Rule of the Bone

“She put her hand to her mouth and took a few short steps away from me, then turned and disappeared into the crowd. And as I crossed over toward Russ and the other kids I remember saying to myself, Now I’m a criminal. Now I’m a real criminal.” 

Here, Chappie has demanded money from his mother before walking away from her with no intention of returning home. In his mind, he’s a criminal because of his open disregard for his mother and for the family.

“Basically people don’t know how kids think, I guess they forget. But when you’re a kid it’s like you’re wearing these binoculars strapped to your eyes and you can’t see anything except what’s in the dead center of the lenses because you’re too scared of everything else or else you don’t understand it and people expect you to, so you feel stupid all the time.” 

Chappie is saying this about Froggy, but it’s an apt description of Chappie’s own thinking about his situation. His homelessness, as well as the sexual violence he’s faced at the hands of his stepfather, has left him unable to think beyond his immediate situation. He’s also, in many ways, still a child. His plan in this chapter reflects this: He decides he will take the place of Froggy without clearly thinking on what that means (further sexual violence at the hands of Buster Brown), and then abandons that plan when confronted with an image that reminds him. Chappie’s actions throughout the early parts of the novel are reactionary; he’s still wearing binoculars, so to speak.

“When we get closer I see that the mannequins are like in pieces with their arms and hands lying on the floor and some of them don’t even have any heads and the ones that do are bald. They have breasts and all but no nipples or pubic hair. It’s like they’re adults but they’re really little kids […] I’d never seen mannequins like that before […] it was the grossest thing I’d ever seen, at least at that moment it was which is strange I guess because I’d seen lots of really gross things by then.” 

Chappie has just negotiated a sexual transaction with Buster Brown in the hopes of getting Froggy away from him, but he’s stopped by this image of mannequins. He sees himself in them: the odd sexualization of prepubescent forms and the implicit violence of their unattached limbs. When Chappie reacts impulsively in the novel, it’s often because some image or thought has triggered a memory of sexual violence that he cannot deal with.