Good Girl, Bad Blood

“‘At least he said sorry,’ Ravi continued. ‘Look at all of them.’ He nodded at the group around his parents. ‘Their friends, neighbors. People who made their life hell. They’ve never apologized, just pretended like the last six years never even happened.’”

In one of the rare instances when Ravi has a negative comment to offer, he notes the casual appearance of friends and neighbors at the memorial. While the town’s residents once considered his brother a murderer, they now turn out to honor his memory. No one but Ravi acknowledges the contradiction in their behavior. People believe what they choose to believe, regardless of the facts, as Ravi and Pip will learn in season two of the podcast.

“Pip didn’t look away. Her neck strained, sending stabs of pain down her spine, but she refused to look away. Not until those golden lanterns were little more than specks, nestling among the stars. And even beyond that.”

Pip is watching the lanterns for Andie and Sal traveling skyward. Watching them causes her physical pain. This correlates to the emotional pain she feels for two lives that she couldn’t save. Her unwillingness to look away is also an indicator that she tends to obsess and dwell morbidly on past events that can’t be changed.

“‘And your podcast’—he swallowed—‘hundreds of thousands of followers; that’s probably more effective than any media connections the police have. If we want to find Jamie, spread the word that he’s missing so people can come forward with any information they have, or sightings, you are our best hope of that.’”

This is the first point at which the reader becomes aware of the social reach of Pip’s podcast. Connor points out the vast influence that social media has on people’s daily lives. As will be discovered later, that wide net of influence has a downside too. It can attract trolls and naysayers as well as a potential murderer looking for revenge. 

“And as Pip said goodbye, she realized the decision was already made. Maybe it had always been made, maybe she’d never really had a choice and she’d just been waiting for someone to tell her that that was OK. It was OK.”

Pip has just asked Ravi to decide for her whether she should pursue the Jamie Reynolds case or not. In placing this burden on someone else, Pip is demonstrating the heavy weight of responsibility she carries for the tragic events related to her first podcast. Ravi declines to decide, forcing Pip to consult her own conscience on the matter.

“Pip spread the scrap of paper between her fingers and took a photo of it with her phone. ‘You think it’s a clue?’ Connor asked. ‘Everything’s a clue until we discount it,’ she replied.”

Pip and Connor are searching through Jamie’s room for leads. As a practiced investigator, Pip methodically scans the room’s contents. In making this statement, she seems also to imply that everyone is a suspect until discounted. Pip regards everyone and everything with suspicion, except for the one person she ought to suspect.

“‘Thank you, Stanley.’ She returned his polite smile. ‘I really appreciate that.’ She pivoted on her heels to leave, but Stanley’s voice stopped her before she reached the door.

‘Mysteries always seem to find their way to you, don’t they?’”

Pip has just asked Stanley to feature a missing persons story about Jamie in the town paper. Only in hindsight does the reader become aware that these two people are the catalysts for everything that will happen in the rest of the novel. Additionally, Stanley’s offhand comment about Pip might apply equally to him. He has been on the run all his life to keep the mystery of his real identity from following him.

“She knew him; this was Jamie. Jamie. But how well did you ever know anyone? She watched his eyes, trying to unpick the secrets that lay behind them. Where are you? she asked him silently, face to face.”

Pip is gazing at the photo she’s using for Jamie’s Missing poster. The same question will be uttered by other characters at later points in the story. The question of real identity goes to the very heart of the novel. While Pip and her friends are obsessing about Jamie’s real identity, they ought to be focusing on a different character entirely. Does anybody know the real Layla? Jamie’s aberrations have all been instigated by her.

“‘It isn’t my job, but it feels like my responsibility,’ she said, cutting her mom off. ‘I know you’ll both have a thousand arguments why that’s not true, but I’m telling you the way it feels. It is my responsibility because I started something and I can’t now take it back.’”

Pip is defending her decision to start a new case when her mother challenges the notion. In some sense, Pip became entangled in true crime from the opening words of her first podcast. She set a pattern in motion that has taken on a life of its own. Her success in solving previous cases only adds to the obligation she feels to continue.

“She knew something she should say, something she should have told Connor yesterday: not to touch Jamie’s toothbrush or his comb or anything that would have his DNA on it in case it was ever needed. But now was not the time. She wasn’t sure there would ever be a right time to say that. A line that could never be uncrossed.”

