50 pages • 1 hour read
Suzanne ParkThe Perfect Escape
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020A 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 27-33Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 27 Summary: “Nate”
Nate searches for his stun gun, but Kate left his pack behind to move more quickly, keeping only his food and water. He decides to throw his and Kate’s shirts at the zombie and light them on fire using Kate’s hand sanitizer and matches. This “kills” the zombie, allowing them to keep moving. When the path ends, they realize that they must jump onto a new cliff, which terrifies Nate further. Their wristbands flash with a notification that only three contestants remain. Behind them is the third: a German man who is approaching quickly. Nate and Kate jump together and make it to the other cliff. Nate apologizes for leaving Kate in the cave. Suddenly, he receives a wristband message from Robbie reminding him that Kate cannot win and that if they both win, they will be disqualified.
Chapter 28 Summary: “Kate”
After the German man jumps, he attacks Kate and tries to rip off her wristband, but Nate tackles him, and the two fight violently. Kate realizes that the man has stolen her mother’s necklace from her neck and desperately tries to get it back. In the struggle, she retrieves the necklace but loses her wristband. The German man tries to get Nate’s band as well, but Kate remembers a Krav Maga move that Nate taught her: a swift kick to the groin. This incapacitates the man and allows Nate to get away with Kate’s stun gun as his wristband buzzes with a new message.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Nate”
After reading the new message from Robbie offering him an extra $10,000 if he leaves immediately, Nate runs toward the finish line with the German man right behind him. More zombies await them at the finish line, but Nate uses the stun gun on them. The German man pushes through and sends Nate flying, knocking him unconscious in the process. When Nate awakens, he is still at the finish line and is surrounded by doctors, nurses, and Robbie, who angrily informs him that he won the contest by a few millimeters. Nate is ecstatic about all the money he has won and privately vows to himself that he will give Kate her share. He suddenly realizes that he’s in love with Kate and looks for her in the crowd.
However, Nate’s family greets him instead. His parents tell him that he is grounded. He apologizes to his family for lying and telling them that he was at a friend’s house, but he promises them some of the prize money that he won to help their financial situation. His parents refuse to take his money. His dad reveals that he has found a better job, and his mom claims that she likes her older car. They like their simple life and don’t need any extra money. His father cries as he tells Nate about his wealthy family in Korea. They denounced him for marrying Nate’s mother, who wasn’t wealthy. He is proud to have sacrificed money for love and happiness. Nate considers this as he is bombarded with interviews and comes to realize that he has sacrificed Kate in order to pursue money. He leaves and tries calling Kate but receives no answer. On his way home, he asks Zach for help transferring cryptocurrency to Kate anonymously. When he opens Kate’s birthday gift, which she left in his car, he discovers that it’s a funny T-shirt and vows to do anything to get her back.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Kate”
After cleaning herself up at home, Kate gathers her things in preparation for going to New York. She has already purchased her ticket, so now she packs her belongings and arranges for a cab to the airport. As she tries to get past Jeeves, her father video calls her and discovers her plans. He forbids her from leaving and locks down the house remotely. Jeeves reveals that Kate’s father built Jeeves especially for Kate’s protection, and she wonders if this was done out of love or a desire to control her. She asks Jeeves to make her a meal, and while he is gone, she overrides the lockdown by shutting off the house’s power supply. As she gets into the cab, she sees Nate’s text messages thanking her for the shirt, and she thanks him for the cryptocurrency. She cries as she shuts off her phone and finally leaves home.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Nate”
Nate is at Lucy’s school for “share day” to talk about his experience at Zombiegeddon with her classmates. They are all amazed and ask him lots of questions about the prize and the zombies. They also ask whether he has a girlfriend. After he leaves, he thinks about Kate again. He regrets losing her when he chose money over happiness.
Chapter 32 Summary: “Nate”
Weeks later, Nate gives Lucy some of his collectible figurines, choosing her happiness over his material possessions. Jaxon and Zach come over to play video games as Nate laments Kate’s disappearance from his life. After he and the other “skids” came together to reveal Peter’s scheme to the headmaster, Nate is now on-track to become valedictorian. Peter has been barred from sports for the rest of the year, which will affect his college applications.
