“I wish someone would tell me exactly what a journal is. I asked my mother and she just said, ‘Well, it’s like a diary only different.’ […] She was going to explain more, but Mrs. Furtz (the lady who just moved in across the street) called to say that my brother Dennis was throwing eggs at her house, and my mother went berserk so she didn’t finish telling me. How am I supposed to write a journal if I don’t know what one is?”

This first journal entry reveals Mary Lou’s anxious, eager-to-please character as she dreads getting the assignment wrong. Her mother’s inability to answer the question—both because she does not exactly know how to define a journal and because she is distracted by the more urgent task of chasing after Mary Lou’s troublemaking brother—indicates that Mary Lou will have to figure out the assignment for herself. Mary Lou’s ability to figure things out for herself, rather than defer to authority, is a key theme of the novel.

“But the party was the stupidest (I know there is no such word as stupidest) thing I have ever seen, with the girls all giggling in the middle of the room, and the boys all leaning against the walls, and then they put on the records and started dancing, just the girls with girls, until finally a slow song came on and some of the boys danced slow with some of the girls just to hang all over their necks and look cool but no one asked me to dance, so I had to stand by the food and pretend to be hungry as anything.”

Mary Lou casts a cold eye on the cool kids’ parties, which she believes to be a pointless exercise in flirtation that merits the superlative “stupidest.” Conveying the happenings of the party in a single sentence indicates that Mary Lou is an observer rather than a participant, who watches the action unspool before her. This is confirmed when she reveals the reason that she is left out: no one asks her to dance. The pretense at this party—which involves everyone pretending to look cool and her pretending to be hungry—disturbs Mary Lou and causes her to feel defensive.

“Carl Ray is tall and skinny, about as skinny as a person can be and still be alive. He has the blondest hair, almost white, and it sticks out in places like at the top of his head and by his ears where it is cut kind of short […] He has tiny little eyes and a tiny nose; in fact his whole head looks like a miniature of a real person’s head.”

Mary Lou describes Carl Ray in minute detail. His eccentric appearance, which is full of contrasts, exacerbates his stranger status in the family. The fact that he is so skinny yet still alive hints that he has been through hardship and survived. The unflattering, distancing terms in which Mary Lou describes Carl Ray indicate her resentment towards him and her unwillingness to consider him with more imagination and empathy.

“She had her eyes closed as if she was trying to remember and she was moving her lips around. ‘Well, I guess it tasted like…chicken.’ Now that surprised me. ‘Chicken? Are you sure?’ ‘Well, gosh, Mary Lou, I wasn’t paying that much attention. I think it was like chicken, yes.’ It’s not the sort of taste you would expect, is it?”

Mary Lou’s obsession with how kisses taste causes her to cross-examine her friend Beth Ann for what she hopes will be a definitive answer on the subject. Her lack of confidence causes her to discount her own experience for that of her friends. Creech conveys the comic subject matter of this conversation in the earnest tone of two relatively inexperienced teenage girls.

“Beth Ann was acting as if she’d just been crowned the Queen of Easton or something. I’d never seen her like that. When I went over there, she was lying on her bed dressed in one of her sister Judy’s flimsy nightgowns (pink nylon! aaargh), flipping through Seventeen. She didn’t even seem happy to see me.”

Beth Ann’s performance of being newly in love incorporates the hackneyed stereotypes of lolling about in shiny bedclothes and self-absorption. While Mary Lou is judgmental of Beth Ann’s arrogance and the drama of her performance, she is hurt at being left out. The hurt is conveyed in her awareness that Beth Ann does not even seem pleased to see her; Mary Lou feels superfluous to her friend’s happiness. As Mary Lou has not yet been in love, Beth Ann’s state seems more like a performance than something relatable.

“It really bothered me all day that she didn’t tell me anything about her date and that she just dropped that bit about her and Derek going out again, just dropped it like some big bomb right on my head. I didn’t think best friends did that sort of thing. Even though our house was full of people all day, I kept having this lonely feeling. It was really strange. Am I jealous?”

Mary Lou uses her journal to interrogate her feelings upon returning home after her visit to Beth Ann’s. She is hurt by Beth Ann’s secrecy and reads cruelty into her intention to drop the subject of the new date suddenly before Mary Lou. The feeling of being lonely in a crowded house is one that Mary Lou has from the outset of the novel, and it is exacerbated by others moving away from her. She experiences her discomfort as strangeness.

“The surprising thing is that Mr. Furtz looks like one of those real healthy types who plays lots of golf and tennis and is always running around in his gym shorts and tennis shoes. He’s got these really long skinny legs and great big feet.”

Mary Lou reflects on the unpredictability of Mr. Furtz’s sickness. She cannot figure out how a man who flaunts his athletic good health wound up in hospital. She also unwittingly describes a man who physically resembles Carl Ray in having big feet and long skinny legs. Here, Creech foreshadows the doubt concerning Carl Ray’s paternity.

“She also asked me what I was doing tomorrow night. Well, I’ve fallen for that one before, so I was happy that I had something to say. ‘Going to the funeral home,’ I said. I knew she’d be surprised.”

