Come and Get It

Millie’s sex life interferes with her work life in a significant way, bringing the theme of Crossing Personal and Professional Boundaries to its moral crisis. As that boundary continues to collapse, Millie brings her secret relationship with Agatha into the dormitory where she essentially works. The narrative defines Belgrade as Millie’s workplace, distinguishing it from the house-sit that she begins to keep as if it were her home. Millie even stresses that she can’t go to Agatha’s house because she is on duty. Because she lets her guard down, Millie fails to intervene at the exact moment when she is needed, missing the calls that would have brought her to the suite sooner. This oversight is also the culmination of earlier missteps that Millie takes. In Chapter 16, she inadvertently fails to execute her duties in looking after all three of her neighboring suitemates. Her resentment towards Tyler causes her to refuse an opportunity for reconciliation. Later in the same chapter, she sees Peyton carrying Kennedy’s dirty dishes to her room but fails to think that it is suspicious. She also notices that Agatha is rejecting Kennedy from her workshop but only delivers a passive reaction to it. This will be a moment Millie returns to at the end of the novel.

Agatha’s rejection causes Kennedy to spiral, emphasizing the risks of idolizing authority figures amidst The Complexities of New Adulthood. She entertains intrusive thoughts, either to stop or to satisfy her compounded grief. Where she once saw Agatha Paul as someone who could help her resolve her trauma, she now sees her as someone who causes her great pain. From her perspective, the rejection is tantamount to a denial of Kennedy’s experience, even though Agatha’s rejection stems merely from a craft matter. Agatha is teaching a writing workshop that is too advanced for Kennedy at this stage. However, because Kennedy has determined that Agatha’s workshop is the single key to her future, even making her decision to transfer to the University of Arkansas based on Agatha’s presence, the rejection becomes an existential one. By exalting Agatha’s workshop as her singular hope for success, Kennedy sought a straightforward solution to her pain. The rejection, therefore, represents more than the loss of an academic experience; instead, it forces Kennedy to reckon with the fact that there is no one, simple resolution to the pain and isolation she feels.

What escalates Kennedy’s crisis even further is her conflict with Peyton, which underscores The Social Dynamics of Communal Living and The Complexities of New Adulthood as interconnected themes. Peyton has been clear about her needs from the beginning and has exhausted all avenues to resolve the issue, including asking Millie for advice. However, when she sees Kennedy upset, she tries to assert that her needs are still valid and that she tried to resolve the issue without being intentionally petty or mean. Her attempt to fix Kennedy’s pizza cutter is an effort to remedy the situation while she still can, putting aside their differences to show that things aren’t so bad. However, since Kennedy needs someone to blame for all her misfortunes, she fights to get back her pizza cutter, leading to her suffering an injury and briefly considering its consequences. The escalation of an otherwise minor conflict over dishes into an event that sends two students to the hospital illustrates how simmering tensions are exacerbated by communal living.