58 pages • 1 hour read
Kathleen GlasgowGirl in Pieces
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Pages 305-356Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Pages 305-330 Summary
Blue comes to Tucson to stay with Charlie, who is disappointed to discover that her friend is still drinking. Blue’s easy camaraderie with Riley makes Charlie jealous. She grows increasingly resentful of Riley’s domineering behavior.
Blue’s first night in Tucson, she and Charlie drink together. Charlie notes how easy it has become. Blue reveals that she is not doing drugs or self-harming. At work, the staff discusses the upcoming Day of the Dead parade. Temple says that Charlie will love it because “[i]t’s a giant art party in honor of the human spirit” (314). Thinking privately about her father’s spirit and the part of Ellis that vanished, Charlie privately disagrees. Blue turns up at the end of her shift, chats easily with the staff, and insists on finally meeting Riley.
Charlie and Blue find him on his porch playing music. Blue is immediately comfortable around him. Not knowing how to read the situation, Charlie is jealous and wonders if they are flirting. Riley seems happy, making Charlie wish she could have him all to herself. When Riley asks how they met, Blue reveals more than Charlie wants Riley to know. Charlie realizes Riley does not remember that she was homeless. Later at Charlie’s apartment, Blue tells Charlie that she would never steal her boyfriend.
Blue gives Charlie a present from Louisa: the notebooks in which she wrote her life story. Not wanting to share Louisa’s words, Charlie puts the notebooks in her backpack. Before leaving for work, Charlie gently asks Blue to go easy on the alcohol. The apartment is empty when Charlie returns. She finds Blue at Riley’s, where he is teaching her to play guitar, and feels simultaneously jealous of and happy for her friend, who she realizes must be lonely. Blue tells Charlie that Leonard stopped by her apartment suggesting that her rent would need to increase if Blue is staying. Blue assures her that she has money and is working off the extra rent as the new building manager. Blue looks so happy that Charlie softens.
As she, Blue, and Riley continue drinking, Charlie feels “heavier and heavier” (326). She had hoped that Blue would be in better shape and a positive influence on Charlie’s recovery.
In bed later, Riley tells Charlie that he hopes Blue is not serious about staying. Charlie snaps, asking if she is allowed to have one friend. Noting that he has never asked her about her story, she blurts it all out, from Ellis to Frank’s sex house and everything in between. She asks him to stop abusing drugs, but he says no. Charlie grabs Blue and leaves.
Part 3, Pages 331-356 Summary
While Charlie is at work, Blue hears that Louisa has died by suicide, setting off a chain of destructive events that lead to another breakdown for Charlie. Linus and Tanner bring her to their artist grandfather’s retreat in New Mexico to recover.
The night of her exhibit’s opening, Charlie finds Blue happily and effectively painting and repairing the building. When Charlie returns from work, Blue is gone, her “fancy phone” cracked, and a mess left behind (334). Realizing something must be wrong, Charlie decides to get ready, then look for Blue. She promises herself not to drink.
She finds Blue at Riley’s hunched over a crack pipe, weeping. Blue tells Charlie that Louisa set herself on fire. Charlie’s body “goes cold, then hot, and then numb” (337). She looks for Riley, sure that he will take care of her as he did after she learned Mikey had married Bunny but finds him in the kitchen having sex with Wendy, his drug dealer. He shouts at Charlie, she disassociates, and he mashes her face into the wall, screaming at her to leave.
Charlie runs through the All Souls parade, thinking of Ellis letting Charlie take the blame for her boyfriend’s pills, of the many troubled souls around her and those she has lost. Returning to her room, she finds her apartment trashed and “Love, Wendy!” scrawled across her mural (341). She wonders why she ever listened to Mikey and Casper telling her that things could be different. She coats herself in broken window glass.
The next thing she remembers is hearing men crying. She feels a wet washcloth and ointment. She smells gauze and hears more crying, then realizes she is hearing herself. Later, she is in a car with Linus and Tanner. They had gone looking for her and found Manny, Hector, and Leonard trying to clean her up and weeping. Tanner had his EMT training bag with him and patched her up.
