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Catalyst
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Part 3, Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Gas”
Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “Photoelectrons”
The news media arrive at the house even before paramedics take Mikey and Teri away, as do the police. Kate and her friends stay. They sit on the floor in the house, candles lit, and try to make sense of the accident. Each one cries as they wonder whether the accident was their fault. Everyone knew the electricity was poorly wired, but nobody watched out for Mikey.
Toby splatters paint on the walls. The others follow suit. Their painting—wild colors, thought fragments, and crazy forms—provides an outlet for their sorrow. No one wants to go home: “We work together until the candles burn out” (162). The painting ritualizes their grief.
Kate’s father brings Teri home shortly after midnight. She is obviously sedated. Later, Kate checks on her and finds Teri trying to climb out the bedroom window. Distraught, Teri tells Kate she needs to go home. Kate tries to stop her, but Teri is determined to spend the night in the room where her son died.
Kate finds her in Mikey’s room sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by her son’s toys, including the blackened fire truck. Uncertain of what to do, Kate sits down behind her, resting her back against Teri’s: “The ridge of her backbone is thick, like she has hunks of granite instead of vertebrae” (167). Wordlessly, Teri slips her hands into Kate’s. It is their first real emotional connection.
Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary: “Radioactive
On Sunday, Teri leaves to visit her mother. Kate can’t concentrate on her chores. She no longer cares about MIT or even homework. All she can think about is little Mikey in the funeral home. She spends the day watching cartoons with her brother. When Teri returns, Kate drives her back to her home and the two return to Mikey’s room.
Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary: “Phase Transition”
Against her better judgment and at Teri’s urging, Kate and Teri go to school Monday morning as if nothing happened. Teri refuses to leave Kate. The two follow Kate’s schedule as Teri keeps dropping off to sleep. Kate refuses to answer any questions about Mikey. The funeral is the next day, and Kate wonders where Mikey’s body is at that moment.
Kate believes that, without MIT, she really has “no future” (172). She imagines that Teri will join the army and live in Hawaii while Kate will stay home, caring for her aging father. In the lunchroom, Kate’s friends who were at Teri’s house the night of the accident talk with Teri awkwardly. They tell Kate that no one has seen or heard from Mitch since the accident.
When Kate and Teri get back home, the funeral director is there to pick out the casket. Kate’s dad assures her that parishioners have collected money to cover all the costs. Kate wonders where all this generosity was when Teri’s father was “beating the crap” out of Teri’s mother (178).
Kate goes to her room and calls the MIT admittance office. Pretending to be her mother, she asks whether there might be some mistake in rejecting her daughter’s application. The counselor, figuring out that it’s really Kate, says that, although her application was strong, she lacked that “extra something” (180).
Kate is not sure what that means. She drives over to Mitch’s house to check on him. To her surprise, she finds that he has cleaned his room, straightened his desk and closet, and has already notified Harvard that he wants to switch his major from history to international economics and then earn an MA in business. His mother is delighted: “He’s finally going to be practical about college” (182). Mitch tells Kate that everything changed for him when they “put Mikey’s body in the ambulance” (188). Mitch realized that he needed to be an adult and look toward the future.
Kate, for her part, feels overwhelmed and lost, like “somebody switched the road signs and [she’s] stuck with an old map” (184). She tells Mitch that she never applied to any back-up school.
Part 3, Chapters 8-10 Analysis
The novel centers on teenagers, and handling death is a difficult emotional issue. Anderson focuses on how these young adults cope with grief. Kate sums up the disconnect between her belief and reality: “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, seventy-five years” (152). As these chapters center on the memorial service for Mikey, Kate slowly realizes that the world doesn’t conform to her expectations.
Painting in the aftermath of Mikey’s death makes Kate confront uncomfortable, spontaneous emotions. Like the “Student Body” statue, the painting is a creative, nonverbal expression of emotion; it contradicts the logical, analytical way Kate approaches her problems. She realizes that her way doesn’t work, and that she must venture into unknown territory.
When she dips a finger carefully into the yellow paint and traces a few lines across the wall, she taps into the catharsis of emotional release: “I plunge my left hand in, bring it out, dripping threads of rich blue sorrow. I throw a handful of blue at the wall” (161). This is hardly Good Kate. In her shock, Kate taps into her deepest vulnerabilities, not as Bad Kate or Good Kate, but just Kate.
She is learning that life is not a math test; it is not a book report or a track meet. Religion is not the answer for her. Life is messy, subject to bad luck, misfortune, and surprises. Logic is for the classroom. Mitch, ever insensitive, does not believe Mikey’s death was an accident: “Someone is always responsible” (160). This is his way of coping; like Kate, Mitch does not believe that life is arbitrary.
Kate’s friends seem willing to move on and forget about the accident, but Kate cannot. Her friendship with Teri has begun to change her. Kate learns when calling MIT that she has the right grades, the right extracurricular activities, but isn’t aware of others. Successful applicants have tried to find a useful place in their community. That connectedness is the “oomph” that she is lacking (180).
Kate taps into her “oomph” when she goes to Teri’s house after the memorial service for Teri’s son. “Her hand,” Kate says, “[it] is so hot, I can feel blisters forming” (167). This suggests Teri’s strong emotions. Kate and Teri’s physical closeness is awkward. An earlier Kate would have shirked from such intimacy and raw emotion. This Kate stays: “Our fingers weave together…I don’t let go” (167). This is Kate’s turning point. She can’t return to her shallow friends and to her old life.
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By Laurie Halse Anderson
