The Summer of Broken Rules

“It didn’t feel right being on the Vineyard without my sister. She’d loved it most of all. It’s been too long, my dad had said at lunch, but now I also couldn’t help asking myself, has it been long enough.”

Meredith is still resisting the need to undergo the healing process and fully grieve the loss of her older sister. While her dad has started moving forward and is ready to return to family events, Meredith has not quite reached that state of readiness because she does not wish to face the reality of the new family dynamic without Claire.

“It was always about Ben, I was beginning to realize. Our relationship was uneven—never about me. Everything revolved around him.”

Ben represents everything that Meredith needs to learn this week at Martha’s Vineyard—how to be her own person, how to allow others in while standing on her own, and how to make others a priority in her life. Her recognition of her unhealthy patterns with Ben early in the week paves the way for her to begin moving forward in healing and becoming her own individual.

“‘You look beautiful,’ my mom said as I noticed her eyes land on Sarah’s scar. My heart dipped. Part of me suspected she couldn’t really tell how well it had healed, instead seeing all the stitches. Neat and clean, but also grisly and brutal.”

Meredith assumes that her mom sees the same thing she does when looking at Sarah’s scar and vividly remembers the injury of that night. Rather than living in the present, Meredith can only think about the past and how everything existed back when things were “better” when Claire was alive.

“But I couldn’t sleep here, in the Annex’s bunk room, without my sister. It’d always felt so small for two people, but now it seemed too big for only me.”

Location and space are important to Meredith, as she returns to spaces that hold a wealth of old memories about her sister. Without Claire, those spaces feel different, and Meredith is not ready to let them be different; instead, she wants to keep everything the same as it was before. The changes brought about by her sister’s absence make her uncomfortable and demonstrate the many ways in which she needs to grow.

“When we first started dating, he called me his ‘girl’ in an endearing and old-fashioned way, and it seemed so special…but then somewhere along the way, I became an impersonal ‘babe.’ Babe in public, babe in private, babe always.”

When Ben and Meredith first start dating, he makes her feel special and feel like a person. As time goes on in their relationship, however, that changes, and she becomes an attachment to him rather than a person in her own right. The details of her unhealthy relationship with Ben serve to provide a direct contrast with the healthy aspects of her growing relationship with Wit, emphasizing that she is now making good decisions to improve the quality of her life moving forward.

“And then unexpectedly, I was crying, sobbing uncontrollably by the time Eli pulled up beside me. I was in a haze as Jake and Luli helped me into the boat, asking if I was okay when my legs wobbled underneath me. I hardly heard them, tears still falling.”

Meredith experiences a trauma response to hitting the water, involuntarily associating her collision with the water to the collision that killed Claire. To move forward, Meredith must disconnect her pain from how she imagined Claire to have felt at the moment of her death. This particular scene is thus designed to emphasize how much the family tragedy still haunts Meredith personally, for it intrudes even into the most innocent of moments.

“‘Thanks, Meredith,’ Luli finally said. ‘That means a lot. It does.’ She kicked up some dust and added in a smaller voice, ‘But why? Why didn’t you answer them? You know how much I loved her.’ Her voice dropped even more. ‘We both needed—’”

Luli voices what Meredith needs to hear—that other people needed comfort just as much as she did. Part of Meredith’s character development is recognizing that Claire is not hers alone and that Claire’s death impacted other people as well. Luli serves as the symbolic portrayal of that dynamic.

“My sister would have said it didn’t matter. An astrology lover, Claire believed that some people had written-in-the-stars fated connections, and even though I’d always rolled my eyes, maybe now I was beginning to believe her.”

Meeting Wit begins to change Meredith’s mind about the world. Prior to spending time with Wit, she didn’t believe in astrology the way her sister did, but now the presence of a new romantic interest in her life compels her to give the practice a second look. This sets up the foundation for Wit helping Meredith change her mind and views about her own character flaws.

“I ended the message and hit redial, and when Ben answered, I said what I should’ve said last month. If only I’d had more strength. If only I’d realized that our relationship was imbalanced, the scales always tipping in Ben’s favor.”

After only a couple of days, Meredith starts to untangle her identity from the identities of others. She no longer depends on Ben to define who she is, and this vital shift allows her to entertain the possibility of also letting go of the need to let Claire’s memory define who she is within the context of her family.

“Because I did—I couldn’t continue living in fear whenever I wasn’t the one behind the wheel. I needed to trust other drivers again.”

Wit offers Meredith the opportunity to take control, and Meredith has two choices. She can accept Wit’s offer and remain stagnant in her trauma or reject Wit’s offer and allow someone she trusts completely to help her move forward. By rejecting Wit’s offer and trusting him to follow the speed limit and drive safely for the rest of the drive, Meredith opens herself to trusting other people and lets go of the need to always maintain control.

“I didn’t laugh. Because it was hitting me now, really hitting me. ‘Wit isn’t a hookup,’ I’d told Luli, but yes, that was exactly what we were to each other. After Sarah and Michael said ‘I do’ on Saturday and drove off into the sunset, Wit and I would go our separate ways, him halfway around the world and me to Hamilton. Suddenly, I felt like I was treading in unfamiliar waters, and I didn’t like it.”

Meredith’s need to be in control reasserts itself when she realizes that she and Wit will be going separate ways at the end of the week. She does not like the uncomfortable feeling associated with not knowing how to manage a situation she never expected to have to face. This discomfort will lead to Meredith’s further character development as she learns to identify and pursue what she truly wants from her situation with Wit.

