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Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Assassin”
In the spring of Lee’s freshman year, she meets Conchita Maxwell while playing lacrosse. Lee wears her dad’s Bob Dylan t-shirt with the words “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and Conchita has to tell Lee about Dylan. Conchita’s mom is Mexican, and her Dad is “American.” She doesn’t like much about Ault, but Lee says she likes it, which makes Conchita suspicious of her. She thinks Lee is thoughtful, and a thoughtful person must have issues with Ault.
At a festive roll call, Adam Rabinovitz, a gregarious senior whose penis might have been a part of a plaster body-part art display in the fall, announces that Assassin will start tomorrow. The rules for Assassin are as follows: Orange stickers and a name are put into each student’s mailbox. The name is their target, and they have to kill them by putting a sticker on them without being seen; if someone sees them, they must wait 24 hours before trying to kill them again. Once they eradicate their target, the killer gets their victim’s target and their stickers.
Conchita invites Lee to her large room, which looks like a TV set. Conchita says she has asthma, so Ault lets her have a phone in her room in case she has an asthma attack. Conchita talks to her mom once a day, while Lee only speaks to her mom on Sundays when the rates are lower. The girls listen to Dylan, and Lee likes “Lay, Lady, Lay” (1969).
Lee suggests they bike to get pizza. Conchita doesn’t know how to bike, but Lee teaches her one morning as they discuss who they’ll room with next year. They also discuss Aspeth. Conchita and Aspeth grew up in Texas together, but Aspeth stopped speaking to her in fifth grade when she became “too cool.”
After Lee kills an irritated Devin Billinger, a boy of no importance to her, she kills sophomore Sage Christensen and senior Allie Wray. The traits Lee doesn’t like about herself—her “invisibility” and tendency to monitor others—help her with Assassin.
Lee’s next target is McGrath Mills, a junior, but Max Cobey sees her, and McGrath tells Lee she can try to kill him, but it would be wrong to succeed. Edmundo Saldana has Lee as a target, but he promises not to kill her. Edmundo is in the Minority Student Alliance (MSA) with Conchita, but Conchita doesn’t have a crush on him. She doesn’t believe in crushes, but Lee tells Conchita about her crush on Cross and her hopes that they’ll be targets for one another in Assassin.
Conchita told her mom about Lee and later asks Lee if she wants to be her roommate next year. The girls have a lot in common. They’re both on scholarships and have a kind of “dorkiness.” Lee isn’t sure about living together and suggests that Conchita room with her friend Martha Porter.
At curfew, Sin-Jun, Lee, and Amy team up to take down the “cocky” McGrath. Madame Broussard joins, and they write a menacing phrase on a pillowcase. Using a mop, they dangle the pillowcase outside McGrath’s window. Sexual banter ensues, and Madame Broussard ends the hullabaloo.
McGrath is a server at the table of Ms. Prosek, the math teacher, and Lee hides under the table and puts the sticker on his lower leg. McGrath congratulates Lee, but Lee feels like she ruined something between them. McGrath doesn’t have his stickers on him, but he promises to give them to Lee later.
Conchita takes Martha and Lee in a limousine to see her mom. Lee realizes Conchita isn’t a scholarship student: She’s breathtakingly rich. The girls discuss sex and the rumor that Headmaster Byden and Broussard dated. They meet Conchita’s mom at an expensive restaurant in a luxurious hotel, and a muscular man sits nearby. Mrs. Maxwell is bigger-bodied and tells Conchita they’ve hired someone new to assist Miguel in the garden.
Conchita stays with her mom at the hotel, but the limo takes Martha and Lee back to Ault. Through Martha, Lee learns the beefy man was a bodyguard. Conchita’s dad is the CEO of an oil company; he met her mom when she was the cleaning person at the office. Conchita doesn’t have health issues, but Ault lets her install a phone and gives her a big room due to her wealth. Martha and Lee can’t imagine rooming with Conchita, but they can fathom sharing a room with each other.
