58 pages • 1 hour read
Philip BeardDear Zoe
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2004A 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 29-31Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 29 Summary: “Sixteen”
The day before her 16th birthday, Tess’s dad calls from the police station to say he’s been arrested and not to tell her mom. He tells Tess to call Gram and says he should be out soon because the cops don’t have anything on him. He tells Tess they arrested Jimmy, too, and Tess realizes that Jimmy helps her father deal drugs.
Tess stays at home alone. Frank and Keisha can’t settle down, and Tess feels anxious. She sleeps in her father’s room and looks at the wedding photos of her parents, feeling unnerved that her mom looks so happy and doesn’t realize she’s making a mistake. Tess is afraid because her mom in the photo is not that much older than Tess is now, and Tess worries she could be making terrible mistakes in her own life. Tess falls asleep and dreams that she is Em and Zoe’s mother. Zoe is in her car seat but bleeds from her nose and tells Tess she’s a big girl now.
When Tess wakes up, it’s her 16th birthday. Her dad calls and apologizes and says he’s thinking about cooking school. He tells Tess he’ll come home after he and Jimmy get the truck, and after Jimmy reminds him, Tess’s dad wishes her a happy birthday and promises they’ll do something special. Tess calls work to say she won’t be coming, and her mother pays her a surprise visit with birthday presents. Frank is excited to see her, and Tess lies and tells her mother that her father is at the gym. They talk for a while, and Tess tells her about Kennywood and Vicky and Jimmy. An hour passes; Tess becomes paranoid her dad will come home soon, and she tries to get her mother to leave even though she wants her to stay longer. Tess’s mother tells her she loves her and that she wants her to come home.
Tess’s dad and Jimmy arrive in the milk truck with pink and white balloons tied to the bumper. Tess and Frank are sharing ice cream on the stoop, and Frank, excited, runs out into the street and is hit by the truck. He’s still breathing, so Tess’s dad scoops him up and drives away. Tess feels she should’ve seen the incident with Frank coming.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Little Dance”
Jimmy and Tess go up to Tess’s room. Jimmy gives her a birthday present, a tiny empty bag that is supposed to be Tess’s makeup case and hold all the makeup she will need for the rest of her life, and a rolled joint that says “Sweet Sixteen” on it. Tess says she’s never wanted to get stoned so badly in her life, and after she and Jimmy smoke, they kiss. They take off their clothes and move the bed, and Jimmy performs oral sex on Tess. Tess feels good at first, but then they begin to have intercourse, and the noise of the bed reminds Tess of the noise of the truck hitting Frank and the gurney that carried Zoe.
Tess yells at Jimmy to leave, and they stop having sex. Tess wants to be dead. She begins to cry. Jimmy touches her shoulder through the covers, and Tess realizes he hasn’t left. She tells him everything about Zoe because she feels the silence isn’t doing anyone any good.
On September 11, the day of Zoe’s death, Tess misses the bus, and Tess’s mom tells her to make herself useful and watch Zoe. Tess is playing with Zoe outside when a driver of a passing car tells her to go inside and turn on the TV. Tess tells Zoe to wait, and she goes inside, where she and her mother watch the planes hit the towers. Tess goes back outside to play with Zoe, and Zoe sprints off the curb, where a car hits her and sends her flying through the air. There’s no blood, but Zoe is completely still.
At the hospital, the news shows the towers falling over and over again. Tess watches people jump from the burning towers. A doctor arrives and tells Tess and her mom that Zoe died of internal bleeding. David arrives and knows right away. Tess tries to crawl under the chairs, but he pulls her out. David and Tess’s mom go to see Zoe’s body, but Tess stays with the doctor, replaying the scene of Zoe being hit by the car.
Tess doesn’t remember going home. Em comes home from school with something to show Zoe, and Tess hears her mom crying from her room. Tess thinks “I killed my sister” on repeat (174), and she feels she hates Zoe for it, even though she loves her.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Paper Doll”
Tess thinks about people who died on September 11 but not in the terrorist attacks. She thinks about women who give birth on September 11 and how now September 11 is a “a day that’s named after its date” (175). She has nightmares about blood, Zoe’s and the victims of September 11. She dreams about finger painting with it and making a print of herself in blood, “like an unfolded fan of paper dolls” (176).
