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Chapters 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Quiet”
At school on Monday, the sticky notes escalate. Most of them contain harmless sayings or pictures, but some are controversial or downright hurtful. In math class, the teacher catches a girl writing a nasty note. She’s sent to the principal’s office, and Eric decides to keep his own notes in his locker from now on. There are things he wouldn’t mind writing, but it’s not worth getting in trouble, and he isn’t “sure it would do any good anyway” (208).
By lunch, Bench is nowhere to be seen, and Eric starts to worry. He asks the group where Bench is, and Deedee points him out at a table full of football players in uniform. Bench doesn’t look at their table even once, leaving Eric disappointed. Rose shows the group a sticky note she received with a picture of a dead moose. She blows it off, but Wolf is convinced the picture is a threat. The two stare each other down. Though he’s not hungry, Eric gets in line for food to get away from the quiet as it reminds him too much of the quiet in his house before his parents split up. The rest of the day passes in a blur, and Bench isn’t on the bus that afternoon.
At dinner, Eric asks his mother if she was ever popular in school. She doesn’t know how to answer but says she had friends and wasn’t picked on. After dinner, Eric looks at his mother’s high school yearbooks. The ones from her freshman and sophomore years are full of signatures and positive messages; her junior and senior years feature fewer people. The senior yearbook includes a note from Eric’s father—as well as something that was blotted out with blue marker.
An uncertain Eric goes to bed and pulls a sticky note from Bench out of his backpack. In the note, Bench apologizes for his absence at lunch and tells Eric it wasn’t about him. Eric knows it’s not, but regardless, he’s “still the one who rode the bus home alone” (224).
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Offer”
Monday afternoon, the teachers take down as many sticky notes as they can; by Tuesday morning, a sticky note ban is imposed until further notice. In English, Mr. Sword discusses the notes, expressing disappointment in the nastier messages. A student argues that they’re all in good fun and that no one means anything by them, but Wolf counters that the notes mean something regardless of intent. The two argue, and before anyone can stop him, Wolf writes “asshole” on a sticky note and slams it down on the other’s desk. Wolf is sent to the office and goes home. At lunch, Eric, Deedee, and Rose discuss the incident. Rose says Wolf will be okay, but for the first time since Eric met her, “Rose Holland [doesn’t] sound too sure” (239).
After school, Rose visits Eric’s house, and they talk about the group. She feels bad that Bench ditched them, but she’s also grateful to have the boys as friends. She recognizes that her presence changed things and offers to leave them alone.
Eric recalls a line from Robert Frost’s “Road Not Taken” and understands that even if Rose were to leave, “things would never go back to the way they were before” (251). He tells her he doesn’t mind if she hangs out with the group. Rose makes him an origami phoenix, which looks more like a fish, and goes home. Later, Eric writes a poem about a flying girl made of paper who gets too close to the sun and burns to ash.
Chapters 13-14 Analysis
These chapters show a change in the sticky notes at school. Rather than being mostly harmless, the notes are getting noticeably nastier, showing how Anonymity Gives People Power. Wolf demonstrates this by using one for the sake of name-calling (i.e., he calls a classmate an “asshole”). Though Wolf was wrong to lash out the way he did in the middle of class, the group’s bullies aren’t in the right either; regardless of morals, there are multiple sides to any confrontation. The sticky note ban also hints at one of the book’s main messages, which is that technology doesn’t dictate what people say, though it can give other methods for saying it. The cell phone ban in Chapter 2 foreshadowed the eventual sticky note ban—neither stops the students from saying hurtful things. The feelings behind communication don’t change, even if the medium of choice does.
Chapter 14 uses allusion to show Eric processing the changes in his friend group. Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” describes a fork in its titular road and a traveler’s thoughts on which branch to take. Though the traveler notes both branches are good options, he knows he can only pick one; even if he comes back the same way, his path will be forever altered by the first road he took. Wolf asking Rose to join the group in Chapter 4 was the proverbial fork in the road. Rose chose to sit, irrevocably changing the book’s progression. Like the traveler in Frost’s poem, Eric’s group can’t return to that crossroads unchanged.
Eric also references Icarus, a figure from Greek mythology. In Icarus’s myth, he and his father fashioned wings of wax to escape imprisonment. Though Icarus’s father warns him not to fly too high as the wings will melt, he ignores the warning and falls to his death. Eric’s poem in Chapter 14 likens Rose to Icarus as she also ignores warnings and does what she wants. He worries that she will be punished or suffer from this confidence. Icarus’s fall mirrors Rose eventually running the Gauntlet, but unlike Icarus, she survives. Like her changing the D&D rules, Rose’s actions consistently intervene with the idea that toeing the line will keep someone safe; her character shows that staying true to one’s self is ultimately the best course of action.
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By John David Anderson
