Good Girl, Bad Blood

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue and Chapters 1-9

Chapters 10-19

Chapters 20-30

Chapters 31-43

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 10-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 10-14 Summary

This summary section includes “Sunday 2 Days Missing,” and Chapters 10-14.

Pip goes to Nat da Silva’s house and meets Nat’s new tattooed boyfriend, Luke. He looks on the rough side, and Pip is slightly intimidated by him. Despite his off-putting appearance, Luke leads Pip inside to where Nat is eating breakfast. Nat is still angry with Pip over issues related to Pip’s first investigation. Initially, she doesn’t want to talk but agrees when she learns that Jamie is missing. Nat spoke to Jamie briefly at the memorial. He walked away after mentioning that he’d seen someone he knew. Nat didn’t get together afterward with Jamie that night. She denies that they’ve been calling or texting frequently, so Pip infers that Jamie has been in contact with someone else lately.

Shortly after Pip leaves Nat’s house, she receives two messages from neighbors who saw the Missing poster. Stanley Forbes has sent her multiple pictures from the memorial, and Gail Yardley shows Pip a photo of the crowd. Everyone except Jamie is watching the lanterns for Andie and Sal rising skyward. He’s staring off at something else. His facial expression indicates that he might be worried about something.

Later that morning, Pip goes to a local café to work on her podcast rather than face the disapproval of her parents because she’s opened another case. Pip’s friend Cara arrives and says she saw Jamie at the calamity party after the memorial. However, she was so drunk that she can’t be sure. The party was held at Stephen Thompson’s house, so Pip calls him for confirmation. Stephen says that Jamie was there, but he wasn’t drinking or talking to anyone. He just seemed to be watching the crowd.

Pip sends out a Facebook appeal to her senior class, most of whom attended the party. She asks them to send her photos or videos that might help pinpoint Jamie’s movements that night. George Thorne calls Pip and agrees to be interviewed for her podcast. Around 10:00, George saw Jamie outside the party house on his cell phone in an agitated conversation with someone. Jamie kept insisting that he couldn’t do what the person on the line wanted him to do. Their conversation had something to do with a child, and Jamie threatened to call the police. He talked for almost half an hour before hanging up and walking away.

Back at home, Pip is going through the photos and videos from the party that her Facebook group has sent. Ravi is helping her by going through a few hundred photos from the memorial. Pip tracks Jamie’s movements at the party by mapping his location and his sightline against the floorplan of the house that she found on Realtor.com. Jamie was obviously watching someone, but Pip doesn’t know who. She theorizes that once she searches through more photos, she might be able to learn this person’s identity. Meanwhile, Ravi has found an unsettling image in the memorial photos. While everyone is watching the lantern display, serial rapist Max Hastings is seen at the back of the crowd. Max has been released on bail during his trial, but nobody expected him to attend the memorial. This presents a new mystery.

The investigation is interrupted when Pip’s parents and brother return from grocery shopping. They have seen the Missing poster around town, and Pip’s mother, Leanne, is upset. Even though Pip promised never to air another podcast after the hazards of the first one, she tells her parents that she has no choice. Jamie’s family needs her help, and the police won’t do anything. Pip feels that she has a responsibility to take action. She does promise her mother that she’ll be extra careful this time.

Leanne hesitantly reveals a secret that she knows about Jamie and allows herself to be recorded for the podcast. Jamie was working for Leanne’s realty firm, where she caught him stealing a credit card from her desk and fired him on the spot. Although he apologized, he said that he needed the money because it was a matter of life or death. Unfortunately, Jamie never told her whose life was on the line.

Chapters 15-19 Summary

This summary section includes “Sunday 2 Days Missing” (Chapter 15), “Monday 3 Days Missing.”

Pip goes to the Reynolds home to tell Connor and Joanna that Jamie stole money and said it was a matter of life and death. Pip wonders where Arthur Reynolds is while his son’s investigation is going on. He seems totally unconcerned by Jamie’s absence.

While sitting in the Reynolds kitchen, Pip studies the photo of Jamie that she used for the Missing poster. It was taken in the same location where she is now sitting, and she realizes that one of the knives from the knife rack in the background is missing. After a thorough search, the knife isn’t found in the house. Pip doesn’t want to think about the implications of its absence.

The next day in history class, Pip and Connor sit in the back of the room. Their new teacher is Mr. Clark, who has taken over for convicted murderer Elliot Ward. As the lecture proceeds, Pip and Conner scan more videos from the party, looking for the person Jamie was stalking. One of the videos shows Jamie accosting a girl named Stella Chapman, who is in the same class as Pip and Connor.

At lunch break, Pip asks if she can interview Stella privately for the podcast. Stella explains that Jamie approached her and called her “Leila.” He seemed surprised that she would be attending a high school party and also remarked that she had changed her hair. When Stella insisted that he had the wrong person, Jamie appeared confused and left the party. Pip begins to suspect that Jamie has become the victim of a catfishing scheme on the internet.

After recording the podcast, Pip gets an email from a clerk at a local bookstore called the Book Cellar. He claims that he and his friends saw Jamie out on the street at 11:40 on the night of the memorial. He seemed to be walking with great purpose away from the center of town.

