Awkward

Jaime is a key side character and secondary protagonist. The plot’s main conflict begins when Peppi pushes Jaime away after the mean kids call her “nerder girlfriend” for being seen with him. Jaime is illustrated with pale skin, dark brown messy hair, and dark square-rimmed glasses.

At school, Jaime is often depicted apart from others. He walks by himself between classes; in science club, when he is among a larger group of people with similar interests, he is never seen with the segment of the club that teases the art club. Jaime can instead be found making small robots by himself. Jaime is teased and disliked by the mean kids for no apparent reason. However, unlike Peppi, who often appears flustered, Jaime never seems perturbed by the bullying directed at him. This is perhaps because of his supportive and loving parents. Jaime’s mom gives him the advice that “there are bad people who hurt others for fun…and there are good people who do it by accident” (128); differentiating between these types of harmful behavior helps Jaime process actions and words leveled against him. With this perspective, Jaime can write off the bullies, while seeing Peppi’s shove as a momentary lapse by a good person.

Jaime’s parents help shape his character in other ways, too. Jaime’s mom is an artist. Because of her, he knows more about art than the other science kids do. His dad is a scientist who teaches Jaime to love science more for its own sake rather than for awards and praise. Because of his parents, Jaime has a different perspective on the art club than the other science club kids. The panels on pages 112 and 113 depict Jaime showing Peppi around both his dad’s workshop and his mom’s artist’s studio. To Jaime, the relationship between his loving parents symbolizes the complementary natures of art and science. After Peppi is also led to this realization by Miss Tobins, she sees that Jaime’s positionality as a science club kid who understands the value of art makes him a perfect collaborator for recruiting the other science club kids to work with the art club.

Throughout the graphic novel, Jaime is never unsure of himself or his identity, despite the bullying he experiences. Even though Jaime is “always alone” and “everyone either ignores him or makes fun of him” (9), he rises above their insults and continues to do the things he loves. In this way, he is a model for Peppi, who panics at being teasing and hurts Jaime as a result. By the end of the novel, Peppi has become more like Jaime. This friendship helps mend the rift between the art and science club, who unite in their defense of Peppi and Jaime against the mean kids and finally sit together at the same lunch table.

Maribella is a secondary side character who gradually becomes more complex as she and Peppi become better friends. Maribella, the leader of the art club, is a “confident, talented, problem-solver” (14). Because the art club members are historically insular, complaining about or avoiding larger contributions to the school, Maribella exerts her proactive and assertive (but not aggressive) personality to keep them on schedule.

While it is Maribella who officially offers the club the idea about doing newspaper comics, she later tells Peppi that she heard Peppi say the same thing quietly. Maribella sees leadership potential within Peppi and integrates her into the editorial staff. Initially, Peppi envies Maribella. She sees her as a “force of nature” (15), while she sees herself as “a tiny draft” (15). However, as Peppi gets to know Maribella, she realizes that Maribella’s actions are motivated by a fear of her father.

Maribella’s father demands that Maribella “crush” her competition. Maribella echoes what her father wants to hear: “Fight! Win! Put the losers in the trash bin!” (104), to which her father responds that he is glad she doesn’t take after her mother before warning Maribella not to disappoint him. When he references her mother, he uses a common profanity often weaponized against women. When Maribella’s father uses this word in front of both Maribella and her friend Peppi, his behavior is highly inappropriate. Maribella’s father inflicts on his daughter a type of emotional abuse called “parental alienation”: using strategies such as verbal abuse, name-calling, and bad-mouthing to alienate and belittle the other parent while seeking to ally the child with themselves (Baker, Amy J. L. “Parental Alienation is Emotional Abuse of Children.” Psychology Today. 28 June 2011). Maribella’s need to win the table for the art fair is therefore motivated by the desire to get her father’s approval and avoid the anger and animus he directs toward her mother. This combination leads Maribella to steal Jaime’s remote. While Maribella knows this is wrong, she is acting out of fear, desperation, and hopelessness. When she asks Peppi, her only friend, to help her, her face is illustrated with lines of exhaustion and the buns in her hair are messy.

Parental abuse is one adult-generated problem that a child cannot solve: Nothing Maribella can do will calm an abusive parent. Instead, other adults must step in and ameliorate the situation. In this case, Maribella’s mother and grandmother intervene. At the end of the story, Maribella is about to leave the state with her mother to live with her grandmother. She is grateful that Peppi returned the remote, which shows that she meant no real animosity to the science club. After Maribella leaves, there is no mention of her throughout the rest of the text. This is true to real life: sometimes, life circumstances mean force primary and secondary school friends to lose touch. Maribella’s absence means she and her mother are now safe from her father and it also allows Peppi to step into a leading role in resolving the conflict between the art and science club.