72 pages • 2 hours read
Nina LaCourWe Are Okay
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A 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 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
In the groundskeeper’s home, Marin and Mabel lie silently on the fold-out couch. Marin remembers a party shortly after her high school graduation, an event at which everyone seemed beautiful and connected and present in the firelight. She recalls Mabel holding her hand and her decision not to kiss Mabel; she wonders if things would have been different if she had, if the public knowledge of their relationship would have been enough to tie them together after Gramps’s death. She struggles to reconnect with the Marin of that moment, thinking that they were all innocent of the painful surprises they’d all experience as they got older.
Mabel cannot sleep, so she asks Marin about the time right after she arrived in New York. She thinks Marin moved into the dorms early and met new friends. Marin tells Mabel of the dirty motel she stayed in and the woman in the room next to her who would howl like a wolf for hours. She notices that this information changes the way Mabel feels about Marin’s disappearance.
Mabel asks about Birdie; she wonders if anyone told her that Gramps had died. Marin says, “There was no Birdie,” and hopes Mabel will ask more (132). Instead, Mabel says Gramps must have been very lonely to make up a pen pal. Marin says Gramps didn’t have to be lonely because she was there; Mabel was the lonely one. They decide to sleep, and Marin, hesitant, cuddles with Mabel. Mabel makes Marin promise not to disappear again. The chapter ends with the title phrase: “We are okay” (135).
Chapter 14 Summary
The girls wake in the morning and walk back to the dorms. The snow is deep and bitterly cold, making the walk wet and painful. They dig out the snow around the door to open it. Once inside, they take hot showers, then go check on the food left overnight without power. It’s still cold, so they decide to make chili and cornbread. Mabel announces that her brother, Carlos, is expecting a baby with his wife, Griselda. Marin thinks about “the expansiveness of a life” (141). She thinks of Ana and Javier as a young couple, then new parents, then parents of adults who moved away, and now as grandparents of a new generation. The thought of that evolution of love moves her deeply, but it also allows the loneliness to flood her.
She asks Mabel to elaborate on what she meant when she’d called Gramps cute earlier in the visit. Mabel notes some characteristics and habits of Gramps, including the loveseat lectures he used to give. Marin tells her about one three-day loveseat lecture series on stain removal, noting that it worked, and she is now able to get a stain out of anything. Something occurs to her, and she asks Mabel about a comment she’d made earlier about her parents cleaning out Carlos’s room. Mabel says she’s already told Marin that they made her a bedroom of her own. Marin had assumed it would be the guest room, but Mabel points out that a guest room is for guests and that their intention was to give Marin a home. This sparks a brightness in Marin.
Marin asks Mabel to tell her about her life at college in Los Angeles. Mabel tells her and talks about other high school friends who go to school near them, particularly in New York, suggesting that Marin could reconnect. Marin declines and asks Mabel about Jacob. She sees a picture and says they look happy together, which pleases Mabel.
Chapter 15 Summary
LaCour returns the narrative to July and August. Marin does not adhere to a curfew. Without school to assert a consistent bedtime, their previous dinner routine is also disrupted. Once, when Marin does the laundry, she finds seven bloody handkerchiefs stuffed into one of Gramps’s socks. She diligently uses her stain-removal knowledge to restore them, but she is worried. When she asks, Gramps says he’s “so-so” and declining to visit a doctor.
Gramps sits Marin down and explains the details of her tuition and financial situation, showing her the college and banking documents. He emphasizes the need to be frugal with the money he’s set aside for her, saying, “After you’re gone, no more four-dollar coffee. This is food and bus-fare money. Textbooks and simple clothing” (151). The discussion makes Marin anxious and uncomfortable. She insists she won’t need the money and can continue to use their shared account. Gramps, looking too thin, with yellow eyes, too often coughing up blood, says she will need the money.
Marin and Mabel’s summer together is romantic and idyllic. They spend a great deal of time together and avoid talking about their upcoming parting or Marin’s worries about her grandfather. When Mabel’s parents drive her to the airport to go to college, she and Marin agree that it would be too painful if Marin accompanied them. They make plans to visit each other, locating Nebraska as a middle point at which they can meet—a 20-hour drive for each of them.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
The mystery of Gramps’s death and the conditions surrounding it come into sharper focus in these chapters. Alongside the discussion of finances, Gramps’s loveseat lectures take on the shape of a dying man trying to impart wisdom in the time he has left. Though some of the lectures are more abstract—such as his earlier words on types of love—some of them are practical. Also interesting is the revelation that Marin and Mabel’s romantic relationship was private and not known by their family and friends. Though the two young women cared for each other deeply, the fact that they were not “out” as a couple ultimately adds to Marin’s unmoored feeling.
Gramps’s physical symptoms become more pronounced, though the trauma and earlier references to Marin’s departure from a police station indicate that the death was not of natural causes. Marin’s admission that Birdie was not real also adds dimension to Gramps’s mental condition. Though she does not elaborate, the information suggests that Gramps was writing both the letters to Birdie and those from Birdie, a deception which seemed to have been vital to his happiness. In these chapters, we also see Marin coming to terms with her own history of loneliness and the lack of emotional stability present in her home with her grandfather. This, combined with the trauma of Gramps’s sudden death, gives further insight into Marin’s fragility and abrupt departure from home.
Marin and Mabel’s discussion about the woman who howled like a wolf at the motel develops the symbol of Literary Analysis. Marin compares the woman to Rochester’s wife in Jane Eyre, the proverbial “Madwoman in the Attic.” This trope of Victorian literature paints female characters as either angelic or monstrous. Here, Marin confesses that she’s afraid she’ll “turn into” the “madwoman” from the identical room next door. This parallels the literary moment when Jane sees Rochester’s wife reflected in a mirror. Though Marin and the “madwoman” are different, she notes that there are similarities between them, and she could just as easily become a “madwoman.” LaCour is disassembling the dichotomy of angelic versus monstrous—there’s a little bit of madness in Marin and Jane, just as there is the angelic. Marin’s fear of sliding into absolute madness comes from her isolation and loneliness.
