Catalyst

Content Warning: This section discusses child death and domestic abuse.

In these chapters, two critical events take place: Teri takes center stage in Kate’s emotional evolution, and Kate, the model student, begins to reveal significant shortcomings. Her developing friendship with Teri will address these, though Teri is the girl in Kate’s class whom she most avoids, even fears.

Teri Litch is the focus of these chapters. When she moves into the Malone home, Kate treats her like a hostile invader, unwanted and vaguely threatening. Kate is civil only when she thinks that is what Good Kate would do. She is quick to notice Teri’s flaws: She is moody, rude, and sullen. Even worse, she is a kleptomaniac. She steals Kate’s necklace and watch, and Kate, incensed, judges Teri as morally inferior.

Teri, however, begins to reveal her true character. She shares critical elements of her life with Kate, such as her father’s violence, an idea foreign to Kate whose only complaint about her father is that he’s too busy helping others. The idea of Teri’s father swinging a baseball across Teri’s mother’s forehead shakes Kate. She starts to understand that a woman she had long found rude and antisocial is a victim of abuse.

At first, Mikey’s presence upsets Kate. He is noisy, selfish, busy, and energetic. He snores loudly and Kate resents having to change his diaper. When Teri confronts the contractors about salvaging a garbage bag of stuff from her burned-out home, Kate plays with Mikey in the yard and thinks he is not all that bad: “Maybe Mikey could stay with us a while” (103).

When Teri and Mikey accompany Kate on her errands, Kate is hardly sympathetic, even though the Litch home has been ravaged by fire. She does not show the Christian tenets of hospitality and compassion preached by her father. The family’s plight does not register with Kate when she watches Teri take care of her little brother in the car, when she drives Teri to the biker bar in the roughest section of Syracuse where she works as a server, or even when Teri tries to steal some groceries from the store where Kate shops. To Kate, drawing on her school’s clique mentality, Teri is a “burned-out kleptomaniac” whom she must babysit (98). Kate does not see that Teri’s actions are really survival skills that she developed to deal with her dysfunctional family.

Kate reveals her cavalier attitude toward religion when she prays for admission to MIT. She does not really believe; she prays because she thinks it will benefit her. Her prayer is little more than an invocation of gods and goddesses from her AP English class.

These chapters aim to show Teri’s humanity and Kate’s shallow selfishness. The revelation that Mikey is Teri’s son prompts Kate to view Teri in a different light and leads to her growth as a character.

To prepare for Kate’s growth, the chapters focus on Kate’s reaction to getting contact lenses. For the first time, she sees the bright and lively shopping plaza parking lot, which before she dismissed as empty space. Kate is finally gaining vision, symbolized by her new “magic eyes.” She is starting to see the people around her, rather than focusing myopically on herself.