Summary
THE WAY IT IS...
A couple of weeks later, Sephy’s mother demands she put on an expensive dress without explaining why. Sephy only realizes once they’re seated in an audience at Hewmett Prison that her family is going to watch Ryan McGregor’s execution. She tries to leave, but Jasmine slaps her in public and forces her to stay. She sees hatred for Crosses in Callum’s expression. As he’s about to be hanged, Ryan shouts “Long live the Liberation Militia!”
At the last second, the governor announces a stay of execution. Callum is lost in the resulting riot, and he looks forward to joining the violence that’s beginning, but Meggie pulls him away. At the Hadley house, Sephy yells at Jasmine for forcing her to go, throwing a wine bottle across the kitchen. Jasmine slaps Sephy, then reveals that she paid Ryan’s legal fees, and that she tried everything she could to save the McGregors. Sephy, still furious, tells her to go back to drinking.
Mr. Stanhope gets Callum and Meggie in to see Ryan, who wishes he’d just been hanged. Ryan says that he has a plan to get out. That night, Callum climbs up Sephy’s balcony to see her. They talk about his anger—he wants to smash every Cross, including her—and they snuggle. Sephy falls asleep, and he confesses his biggest secret to her. The next morning, Sarah Pike helps Sephy hide Callum’s presence from Jasmine.
Four days after Ryan was meant to hang, the news channel reports that he was electrocuted and died while trying to climb the fence to escape. Sephy prays to God to leave the McGregors alone, and she wonders if hatred is something humans have invented.
Months after Ryan’s death (which most noughts see as murder, with electrocution as the cover story), Callum feels directionless and powerless. When Jude approaches him in a burger restaurant and recruits him to the L.M., Callum agrees, feeling like he has purpose for the first time in a long, long while.
Sephy writes Callum a letter, asking him to run away with her before she goes to boarding school. Sarah Pike delivers it to Callum’s house, but Callum is too busy packing to read the note immediately. Sephy waits as long as she can, but she gets into the car with her mother and drives away to boarding school. Callum sprints to Sephy's house after he reads the letter, but he only gets close enough to watch her drive away.
Analysis
After his father's death sentence is changed to life in prison, Callum feels happiness at the idea of joining a riot and channeling his confused emotions into violence. However, Meggie stops him, pulling him out of the crowd at Hewmett Prison. For the first time, when a woman touches him, Callum feels denied instead of feeling calmed. He wants to channel his anger; he wants to belong in an angry crowd.
This section shows Sephy as she prays for God to leave the McGregor family alone. Prayer and access to God are complex matters in Noughts & Crosses, as Crosses' social status is justified by the belief that their dark skin means they are closer to God. Callum states earlier that neither of his parents believes in the Good Book, and that's true for most noughts. However, Callum sees his father praying. Callum says that God was made by Crosses to support Crosses, but, at the end of his life, Callum will also find himself praying to God.
Callum's trajectory moves from one of drifting to one of purpose in this section when Jude recruits him to the L.M. He muses that this isn't the route he would've expected for himself a few years ago. This route would have been hard to predict for the reader, too, looking back at Callum's gentle personality and hopefulness in the opening chapters. Since Callum started at Heathcroft High School, every part of his life that gave him hope—school, opportunity, family, home, and Sephy—has been taken away.
This section ends the first part of the book. After this section, there is a two-and-a-half-year time skip, during which Sephy is at Chivers Boarding School and Callum rises through the ranks of the L.M.
