72 pages • 2 hours read
Nina LaCourWe Are Okay
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A 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.
Chapters 25-27Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary
In September, Marin arrives on campus for freshman orientation carrying only a duffel bag with some clothes, crackers, and a photograph of her mother. She meets Hannah, her roommate, and is suddenly struck by the realization that she looks “feral. Puffy face, wild eyes, greasy hair” (199). Marin laughs off her appearance, saying she “must look like a disaster!” and heading straight for the laundry room and the shower. Once bathed, she puts on the freshest of her dirty clothes and goes to the student store to buy new ones. After buying $300 worth of clothes and changing into one of the outfits, she returns to the dorm room to try again to make a good impression. She quickly realizes that she has nothing she needs—no sheets, no comforters, no pillows. Hannah’s family steps in, kindly supplying her with extras of the essentials they’d brought. Marin reflects that Hannah would continue to step in and save her, helping her acquire necessary items and smoothing over social situations.
Chapter 26 Summary
In the present, Marin hangs the snowflake chain on her empty bulletin board. Hannah is enthusiastic when Marin texts her a picture. She notes that “it feels so good. [She] want[s] to do more” (205). She transfers her plant into its new pot and stands back to see what these personal touches have added. She sees: “Two yellow bowls, a pink pot with a green leafy plant, a strand of paper snowflakes.” (207). She carefully adds the photograph of her mother. She makes a loose plan to return to California and assemble a box of Gramps’s personal items to bury in a grave so that she might grieve for him.
She makes soup and reads her essays on solitude. Unable to focus, she instead thinks about her life with her grandfather. She realizes now that something was missing from their life and reflects on how she’d tried to make a life of small shared habits and care into something that was greater than the sum of its parts.
Marin remembers the day the yearbooks came out. Unlike the others, who’d immediately turned to the back to find the Seniors pages, Marin had begun with the cover and examined every page, putting off the section with the baby pictures. She finds that she is the only one who is lacking a baby picture; the editors had simply made her senior portrait large enough to cover the same space as the side-by-sides of the other students. Marin is the only one without a photo. She notes: “Even Jodi Price, adopted at eight, had a baby picture. Even Fen Xu, whose house had burned down the year before” (209). Marin realizes that she’d spent much of the early days thinking she was “afraid of his ghost” but that she’d really been “afraid of [her] loneliness. And how [she’d] been tricked” (209). Her real fear is that their entire relationship had been a lie.
Chapter 27 Summary
This chapter consists solely of the words “I am afraid he never loved me” (211).
Chapters 25-27 Analysis
Marin’s reflection on her arrival at school shows the reader how affected she’d been by her grandfather’s death. The days and nights in the motel had further impacted her mental health, surrounding her with people who were struggling with their own stability and priming her mind to become vulnerable to debilitating things—such as her belief that Gramps was haunting the pipes and would sing every time she turned on the water. Hannah’s appearance in Marin’s life, we see, is stabilizing even if it can’t be healing. The reader sees how Hannah’s appearance was a life preserver for Marin, providing enough buoyancy for her to float, rather than sinking under her grief and fear.
When Marin’s reflections move towards her senior yearbook, she is able to give a fuller picture of the questions and concerns her mind has been struggling to answer. She becomes better able to articulate how precarious and unstable her home life had been, acknowledging that the sets of caregiving habits and behaviors she and Gramps had settled into hadn’t added up to the love and support she truly needed in a home life. The very brief Chapter 27 shows Marin’s concern that her grandfather hadn’t really loved her—considering that he was her only living relative, this may extend to Marin feeling that she has never really been loved.