Nate’s friends try to cheer him up, but he has realized that winning the money has not made him any happier with his life. He takes Kate’s earlier advice to prioritize his happiness by cutting down on his extracurricular activities in order to make time for things he enjoys. As he adjusts his lifestyle, he waits for a phone message from Kate. Eventually, he gets a postcard from New York instead.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Kate”
Kate is now the stage manager assistant at a theater in Queens, working alongside her friend Zoe. She also has a small role in the theater’s current production. Kate is shocked when Nate visits her at the theater and reveals that he found her by snooping around online. She has changed her name to Kate “Hall” to avoid being found by her father, with whom she has only recently started mending her relationship. Nate tells her that he is visiting colleges in the area; he has narrowed his choice down to three East Coast schools. He invites her to dinner, and she accepts.
As they walk to a local diner, Nate tells Kate that he has missed her and apologizes for his behavior. Kate’s father has since revealed that he paid Nate to abandon Kate during the Zombiegeddon competition, so she is no longer angry with Nate. At the diner, she notices that Nate is wearing the shirt she gave him. They hold hands and make plans to get together more often. Kate knows that their future is uncertain, but she is excited to see where it leads.
Chapters 27-33 Analysis
In the end, Kate notes that the competition has physically changed both her and Nate because the brutality of surviving in the wilderness has left them with injuries and scars that are both physical and psychological. However, the competition also changes their outlook on life profoundly. Nate realizes that he is in love with Kate and has lost her due to his ambition and pursuit of money. He discovers that the “fame and glory [he’d] wanted so badly” made him an “idiot” (271, 285) and ultimately decides, “Fuck the money” (285). To make amends with Lucy and embrace this new attitude, he gives some of his precious figurines to his sister, only keeping the rarest figures that make him especially happy. This action reflects his earlier promise to Kate to pursue happiness instead of just financial success. Nate’s situation at school also changes for the better when the all the scholarship students learn the importance of friendship and teamwork by uniting against Peter and other arrogant bullies at school. Overall, these inner and outer changes demonstrate the importance of the survivalist competition to the themes and character arcs of the story, proving that such competitions exercise participants’ survival skills even as they provide opportunities for emotional development.
Kate’s perspective is also profoundly changed by the competition and the events afterward. She learns that friendship and connection can be life-saving assents, not liabilities, and she also discovers that her father’s actions, while harmful and ultimately inexcusable, may also stem from a misguided but well-intentioned source. This revelation occurs when Jeeves reveals that Robbie designed him to keep Kate “safe” and “protected.” She wonders what this could mean about her father’s affection for her, and her narration reflects the flurry of confusion in her mind, as she asks herself a barrage of rhetorical questions: “Was this Dad’s way of trying to be a good father? Or was this his way of outsourcing his parenting job because he was never home? Was this love? Or outright rejection?” (278). The author never fully reveals the answers to these questions; the only hint that this relationship might one day improve is the fact that Kate eventually re-establishes contact with her father from her new refuge in New York. His unclear intentions don’t justify his behavior, but Kate’s questions are significant, for they give Robbie a path to redemption in her eyes. The ability to interpret her father’s behavior as being at least partially motivated by love illustrates Kate’s emotional development and the evolution of her Complex Family Dynamics. She is giving her relationship with her father a chance to heal instead of completely casting Robbie out of her life, as her desperate escape to New York initially implies.
Furthermore, the novel ends with symbols of hope for both protagonists. While sharing his competition experience with Lucy’s class, Nate gets a question from a Korean boy named James Ejoon Cho, whom Nate thinks of as a “[p]int-size Nate” (282). Nate sees himself in this boy who chooses to go by his full name. James Ejoon Cho is indeed a younger version of Nate who is also very involved in school and extracurricular activities. However, James Ejoon Cho isn’t afraid to embrace his full Korean American identity, thereby giving hope to others who struggle with similar questions of Navigating Cultural Identity and resolving conflicting family values across generations. Likewise, Kate’s symbol of hope is the postcard that she sends to Nate from New York. The communication shows that she doesn’t want to break their connection, and this represents a reversal of her initial desire to maintain emotional distance from him. At the novel’s conclusion, it is clear that they are moving forward once again as a team and embracing the uncertainties of their future, a good sign for two people who were previously driven to fulfill their own meticulous plans alone.
