60 pages • 2-hour read
How to Make Friends with the Dark
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Part 1-Part 2, Chapter 13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Before”- Part 2: “After”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section discusses themes of grief, parental loss, and trauma.
Sixteen-year-old Grace “Tiger” Tolliver finds a stack of unpaid bills on the dresser, which worries her. Her mother, June Tolliver, is asleep on the couch with a headache. The running water in the house is dirty, and there is no food. June recently lost her job since the daycare she worked at suddenly closed.
Tiger wakes June up, and as June drives her to school, June promises to do better and take care of all the pending chores. Tiger hesitantly tells June that she is going to the Memorial Days dance with Kai Henderson. Kai, Tiger, and Tiger’s best friend, Katerina “Cake” Rishworth, play in a band together. June is worried about the dance, citing the inevitable drinking at the afterparty, and asks Tiger a number of questions about it. Tiger lashes out at June, saying she is tired of feeling like a “bug in a jar” (10), and she runs off into the school.
In zero period, Lupe Hidalgo, a senior, makes fun of Tiger’s clothes. As usual, Tiger is wearing thrifted clothes that her mother picked out. Tiger’s phone vibrates constantly, but she doesn’t check it; she counts down the minutes until biology, when she will see Kai.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Tiger sits next to Kai, her lab partner, reflecting on how and when her crush on him began. She suspects that he reciprocates her feelings, and Cake has been encouraging her to act on it. As Tiger and Kai chat, Taran Parker, one of their classmates, teases them. Tiger doesn’t like Taran, as he publicly commented on her breasts when they were in the seventh grade, and she has been self-conscious of them ever since.
Tiger and Kai make plans to hang out after school. At lunch, Tiger tells Cake about her argument with June. She shows Cake the multiple texts and missed calls from her mother. At Tiger’s request, Cake looks through them, and the girls discover that June has bought Tiger an old-fashioned, ivory lace dress for the dance.
June calls again, and Tiger answers this time. Tiger is angry at not being allowed to choose anything, and she ignores June’s excitement about the dress and yells at her to leave her alone. Tiger runs out of lunch and cries in a bathroom stall until classes resume. Cake checks up on her over text, and Tiger tells Cake she is meeting Kai after school.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Tiger waits for Kai at “The Pit,” an emptied-out swimming pool behind one of the townspeople’s houses, where the skater kids hang out. One of the older kids there asks if Tiger is finally coming in again to skate. Tiger remembers that the last time she skated was with Andy, June’s ex-boyfriend. She broke her arm once and has not skated since. Tiger doesn’t like thinking about what happened with Andy and why he left. Kai arrives, and the two of them walk away together.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Tiger makes the first move and kisses Kai. As they are kissing, she suddenly feels shivers run through her, and they break apart. Tiger sees multiple missed calls from her mother and Cake on her phone, the latter of which is unusual. She calls her mother back, but June doesn’t pick up, and Tiger leaves a voicemail. Kai picks up his phone, which is also ringing, and his expression changes. He says “three awful, horrible words” (38), telling Tiger that her mother is dead. Tiger cries out, wondering how he can be so cruel.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “9:21 p.m.”
At the hospital, Tiger is unable to accept that the woman lying in the bed in front of her is her mother. She throws up as the doctor tries to explain what happened to June, and Rhonda, Cake’s mother, starts crying. The doctors want Tiger to identify the body, but she is in denial, and her throat is hoarse from screaming after Kai said, “Your mom. Died” (44). Finally, Rhonda identifies the body instead. Tiger walks out, and to her shock, she learns from Cake that Kai has already left.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “11:04 p.m.”
A social worker named Karen calls Tiger “Grace,” and Tiger corrects her. She got her nickname when she bit another child who was always clinging to June in the daycare where June worked. Karen says Tiger needs to go with her. Cake and her parents protest, but Karen insists on following procedure.
Tiger feels cold, like she is drowning. She numbly processes that her mother has died of a brain aneurysm. Tiger recalls her last, angry words to her mother and bursts into tears; she gets up and runs away from the people around her. She thinks that she is “a girl-bug now, trapped in glass, watching everything on mute” (52).
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary
The next morning, Tiger wakes up in the back of her mother’s car. She feels disoriented, until she remembers the night before. After much crying on Cake’s part, Karen finally relented and allowed Tiger to go back home for one night to collect her things. Cake’s parents assumed responsibility for her. Cake fell asleep in the house, but Tiger slunk out to the car to sleep since the house reminded her too much of her mother.