At home that evening, Pip begins searching local dating sites, but the name Leila has many variant spellings. Connor is helping search, and Ravi arrives to report on the progress of Max’s trial. His mother took the stand and drummed up sympathy for her son’s childhood battle with cancer.

The trio switches to a Tinder search in the immediate vicinity, hoping to find Jamie’s catfish. Almost immediately, they find a listing for Layla Mead, age 25, who lives less than a mile away. The photo is that of Stella Chapman with ash-blond hair. The profile for Layla was created recently, in February. Strangely enough, one of the most recent “likes” on her page is from history teacher Adam Clark. This will require further investigation.

Piecing together what happened to Jamie, Pip speculates that Jamie was still recovering from being rebuffed by Nat when he came across Layla’s profile. The two must have been in contact for a few months without ever meeting. Then, Jamie spied Stella at the memorial and followed her to the house party. After he confronted her, and she denied knowing him, he must have figured out that he was being catfished. His phone call outside the house must have been to Layla.

Connor offers to use his anonymous Instagram account to send a private message online to Layla. Pip types in a casual, “Hey, how are you.” She receives an almost instant reply: “Hello, Pip” (182). A second message appears shortly afterward: “You’re getting closer : )” (183). Pip is unnerved that the catfish already knows the message came from her. Immediately, Layla Mead deactivates her various internet profiles.

After Connor and Ravi leave, Pip gets an unexpected visit from some neighbors—Charlie and Flora Green. Charlie says his home security camera picked up Jamie slipping through an unlocked window four days earlier. He took nothing of any value except Flora’s wristwatch. Pip realizes that this is the same watch she found while searching Jamie’s bedroom. Pip promises to return the watch, but she is left with more questions than answers. Meanwhile, she is approaching the 72-hour mark, after which most missing persons cases become homicides.

Chapters 10-19 Analysis

The book’s second segment is almost entirely devoted to the theme of Questions of Identity. As Pip dives into her investigation, the most puzzling factor is Jamie’s behavior. The reader has already been given a baseline description of the young man by his mother, yet everything Pip discovers in these chapters seems to contradict that profile. The first inkling that Jamie is acting oddly comes from Pip herself. She recalls that he seemed distracted at the memorial, and one of the first snapshots of him confirms this perception:

And his face—there’s something there I can’t quite read. He doesn’t look scared, per se. But it’s something not far off. Concerned? Worried? Nervous? His mouth is hanging open, eyes wide with one eyebrow slightly angled up, like he could be confused about something. But who or what caused this reaction? (106).

Everyone who knows Jamie has described him as laid-back. His facial expression in this photo seems out of character. Further evidence begins to pile up as hundreds of photos arrive in response to Pip’s Facebook plea for more data on Jamie. There are videos and photos of Jamie at the memorial and later at the party. Pip begins interviewing people who saw him that night, yet none of their descriptions seems to correspond to the young man Pip knows. She tells Ravi, “It’s all behavior that’s very out of character. I mean, you saw Connor’s face when I told him. It’s weird. There’s no other word for it. Jamie’s behavior starting from the memorial is weird. It has to be relevant to his disappearance somehow” (119).

Initially, Pip focuses on physical clues to determine Jamie’s state of mind. She is assisted by social media in its more benign form when people volunteer their photos and videos. However, as the night progresses and Pip continues to track Jamie's whereabouts, his actions begin to conform to his facial expressions. Both are now out of character. Jamie is caught stealing a credit card. A butcher knife goes missing from the family kitchen. A neighbor reports a petty theft. Charlie Green asks, “Why did he only take the watch? It’s clearly not expensive. And I leave my wallet in this room, with cash in it. There’s my computer equipment too, none of that is cheap. Why did Jamie ignore all that?” (191).

Once Pip establishes that Jamie’s aberrant behavior on the night of his disappearance runs contrary to his character, the novel changes its focus to scrutinize a second character whose identity is also questionable. As these chapters begin to reveal, Jamie isn’t acting so much as reacting to the mysterious Layla Mead. The two act in counterpoint to each other.

Pip once again engages social media to try to trace the elusive Layla. Although the internet continues to function in a benign role by aiding in her investigation, Pip herself is engaging in unethical behavior by using a fake identity to post on a dating site. Dating sites seem to be a haven for social media abuse, as Pip learns when she finds a classmate’s picture attached to Layla’s profile:

‘Less than a mile away? Creepy,’ Connor said, shuffling closer for a better look. Pip scrolled through the four photos on Layla’s profile. They were pictures of Stella Chapman, stolen from her Instagram, but they’d been cropped, flipped, and filtered. And the main difference: Layla’s hair was ash blond (178).

The two themes of questionable characters and the misuse of the internet run in tandem from this stage forward, as Jamie’s behavior is now understood in the context of Layla’s manipulations. Pip concludes:

It fits everything we know so far. […] Late-night phone calls. And Jamie’s been protective about no one seeing his screen, which makes me think that his relationship with this Leila, this catfish, is a romantic one. Jamie was probably feeling vulnerable after the whole Nat da Silva situation, so it’s easy to see how he might fall for someone online (168).

Pip identifies an important psychological element of online hookups. People who try to establish such relationships tend to do so because they feel emotionally needy or vulnerable. Scam artists and emotional predators can easily take advantage of that vulnerability by exploiting the least benign characteristic of the internet: Nobody is required to show their true face.