Pip is acutely aware of the passage of time in her investigation. The novel’s chapters are structured to mark the passage of each day since Jamie disappeared. In this quote, the investigators are nearing the 72-hour point at which a disappearance becomes a homicide. Pip refuses to admit this fact to Connor but is even more unwilling to admit failure to herself.

“‘What does “You’re getting closer” mean?’ Connor asked.

‘To finding Jamie,’ Pip said. Or finding out what happened to Jamie, she thought, which sounded almost the same but was very, very different. And Layla knew. Whoever Layla was, she knew everything, Pip was sure of that now.”

Pip and her friends have just received an online message from Layla that turns the tables on them. Both sides are engaging in catfish activities, but Pip is unnerved to realize the extent of Layla’s knowledge about her investigation. The question Pip never asks is why Layla should care what she’s doing. This is an early indicator that Pip is a chess piece on a much bigger board than she realizes.

“‘I don’t know, that is strange,’ Pip said. ‘I can’t explain it. I’m so sorry. This’—she cleared her throat—‘this isn’t the Jamie I know.’

Charlie’s eyes fell to the bottom ledge of the window, where Jamie’s fingers had snuck through. ‘Some people are pretty good at hiding who they really are.’”

Pip has just come to inspect the place where Jamie entered Charlie’s house to steal his wife’s watch. Her comment echoes an earlier quote in which she expressed the belief that nobody really knows anybody else. The irony of Charlie’s comment can only be understood in hindsight. Pip doesn’t know him any more than she knows Jamie. Charlie is making a veiled reference to his disguise as Layla.

“‘But you tell me everything you know about Layla Mead. If you do that, I’m sure no one will ever find out anything you wouldn’t want them to.’

Mr. Clark paused for a moment, chewing the inside of his cheek, glancing at Connor as though he could help. ‘Is that blackmail?’

‘No, sir,’ Pip said. ‘It’s just persuasion.’”

Pip is trying to get a witness statement from her history teacher. Her willingness to resort to blackmail is an indicator of just how far she will go to solve a case. While she holds other people to standards of truth, she seems to have no trouble bending the rules to suit her own purposes. She rationalizes this behavior by claiming that she’s acting for a good cause. Charlie would probably say the same about himself.

“It was the comments, she knew. Strangers on the internet with their theories and their opinions. Jamie Reynolds must be dead. And: He’s definitely been murdered—seems he kind of deserved it, though. Pip told Connor to ignore them, but it was clear he couldn’t, their words skulking around him, leaving their mark.”

This quote illustrates the downside of social media. Random strangers are free to offer damaging opinions on Jamie’s case, not caring that his family might read these comments. There is no accountability on the internet. An even greater offense against the social contract is Layla’s catfish scheme, which includes inciting someone else to commit murder.

“‘No, it’s not you,’ Joanna cried, carefully placing the sweater back on top of the basket. Two more tears broke free, racing each other to her chin. ‘It’s just this feeling, like I don’t even know my son at all. I’m not sure I recognize him.’”

Joanna has just shown Pip Jamie’s bloodstained sweatshirt. The reader later learns that Jamie beat up a complete stranger because Layla insisted that he should. This quote echoes many other comments about the disconnect between behavior and identity. Joanna doesn’t recognize her son’s true identity based on his aberrant actions.

“‘Yes, OK,’ Daniel interrupted. ‘What is all this?’ He gestured to the students, still gathered a ways back from the farmhouse.

‘That is a search team,’ Pip said. ‘When the police won’t do anything, I guess you’ve gotta turn to high schoolers instead.’”

Policeman Daniel has just arrived at the old farmhouse to find Pip and 80 other students combing the area. Daniel has always been antagonistic toward Pip and her interference in police business. As Pip now points out, if the police won’t make a missing persons case their business, then teenagers will.

“‘Well, it’s your podcast they’re commenting on. Where do you think they got those ideas?’

‘You asked me to do this, Connor. You accepted the risks that came with it.’ She felt the dead of night pressing in around them. ‘All I’ve done is present the facts.’”

Connor is upset because internet trolls are speculating that his own father killed Jamie. Pip’s dispassionate response to his accusation indicates that she doesn’t want to take responsibility for the reaction her podcast is generating. Given Pip’s obsessive drive for truth, her prim observation about merely presenting the facts seems disingenuous and hyperrational.

