Popular Girls
Popularity among kids, tweens, and early teens is a funny thing. They know the code and the code is usually not anywhere near as complicated as it may seem to parents or other older outsiders. The code to being popular here is quite clear to Catherine and, fortunately, she easily facilitates imagery to convey the code to the reader about why the new girl named Kristi is destined for popularity:
“Tall with straight brown hair falling her elbows, she’ not fat or skinny, a perfect between. She doesn’t run—just walks, like the rain doesn’t bother her at all.”
If only popularity was that easy to attain in the adult world.
Setting
The first-person narration of Catherine also uses an instance of imagery to quickly and efficiently provide a sensory-laden description of the setting in which the story takes place. It is quick, specific, precise and vivid:
“I love the road between our house and the clinic. It follows the ocean’s shoreline, and I look for snowy egrets standing stick-still in the salt marshes and osprey circling, hunting fish. At high tide, waves sparkle under the wooden bridges, and I can guess the tide before I even see the water, just by closing my eyes and breathing the air through the open car windows. Low tide smells mud-black and tangy, but high tide smells clean and salty.”
Catherine’s Empathy for David
Catherine narrates, but the story is every bit as much about her autistic younger brother, David. As a result, there is much descriptive imagery targeted toward bringing David to life as a character, but one particular passage really rises above the others as an example of how to tell a lot without saying a lot. In fact, it is a heartbreakingly perfect piece of writing that works on two levels simultaneously by giving important information about both sister and brother, writer and subject, observer and the observed.
“I study the hair on the top of his head. How can his outside look so normal and his inside be so broken. Like an apple, red perfect on the outside, but mushy brown on the first bite.”
David Tests that Empathy
From the above example, it is clear that Catherine is tremendously empathetic toward her brother and the difficulty of his life caused by the autism. At the same time, of course, it is also that very same condition which stimulates the actions that test the limits of that empathy and this test is shown through the imagery rather than merely being told through narrative introspection:
“The video store is David’s favorite place, better than the circus, the fair or even the beach…David has to watch all the previews on the store TVs and walk down each row of videos, flipping boxes over to read parental advisory and the rating…David’ll say, loud enough for the whole store to hear, `Rated PG-thirteen for language and some violence! Crude humor!’…But the hardest part is when David knees in the aisle to see the back of a video box a complete stranger is holding in his hand.”
