58 pages • 1 hour read
Philip BeardDear Zoe
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 20-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 20 Summary: “Stoned”
Tess tells Zoe she thinks about her less while she’s at her dad’s, especially once she and Jimmy start hanging out. Hanging out with Jimmy helps her understand what was happening between her mom and Justin. Tess doesn’t think Jimmy is a bad boy—she sees him more as “a really good guy who couldn’t help himself from screwing up a lot” (102), a bit like Tess’s father.
The night Tess discovers her father deals drugs, she hears James Taylor playing from Jimmy’s window. Using a hockey sick, he knocks on her bedroom window. He climbs into Tess’s bedroom window from his own. Frank licks his hand. Jimmy offers Tess weed, which Tess has never smoked, and they sit on Tess’s windowsill and share a joint. Jimmy teaches her how to smoke. Jimmy tells Tess he was at a school for troubled youth up in Maine, reminding Tess of her friend Kasey who was arrested. Jimmy tells Tess she’s a natural at smoking, and while they are stoned, everything is funny and they reveal more about each other. Jimmy tells Tess about his mother who died when she was 10, and Tess tells him about her mom, David, and Em, but not about Zoe. He kisses her goodnight and, from his window, throws her a can of Lysol. Tess gets a piece of pizza from the fridge, shares it with Frank, and makes him promise not to tell her dad.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Leaving Em Again”
Tess and her Dad pick up Em on the last day of school. Em is quiet and sad, and she asks Tess when she’s going to see her again now that school is over. Tess says she’s not sure, and Em says it’s not fair and no one thinks that Em misses Zoe. She has to do everything just like before, while her mom and David and Tess all behave differently. Em asks Tess when it will stop hurting so much, and Tess says she doesn’t know. Tess’s father puts his hand on Em’s leg, and they ride home that way.
When they arrive at Em’s house, David is in his suit to meet the school bus, looking confused. Tess turns away and asks her dad to keep driving, but he can’t. David asks Tess how she is and asks her to call her mother more often, like when she first arrived at her dad’s house. Tess, absentmindedly pressing her foot to one of the holes in the truck, puts her foot through the floor of the truck. Her dad helps Tess extract her leg, and she can tell he is embarrassed by the truck. David and Em watch, but David doesn’t help because that would make it worse. There is a hole the size of a football in the truck floor.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Dolls”
Tess thinks that Em is right and that it’s easy to forget how much Em missed Zoe. She remembers that Zoe loved playing with dolls, and Em loved playing with her and teaching her how to hold a baby. More than anything, Tess says, Em loved when Zoe would pretend to a baby and Em would pretend to be her mother. Zoe would pretend to fall asleep, which was so unlike her that Tess feels she must have been trying to prove herself to Em.
Chapters 20-22 Analysis
Spending time with Jimmy becomes a form of escape for Tess, one that allows her to forget about Zoe, as she acknowledges when she writes, “it was easier to forget about you at my Dad’s” (101). Ironically, spending time away from her mother is precisely what helps her understand her more. Beard does not moralize Jimmy and Tess’s drug use, and Tess says, “I think parents have this view that their kids are being pressured all the time to do drugs and maybe some kids are, but I guess I was just waiting for someone to ask” (105). Drug use serves as escapism for Tess, a way to build intimacy between her and Jimmy. The escapism feels good for a while, fun and funny, but when the conversation turns to September 11, Tess doesn’t have the emotional capacity to open up to Jimmy. The drugs don’t solve her problems; rather, she keeps Zoe and the story of her death hidden from Jimmy, keeping him emotionally at arm’s length. Furthermore, her night with Jimmy creates distance between Tess and her father, as Tess must keep her relationship with Jimmy a secret. Escapism is a temporary fix for Tess’s pain, one that creates its own set of problems.
In Chapter 21, “Leaving Em Again,” Em’s outburst about the unfairness of her position adds depth and richness to her character, and it complicates Tess’s choice to leave her. Em mentions that her mom and David have ways of coping with the loss, or escaping, while Em does “everything the same” (112). Tess accidentally putting her foot through the floor of the mail truck underscores her father’s haphazard lifestyle, which stands in even starker relief given that the incident happens in front of David. Tess describes the hole in the truck with figurative language, and the flakes of rust from the truck fall on the street not far from where Zoe was killed, “arranged in a pattern that was like some form of hieroglyphics I was supposed to understand” (116). Here, the hole in the truck becomes symbolic of the hole in Tess’s life made by Zoe’s absence, and she is unable to interpret what’s left over in a way that makes sense.
Chapter 22, “Dolls,” focuses more closely on Em and Zoe’s relationship, demonstrating how all members of Tess’s family were affected by Zoe’s death. Just as Tess feels excluded from her mother and David’s grief, Em feels excluded from the family’s grief. Tess admits she’s guilty of this herself: “It was easy to forget how much she must have missed you” (117). Tess’s description of Em and Zoe’s game creates a further parallel between the sisters: In the same way that Tess mothered Em, so Em mothered Zoe, even if only in play. “Dolls” also stands in contrast to the later chapter “Paper Doll”: The former chapter is filled with images of mothers and daughters and familial closeness, the latter with violent images of blood-spattered walls.
