74 pages • 2 hours read
Wesley KingOCDaniel
Fiction | Novel | Middle GradeA 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.
Chapters 17-20
Chapter 17 Summary
Daniel tells Sara, via email, about Raya’s party, and how that means that though he can still come to collect the phone from John’s that he will have to go straight after. She just responds with “K” (186). She ignores him at school and is clearly upset. Max and Daniel discuss Raya’s party. For Max, who has been to Raya’s parties before it is not that important, whereas Daniel is extremely nervous.
After football practice Sara and Daniel break into John’s house again to retrieve the phone. They get it but find out through a text from her mother that John is going to Sara’s mom’s place for tea, so John might return to his own house first. As a result, they need to leave quickly. However, Daniel gets zapped as they’re leaving. Sara tries to help him and says, “You are stronger than your fear” (192). They are just getting out when John’s car pulls up in the drive.
Chapter 18 Summary
As John’s car approaches, they bolt out of the back door, and dive into the shrubs in the back garden. Daniel starts to have an attack of anxiety again when, thankfully for them, John leaves. Sara tells Daniel, “You have to pay the price to be special” (194).
Daniel goes to Raya’s party, where she greets him with a hug. He is conscripted into a debate about which is a better film, The Terminator or Love Actually. Taj, who is also there, suggests they play some “games,” like spin the bottle. Daniel gets lucky and ends up being chosen to kiss Clara. This kiss though is quite unenthusiastic, on Clara’s part, and brief. Daniel gets lucky again, and when Raya spins the bottle it lands on him. The embrace this time is longer and more intimate. However, it is broken off by Raya’s father on the stairs, who, seeing what was happening, shouts at Raya.
Chapter 19 Summary
Max and Daniel walk back from Raya’s house, after having to leave. They discuss how Daniel has now kissed more girls than Max, despite Max being more popular with most of the girls in school. Daniel that night hopes for a thunderstorm to cancel the game that would be taking place in the morning.
Unfortunately for Daniel, it is only raining the next day, and the match goes ahead as planned. Because of the rain and bad weather Daniel has a poor first kick, and the game begins badly for their team. A star player of the opposing team is overrunning their defence and they are losing. Daniel has to make another important kick. He misses, but Max ends up with the ball, and is in turn then tackled. In the confusion, the ball ends up coming back to Daniel to kick, but the opposing player’s star dives in at the ball at his feet. The resulting clash ends up with that player breaking his fingers against Daniel’s boot and having to be taken to hospital. Without their best player their opponents quickly disintegrate, and the Erie Hills Elephants, Daniel’s team, romp to victory. The coach declares Daniel to be a “good-luck charm” (207) and insists he will play in the state finals the following week.
Daniel later writes more of his story. Fictional Daniel and Sara are driving to New York, and Sara explains that the switch Daniel pressed sent everyone else into an alternative reality. That is, everyone except for them, because they are unique. Back in reality Sara plays Daniel the recording of the phone they had planted at John’s. It seems to indicate that he had been involved in removing Sara’s dad for Sara’s mom. He admits to doing “it” (210), which Sara interprets as the murder. Sara also reveals that she had shown up at Daniel’s house one night and seen him flicking the switch multiple times. This discovery, that he had been seen doing this by her, makes Daniel cry. She gives him a book she got from her doctors. It is called OCD: How Compulsions Can Take over Our Lives.
Chapter 20 Summary
That night Daniel reads about OCD in the book. What he had known as “zaps” are caused by anxiety, and the things he did to deal with that anxiety, like flicking switches, are obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are when he wants to do certain rituals, and compulsions when he in fact follows through and does them. Daniel now recognizes that he has OCD. Although he feels that this is relatively small consolation, as he believes now that people like him and Sara were not unique, “We were mad” (216).
He rings Sara in the morning, on Sunday, and they agree to go for a walk. Daniel also writes two more chapters of his book to reassert control. Walking through a field with Sara he remembers an incident at school the previous year where he had gotten praise from a teacher for his writing. Another boy had then responded to this in the corridor by knocking him to the ground and insulting him for being a “teacher’s pet.” Sara also admits to having had a crush on Daniel, though she now claims that she likes someone else.
Chapters 17-20 Analysis
There are many references to luck and chance throughout these chapters. Max says in relation to the upcoming game that “we would need a little luck to win it” (189), and also talks about the “luck” (202) that meant Daniel kissed a girl before he did. When hoping for the game’s postponement, Daniel reflects, “There’s only so much luck to go around” (203). King emphasizes the ambiguous nature of chance, that which happens outside our control or design, and our concomitant efforts to manage or control this. The dynamic between chaos and control plays a central role in Daniel’s experience of OCD.
As Daniel discovers when reading the book on OCD that Sara gives him, his obsessive rituals are all about control. As Daniel notes, “The things I did—the counting and the rituals—were just ways that I tried to control the anxiety” (215). To deal with the distressing and seemingly arbitrary feelings of fear, distress, and hopelessness, he creates routines that make the world manageable and familiar. Thus, a sense of horror at the world’s chaos is temporarily assuaged. However, such rituals are double-edged. While temporarily easing the suffering from anxiety, they also create prisons from which it is difficult to escape. The routines become a source of anguish in themselves, and they do nothing to address or resolve the underlying source of the original anxiety, which therefore inevitably returns.
Yet King does not view all forms of control as bad or unhealthy. There are positive types of control too, such as Daniel’s writing. As Daniel says, “I got to control everything. It was my world and my story” (217). If the need for control is channeled into a creative outlet like writing, then anxiety can serve a positive function. Moreover, it is not just writing or control for its own sake. Like the book on OCD, Daniel’s own story helps him explore and understand the nature of his condition. It allows for a deeper form of control rooted in self-understanding, and understanding of the world, rather than arbitrary rituals.