While Mary Lou is devastated about Mr. Furtz’s sudden death, she also cannot resist using the shocking story as a means of impressing Beth Ann. Here, Creech shows conflicting feelings at work, as Mary Lou’s shock and loss coexist with the desire to keep score with Beth Ann that was present prior to the tragedy. The author thus presents a realistic and unsentimental portrayal of grief, which is also humorous for the reader who is by now aware of Mary Lou’s rivalry with Beth Ann.

“It just kills me the way these gods decide everything. Here’s this big hero Odysseus and everything he does is because the gods decide he should do it. It’s sort of like what a writer does with his characters.”

Mary Lou, who is reading The Odyssey, relates the gods’ whimsical nature to the turbulent events that caused Mr. Furtz’s death. She alerts readers to her awareness that writers decide their characters’ fates, thus highlighting the extent to which Mary Lou is Creech’s pawn. Regardless of whether the author is a god or a mere writer, Mary Lou communicates a feeling of being controlled by events beyond her consciousness.

“All day it rained. Dougie said it was God crying about Mr. Furtz, but I told him that if that were true and if God cried every time someone died, it would rain every single day. But it’s a nice thought, about God crying, I mean. I keep thinking about Mr. Furtz lying there in that box and that lid closing on him.”

Mary Lou’s younger brother Dougie sees an easy relationship of cause and effect in the world, equating rain with God’s grief. By contrast, Mary Lou contemplates a vaster and more complicated universe and therefore cannot draw such comfort. She is haunted by the thought of Mr. Furtz being alone and forgotten in whatever uncertainty death represents.

“And then, this really gets me, Menelaus’s maidservants wash Telemachus and his men and ‘anoint’ them with oil! […] All of this before they even find out who Telemachus is. It all reminded me of my mother and how she’s always going on about ole Carl Ray being a guest in our house. Well I sure feel like his maidservant.”

Mary Lou is triggered by a passage in The Odyssey in which Odysseus’ son Telemachus is greeted with ardent hospitality by strangers. She feels that this worshipful attitude is undue and unnatural, especially when the strangers do not know Telemachus. Mary Lou does not yet appreciate the vulnerability of being a guest in a strange house.

“And I just sat there like some idiot. I just sat there staring at him. He looked so different all of a sudden. He looked like Odysseus probably did when he cleaned himself up and anointed himself after being in the ocean for three weeks. All the girls standing around Odysseus about fell over from his beauty and all. They all thought he was some kind of a god.”

Mary Lou’s delight in Alex liking her is conveyed in her seeing him as a god, as the girls did Odysseus in The Odyssey. Like the girls, she feels herself under this mortal’s power, as though he were some divinity capable of changing her fate. Thus, Mary Lou feels that she has reached the idiotic state of other girls who moon over boys and judges herself for it.

“I wish this summer could go on and on and on and I wish I could always be this happy. It seems that whenever you are sad or just normal, you’re always wishing you were happy, but when you’re happy, you start worrying about when all this happiness is going to end. […] Already, I’m worrying that I’m too happy, and I’m either going to have to pay for this or it’s all going to end real soon.”

Mary Lou reflects that while happiness is a longed-for state, there is some anxiety to being happy, because happiness cannot last. Already, she is fantasizing about how things will go wrong. The use of the pronoun “you” indicates that Mary Lou believes this anxiety to be a universal state.

“Apparently Beth Ann and Carl Ray (I’m going to start calling him Lance Romance, as he is finally using the shower and splashing on tons of after-shave) had a ‘truly div-iiine and wonderful’ time.’”

Here, Mary Lou’s reporting of Beth Ann and Carl Ray’s date reflects both of their typically teenage preoccupations. Now that Carl Ray has a date, he breaks his grungy stereotypical teenage boy habits and gets acquainted with personal hygiene. He even takes it too far, splashing on tons of aftershave. This reminds the reader that Carl Ray is a normal teenage boy, in addition to being the lost soul of the novel. Meanwhile, Beth Ann’s vague but enthusiastic description of the date reflects her standard view of what dates should be, as she mimics the ideas of being rapturously in love.

“My mother has forbidden me to use the following three words: ‘God’, ‘stupid’ and ‘stuff’. She said I needed to expand my vocabulary. It’s not easy just eliminating those words all of a sudden.”

Mary Lou’s mother’s announcement that she needs to stop using these exclamations and filler words provoke her to think about how she communicates both orally and in writing. She reflects that deleting those words is not as easy as her mother makes out. This leads her to experiment with how she expresses herself.

“All of a sudden I realized that Alex and I were alone in his house. I started examining all the things on the walls—the pig’s head and the shelf with all the pebbles on it and the big pair of red lips with the gum sticking out the centre. Can you imagine practicing kissing on those huge lips?”

“All of a sudden I realized that Alex and I were alone in his house. I started examining all the things on the walls—the pig’s head and the shelf with all the pebbles on it and the big pair of red lips with the gum sticking out the centre. Can you imagine practicing kissing on those huge lips?”

