62 pages • 2 hours read
Jason RekulakHidden Pictures
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 21-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 21 Summary
Mallory recalls her history with painkillers, which began with a small sacral fracture. It is a common runner’s injury and wouldn’t affect her offer to Penn State. Doctors prescribed Oxycontin for her, which took the pain away for a while. Mallory’s mother was single, often in poor health, and she smoked constantly. However, she always encouraged the girls to stay close and rely on one another: “That was our big refrain growing up: showing up for each other” (249).
She told Mallory to take Beth and her friend, Chenguang, to Storybook Land while she worked mandatory overtime. Mallory was missing an important running meet and was checking her phone for updates during traffic. She crashed into another car and woke up days later in a New Jersey hospital with three cracked ribs. A mountain bike mounted on an SUV had fallen off, hit the road, and caused everyone to swerve, but Mallory hadn’t noticed because she was checking her phone. Beth and Chenguang died in the crash. Afterward, no one wanted Mallory to blame herself. She eventually left the hospital with more Oxycontin, but it was no longer as effective. Getting off the drug was too hard. Rather than make her doctors suspicious, she asked classmates to get it for her. She burned through her savings in a month before discovering that acquiring and injecting heroin was cheaper. Penn State withdrew the running offer, citing her injuries rather than her addiction. Mallory deteriorated, taking any drugs she could find while her mother desperately tried to help. Her mother had a heart attack during that time, and Mallory never knew.
In the early stages of her recovery at Safe Harbor, she left apologetic messages, but her mother never answered. One day, a man named Tony answered and told Mallory to stop calling. The number was disconnected shortly after. Now, they haven’t spoken in two years. Mallory must remind herself that she is grateful for many things, including the close calls that didn’t kill her, as well as meeting Russell. Adrian listens as she talks about how much she misses Beth. He is embarrassed that she lied to his family and their friends. He says he went to a movie during their interrupted date, and when he got home, there was a drawing on his desk. It is a skilled drawing of a woman being strangled. Now he thinks Mallory is telling the truth, and he believes that Anya wants him to know that.
Chapter 22 Summary
Mallory and Adrian arrange all the sketches by the pool and take photos. They try to arrange the sequence of images into a logical progression. First, a girl is painting a hot air balloon. A white rabbit watches. The girl follows the rabbit, and Anya doesn’t see her leaving. An angel approaches and leads the girl toward the light. Anya runs after them, but the angel either can’t or won’t give the girl back. Someone then appears, strangling Anya as the easel is abandoned. The man then drags Anya into the forest and buries her. However, something is still missing from the narrative.
Mallory remembers that Teddy said Anya talks funny, which makes Mallory wonder if Anya might not speak English. The spirit board could have been speaking in a different language, rather than in what appeared to be random letters. She and Adrian knock on Mitzi’s door and then let themselves in when there is no answer. They find the notepad she used to record the message from the spirit board. They wonder if the letters she recorded—which are mostly consonants—might be a cryptogram. They find the caps of several hypodermic needles on the floor in the living room just as a cop knocks on the back door and tells them to come outside.
Chapter 23 Summary
There are two more cops waiting outside. After one frisks Adrian and Mallory, two detectives—Briggs and Kohr—approach and separate them. They refer to Mitzi as a victim and then reveal that they found her body in the woods a couple of hours prior. Mallory tells them about her history with Mitzi, including the séance. Briggs says Mitzi was found in a nightgown with no signs of injury. Mallory tells them about the letters from the spirit board. Briggs asks about the spirit, and Mallory tells her about Annie Barrett. Briggs says she knows Annie’s story.
Caroline calls and says she heard Mitzi yelling Thursday night. She was telling someone to get out. Then, she had come outside in a nightgown and was saying she wanted to go with someone. Adrian and Mallory think Anya might have killed her and that maybe she wants revenge. Then, Mallory realizes how to solve the puzzle with the letters. The Xs are meant to be spaces, which lets her divide the rows of letters into sentences. In Hungarian, the message says “YES BEWARE THIEF HELP FLOWER” (293). Mallory’s phone rings. The call is from Rest Haven Retirement Community.
Chapter 24 Summary
The call is from Jalissa Bell, a caregiver at the rest home. She says that Dolores has dementia. Jalissa can’t give any information about her past, but Mallory is welcome to visit during a four-hour window the next day. Adrian says Mallory should invite Anya to use her for more messages while he keeps watch and guards her. He will sleep over at the cottage since Mallory no longer works for the Maxwells. Mallory gets in bed near midnight as Adrian prepares for the night.
Mallory dreams of being in the Enchanted Forest, being pulled by the ankles. Then, she is looking up from a hole. A man looks down and drops a stuffed bunny onto her. He apologizes and begins filling in the hole. She wakes at 3:03 a.m. and sees Adrian on the floor. She wakes him and asks if anything happened. He says she scribbled a dark black circle on a page around 1:00 a.m. She thinks the scribble might be a sketch of the hole in which she was being buried. Before she turns out the light, she admires Adrian’s physique and then tells him to join her in the bed.
Chapters 21-24 Analysis
The main purpose of these chapters is to reveal the origins of Mallory’s addiction and the case of Beth’s death.
Mallory’s addiction started as a treatment for her pain, not as the pursuit of a pleasurable high. Her dedicated running training led to the sacral fracture, which led to the Oxycontin prescription. Unfortunately, Beth’s death—and Mallory’s resulting injuries from the car crash—overlapped her recovery period and required even more opiates: “Over several months, the drug had completely rewired my brain, hijacking more and more of my pain receptors, and now I needed OxyContin simply to exist. I couldn’t sleep, or eat, or focus in class. And no one warned me this was going to happen. No one told me to expect a struggle” (252). Mallory was going through one of the cruel physical torments that Russell mentioned, except that the addiction was not a struggle she chose. The medication then began to make choices for her as Mallory became little more than an appetite.
The drugs help with her pain, but they also numb her against the devastating loss of her sister, for which she feels culpable. This distraction and guilt are mirrored by that of the woman in the drawings, whose daughter runs off while she is distracted by her art. For her, like Mallory, that moment changed everything. Mallory takes on more responsibility for the accident than is reasonable, which makes it easy for her to punish herself through the debasements produced by her addiction. Addiction, Faith, Guilt, and Shame are interconnected in that if she does not believe that she is a good person who deserves forgiveness, then the drugs give her a guaranteed route to perpetual misery.
After losing her running scholarship and finding rock bottom, Mallory eventually begins rebuilding with the help of Russell, Safe Harbor, the recovery steps, and her faith. At this point, however, she has forfeited the right to make her own first impressions on anyone who knows that she is an addict.
