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 5-8
Chapter 5 Summary
After seeing Taj ask Raya to the dance, and failing to do so himself, Daniel describes the experience of “heartache” (49) as he is lying in bed. He compares it to the feeling of being zapped. Heartache is similar and involves the sense of having “messed up” (49), as well as the fear that you will never be happy. However, it does not involve the belief that you might die or destroy the world. On the other hand, being zapped can be temporarily fixed by a ritual, whereas heartache cannot. Nevertheless, Daniel concludes that being zapped is still worse.
Participating in the school football game, but as the back-up kicker, he sees Taj playing properly and Raya cheering him on. He concludes from this embarrassing experience that he needs to seek advice about girls; his older brother, Steve, suggests that Daniel change his personality and his looks. He says that Daniel should build his physique, demonstrate more confidence, and emphasize his intellect rather than struggling to succeed at football. Returning to his room, and about to start writing, Daniel finds an email from a strange address. It says that they are running out of time, and it is signed from a “Fellow Star Child” (58).
Chapter 6 Summary
Daniel is talking to Raya. He tries to follow Steve’s advice and, even though the conversation is going well, drops in a question about the government’s new policy on Iran. This contrived effort at “intelligent conversation” goes down badly, with Raya retorting that she is Indian not Iranian. She then starts speaking to someone else.
It is the day of the dance, and Daniel is getting ready, trying on shirts. He cannot wear his preferred blue because Max is wearing that color. Daniel then sets off in the car with his mom to pick up Max for the dance. Before they arrive at Max’s house, she takes the opportunity to give him some pointers. She tells him that girls like politeness, but also that he has to dance as girls “don’t like the guy in the corner” (64). Finally, she suggests that he does not focus on the pretty girls but ask the quiet girls to dance, too.
Chapter 7 Summary
Daniel and Max go into the dance in the school gym. Raya speaks to Daniel, and she talks about liking his hair messy, as it makes him look like a writer; she playfully messes it up with her hand. She reveals that she has seen him writing. Daniel goes to the bathroom, and on the way notices Sara, sat alone with her teaching assistant, watching him.
Daniel sees Raya dancing with Taj and laughing in a “fun and loud” (86) way that she does not with Daniel. This sight, and its attendant jealousy, provokes anxiety, a feeling of inadequacy, and an attack of zaps. Feeling like he is going to die, he starts to tap the chip bowl a certain number of times. He feels like he has got the number wrong; in a state of panic, he tries to leave the dance and go home. Daniel then experiences what he calls “the Great Space.” He gets zapped badly as he is passing the light switch in the gym. To deal with this anxiety, and despite his desperate desire to do otherwise, he flicks the switch on, then off again. Everybody stares at him.
Daniel then runs home and does a particularly long and traumatic routine, brushing his teeth until his gums bleed, and washing his hands till they are raw. His father notices something odd, and Daniel claims that everything is fine. After his dad has left his room, Daniel reflects, in anguish, on the fact that he is “crazy” (77), and why this means Raya will never date him.
Chapter 8 Summary
Daniel wakes up feeling awful and is quizzed by Emma and Steve about the dance. They ask whether he humiliated himself. Steve also offers him more advice, saying that he should “Buck up” and that “No one likes a mope” (80).
At the beginning of school Daniel bumps into Sara, and they talk. She thought that he would not come into school after what happened with Raya and the dance. Sara reveals that she watches him sometimes, and that she finds him interesting. Daniel asks whether she is the “Star Child” who left the note in his bag. She confirms this and tells him that he is a Star Child, too, although he doesn’t know it yet. Daniel agrees to help her, and to meet her after school to begin. They are going to look for her father.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
In the context of middle school and high school, social acceptance is linked to romantic acceptance. To be recognized and viewed as “normal” is to be accepted by the opposite sex. In Chapters 5-8, King explores the challenges presented by the pursuit of such acceptance for the person living with OCD. The kernel of this challenge is that of the conflict between being seen and being concealed.
For example, Steve advises Daniel to “Stop shuffling around in Max’s shadow” and “Stand out a little” (57). Likewise, Daniel’s mother explains that he needs to dance if he wants girls to like him. The basis of this advice emphasizes “being seen” and conforming to social expectations. His brother and mother suggest that if Daniel wants girls to like him, he must do or say something to get noticed, but in a socially validated way. Taj is presented as the archetypal, successful, embodiment of this ideal. He is loud, aggressive, and plays on the football team. After the game, he “strut[s] around like a rooster” (59). He behaves in an obnoxious, attention-grabbing way and succeeds in taking Raya to the dance.
The situation for the girls is scarcely better. Clara, Raya’s friend, dresses “like a Barbie doll” (61) to get noticed by Max. Her hair, clothes, and even skin, are elaborately presented to get his attention. Meanwhile at the dance, Daniel observes the girls as “flitting around like multicolored birds” (67). Bright, colorful dresses in oranges, yellows, and purples, are worn to win the interest and approval of the boys. By contrast, Sara’s muted outfit of a green blouse and dress pants renders her invisible. King suggests that something hypocritical and even oppressive is happening. These 13-year-olds are being constantly exhorted to stand out. They are repeatedly told to equate happiness with the social acceptance supposedly won through this. Yet this “standing out,” for both genders, is entirely superficial and conventional. It is about public displays and performances; a situation made worse by the fact that it is encouraged by parents and the school. There seems little room for being recognized in a more meaningful or individual way.
Further, anyone who is genuinely different will suffer deeply from these pressures. Reconciling the admonition to “stand out” with the demand that unpalatable, unusual aspects of oneself be concealed or repressed may seem impossible. King demonstrates this with the character of Sara. What makes her a distinct, interesting, individual is also what makes her a social nonentity. Her way of dealing with the contradictory demands of public romantic acceptance is by withdrawing from that world altogether.
In contrast, Daniel tries to succeed by the more ordinary standards of that world, but his efforts to gain acceptance flounder against the reality of his condition. This is symbolically realized in his flicking of the switch in the gym. The tension between being seen and trying to remain concealed reaches its climax in this moment. His OCD, a vital part of who he is, humiliatingly reveals itself, as he is observed, momentarily, by all the others through that act. This experience provokes a desire to be totally invisible. As he says after the dance, “I wanted to wake up and be the only human on earth” (78). The recognition of the other that he hoped to win turned against him. Far from being a way of ameliorating his suffering and anxiety, it has become an exacerbating cause of it.
Yet the picture presented by King is not wholly negative. From the failure of a conformist and superficial conception of “being seen,” a potentially more affirmative, authentic form of recognition is indicated. This is first hinted at in Daniel’s conversations with Raya. What she admires in him is not some obvious or crude “confidence.” Nor does she care, so she says, about his position on the football team. Rather, she likes that he is a writer, something she has noticed him doing in class. Sara has also watched him and finds him interesting and unique. Her interest in him is not in spite of his strange habits but seemingly because of them.
