The Pinballs

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1976

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-14

Chapters 15-21

Chapters 22-26

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 7-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary

On their second night in the house, the three children write letters home. Carlie writes a letter begging her mother to ask the social worker to take her back and promising that she’ll stay away from her stepfather. Thomas J tries to write a letter to the twins but doesn’t know what to say.

Harvey doesn’t want to write a letter, so he starts making a list of bad things that have happened to him, which Carlie steals and reads aloud. In return she tells them two bad things that happened to her: First, she couldn’t be a majorette because of her failing grades, and second, she was going to try out for Miss Teenaged Lancaster, but her stepfather attacked her the week before tryouts. She mentions the attack casually, but the boys are startled.

Chapter 8 Summary

While Carlie uses the swing set outside, Harvey sits in his wheelchair on the porch and composes more Lists in a spiral notebook Mrs. Mason got him. He’s come to enjoy making lists, especially ones that are pleasant and don’t lead him toward bad memories.

Carlie keeps trying to engage Harvey in conversation, asking him if he thinks about running away. Then, looking at his legs, she amends this to “rolling away.” He answers her questions and ignores her goading.

Chapter 9 Summary

Mr. Mason takes Thomas J to visit the Benson twins in the hospital. Carlie begs to go by lying; she says she has a cousin who owns a boutique nearby. Harvey also begs to go but tells the truth: He wants to go to the Kentucky Fried Chicken near his father’s house, which is also near the hospital. It is a comfort food for him since he would eat it, sometimes for more than a month straight, on nights his father wasn’t home for dinner.

Mrs. Mason says no to Harvey’s request to go with Mr. Mason and Thomas J but concedes that Mr. Mason can pick up Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner since it’s “too hot to cook” (44). While Mr. Mason and Thomas J are gone, she teaches a begrudging Carlie how to sew. Carlie asks Mrs. Mason why she never had kids of her own or adopted. Mrs. Mason says she cannot have children and that she intended to adopt, but the agency asked her to foster instead, and it worked out.

Chapter 10 Summary

Thomas J drives with Mr. Mason to the hospital. He feels strange and wishes he had candy to bring them. Even though the twins didn’t “believe” in candy, he fantasizes about their gratitude toward him.

When he arrives, the twins ask if he’s been back to their house. They give him a list of things to take care of, like canning the garden peas and finding their gold coins and their father’s gold watch. He wants to ask them about the morning he arrived at their house even though he’s asked before and they only vaguely answered about him showing up alone in a Snoopy T-shirt.

The twins fall asleep soon, and he and Mr. Mason leave.

Chapter 11 Summary

Mr. Mason takes Thomas J to the Bensons’ house, where he grabs the watch and gold coins. The trip makes Thomas J sad. He looks at the garden, but it’s ruined after three weeks without water. As they’re driving away, Thomas J is suddenly sure this will be his last time seeing the house. He wants to look at it closely and envision himself walking there as a baby.

They forget to get the Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner, so Harvey is incredibly upset when they get home. Carlie follows Harvey into his room, pestering him about what’s wrong even though he asks her to leave him alone.

They grill hamburgers instead. Afterward, Carlie makes bad jokes to try to cheer the boys up. She asks what she can do to cheer them up; Harvey tells her to go in the house. This reciprocal teasing makes her smile.

Chapter 12 Summary

Carlie asks what Harvey’s newest list is about. He says it’s about presents he received that he didn’t want. His mother promised him a puppy for his birthday, but abandoned him 11 days before his birthday. His father wouldn’t get him one “on principle” and got him an electric football game instead. He bought himself a guinea pig and the supplies to care for it, but his father got rid of it and gave him a snooker table.

Thomas J, who doesn’t talk much, says he got four presents from the twins over the course of his life: pencils with his name on them, gloves, a kid’s Bible, and the three gold coins.

Chapter 13 Summary

Carlie and Harvey decide to go to the library; she will wheel him there. She wants to play a trick on Mrs. Mason, but Harvey defends her. Carlie admits that at least Mrs. Mason hasn’t “done us in yet” (64). She asks Harvey who he’d put on a list of people who’ve done him in. He says two, thinking of his parents.

Carlie describes her own list: her birth father, who left before she was born; her first stepfather, who stole her babysitting money and ran away; and her second stepfather, who physically abused her. After hearing about the abuse, Harvey admits that his legs are broken because his father drunkenly put the car in drive rather than reverse and ran over him. Carlie is shocked into silence.

