next to each other during the read through. Christine complains about having to move the chairs and about Mr. Reyes’s English classes while Jeremy attempts to read his lines as Lysander. Jeremy is not sure if Christine is genuinely interested in talking to him or if she just dislikes Mr. Reyes, but he attempts to direct the romantic lines in the script toward her. As they sit close together, Jeremy is hyperaware of his own body and his closeness to Christine. He becomes distracted and forgets to say his line, and she smiles at him.
Chapter 6 Summary
The play reading ends, and Jeremy approaches Christine to give her the chocolate Shakespeare. However, he first asks her about the rumor regarding the letter, giving her the impression that he does not want to be associated with her. She leaves, offended. When Jeremy reaches into his pocket to try to give her the chocolate Shakespeare, he finds that it melted in his pocket. Jeremy is upset but also relieved; his failure validates his anxious thoughts. Back to his unconfident normal self, he goes to the bathroom to clean out his pocket.
Chapter 7 Summary
As he heads to the bathroom, Jeremy notices that the school put up Halloween decorations. While he cleans out his pocket, Rich enters the bathroom. He insults Jeremy and makes a joke about him being a “fudge packer” due to the chocolate in his pocket (28). When Rich leaves, Jeremy adds another tally to his Humiliation Sheet and reflects on how Rich insults everyone in the school. Jeremy compares being cool to having power in society, thinking that people such as Alexander the Great and Henry Kissinger must have been cool. He wonders if being cool is genetic, thinking that it must skip a generation, since his parents seem to be popular.
Chapter 8 Summary
That evening at home, Jeremy’s mother asks how his day was, but he does not mention his embarrassment or his crush. His mother and father work as divorce lawyers, and his mother is constantly buying his father gifts he doesn’t use to try to convince him to lose weight. Jeremy watches an MTV reality show called Dismissed, on which young men go on dates with two women at the same time, and the women decide whether or not to reject them. Jeremy calls Michael, who is also watching the show. When one of the women removes her shirt, Michael uses a device called a “De-Fuzzer” to have his television unblur her nipples. Jeremy and Michael decide humanity will stop evolving because people can date whoever they want to, and there is no more need for “survival of the fittest” (37). Jeremy ends the evening by masturbating to online pornography.
Chapters 1-8 Analysis
The opening chapters of Be More Chill establish the central conflict of the novel: Jeremy’s inability to fit in with his peers and his desire to quantifiably calculate his social status. Because the book is in first-person perspective, and Jeremy is the narrator, his internal anxieties and systems for managing them are an integral part of the plot. Jeremy is highly analytical, viewing his struggles with acceptance in high school as part of a definable system of social value wherein certain behaviors, physical attributes, and cultural signifiers determine whether or not a teenager has power. This academic perspective is often used for comedy—exposing how absurd and arbitrary some of the rules of youth culture can be and juxtaposing other forms of power with popularity in a high school setting. For example, Jeremy thinks that “Saddam Hussein was Cool; not that he’s a good guy or anything, but he had to be pretty slick to get in power and keep it for so long” (29). This comparison between a real-world dictator and a popular high school student amusingly portrays the excessive value that teenagers place on their social status, but it also suggests that the struggles that Jeremy faces might be more serious than they appear. To Jeremy, being popular in high school is a significant indicator of future power, and his lacking social skills suggest to him that he will live a fearful and unhappy life, even as an adult.
One theme introduced in these chapters is the impact of social anxiety on Jeremy’s mental health. While his embarrassments at school might seem insignificant, his fixation on his own failures indicates how damaging this mental state is for him. When Jeremy considers how he would feel if he did not give Christine the chocolate Shakespeare, he thinks that he will feel “[l]ike I do all the time, like I feel whenever I can’t dial a phone number or dance at a dance or hold a hand right. Like I’m used to feeling. ‘Like shit.’” (13). This passage exemplifies the constant anxiety that seemingly minor mistakes cause him. When he accidentally offends Christine and fails to give her the chocolate Shakespeare, he feels oddly relieved, reflecting that “failure justifies all my worrying and planning and strategizing” (25). Jeremy is trapped in a painful cycle of failure due to his lack of self-confidence. That the melting chocolate is in the shape of playwright William Shakespeare foreshadows that his work A Midsummer Night’s Dream will cause Jeremy’s romantic rejection. By acting like someone else, the text hints, Jeremy will ruin his chances with Christine.
These chapters also establish the theme of the way that technology contributes to Jeremy’s social dissatisfaction. While this book was written before the broad adoption of social media websites, popular media such as music, games, and television impact the behaviors and expectations of the teenage characters. Mark plays a violent video game called “Kill All People,” which appears to be a parody of very violent games like Grand Theft Auto, a franchise that was popular in 2004. His rude and dismissive mannerisms suggest that his fixation on the game makes him less empathetic toward his peers. Similarly, when Jeremy watches Dismissed, he feels overwhelmed by the unrealistic romantic expectations that the program creates: “What are you telling them—all of sudden, you’re not Cool unless you’re going out with two girls? You’re entitled to two girls? Where’s my one girl?” (33). Similarly, Jeremy is jealous of Michael’s access to new technology that allows him to unblur the censorship of women’s breasts on television. Technology and mass media create expectations that cause Jeremy to feel inadequate and excluded, a problem that will increase throughout the rest of the novel.
