49 pages • 1 hour read
April HenryThe Girl I Used to Be
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2016A 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 38-42Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 38 Summary: “Something is Coming”
Olivia has tripped over a branch and hits the ground hard. When she tries to get up, she discovers that she has injured her ankle. She is deep in the woods and doesn’t have cell phone service. No one knows where she is, and she only has about 12 ounces of water. She worries about the dropping temperatures as night approaches. She decides to crawl towards her car in the hopes that she’ll get improved reception. As she crawls, she finds a bone, which she believes to be a human finger. Something large starts moving in the woods.
Chapter 39 Summary: “Freckled with Red”
Olivia shouts for help; a surprised man responds. It is Spaulding, the police chief. Her impression of him was positive at the party, so she’s relieved. He says it’s an odd choice for hiking, and she admits that she was curious about what happened to Naomi and Terry. He is surprised when she shows him the bone she found. He marks the spot and offers to carry her to her car; Olivia tries to protest, but he talks her into it. As he carries her, she has a memory flash of being carried through the woods by the killer.
Chapter 40 Summary: “Let Me Go”
Olivia has a panic response and begins thrashing and kicking. Spaulding puts her down and is worried when she throws up. He says he thinks she had a grand mal seizure. Spaulding insists on driving Olivia to the hospital to get her head and ankle checked out. She asks Spaulding what he thinks happened to Naomi and Terry. He says there’s evidence that it might have been a serial killer, citing one of the murders Duncan told Olivia about earlier. Olivia points out that Jason is a trucker, but Spaulding dismisses that theory and says he believes it was a stranger.
Chapter 41 Summary: “Like I Never Was”
Olivia received a walking boot at the hospital to help her heal from her sprain. Duncan takes her to pick up her car and tells her that they should be friends instead of dating; Olivia doesn’t quite believe this but goes with it because she’s missed him. When she gets home from work there’s a police car in Nora’s driveway. Spaulding comes out of Nora’s house and says he came to check in on Olivia. When Olivia tries to go inside to give Nora the lemonade Nora requested, Spaulding stops her. He says she’s taking a nap. This makes Olivia suspicious; she goes into the house anyway, finding Nora dead on the couch.
She quickly realizes that Spaulding killed Nora. He reveals that he ran Olivia through the databases and realized she was Ariel. He puts handcuffs on Olivia and pushes her into the back of his squad car. Spaulding talks to himself, asking how it got this far. He tells himself he’s a good husband, father, and cop and that he didn’t have a choice in killing Nora. He admits to killing Terry and Naomi. He explains that his family was poor and couldn’t afford food. He was out hunting without a permit in the forest when he accidentally shot Terry. Naomi came upon them, and he killed her to keep the secret. He claims that it was the “hardest thing” to do but that he didn’t have any other choice. He then dropped Olivia off at the Walmart, parked Terry’s truck at the airport, wiped the inside, and took a bus back to Medford. He says he now must kill Olivia, too, but that people won’t look for her because she has a reputation for being impetuous in her movements already.
Chapter 42 Summary: “No Hope”
Spaulding brings Olivia back to the location of her parents’ murder. He forces her out of the car at gunpoint, but she kicks him in the groin with the plastic boot on her sprained ankle and runs into the woods. He tries to hold her back, breaking Nora’s necklace in the process, but she gets away. As she runs, she remembers running here on the day of the murder. Olivia hides in a large blackberry bush. Spaulding passes within 15 feet of her in his search.
Chapters 38-42 Analysis
The mystery is solved in this section. It’s worth noting that there is little in the previous chapters to suggest Spaulding was potentially involved in the murders. We can point back to the destruction of the evidence, but at the time it was a plausible event. We might also consider that Spaulding is the first and only person Olivia interacts with at the site of the murders; this doesn’t seem obvious when he arrives to help her, but we can see that this is significant in hindsight.
Another important event in this section is Nora’s murder. Spaulding has now taken three people from Olivia to protect himself. His explanation for this reveals the depths of his self-interest. He claims that he had “no choice” but to kill Naomi, but the truth is that he had other choices—he simply prioritized his own life over those of two young parents with a toddler. The idea of personal gain as a motive is usually discussed in terms of direct, material benefit. Spaulding’s gain was much more indirect (other than the roughly two thousand dollars); he didn’t want to face the consequences of accidentally killing Terry. He had hopes to be a police officer and would have had to give those up. In his calculations, his future was more important than the lives he was taking.
These chapters also provide a return to both Olivia’s origins (the murder of her parents) and the opening pages of the novel. Philosopher George Santayana wrote, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The cyclical nature of the narrative upholds this concept: The reader returns to the beginning of the novel; Olivia returns to the site of her original trauma; and Spaulding returns to the place where he first found himself to be capable of murder. Olivia enters the final section of the novel at the intersection of fear and inevitability. By reclaiming her life, she is back in the merciless hands of the man who spared her as a child. Olivia has the opportunity now to confront Spaulding and bring justice to her parents in a way she didn’t as a toddler.
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By April Henry