“Connor unstuck from Pip, his cheeks flushed and tear-streaked, and he folded himself around his parents. They held each other and they cried, and it was a cry of relief and grief and confusion. They’d lost him for a while. For a few minutes, in their heads and in hers, Jamie Reynolds had been dead.”

The Reynolds family has just learned that the dead body found near the highway isn’t Jamie’s. Pip makes an observation here about the effect that a thought can have on behavior. The entire family is temporarily thrown into mourning on the basis of a mental assumption. Jamie’s death happened only in their heads. To a great degree, virtual reality on the internet parallels this reaction. Jamie’s romantic relationship with Layla happened only in his head too.

“But Pip couldn’t hear what he was just saying, because her ears were ringing, a hiss like static, broken up by her own voice asking her: Did you plant the knife? Could you have planted the knife? Is Jamie missing? Is Layla Mead real? Is any of this even real?

And she didn’t know how she was still walking because she couldn’t feel her feet.”

Pip has just been accused by one of her classmates of fabricating Jamie’s disappearance for her podcast. In some sense, this quote echoes the preceding one. What happens in a person’s head can feel as real as anything in the outside world. Pip has spent so much time in the virtual world of the internet that even she isn’t sure where reality begins or ends.

“It’s like it’s happening all over again six years later, and this time I actually have a chance, a small chance, to help save Connor’s brother where I had no hope of saving my own. I know Jamie isn’t Sal, but this feels like some kind of second chance for me. You aren’t on your own here, so stop pushing people away. Stop pushing me away.”

Ravi is arguing with Pip about her vigilante behavior in the final stages of the case. Up to this point, Ravi has seemed entirely focused on fulfilling Pip’s needs. This is a rare disclosure of what his personal motivation is in helping her solve the case. He was unable to help his own brother, but now he may be able to help Connor save his.

“‘And when you really think about it, those words—good and bad, right and wrong—they don’t really matter in the real world. Who gets to decide what they mean: those people who just got it wrong and let Max walk free? No’—he shook his head—‘I think we all get to decide what good and bad and right and wrong mean to us, not what we’re told to accept.’”

Pip and Charlie have a conversation shortly after Max Hastings is acquitted. Pip is upset because justice hasn’t been done, even though she had truth on her side. This is another comment in which the irony appears only in hindsight. Charlie has been searching for Stanley for the past decade to exact the vengeance that the law denied him. He is correct in seeing the parallel between his own obsession and Pip’s. Both take the law into their own hands.

“I’m trying to unlearn all those things, those views, those ideas. Trying to be a better person. Because the worst thing I could be is anything like my dad. But people think I’m exactly like him, and I’ve always been terrified that they’re right.”

Stanley is confiding his deepest fears to Pip. Despite his horrible past, Stanley is portrayed as a sympathetic character in the novel. He is also correct in his perception that people will never see him as anything but a murderer’s accomplice. Charlie certainly does. Even Stanley’s apology can’t affect Charlie’s perception that he is righteously ending the life of a monster.

“This is exactly what we talked about, Pip. Where the justice system gets it wrong, it’s down to people like you and me to step in and set things right. And it doesn’t matter if people think we’re good or not, because we know we’re right. We’re the same, you and me.”

Holding Pip and Stanley at gunpoint, Charlie justifies his impending execution of Stanley by invoking the notion of justice. Even though Pip hotly denies the similarity in their motives, she has frequently shown herself to use the same unscrupulous methods as Charlie to get what she wants. The novel never answers the question of whose notion of justice ought to prevail.

“‘He wasn’t what people expected,’ Jamie said quietly. ‘You know, he tried to fit a whole mattress through the gap in the bathroom door so I would be comfortable. And he asked me every day what I’d like for dinner, despite being scared of me. Of what I almost did.’”

Jamie and Pip have a quiet conversation after Stanley’s death. Jamie recalls Stanley’s kindness while he was being held captive. The only reason Stanley locked him up was that Jamie tried to kill him. Stanley was safe as long as people couldn’t tie his current identity to his past. As was true of random podcast comments, people aren’t interested in facts. They form snap judgments about the meaning of events and the value of a person.