McGrath still hasn’t given Lee the stickers, and Edmundo is dead, but he won’t tell Lee who killed him. Lee accumulates kills, and, via eavesdropping, she discovers Cross is still alive. Lee has the chance to get him.
Lee visits Conchita in the infirmary, and Conchita accuses Lee of stealing her best friend (Martha) and of lacking a personal identity. Lee leaves, and Conchita comes out and kills her. Lee believes Conchita killed Edmundo to protect her and maybe even killed more people for her benefit.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Cipher”
It’s the fall of Lee’s sophomore year, and Lee kills a bee on the first day in English class taught by Ms. Moray, who looks like the “cool intern” and has a Franz Kafka quote on the blackboard. Lee goes to the bathroom to clean the dead bee off her hand. When she returns, the students announce where they’re from and their favorite books. Lee thinks of saying Charlotte Bronte’s Victorian novel Jane Eyre when it’s her turn, but Lee never goes.
In her dorm’s common room, Lee bumps into Tullis Haskell, a senior who played James Taylor’s song “Fire and Rain” (1970) at the talent show last winter, spurring Lee to imagine them as a couple. Now, Lee has no feelings for Tullis (though she wishes she had a bra on), but Tullis asks Lee to cut her hair.
Lee gets a towel from upstairs and thinks about laundry at Ault. Every Tuesday before chapel, students can leave their used towels and dirty laundry in drawstring bags with their names on them. When they return from chapel, the towels and laundry are clean. The service costs $3,000 per year.
Though lacking experience, Tullis thinks Lee did a good job and offers to pay her. She refuses the cash but agrees to shave the back of his neck. People notice Tullis’s haircut and ask Lee to cut their hair.
For English class, the students share their essays on where they go to reflect on life. Lee doesn’t want to read hers, so Ms. Moray makes her read it to her after class. Lee’s favorite place to reflect is the storage room in her dad’s store, Mattress Headquarters. Ms. Moray tries to relate to Lee—they’re both from the Midwest—and give her confidence.
The class finishes reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Dede, Aspeth, and Darden reenact a scene with Darden dressed as a stereotypical pimp and Dede and Aspeth looking like stereotypical sex workers. Ms. Moray calls them racist, but Aspeth counters: Darden is black. Ms. Moray implies Darden has “internalized racism.”
Martha goes into town on a Saturday in November but doesn’t want Lee to come. Martha’s getting her hair cut. She doesn’t want Lee to cut it, and she thinks it’s unfair that she cuts people’s hair and they don’t help her clean up.
Ms. Moray tries to win her students back by acting extra cheerful but fails. During one class, Lee, Dede, and Aspeth rate her dress, shoes, and makeup, and they exchange snarky comments. After class, Aspeth asks Lee to cut her hair, and Cross wants to watch the haircut, so they go by his dorm to get him, and Lee thinks about how she likes the blunt crassness of the boys.
The haircut takes place in the basement, and Aspeth uses the popular Ault phrase, “Therein lies the paradox” (153). Another popular word at Ault is “patina”—a term that male students made sexual. Aspeth and Lee discuss how much to cut off, and Cross wonders if Aspeth should trust Lee. The three make fun of Ms. Moray. The woodworking teacher, who maintains “friendships” with female students, told Aspeth why Ms. Moray is at Ault. The teacher should have been a Black woman from Yale, but her husband got cancer.
After reading Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself (1892), Lee has to write about something that matters to her, and she chooses to write about how prayer doesn’t belong in public schools, noting that she doesn’t truly care about the issue. After class, Ms. Moray upbraids Lee and threatens to flunk her. She calls Lee a “cipher,” and Lee thinks Ms. Moray is behaving like a motivational speaker.
