Skippy anxiously awaits his first official date with Lori, focusing on nothing else except his daydreams of how it will go. One day, he finds a crowd of people around his locker-- it is on fire. Skippy knows that this is Carl, a dangerous, troubled individual who also happens to like Lori. All his friends now warn him that he cannot go to Lori's, but Skippy is adamant. Against all reason, he challenges Carl to a fight after school. Before the fight, Skippy gets a call from Lori imploring him to stop this. Skippy promises not to fight, through crossed fingers. At the place they arranged to fight, people's belief in Skippy dwindles-- there is no way a young, diminutive kid can fairly fight against a hulk like Carl. When Carl does show up and they start fighting, Carl's phone rings. He answers it, talks a bit in a low voice, and looks sour as he hangs up. The two resume the fight, and after Skippy lands one punch to the jaw, Carl goes down. Skippy's friends immediately whisk him away to his date with Lori.
There were a lot of important points in this chapter, where the plot took an interesting turn. When the dreamlike-excitement for Skippy's date turned into stubborn indignation when Carl lit his locker on fire. Between Skippy's challenge and the actual fight, people treated him like a dead man walking, all the while shocked that such a challenge was even made.
"All through class, faces keep flicking back to Skippy, scrutinizing him like he's a ten-foot lizard sitting there at the desk; and the day, which had been going so torturously slowly, begins to hurtle, as if time itself were panting to view the fight. Skippy tries to grasp on to the teachers' lessons, if only to slow things down. But it's as if the words themselves know they are not intended for him and pass him by. This must be what it's like being dead, haunting the living, he thinks. Like everything is made of glass, too slippery to hold on to, so that you feel like you're falling just standing still." (Skippy Dies, p.354)
And then, after the fight itself, Skippy was once again overjoyed and excited.
"And ten minutes later -- hair tamed, teeth brushed, irremediably shredded school jumper exchanged for a clean hoodie -- Skippy's leaving it again, pedaling Niall's bike uphill towards the gate. The rain has cleared and the clouds given way to a sunset that blushes deep and fiery, lush pinks and warm reds piled on top of each other in a breathy rushed jumble like a heart in love; and as he weaves out weightlessly into the traffic, leaving their final words of advice -- 'Full hardcore sex!' 'Just don't puke on her!' -- to disappear into the evening, the euphoria blossoms inside him at last, and with every yard travelled, continues, star-like, to grow." (Skippy Dies, p.361)
I have a theory about the phone call Carl received. I think Lori called Carl to tell him to throw the fight. It may be a pessimistic view of it, but there is just no way an author willing to write about drug-dealing and intense violence in detail would make a fairy-tale ending to a fight. After all, Skippy dies! It's a little bit of a longshot for me to believe. The fact that Skippy even challenged Carl is unbelievable. Paul Murray related this to a poem by Robert Frost about following the road less traveled, which is exactly what Skippy did when he challenged Carl.
Reading this chapter more deeply really brought out what I love in this book. It has a great vocabulary, which may seem like an arbitrary thing, but turns the dull colors of a hackneyed metaphor vibrant. It's as if the same idea when used with different words brings new life to it. When looking closer at this book, you can see that there are so many great descriptive and thoughtful sentences. Paul Murray is getting the most mileage he can out of each sentence, and he's clearly mastered this without making them sound too wordy. The tone of the analogies also changes with the mood of the character. The two passages above are the same in their complexity, but so very different in the feeling they express.
Tyler, I like how you chose to do a play-by-play of the fighting scene between Skippy and Carl. It shows that you have a solid ability at recognizing what your readers would truly be interested in hearing details about. I also agree with your theory that Lori may have called Carl and told him to have the fight, since I've had first-hand experience with girls and people in general having secret agendas. It sounds like this chapter was quite significant in terms of the entire plot of the story; you did well at choosing the quote (the looks Skippy got in the classroom) that shows the enormity of the fight, both during and in its aftermath. Nice blog post.
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