Charlie cannot speak, but Blue has prepared Linus for that. She explains that Wendy followed Blue back to Charlie’s apartment, beat her up, stole Charlie’s money, and trashed the apartment. Another tenant is looking after Blue. Wendy and Riley stole Luis’ car, cleaned out True Grit’s night deposit, and bought more drugs. Riley has been stealing from his sister for months to fund his drug addiction. Charlie is overwhelmed with grief and shame, for having helped Riley and not having helped Ellis.
Linus and Tanner bring Charlie to their grandfather Felix’s home in Santa Fe. Linus takes her on a tour of Felix’s house and art studio, where his assistant, Devvie, is quietly working. Charlie wishes she could get to work straight away and smiles at Linus.
Felix suggests that Charlie may be experiencing the “heartbreak of being in the world when you don’t know how to be” (355, italics in original). He observes that “momentous” events can tear one’s being into pieces, and it takes a while to assemble them into something you can live with (356, italics in original). Later, alone in her room, Charlie wonders if losing her father was her first momentous and reflects on how each of the significant people in her life fit in.
Part 3, Pages 305-356 Analysis
Charlie’s decline accelerates after Blue comes to stay with her. Blue and Charlie both want to succeed at and are at similar stages in their recoveries. Both struggle against the temptation of old habits. Ideally, this should enable them to provide support for each other in overcoming those temptations. Practically, they get caught up in each other’s negative enabling. Though she knows neither of them should do it, Charlie drinks with Blue. Though Blue knows Riley is a bad influence and warns Charlie, Blue seeks his company when she feels lonely after Charlie goes to work.
Charlie’s jealousy of Blue’s camaraderie with her True Grit coworkers and Riley illustrates Charlie’s difficulty trusting and reading people. She does not know how to interpret Blue’s behavior and fears that she is somehow going to take advantage of Charlie, as others have. At times, though, Charlie can see her loneliness in Blue and feel happy that her friend feels less isolated. She remains unsure of Blue’s motives even as she identifies with what her friend is going through.
Charlie continues to struggle with communication. She wants to tell Blue that everything is a mess but cannot find the words to express herself. When Riley pressures her not to allow Blue to stay, she lashes out, verbally and physically, essentially replaying her dysfunctional relationship with her mother.
The catalytic event that causes Charlie to break down again is Louisa’s suicide, which seems to validate Charlie and Blue’s fears that their recovery efforts are doomed to fail. The course of events is never clear because Charlie disassociates and loses her ability to communicate. Paralleling Charlie’s emotional state, the narrative breaks down into fragments of sense memory out of which a tentative time frame emerges: Blue’s cracked phone and the mess in the apartment reveals that Blue learned of Louisa’s suicide while Charlie was at work. She then ran to Riley, who called his drug dealer. Charlie found Blue at his apartment smoking crack and found Riley and Wendy having sex in his kitchen. Riley physically and verbally abused Charlie, sending her running from the apartment and through the Day of the Dead parade. How long she spent wandering the streets is not specified, but it was long enough for Blue to return to Charlie’s apartment, followed by Wendy, who destroyed everything she could find.
Charlie remembers grinding her feet and coating her body in broken glass, but her injuries are not serious enough to require stitches, because Tanner cleans and bandages her with his EMT training bag. With Riley consuming so much of her attention, Charlie has not spent time getting to know Linus and Tanner. Both have been kind to her, but she could not see anyone but Riley. As Linus and Tanner drive with her to their grandfather’s home in Santa Fe, Charlie reflects on having been so caught up in her own problems that she failed to see anyone else’s. Charlie has people in her life who want to help her, but she had not been paying attention to them.
When they arrive at Felix’s house, Charlie is still experiencing selective mutism, but Felix does not judge or condemn her silence. Welcoming her into his home, Felix tells her that Quakers believe “silence is a way of letting the divine into your body” and “heart” (352). In doing so, he gives her a language for making her experience meaningful, a time for reflection and peace against the upheaval and chaos she has experienced. His explanation about “momentous” events tearing one’s self into pieces further offers Charlie a practical concept wrapped in a visual image that help her make sense of her painful experiences. Destruction can become a catalyst for creation. In Felix, Charlie has found an artist whose understanding and methods align with hers, and he will play a significant role in her recovery.
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