Later that night, while Martha is at the library, Ms. Moray comes to Lee’s dorm and lets Lee cut her hair to compensate for the F she got on the paper. Ms. Moray likes Lee’s work and gives her an A.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Conchita Maxwell’s character furthers the motif of diversity and gives the reader more reasons to doubt Lee’s reliability. Though Conchita has a separate large room that looks like a TV set and features a phone, Lee portrays Conchita as a member of her socioeconomic class. While Conchita is a Latinx student, and her skin color visibly sets her apart, what also makes her different is her dad’s oil money. Lee realizes, “There was normal rich, dignified rich, which you didn’t talk about, and then there was extreme, comical, unsubtle rich—like having your dorm room professionally decorated, or riding a limousine into Boston to meet your mother” (156). Conchita complicates the theme of Money and Visibility by giving Lee the impression that she’s a scholarship student. Thus, Lee’s formulation is skewed. Even Conchita’s “extreme” wealth doesn’t have to be “unsubtle.”
Getting away from Ault continues to put Lee in positive situations. The mean-girl atmosphere vanishes in the limousine, and Conchita, Martha, and Lee joke about Byden’s rumored relationship with Broussard. As the comments are sexual, sex remains a symbol of validation. The girls prove they belong together through their silly comments about the supposed romance.
Back at Ault, the mean-girl drama returns with Conchita accusing Lee of stealing her best friend when Lee and Martha choose to live together. Lee replies, “We’re not on a soap opera. Stealing friends isn’t something that happens in real life” (164). Yet the closed universe that Ault symbolizes makes it seem like a melodramatic TV show or performance.
Assassin furthers the unreality of Ault: It turns killing people and death into a game. As Lee excels at Assassin, it also helps Lee with her Identity Construction. She admits, “[T]he qualities that I usually lamented in myself—my invisibility, my watchfulness of others—now served me well” (123). Through Assassin, Lee reveals that she can make friends and assert herself. Yet her main goal is to get to Cross. In the world of Ault, Cross is a celebrity or a male heartthrob, and Lee acts like his number one fan.
Assassin links to Lee’s search for acceptance—another theme. Her success at Assassin doesn’t lead to stable acceptance. When she kills people, they don’t seem to care too much. Initially, McGrath makes it seem like a big deal, but when Lee kills him, he’s nonchalant about giving her the stickers. Haircutting also symbolizes Lee’s quest for acceptance. She proves her value to the Ault community by cutting people’s hair. The haircuts link to the theme of Money and Visibility, but neither Lee nor the students acknowledge how they reinforce economic class positions. Martha has to tell Lee, “It’s not an equal trade” (210).
Assassin also adds an element to the theme of Girls versus Boys. Even though the game is not set up in a “girl versus boy” format and Lee kills both male and female students, her quest to kill McGrath becomes a “battle of the sexes,” with her dorm mates and warden getting involved in the big tease with the pillow. Later, another element of the theme emerges when Lee realizes that she often prefers the company of boys. In this section, in Lee’s interactions with Ault students, Girls Versus Boys often falls out in favor of boys.
The books and authors noted in Chapter 4 provide Prep with another literary context. In Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, the titular character endures an abusive school, confronts a deceptive romantic interest, and makes a life for herself. Arguably, Jane is a foil for Lee: She has traits—confidence and will, among them—that Lee often lacks. Kafka is a 20th-century Eastern European author whose stories touch on the absurdity of systems and identity. In the novella The Metamorphosis (1915), the main character turns into a bug, and Lee regularly imagines turning into somebody else.
The conflict over Aspeth, Darden, and Dede’s interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin furthers the motif of diversity. Ms. Moray describes it as “nothing but racism,” and Lee claims “[r]acism didn’t exist at Ault” (206). The blanket statements preclude an intricate discussion of race, and Ms. Moray doesn’t acknowledge that many people, like the lauded 20th-century Black author James Baldwin, believe Uncle Tom’s Cabin is racist and presents a reductive, white-centric picture of Black people.
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