Cake comes out with the suitcase she packed for Tiger. Her mother, Rhonda, is arriving soon with food, and Cake suggests that Tiger change into fresh clothes. Tiger finds and puts on the lace dress her mother got for her. She decides that she will never take it off again. Cake begins crying; she promises Tiger that she is not alone. She tells her she will get through this, but Tiger doesn’t believe her.
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “16 Hours, 1 Minute”
Cake and Rhonda drop Tiger off at Karen’s office. Karen asks Tiger about her father, but Tiger reiterates what she said the previous night: She has never met him and doesn’t know his identity. June’s parents died when she was in college, and she had no other family.
Karen drives Tiger to her new foster home. They pass by Randy Gonzalez’s ranch on the way, and Karen offers to stop. However, it is too painful for Tiger: She remembers that her mother loved horses, and June even used to ride when she was little.
Karen stops at a fast food joint on the way, though Tiger is not hungry. Taran and some of Tiger’s other classmates are there, and they spot Tiger. Tiger realizes that they think she is being arrested since Karen’s car has the state seal; none of them know what happened to her mother yet.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “22 Hours, 4 Minutes”
Karen drops Tiger off at a solitary, bare-looking house. She assures Tiger that this is only for one night. The woman who runs the home is named Georgia; Karen asks Tiger to follow Georgia’s rules. Tiger makes Karen promise that she will return the next day.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “22 Hours, 5 Minutes”
Georgia greets Tiger and directs her into the kitchen, where she meets two other girls whom she privately nicknames “Brownie” and “Blondie.” Tiger’s food is waiting for her on a paper plate; she will only get real crockery and cutlery once Georgia is sure she is not a “thrower.” The two girls tell Tiger to eat up, as she won’t get anything else until the next day. All the cabinets are padlocked. Blondie explains that some foster kids have previously been so starved that they raided the cupboards.
Georgia comes back in, and the others quickly eat their food. Georgia directs Tiger to eat as well, but she has no appetite. Georgie turns stern and instructs her to finish her milk; Tiger is scared and complies. The girls then head up to bed by eight o’clock, as per Georgia’s house rules, and they instruct Tiger to use the washroom before bed; Georgia doesn’t like any noise in the middle of the night.
As they settle into bed, the girls talk about their previous experiences. Brownie’s mother is in rehab, and she has been in foster care since she was seven. Tiger has been feeling queasy all this while, and she finally throws up the milk she was forced to drink. The girls help her clean up. She tells them that her mother died and is met with sympathy. Tiger finally cries herself to sleep.
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary
Tiger is intensely relieved when Karen arrives the next day since the other girls didn’t believe she was only there for one night. As she is leaving, Georgia offers Tiger her condolences, but Tiger remembers how stern she was about the milk and pushes past without responding.
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “47 Hours, 15 Minutes”
Karen brings Tiger to a new foster home and gives her a phone. LaLa, the foster parent, seems pleasant. She explains the rules: no fighting, drinking, or drugs. There are also three other foster children who live with LaLa: two younger children and one boy who is a little older than Tiger—he is away at the moment. For Tiger, LaLa’s place is a short-term arrangement; Karen is working on finding her a longer-term home.
LaLa shows Tiger her room, where one of the younger children, a 10-year-old named Sarah, is already asleep in the bottom bunk. Tiger cries in the shower, remembering how June always told her she would never leave her. LaLa has laid out fresh pajamas for Tiger in the bathroom, but Tiger puts the ivory lace dress back on again and wears it to bed.
Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary: “2 Days, 6 Hours, 9 Minutes”
Tiger wakes up disoriented once again, and she begins crying when she recalls what has happened. Sarah and the other foster child—a little boy named Leonard—are going through Tiger’s things, and they ask if they should fetch LaLa. Tiger scares them away and cries herself back to sleep.
When Tiger wakes up again, it is dark. She heads downstairs and finds a note on the fridge asking her to eat, but she is still not hungry. Filled with an urge to hurt someone, Tiger uses the house phone to call Kai. She yells at him for breaking her heart and leaving her at the hospital; she ends up saying all kinds of hurtful things, including that his mother should have been the one to die. Kai is crying and hangs up on Tiger. She goes back to bed and checks the time on her phone, calculating that it has been 3,294 minutes since her mother died.
