41 pages • 1 hour read
Megan MirandaA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Avery prepares for the summer’s-end Plus-One Party in Littleport, Maine. Her friend Luciana (Luce) arrives as the party is well underway; Parker, her boyfriend, dropped her off and went to park their car down the street. Avery asks if Parker’s sister Sadie, their mutual friend, came with them, but Luce says Sadie was still packing her things when they left. When Parker finally arrives, he tells the two women that Sadie told him not to wait for her, which is “Sadie-speak for not coming” (8).
Avery recalls that Sadie visited her earlier that day and wonders what she was dressed up for if she is not attending the party. Avery tries to text Sadie but gets no response. At midnight, two police officers arrive and ask to speak to Parker. The officers found Sadie’s body on the nearby Breaker Beach. Parker, Avery, and Luce immediately leave the party and head to the scene themselves. Upon arriving, Avery sees an officer’s flashlight catch the shine of Sadie’s gold sandals.
A year later, Avery reminisces on the days immediately after Sadie’s death. The official cause of death was drowning, and the fact that Sadie stopped to unstrap her shoes and leave them behind made the officers think that her death was not an accident. The officers also found what may have been a suicide note in the kitchen trash at Sadie’s house.
After talking to a couple about recent damage in their rental property, Avery falls asleep in the guesthouse with the television on. When she wakes up in the middle of the night, the television is off and her phone has not charged—the power is out, and from what Avery can tell, the outage is only in the guesthouse. She walks to the garage to reset the breakers, but she is startled by a sudden noise coming from the main house. When Avery enters the property, she finds Parker.
Parker and Avery share a drink. Parker tells her that he and Luce have split up and that his parents are not coming to town for the dedication of Sadie’s memorial. Avery goes to the bathroom to freshen up, and she recalls the circumstances of how she first met Sadie. Avery’s grandmother had just passed away, and she was hired to work a party at Sadie’s house. Avery accidently cut her finger with a kitchen knife, and Sadie helped her clean and bandage the cut in the bathroom. When Avery returns to the sitting room, Parker tells her that there will be a Plus-One Party again this year. Avery is surprised but says she will not attend. He also invites her to a lunch meeting about the dedication, and Avery accepts.
Avery wakes up with a slight hangover. Renters at the Blue Robin (the house where the Plus-One Party was held last year) call to report a break-in the night before. Before going on her morning run, Avery stops by the main house and sees Parker. She recalls the day they met and how Sadie warned her against getting involved with him. Avery’s run takes out to Breaker Beach. She follows a set of footprints in the sand, becoming more and more concerned about last night’s power outage and the reported break-in. The footprints stop just short of where Sadie’s body was found, and Avery admonishes herself for “look[ing] for something that didn’t exist” (44).
As Avery gets ready for the lunch meeting, she thinks about wearing Sadie’s hand-me-downs and how she used to feel like she would never truly blend in with Sadie’s crowd. Avery carefully chooses an outfit that is not a hand-me-down because she cannot “stomach the thought of Parker seeing [her] in his sister’s clothes” (49). Shortly after Avery arrives, the hostess brings Detective Ben Collins to the table. Collins was the officer investigating the beach, and he also interviewed Avery several times after Sadie’s death. Collins reveals that he responded to the Blue Robin break-in last night.
Avery goes to the Point Bed-and-Breakfast to drop off a refund check for the Blue Robin renters, who relocated after the break-in. She runs into Faith, a former childhood friend, and they exchange awkward pleasantries. Avery walks up the hill to the Blue Robin to assess the damage. While checking the bedroom, Avery empties a chest at the foot of the bed to make sure there are no forgotten valuables hidden under the spare blankets inside. At first, Avery assumes the phone she finds belonged to the renters, but she recognizes a streak of red nail polish: It is Sadie’s phone.
Avery straddles two worlds in her role as Grant Loman’s property manager: She is an employee and a year-round resident in Littleport, but she is also close friends with Loman’s children, Sadie and Parker. These personal relationships connect her to the upper-class vacationers, but that bond reminds her of just how different she is from them—for example, she cares about the consequences of her actions in a way that Parker does not. An event like the Plus-One Party, which requires no invitation and has no guest list, is supposed to be a neutral ground where one’s wealth and residential status do not matter. But when the police arrive, Avery notes that she is the one “expected” to handle this type of interaction with locals because, at the end of the day, she is still a local herself.
The circumstances of Sadie’s death are worrisome because details like her shoes being removed and the discarded note create the impression that Sadie intended to die. Avery’s grief displays the bond between them; their friendship created a sense of responsibility for one another, a duty Avery feels she let down by not seeing any “signs.” Although Avery is a local, she has no family in Littleport. Her parents and her grandmother are dead, so her connection to Sadie provided a more stable sense of community—one that is severed again by this new loss.
What these chapters unveil about Avery’s parents is particularly revealing and helps readers better understand her present behavior. Her father was a Littleport local and a straightforward man; he planned to become a teacher, and he did. Avery’s mother, however, moved to Littleport spontaneously and felt drawn to some mysterious quality about the town. Her mother’s continual search for an unknown, hidden meaning coupled with her father’s unwavering commitment to his plans are evident in Avery’s determined search for any sign of what is coming next. She feels that if she pays close enough attention—looking hard enough at the right things at the right time—then she can prevent another bad thing from happening.
The break-in at the Blue Robin is the second incident Avery deals with in only a few days, and those trespasses combined with the isolated power outage and other disturbances all heighten Avery’s anxiety. Her discovery of Sadie’s phone in the blanket chest is shocking because of what its presence implies: Either it was there all along and someone broke in to find it, or the break-in was staged so that someone could plant it to be found later.
By Megan Miranda