56 pages • 1 hour read
Holding Up The Universe
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Pages 98-162Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 98-162 Summary
The next section of Holding Up the Universe is titled “Now,” and the story moves back into the present. Libby encourages Iris to tell the principal about what happened, but Iris declines. Libby then meets with her counselor, Rachel Mendes, for their weekly meeting ata local park. Rachel met with Libby daily after her stint in the hospital, and now, Libby thinks of Rachel as her best friend. The two discuss the rodeo incident, as well as Libby’s handling of her own anxiety issues.
The narrative switches back to Jack who is at Masselin’s Toys, the family business. Jack’s dad enters the store office and confronts Jack about his quitting advanced chemistry. Jack takes this as a sign that his dad is still seeing Monica Chapman behind his mother’s back. When Jack gets home, he talks to Dusty, whose purse was vandalized by his classmates. Jack offers to make or buy him a new one, but Dusty decides he would rather have a robot “that can be my friend” (107). Jack immediately sets out to find components for the robot in thebasement, which is “like a warped version of Santa’s workshop” (109), full of discarded toys and parts. His hunt is interrupted by a text from Kam, who declares Libby to be the “prize” of the Fat Girl Rodeo. Jack continues to find the idea of the rodeo distasteful, but again, he declines to speak up about it. He contemplates the consequences of speaking out against Kam and Seth, deciding he needs them to retain his identity at school, saying, “I’d rather not lose me” (113). Plagued by a guilty conscience, Jack begins writing the apology letter from the novel’s Prologue.
The next section, “The Next Day,” opens in the school cafeteria, where Jack grabs onto Libby as part of the rodeo. Libby throws him off and punches him in the jaw. The two are called into Principal Wasserman’s office where they are joined by Jack’s mom and Libby’s dad. The principal confronts them about the rodeo altercation as well as vandalizing the school bathroom. Libby confesses to writing the messages on the bathroom wall and also insists that she did not feel sexually harassed by Jack’s actions. The principal decides not to expel them, instead, ordering them to perform community service by painting the bleachers and locker rooms. She also orders them to attend a daily after-school “Conversation Circle” with the school counselor, Mr. Levine. Libby’s dad is disappointed but fairly good humored about the incident; in contrast, Jack’s parents are furious with him. However, it is Dusty’s disappointment that truly stings Jack, and at Dusty’s request, he vows to “make it right” (146).
Libby goes home and Bailey comes over with bad news. News of the Fat Girl Rodeo has gotten out, and someone has taken pictures of her standing over Jack after the fight. The pictures have made their way to social media, and the comments are unkind. After Bailey leaves, Libby finds the apology letter from Jack, which he slipped into her backpack during their altercation in the cafeteria. She writes back to him, saying she has questions for him. Meanwhile, Kam calls Jack to congratulate him on winning the prize and tells Jack that Libby Strout is the same girl who had to be rescued from her house. Jack climbs onto his roof to look across the street at Libby’s old house and “the gaping hole where the front wall of her house used to be” (162).
Pages 98-162 Analysis
When Dusty asks Jack, “Why are people so shitty?”, Jack’s response shows some introspection. He tells Dusty, “People are shitty for a lot of reasons […] Sometimes they choose to be shitty to others before others can be shitty to them. So it’s like self-defensive shittiness” (105-06). This response echoes his line to Libby in his apology letter: “Better to be the hunter than the hunted. Even if you’re hunting yourself” (134). In other words, according to Jack, bullying is often a matter of self-preservation; bullies use their behavior as a way of safeguarding their own identities and social status among their peers. In giving Dusty this explanation, Jack seems to recognize his own hypocrisy. He knows that he is guilty of bullying Libby—and Iris, indirectly—purely so that he can preserve his identity on campus.
After his discussion with Dusty, Jack decides to work on building a robot for his little brother. Jack’s work on the robot for Dusty represents an outlet for him, a way of channeling the frustration he feels over his lack of control over the prosopagnosia. He is in total control of the robot’s construction since he decides what parts to use, how they interact, and what the robot can do; he can make it as perfect or imperfect as he wants. In contrast, his face blindness is beyond his control. It is a self-perceived imperfection that haunts Jack precisely because there is nothing he can do about it. Jack, motivated by preserving his “popular” identity, constantly pursues perfection, and it is not until he starts spending time with Libby that he begins embracing and appreciating the imperfect.
It is telling that although Jack is admonished for the rodeo incident with Libby by several characters, including his parents and Principal Wasserman, it is Dusty’s disappointment that most deeply affects him. This is probably because Dusty represents someone that Jack aspires to be. Earlier in the novel, Jack watches Dusty go to his first day of school with purse in hand and thinks, “This scrawny kid with big ears is my hero” (43). As he talks to Dusty in his room, he reflects on all the reasons he gave before about why people are shitty, and then he adds another: “Sometimes someone doesn’t like who he is, but then here’s this other kid who knows exactly who he is, and that can make that first kid feel even worse about himself”(145-146). In this moment, Jack realizes that Dusty makes him even more self-conscious about his identity because Dusty, at only ten years old, is secure in his identity. Unlike Jack, Dusty knows exactly who he is and is willing to accept the social consequences of embracing that. In other words, Dusty highlights what is perhaps Jack’s greatest imperfection: that Jack does not like himself—or at least not the identity he has created and insists on preserving.
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