Part 1-Part 2, Chapter 13 Analysis
How to Make Friends With the Dark is divided into three parts, and it is narrated mostly in the first person. This first section covers all of Part 1, where the exposition takes place, and some chapters from Part 2. Part 1 is titled “Before,” and it sets the context for the story and introduces the inciting incident of the novel: the protagonist’s mother’s death. Tiger is only 16 years old, and she has no other family besides her mother, June. After June’s death, she is left all alone to not only handle her grief and loneliness but also figure out how she will manage to get financial and material resources like food and shelter. Even when June was alive, she struggled to pay the bills, so there is no financial safety net for Tiger. This context of preexisting adversity in the first scene of the novel sets Tiger up for all the struggles that follow June’s sudden death. June’s brain aneurysm is also foreshadowed by how she is still asleep on the morning the novel begins, fighting off a headache.
Part 1 ends with Tiger receiving the news of June’s death, and Part 2 picks up right after the incident. The initial chapters of Part 2 address the immediate aftermath of June’s death and dive headfirst into Tiger’s grief. Most chapters are marked by a timestamp, indicating how Tiger struggles to live in a world without June. Every minute feels heavy, and so it is accounted for. In sharp contrast, there are some interspersing chapters written in second person that don’t feature a time stamp. These create a sense of disconnect, signifying the dissociation and depersonalization Tiger feels from time to time as she struggles to process the trauma of her mother’s death.
In keeping with the overwhelming emotion in these chapters, The Struggles of Coping With Grief is one of the central themes of the novel. Immediately after June’s death, Tiger cycles through some of the commonly acknowledged stages of grief. She displays both denial and anger: At the hospital, she is unable to process that it is June’s body lying on the table before her, and she leaves the task of identifying the body to Rhonda, Cake’s mother; even before this, when Kai first breaks the news to Tiger that her mother has died, she lashes out at him. Later in this section, she calls him up and vents her anger about June’s death by saying terribly hurtful things to him. Tiger is looking for someone to blame for this horrific event, and she settles on Kai since he was the first one to tell her about it. Also, she feels guilty that she fought with June over Kai right before she died, and she displaces the anger she feels at herself onto Kai. Tiger also displays some somatic symptoms of grief, primarily a loss of appetite.
Tiger’s grief is even more pronounced because of the disconnect she feels from the people around her. Her relationships with June and Cake are the only strong ones in her life; she has never known or met her biological father or had any other family. After losing June, Tiger feels completely alone. She even feels disconnected from Cake because she doesn’t think Cake can fully understand her bereavement. At this point in the novel, Tiger lacks a stable and supportive community around her, and this exacerbates her pain; in later chapters, the novel will go on to highlight The Importance of Community in Healing.
Further contributing to Tiger’s struggles and sense of disconnect are The Challenges of the Foster Care System that she is suddenly faced with. Tiger faces a series of rapid and overwhelming changes in a short span of time: Not only does she lose her only family member, but she is also displaced from her home and everything familiar to her. Karen, Tiger’s social worker, breaks protocol by allowing her to spend a single night at Tiger’s home, under Cake’s parents’ care. However, the very next day, she is taken to a foster home that is cold, rigid, and unwelcoming. Tiger is lumped together with girls from very different backgrounds and life experiences than her, and she is treated like a potential troublemaker at a time when she needs warmth and understanding. She is lucky to find her way into LaLa’s home after just a single night at the unwelcoming foster home, but this is clearly not the norm. Furthermore, LaLa’s home also signifies continued instability—since Karen explains that it is just a short-term setup—and thus heralds further anxiety.
A number of important character dynamics and symbols are introduced in these initial chapters. Though shown very briefly, Tiger and June’s relationship is clearly a strong and close one. Tiger even derives her nickname from how fiercely she holds onto her mother. However, there are underlying tensions, as June is overly protective and shields Tiger from normal teenage experiences. This is what sets off their last fight, and this fight burdens Tiger with guilt for the remainder of the novel. Kai and Cake are the other important relationships in Tiger’s life, though the nature of both these relationships changes after June’s death—Tiger feels distant from Cake and angry with Kai. The “bug in a jar” symbol recurs throughout the novel (10), with Tiger constantly using this imagery to visually describe her feelings of being trapped.
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