Chapters 29-31 Analysis
After her father and Jimmy’s arrest, Tess berates herself for not having realized sooner that Jimmy was helping her father deal drugs. Tess is highly self-critical and views her failure to put the pieces together as evidence of her naivete and youth. Ironically, Tess is very observant and emotionally intuitive, often understanding larger implications from small moments. She hopes she’ll always be able to see what’s coming as she grows up, an idea that she revisits and complicates in the final moments of the book when she considers that everyone’s life takes the shape of a “Z,” unable to see exactly what’s around the corner.
Her father and Jimmy’s stay in jail contributes to Tess’s dark lens throughout the rest of the chapter. Her voice grows increasingly anxious, and the rhythm of the sentences increases in speed, mimicking her agitated state. Tess frets that she might wind up like her father, and she begins to doubt all the choices that led her here. Her nightmare about Zoe is a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder and also suggests that Tess’s memories of Zoe are close to resurfacing.
Tess’s 16th birthday is a moment of climax for the novel. She reconnects with her mother emotionally, telling her about all the parts of her life. Tess longs for physical closeness with her mother and wants to curl in her mother’s lap, a regressive moment that reveals a longing for maternal intimacy, and a longing to return to a less complicated time in her childhood. Throughout the scene, Tess experiences a great deal of internal conflict: She wants her mother to stay, and she wants her to leave; she wants her mother both to make and not to make a big deal out of her birthday.
When Tess’s father arrives home, Tess’s narration switches from the past tense to the present tense. The change in verb tense lends a sense of urgency and immediacy to the scene, underscoring the feeling of emergency when Frank is hit by the truck. Tess becomes hyper-attuned to the sounds she hears at the moment of impact, in contrast to the silence she heard when Zoe was hit. Frank’s accident is an echo of Zoe’s that prompts Tess to relive the trauma of that day.
For her birthday, Jimmy gives Tess a makeup case that can contain very little makeup, suggesting his desire to see her without a mask—to see her true self. He also gives her a joint, which they smoke, and then Jimmy begins to perform oral sex on Tess. The experience is at first profound and joyful for Tess: “I stayed in that place where nothing bad ever happened and Jimmy’s mouth was I swear touching my soul” (165). The act is a profound moment of intimacy between them and leads to penetrative sex. They are interrupted, however, by the “bump-bump” noise of the bed, which reminds Tess of Frank’s accident and Zoe’s gurney. The noise is a psychological trigger for Tess, causing her to cry, scream, and dissociate: “I was a single-celled creature floating alone in my own universe, not touching anyone or anything” (168). Syntactically, the run-on, addled sentences in this chapter reflect Tess’s altered state, which she experiences both from feeling high and as a result of reliving the trauma of Zoe’s death.
Structurally, Chapter 31, “Little Dance,” contains two section breaks: one when Tess and Jimmy have sex, and another when Tess remembers the day of Zoe’s death. These structural deviations serve as dramatic pivots within the text, mimicking the sharp turns that Tess’s life took on September 11, as well as the “Z” shape that has become significant for Tess. The section breaks also represent a psychological rupture for Tess, who has reached an emotional and mental breaking point during which she must confront the death of her sister. Similarly, though Tess is telling the story of Zoe’s death to Jimmy, the actual memory of the day is offset and formatted in italics, emphasizing its importance. Setting the memory apart from the rest of the narrative contributes to its seeming out-of-order and out-of-time, suggesting that memory, and Tess’s experience of that day, is ongoing. These three chapters in particular make use of metaphoric and figurative language to represent Tess’s experience of that day. At the moment of Zoe’s death, Tess hears “only silence.”
In “Paper Doll,” Tess focuses on the connection between September 11 and Zoe’s death, preoccupied with blood in particular. Zoe’s death is the result of internal bleeding, and Tess thinks about blood donations for firefighters that might have helped Zoe. Tess imagines painting with blood, a dark echo of her mother repainting Zoe’s room. In addition, she imagines making a print of herself with blood like an “unfolded fan of paper dolls” (176), an image that is at once childlike and violent, underscoring the internal conflict and devastation Tess feels over the loss of her sister.