“I don’t know—with Ben it had always felt like talking to my parents was all politeness and pleasantry, while with Wit, we were a family having fun together.”

Meredith observes more directly how Wit and Ben serve as foils to each other. When Ben spent time with her family, it never felt as comfortable as it does with Wit, who lives authentically and fits in with Meredith’s family easily. Because he is content to be himself, he is a much smoother fit for what she and her family need in their life than Ben ever could be.

“My mom laughed so hard she cried, and I smiled so hard from seeing her laugh so much. It felt good; it felt almost like old times. Not quite, of course.”

Wit not only helps Meredith heal from the death of Claire, but he also helps Meredith’s mother, who has not laughed or had this much fun in the past year and a half. Seeing her mom laughing makes Meredith happy. She still feels the absence of Claire and always will, but she is also beginning to see how life can and should go on without Claire, despite wanting to hold onto the sister she no longer has.

“Even if this truly was just temporary, it felt like so much more. Something special, something singular, something I’d been waiting for a very long time.”

Meredith feels the disconnect between what she wants and what she believes she can have—or the disconnect between who she has been and who she wants to be. Wit is symbolic of the life she ought to be living, and he is the vehicle through which she attains that life. However, she cannot quite reconcile these two lives just yet.

“Again, Wit was silent, but the type of silent that felt like he wanted to say something. ‘She did love you,’ he said eventually, sounding a little sorrowful himself. ‘She loved you very much.’”

Wit’s certainty that Claire loved Meredith serves as both a consolation for Meredith and a way for the author to foreshadow the fact that Wit has met Claire. He knows that Meredith needs to hear that she is and was loved, but he also knows that Claire loved Meredith because the only time he met her, Meredith was all that Claire could talk about.

“You pay me the most wonderful compliments. You say such interesting things no one has ever said before, like how affectionate I am, and smart and clever…and I can’t even tell you how good that makes me feel.”

When Wit starts to call Meredith pretty, or any adjective that relates to her physical appearance, it makes her feel like Wit is becoming Ben rather than being Wit, because Ben forced her to become his accessory rather than allowing her to be her own person. In this quote, she indirectly communicates to Wit that she likes his perception of her as her own person rather than as a physical object.

“I needed to talk to her—really talk to her. Yes, I’d apologized on Monday for ignoring her texts and stuff, but after hiking with Wit this morning and telling him about my friend troubles, I felt like she deserved something deeper. An explanation, to make sure the door between us could be fully reopened and stay open for a long time.”

Meredith’s character development has allowed her to recognize that her previous apology to Luli was only a surface-level apology. There is more that the two of them need to discuss to reestablish the friendship they once had, and Meredith is finally ready to have that conversation.

“‘And it’s not just about Assassin, Meredith,’ Luli said. ‘It’s so much more than that.’ She paused. ‘It’s always about you. Always about what Meredith wants, always about what Meredith needs, always about Meredith and her guy!’”

Luli is the character who symbolizes how Meredith’s deliberate isolation has made others feel, and all the resentment comes to a head in this moment. Luli places everything at Meredith’s feet, leaving Meredith no option but to confront the consequences of her actions: consequences she tried to control and handle her own way.

“School, bagel shop job, and Ben—that was all I could handle. When Claire died, fun died with her. It was like I was walking through a thick fog and needed to cling to someone so I didn’t get lost.”

In the immediate aftermath of Claire’s death, Meredith felt like she was completely lost and needed someone to tell her who she was. Ben became that person, but he misguided her. Now that she is healing and doing the work for herself, she is coming to understand how mistaken she was to push everyone away.

“My stomach dropped. I was supposed to do this for Claire. I was supposed to win for her.”

Meredith feels lost, not knowing what comes next. Once again, she has tied her entire sense of self to Claire and winning the game for her sister. Now that she has been eliminated, Meredith must learn how to be her own person, rather than trying to be Claire or anyone else.

“Because I felt like nothing between us had been solved; our situation and communication had only become more complicated. He’d lied to me. I’d lied to him. For once, we weren’t on the same page.”

In this moment with Wit, Meredith is pulled back into the unhealthy patterns that characterized her earlier relationship with Ben. She also catastrophizes the current dynamics, viewing them as entirely unfixable, as though a single misunderstanding has the power to ruin this new relationship. In some ways, the moment also mirrors the insecurities and traumas that she still harbors due to Claire’s death, chief among them being the niggling fear that a single misstep can destroy everything that she holds dear. Fortunately, she learns that this current misunderstanding with Wit is simply an obstacle in her path, not the destruction of the path itself.

“The corners of my eyes stung. I hadn’t felt like that girl—Claire’s sister—in a very long time, not until coming back to the Vineyard and meeting Wit.”

Meredith finally realizes that she can have it both ways—she can be her own person while still being Claire’s sister. In this moment, it becomes clear that Wit’s positive influence and kindness has allowed Meredith’s true self to emerge: the person that she thought was forever lost after Claire’s death. Now, she is faced with the choice of how to handle this development.

“The bottom line: I’d applied to college in my hometown because I was scared of leaving. My sister had died on her first big adventure away from home, so I didn’t want an adventure. I wanted family; I wanted familiar.”

Meredith’s character arc comes to its culminating moment. Meredith reflects on the journey she has undergone and the poor decisions she made in her grief. Now, with a clearer view of who she is and who she wants to be, she is reconsidering the decisions she made and finding new ways to make amends and move forward.