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Kathryn ErskineA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Content Warning: The Chapter 17 Summary references a school shooting.
Caitlin is back in her brother’s room staring at where he carved “SCOUT” in the woodwork of his dresser. She is frustrated. She has looked up the word “closure” in her dictionary dozens of times. As she sits there pondering, she glimpses the list of tools and supplies Devon wrote down when he began his Eagle Scout project. The mission-style chest is still under the gray sheet, unfinished.
When her father gets home, he reminds Caitlin her birthday is coming up. When he asks what she wants, she says, “I want Devon to take me shopping like he did last year” (101). Her father searches for a way to respond.
The next day, Mrs. Brook asks Caitlin whether she understands that her brother is dead, explaining that her father called that morning concerned about Caitlin’s birthday wish. She tells Caitlin she might want to be more thoughtful towards her father and not give him more to worry about. Caitlin agrees. “You’re starting to show empathy” (104), Mrs. Brook says. During their conversation, Mrs. Brook reveals that Michael is the son of the teacher who died in the shooting. Mrs. Brook thinks their friendship might be a good idea.
At recess, Michael asks Caitlin to be his reading buddy (a project in which fifth graders help first graders practice reading). Caitlin cannot promise because she does not know about the program. When Caitlin tells Michael about her birthday wish, he says sometimes he wishes he could still do things with his mother. His father wants to throw a football, but they haven’t yet.
That night Caitlin reassures her father that from now on she will call her brother “Devon-who-is-dead” (109). Her father leaves the room.
When the reading program pairings are announced the next day, the teacher assigns Michael to Josh. Caitlin is confused, saying, “He’s evil” (112). The teacher explains that Josh needs to understand that not everyone is mad at him. She calls this her “Plan for Healing” (112). Caitlin is upset, so Mrs. Brook takes her into the hallway, where Caitlin insists that she needs closure too and that Michael is her friend. Nevertheless, Caitlin is instead paired with a little girl who gets upset when Caitlin reads loudly at her (she wants Michael to hear her).
When Caitlin gets home, she heads to her hidey-hole in Devon’s room. She finally made a friend, and Michael has been taken away from her. When her father comes in, the two talk briefly about Caitlin moving into Devon’s room. Caitlin looks around the room and at the unfinished chest, noting, “I guess it will never be finished” (116).
Caitlin tries to be friendly with the girls in her class. When one girl, Rachel, comes in with a banged-up face from falling off her bike, Caitlin tells her the truth, knowing honesty is important to friendship: “It looks bad. It’s purple and puffy” (119). The other girl rally around Rachel and scold Caitlin. She tries to make amends by going to the classroom and moving Rachel’s desk so that she faces the wall: That way, Caitlin figures, she won’t be self-conscious. The action only makes Rachel feel more self-conscious and embarrassed while angering the other girls.
Mrs. Brook tries to explain empathy to Caitlin and how tricky it can be to put herself in someone else’s position. Caitlin says she has never fallen off a bike and questions how she can feel what Rachel feels: “I am not sure I can learn how to do empathy” (122).
At home, both Caitlin and her father struggle with emotions, neither able to find the closure that Caitlin knows they need. While sitting in Devon’s room, Caitlin overhears a phone conversation between her father and her aunt; her father admits he needs to see a counselor but says his insurance will not cover the sessions. Caitlin is not entirely sure what insurance is but understands her father is worried. She stares at the chest under the sheet. Her father was going to teach her woodworking when the project was done, but now “he won’t teach [her] anything” (128). As she looks at the chest, she begins to cry.
Caitlin finds out that Mrs. Brook will be gone for several weeks; she has gone to be with her sister in the last days of a difficult pregnancy. Caitlin is confused and upset. At the urging of her teacher, she writes a letter to Mrs. Brook saying she hopes that she can come back soon.
These critical chapters throw Caitlin back onto herself for emotional support and reveal how Caitlin struggles with opening herself up to others. She is blunt, direct in her observations, candid with others, and always concise and to the point; she does not (and perhaps cannot) play any kind of language games that might help her avoid coming off as insensitive or even rude. These chapters show how difficult it will be for Caitlin to grasp empathy. Although she wants to be kind and helpful—when Mrs. Brook explains that Caitlin’s father is worried about the extent to which she understands Devon’s death, she asks “Will [acknowledging it] make Dad happy?” (104)—she struggles to understand other people’s thought processes and emotions.
These chapters offer Caitlin opportunities to begin the process of practicing empathy, and in each case her efforts fall short. Though her intentions are good, she comes across as selfish, abrupt, and uncaring. The conversation Caitlin has with her father over her upcoming birthday reveals exactly this dilemma (99-102). Caitlin values honesty and directness, so she says that what she really wants for her birthday this year is for her brother to take her to the mall. She is not attuned to her father’s reaction: how he quietly drops his head, eyes closed. The scene is an example of dramatic irony; the reader, assuming they can read body language, knows what the first-person narrator does not. Though Caitlin’s Asperger’s exacerbates the situation, the scene also makes a broader point about grief’s tendency to isolate people within their own pain and their own coping mechanisms: Caitlin is too immersed in her own concerns to notice her father is struggling with pain of his own.
The same dynamic plays out when Caitlin stumbles trying to be a friend to Rachel. She hopes that being honest will help her make friends, so Caitlin tells the girl, who is already self-conscious about her bruises and cuts, that her face is bruised, puffy, purple, and swollen; Caitlin even uses the word “gross.” The other girls who hear Caitlin are shocked by her apparent cruelty, and their anger deepens when they return to the classroom to find that Caitlin has moved Rachel’s desk to the corner. Caitlin reasons that if Rachel is self-conscious about her injuries, sitting with her back to the class should help. The logic is simple and yet deeply flawed. Caitlin again comes across as tactless, insensitive, and rude. Mrs. Brook tries to explain, “Think like Rachel. It felt like you didn’t want to see her again so you wanted to get rid of her by putting her in the corner” (121).
Caitlin again exhibits how difficult the concept of empathy is to her when Michael tells her that his father wants to toss a football with him and that he (Michael) avoids it. Caitlin does not pick up on the implications of the football tossing: how it reveals the desperate need for bonding that the father feels in the aftermath of losing his wife. More than that, however, Caitlin is too absorbed in renegotiating buddies for the school reading program to care about Michael and his father.
Caitlin’s insensitivity when teams are announced for the reading program is a purer example of self-centeredness; the problem isn’t so much that Caitlin doesn’t understand another’s point of view, but rather that she thinks her own should have priority. Given that Caitlin has only just begun to forge a friendship, her frustration when Michael is assigned a different partner (and one she dislikes) is understandable. Nevertheless, Caitlin’s behavior is selfish—particularly her insistence that Michael can only have one friend (her). Thus, the novel moves to its lowest point: Caitlin appears uninterested in empathy and appears to be mired in her own problems and anxieties. To add to that, Mrs. Brook abruptly departs (importantly, in a show of empathy, as she wants to help her sister in the last weeks of a difficult pregnancy). It is up to Caitlin now to redeem Caitlin.