If Something Happens to Me

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes references to suicide, physical abuse, the loss of a child, torture, and murder.

The inciting incident of If Something Happens to Me is Taylor Harper’s participation in bullying Anthony O’Leary. To escape her mistakes as a childhood bully, she reinvents herself as Alison, and later as Sophia, but her past actions continue to haunt her through her life.

In her efforts to reform and redeem herself in her new identity as Alison, she becomes an advocate for the bullied, even going viral for defending an innocent victim against two male bullies. Yet, nothing she does can erase the dark consequences of her earlier actions. The revenge-driven O’Leary family doesn’t care that “Alison [is] the good version of Taylor” (293)—to them, she will always be the instigator to their bullied son’s suicide. This encapsulates the theme of the difficulty of escaping the past. It shows the permanence of past actions and how Taylor’s reformation doesn’t absolve her history, at least in the eyes of the O’Learys.

Taylor’s transformation into Alison and then into Sophia shows her struggle to find peace from the past, yet she remains haunted. Ryan thinks that “she was still searching for the Alison Lane inside herself.