The Rest of Us Just Live Here

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2015

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-9

Chapters 10-13

Chapters 14-17

Chapters 18-21

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 10 Summary

In the introduction, two more indie kids disappear from their homes and are found dead several miles away. Satchel and her friends go into hiding, and Satchel, seeing a blue light in the night, goes out to find the boy from the amulet. He tells her that nothing is safe, and she should run.

After the incident with the cop, Mikey notices that the police are writing off the indie kid deaths as accidents. Mikey and Henna head to the drugstore where Mel works to get their prom photos printed. Henna and Mikey are flirtatious until a man named Erik Peddersen, who knew Teemu, comes up to Henna and tells her that something strange is happening. This sentiment is corroborated the next day by Tina, Mikey’s and Jared’s manager, who has found some online forums discussing the deaths of indie kids, people with blue eyes, and Immortals. Henna, Mel, and Meredith come in, which allows Mikey a moment to talk to Henna about their kiss and the fact that Henna would like to kiss him again, though she’s still not convinced that his “love” for her is more than an infatuation. When Mikey goes outside to take the trash out, he spies Nathan smoking a cigarette. Mikey notes that Nathan has “a funny old face” (145), and he begins to become suspicious of Nathan’s motives and the timing of his arrival in town.

Chapter 11 Summary

In the introduction, Satchel gets a nighttime visit from the handsome boy, who reveals himself to be the Prince in the Court of the Immortals. He tells her that his mother, the Empress, craves dominion over her world because there’s food in Satchel’s world to “feed their immortality” (148). To live here permanently, the Immortals need Vessels in which to live, but the Prince, having fallen in love with Satchel, can’t bear to watch this happen.

Mikey, Mel, and Meredith attend their mother’s campaign announcement. Their mother deftly fields questions from reporters about a race against Mr. Shurin and helping her family to cope with the stress of the campaign. Mikey rides home with his mother, and they have a frank conversation about her ambitions and her desire to serve in Congress to help her children’s generation because she believes the world is, and always has been, unsafe. As the conversation progresses, Mikey admits that his compulsive habits have returned, and his mother agrees that he should get help.

Chapter 12 Summary

In the introduction, Satchel discovers her love for the Prince, which hurts Dylan’s feelings, but they talk through it.

Nathan tells the friend group that he wants to spray paint the railroad bridge—a tradition for the high school seniors. Mikey thinks this is a bad idea, partially because it’s coming from Nathan and partially because of the blue-eyed dangers lurking all over town, but the rest of the group opts to support Nathan. On the way to the bridge, Mikey is hostile toward Nathan, which irritates Henna. As the rest of the group is spray painting, Henna finds that the names of all of the dead indie kids have been painted onto the side of the bridge, and that there are flowers spread out beneath the names. Before they can investigate further, Henna sees blue eyes gathering in the forest. The group sprints back to the car, and Mikey, driving and full of adrenaline, accuses Nathan of planning to take them out to the bridge because he’s in cahoots with the blue-eyed people. Henna reveals that the bridge painting was actually her idea, which silences Mikey but doesn’t alleviate any of the tensions in the car.

Chapter 13 Summary

In the introduction, the Prince is tricked into giving Satchel and Finn to the Empress and can only save Satchel by sacrificing Finn. Satchel refuses to accept this and thwarts the Empress and saves Finn herself. As she flees, she sees the Immortal Crux, the source of the Immortals’ power. It has an empty space in it that is the shape of her amulet.

Mikey and Mel spend time with their grandmother and talk through the events of the past few days. Mel reveals that the stressors of their mother’s campaign, the blue-eyed invasion, and her new feelings for Steve are causing her to have anorexic tendencies again. Mikey feeds her lunch, which helps make her feel safe.

Later, Mikey sits with Henna as she gets a tattoo—a decision that Mikey feels is out of character for her but is in keeping with her newfound outlook on living in the moment. Henna tells Mikey that she’s angry at him for the way he treated Nathan. When the tattoo is finished, Mikey sees that it reads Teemu.

After Mikey heads home, he wakes in the middle of the night to see Nathan driving a car with its headlights off into the Field.

Chapters 10-13 Analysis

The opening of this section demonstrates Ness’s facility with choosing when to move the plot forward with in-scene sections versus with summarized sections. Chapter the Tenth begins with a summary from Mikey about how much more dire circumstances feel after he and Henna are confronted by the aggressive police officer; he tells of the deaths of more indie kids, the ways the cops lie about what’s really happening, and how the adults in his life are too focused on unimportant things to see what’s going on right under their noses. The choice to summarize these events in the space of a page or two not only consolidates the plot, allowing the narrative to move quickly toward the next event that will have a direct impact on the protagonists, but also functions as Mikey’s characterization: Mikey anticipates that the adults in his life will ignore the strange events happening to him and his friends. He doesn’t think that either of his parents care about him or his siblings, and he feels that adults in his town choose to forget the supernatural goings-on so they can live less complicated lives. It follows that that Mikey would narrate these observations quickly and in summary, because he feels that the internal lives of the adults in his life are unknowable and disconnected from his reality.

Mikey’s attitude toward the unknowability of adults’ interiority shifts over the course of this section. Mrs. Mitchell’s uncharacteristically candid conversation in the car with Mikey about her own aspirations and his fears allows Mikey to see his mother, for the first time, as a complex human motivated by multiple—and at times competing—fears and desires. Prior to this conversation, Mikey has always seen his mother as someone whose political aspirations have subsumed her motherly persona, never allowing her to make decisions that are purely in her children’s best interests. This conversation allows Mikey to see how his mother struggles to balance these aspects of her identity and how this struggle often results in her finding solutions that slightly compromise both her political and personal identities. The other result of this conversation is that Mikey begins to understand his mother’s development through the lens of his own. His mother’s observation that she judged her parents just as Mikey judges her allows him to create a connection between his own experiences and his mother’s that would have otherwise been unavailable to him.

While the previous section of the novel spends significant time emphasizing the ways in which Mikey and Mel have learned to cope with stress by internalizing their pain, this section spends time with a character who has a very different means of Coping with an Uncertain Future—Henna. Henna experiences an unexpected eruption of trauma in the form of Erik Peddersen, who resurfaces the memory of her brother, Teemu, before vampires took him. Henna charts a very different means of coping with trauma: It’s revealed at the end of this section that she’s chosen to tattoo her brother’s name onto herself. Henna’s way of healing herself is through a quite literal externalization of her pain—a choice that Mikey finds surprising, but also one that will shape his healing journey over the course of the novel.