Carlie thinks out loud about how if someone had asked her before she was born what she wanted in a father, she’d ask for a handsome, rich dad who loves her. She wouldn’t have thought to ask for a dad who would stick around, just like Harvey wouldn’t have thought to ask for a dad who could tell forward from reverse. She laments how some people have children and don’t want them, but others want them and are unable to have them.

Chapter 14 Summary

At the library, Harvey looks through old issues of New York Times Magazine to find the article about his mother. Carlie asks why he doesn’t have her address from the letters she sent. Harvey says she sent letters, but his father ripped them up before giving them to him.

Carlie goes to look for a book, and Harvey finds the article. He reads about how the people on the farm have a nightly ritual where someone volunteers to sit on a stool while everyone else praises and criticizes them. He gets the pages copied to take home. Meanwhile, Carlie “reads” the book she finds by reading the first and last few lines.

Chapters 7-14 Analysis

These chapters continue to explore the deeper psychologies of the three children in foster care, including the methods they have developed to process and cope with their trauma and the ways that getting to know each other’s idiosyncrasies brings them closer together. Their characters become more complex as more is revealed about their histories and emotions.

The three children are in a unique situation wherein they can understand one another and their struggles better than other peers. While children should not have to be responsible for the emotional well-being of other children, in certain cases where their basic needs are being met by responsible guardians—such as the Masons and their social workers—having peers who understand their struggles can be an important form of auxiliary support. Through these chapters, the three children begin to open up to one another about their histories. This vulnerability slowly builds bonds between them.

One of the things they each must learn is the difference between Getting What You Want Versus Getting What You Need. They each initially want to return to some version of their old lives because what’s familiar feels comfortable—even if the familiar was unhealthy or dangerous. Carlie, for instance, writes a series of pleading letters to her mother begging her to let Carlie come home, finishing it “with twelve ‘pleases,’ all underlined” (36). When eight days pass without her mother answering her, Carlie starts to linger more around Harvey and Thomas J. She starts asking them more serious questions, such as if they’ve thought of running away, or if they would miss her if she ran away. As she realizes that her mother’s communication is unlikely, Carlie turns to the two boys, asking and revealing increasingly personal details to forge a connection with children whose experiences are similar to hers. While she did not originally want this closeness, telling Mrs. Mason that “pinballs” don’t help each other, she begins to realize they are the type of connections she needs.

One of the moments that cements Carlie and Harvey’s bond is when he is finally honest with her about what happened to his legs. Carlie, who is more extraverted, has already shared details about her stepfather’s abuse. Harvey is initially more reserved and lies about how he broke his legs. He could have been ashamed of how it happened, or he could have been protecting himself from insults from Carlie, who, he thinks, “could out-insult anybody he had ever met” (16). While Carlie does use insults as a defense mechanism, she is more serious and respectful when the others open up to her.

When Harvey tells her the truth, her “shoulders sagged,” and she has to stop pushing his wheelchair (65). Harvey echoes the justification his father gave to the police: “He said he couldn’t help it” (65). Carlie quickly replies, “Which is supposed to make everything all right” (65). Carlie is trying to teach Harvey an important lesson: It does not matter if a parent hurts you on purpose or by accident. Abusers commonly “mak[e] excuses for the inexcusable” or “blame their abusive and violent behavior” on external forces rather than internal choice (Smith, Melinda, and Jeanne Segal. “Domestic Violence and Abuse.” Helpguide.org, 2023). Carlie’s point of view is crucial to Harvey, who deals with his experiences by shutting down. Her words validate what Harvey already knows: His father put him in a dangerous situation, hurt him, and then made claims of innocence “for the doctor and the pretty nurse and especially for the police” (35) without ever truly reconciling with Harvey himself.

Harvey’s complex feelings about his father lead him into confusion about Getting What You Want Versus Getting What You Need. He realizes The Importance of Love and Support and mistakenly believes he will find it with his mother, who ran away to a farm commune several years prior. Harvey has imagined an unrealistic reunion scenario to help him cope with his father’s absence, alcoholism, and abuse. He tells Carlie how he’ll find his mother and write to her, and when she hears about his legs, she’ll take him to the farm and they’ll live, in Carlie’s words, “happily ever after” (68). Harvey’s deep belief in this idealized version of his mother and the single-minded focus with which he pursues finding her contact information foreshadow the severe consequences that follow when this carefully constructed coping mechanism collapses in the next set of chapters.