Catalyst

“I’m distilling myself in the dark: mixture, substance, compound, element, atom. The ghost is getting closer.”

As Kate runs, she uses chemistry as a metaphor. She feels her complexity breaking down and becomes free of herself. The ghost that hovers, however, reminds her life is not that easy. It reveals a flaw, a piece of irrationality forcing itself into her logical world. These irrationalities will increase as the novel progresses.

“Toby and I are the protons and neutron of our atomic family unit. Dad is the loosely bonded electron, negatively charged, zooming around us in his own little shell.”

After her mother’s death, Kate struggles to keep her family together. The structure of an atom helps her understand their father’s separateness, stemming from his inability to process his wife’s death. Anderson uses a narrative strategy that recurs often—that of literalizing something metaphorical or abstract. Here, it’s the abstract concept of the nuclear family. The image of the family as disparate atomic parts reflects Kate’s STEM understanding of the world.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against religion. Religion is good, apparently. […] Sometimes I wish I did have faith.”

Kate has a love/hate relationship with the religion that comforts her father. She cannot understand why a benevolent God would kill her mother. Her father will struggle with the same issue and finally face his grief when giving the sermon at Mikey’s funeral.

“And like I said, the boy knows how to kiss. And kiss. And kissss. The kisses are necessary. When we’re kissing, we can’t argue.”

Kate’s growing disillusionment with Mitch begins when she faces his egotism and insensitivity. She will not be content with a pretty boy who can kiss. The string of s’s and the repetition of “kiss” evokes “hiss,” suggesting Mitch is a snake. 

“I hate essays.”

After her mother’s death, Kate retreats into a world of science and math where things work out with predictable logic. She loathes English class and writing essays, where she has to messily explore herself and answer unanswerable questions.

“Reality feels rather plastic, as if I’ve been operating in an enclosed sphere, and the covering melted, and all of a sudden, I’m in an entirely new world—a world in which my father is tight with the Litches.”

Kate evokes the metaphor of Alice tumbling into the looking glass world. She feels her own comfortable world beginning to change. The Litches are an intrusive variable; she struggles to understand her new, unwanted reality.

“I wish […] I could cry it all away and I would wipe my tears on [Dad’s] shoulder and I could suck my thumb and suck the end of my ponytail and he wouldn’t tell me only babies did that.”

Kate’s initial reaction to the MIT letter reveals her impulse to escape rather than engage. She wants to retreat into her childhood. Teri will help Kate understand the need to confront even the most difficult moments.

“I need to run until I bleed, run all the fluids out of my body, pound, pound the road, unplug the hardware, destroy the system.”

Invoking computer jargon, Kate describes her preferred strategy of running from problems and how this renders her not a person but a programmable machine. Escaping crashes the entire system, which is Kate’s humanity.

“She’s awake, watching the minutes on the face of the clock dissolve into each other […] Teri’s eyes swivel and pin me to the wall.”

Teri unsettles Kate when she and Mikey move in. The first night Kate feels threatened. Understanding Teri, her problems, and her world marks Kate’s transition into adulthood.

“‘It’s faith in action.’”

The busier Kate’s father is the less time he needs to spend grappling with the death of his wife and being a single parent. Faith is his escape. Like Kate, he must leave his comfortable world to confront his emotional wound.

“Holy crap, I can see everything […] I have magic eyes.”

Kate’s new contacts symbolize her maturity into adulthood. The shopping mall’s parking lot, a world she thought she knew, seems new, suggesting how she is coming to see her world more clearly.

“I pray to Zeus. To Hera. To Thor, Loki, Freya, Aphrodite, Ganesha and the Turtle with the World on his back to the Godplace I lost in me when I wasn’t looking: Let me in.”

Kate’s prayer reveals her self-absorbed attitude toward faith. The gods she evokes are figures she learned in her AP English class. They have no real meaning to her. What she has lost, she suggests, is her own faith, her Godplace.

“It’s like I’ve been chopped into tiny pieces of Kate, and all my pieces look like me and run like me and talk like me and act just the right way but they are all lost in this maze.”

As the ongoing renovation of the Litch home reveals, sometimes you have to destroy something before you can rebuild it. After MIT’s rejection, Kate feels in pieces. But like the puzzles she enjoys working through, the pieces will create a picture.

“Children don’t die. Not really, not really, they don’t die, they can’t. They are wound up, charged with enough energy, enough juice, to carry them for seventy years.”

Mikey’s death stuns Kate. It reminds her of the cold fact of mortality, which she has avoided since her own mother’s death. With Mikey, she learns that death has no logic, follows no pattern, and will never make sense.

“I throw a handful of blue at the wall.”

Kate disparages English class, literature, music, and art students. Creativity, she thinks, celebrates chaos, confusion, and anarchy. In the aftermath of Mikey’s electrocution, Kate joins her friends in splashing paint on the walls of Teri’s home to express sorrow. This signals that Kate is beginning to embrace creativity.

“I don’t let go.”

The emotional connection between Kate and Teri begins here—Kate has gone to Teri’s home where Teri is alone, a mother grieving her dead child. Although Teri initially rejects Kate, the two spend the night holding hands, Kate letting Teri know she is not alone.

“Diana comes back and tells me she’s sorry about everything. ‘Everything’ is a big word.”

Kate finally realizes that her friends are shallow. One by one, they reveal their insensitivity and selfishness. Diana’s flippantly expresses condolences for Teri’s loss, and Kate sees the emptiness of her sympathy. 

“They bring that extra something, that oomph.”

The admissions officer suggests that Kate needs to be more than test scores, trophies, and extracurricular activities. Successful applicants demonstrate empathy for others and see education as a means, not an end. That is the connection that her experience with Teri will provide.

“‘I just need you to hold me because it sort of feels like gravity doesn’t work anymore’ […] ‘Not that tight […] I still need to breathe.’”

Kate is vulnerable with Mitch, expressing her hurt over MIT’s rejection. Mitch is insensitive, assuming what she needs is him and his protection. Her choice of simile here (weakened gravity) to describe her feelings is ironic, as topics in science have comforted her in the past.

“She’s in a trance, lost in the action of beating a counter to death, heart pumping, lungs like a bellow.”

Teri introduces the chaos of raw emotion into Kate’s controlled world. Kate watches as Teri uses a sledgehammer to undo the church volunteers’ work. Her emotions are raw and honest—exactly what Kate avoids.

“We’re all really sorry that Mikey was killed, and I know you’ve had a hard life. But that doesn’t give you permission to make Kate feel like shit, or make fun of people, or steal from them.”

This is Mitch trying to be sensitive. His scolding reveals his selfishness and indifference to Teri’s tragedy. This moment, where Kate distances herself from Mitch, is the beginning of her epiphany.

“The diner air is jelling, concentrating, molecules collapsing into the void, the invisible gases taking shape and mass […] I don’t recognize anyone.”

This passage reveals how frightening awareness can be. The diner itself seems to change as Kate grasps the insight she has so long avoided: Her friends are insensitive, and it is time for change.

“Our essence is in this room, the atomic products of breaking down two girls to their elemental selves: frightened, defiant, lonely.”

Science again informs Kate’s perception. From an atomic standpoint, she and Teri, so apparently dissimilar and antagonistic, are fundamentally alike. They share a common humanity with each other and with all high school students, who are also lonely and afraid.