“Oh Deity! I’m here at Aunt Radene’s in West Virginia and there is no light in the bedroom and I’m trying to write by the moonlight. I feel like Abraham Lincoln or something. I can’t see hardly anything! I’ll have to write tomorrow in the daytime. Oh I miss home and Alex!!!”

This passage illustrates the atmospheric change that arises as a result of Mary Lou’s trip to West Virginia with Carl Ray. She is plunged into a different environment where she cannot rely on the usual light source to facilitate night-time writing. Her routines are upended and she must conform to a strange system. This passage illustrates the loss of control that will befall her throughout this trip.

“Aunt Radene said ‘Gosh, we’re starving to death. We usually eat up at five, but we were waitin’ on you all. Gosh, I’m as happy as a pumpkin in a patch to see you.’ That’s just the way she talks, honest, I’m not making up.”

This passage conveys Mary Lou’s ear for dialects as she transcribes the way Aunt Radene talks. Aunt Radene’s speech, which is full of ellipses and the agrarian simile of a pumpkin in a patch, distinguishes her from Mary Lou, who generally uses unidiomatic standard American English in her journal. Aunt Radene’s speech is one of the ways Mary Lou marks that she has traveled far from home.

“It’s a strange thing, walking through a graveyard in the daytime. It’s not spooky, like it is at night. And it gives you this strange feeling: sort of a calm feeling in one way, and a very sad feeling in another way. When you’re in a graveyard, all the other stupid things like the convict and the things Sally Lynn and Sue Ann said, all those thing seem ridiculous to worry about. And you wonder why you worry about them and why you let them get you so mad.”

Mary Lou’s walk through the graveyard, after the tumultuous episode in which she overhears her cousins complain about her, gives her some perspective. She sees how little all of her problems are, which makes her calm. She also recognizes that this is a resting place for the dead, which makes her sad. Mary Lou wonders how she can see things so clearly and on the right scale here amongst the dead, only to lose perspective and get wrapped up in little things at other times.

“I told him each dream. […] ‘I think I’ve been reading the Odyssey too much.’ But Carl Ray had the strangest look on his face. He was watching the road […], but his mouth was half open and his hands were wrapping tighter and tighter around the steering wheel.”

While Carl Ray rejects Mary Lou’s demands to know his secret, he is impressed by the symbolic nature of her dreams about him in storms and graveyards. While Mary Lou dismisses her dreams as fanciful products of being immersed in the Odyssey, Carl Ray’s pointed desire to get control over the car and the steering wheel indicate that her subconscious has hit a nerve.

“And Uncle Carl Joe said, ‘What is a father anyway? Isn’t it someone who raises a child as his own?’”

Uncle Carl Joe’s feelings about fatherhood will prove to be the crux of Carl Ray’s homecoming. While Carl Ray went on an odyssey to Easton to find his biological father, his true homecoming will be to return to the man who adopted him as his own and raised him. Uncle Carl Joe’s belief that he is Carl Ray’s real father will gain further potency when he is the one at Carl Ray’s sickbed in the hospital.

“I read back over all these journals today. All those awful things I said about Carl Ray. I only hope that Carl Ray knows that I didn’t mean them and that it wasn’t his fault that I was being so insensitive. I was only starting to see all the good things about him when this happened.”

When Carl Ray winds up in hospital after his accident, Mary Lou is filled with remorse about her feelings and conduct towards him at the beginning of his stay in Easton. The journals are a testament to her guilt. She berates herself being insensitive, an attribute her mother pinned on her when she hinted to Carl Ray about the desk she wanted. Here, Mary Lou subconsciously prepares for the eventuality that Carl Ray may die and she will never get to see him again. Carl Ray’s potential loss comes at the time when Mary Lou sees just how valuable he is to her.

“The other things that used to drive me crazy are just part of Carl Ray, and once you get used to him, you wouldn’t expect him to be any different. Suppose he did make up his bed and suppose he clomped around so you could hear him coming and suppose he ate like a bird and suppose he talked on and on like Beth Ann? Would those things be very important? Do they really matter?”

Faced with the possibility of Carl Ray’s death, Mary Lou sees how little and unimportant the traits that bugged her about him are. Imagining the opposites of his traits—for example, eating like a bird as opposed to eating tons, or being garrulous instead of quiet—helps her realize that Carl Ray is a distinct person, rather than a flawed specimen to be corrected. This also make the reader feel the potential loss of someone so unique.

“When I was writing […] I thought I noticed everything. I was keeping a record. But I didn’t notice diddly squat. I didn’t even notice anything about Carl Ray being homesick or Carl Ray and Mr. Furtz, or how he felt after Mr. Furtz died […] I didn’t ‘see’ much of anything […] I don’t even recognize myself when I read back over these pages.”

Rereading the journals a second time, Mary Lou finds that she tracked all the evidence for what was going on with Carl Ray without paying any attention to it or reaching penetrative conclusions. She does not recognize the person who was too obtuse to see Carl Ray’s truth. Mary Lou feels that she has changed drastically over the summer, both as a result of Carl Ray and because of the process of seeing him through her journal. This reflection ultimately makes her a better person.