56 pages • 1 hour read
Gordon KormanWhatshisface
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A 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 13-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Alistair’s Magical Window”
Cooper puts the GX-4000 against the couch cushion so Roddy can watch TV. Roddy loves the graphic cop show, screaming whenever the hero is in danger. He has also developed a crush on Vanna White, cohost of the long running Wheel of Fortune game show. From watching TV, Roddy learns 21st-century words and phrases like “chillax” and “major bummer.”
Veronica is suspicious when she hears her brother talking to himself. From the phone bill, she knows that he isn’t calling anyone. Cooper claims that he’s practicing for Romeo and Juliet. He says he is Brock’s understudy but insists that Veronica can’t tell Chad this, as even Brock isn’t supposed to know. Veronica asks if Cooper is telling the truth. Cooper replies, “Verily.”
Based on rehearsals, Brock’s role isn’t in jeopardy. His performance is getting better, and Jolie looks at him with eyes of “pure love.” Outside the theater, though, Brock’s behavior stays obnoxious. He cuts the lunch line or farts and then recites a rude version of a line from the play.
After school, Jolie invites Cooper to go rollerblading with her and Brock. When Cooper declines, Roddy castigates him. He tells Cooper to maintain hope because he hasn’t yet been “voted off the island” (106).
To celebrate that the class has made it halfway to opening night, Wolfson throws the cast and crew a party. This year, the party theme is dance—just like the masked ball in Romeo and Juliet. Cooper feels like this dance is a coronation ceremony for Brock and Jolie, since they are effectively the king and queen of seventh grade. For once, Cooper wishes his family would move again.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Wherefore Art Thou?”
Cooper dreams that he’s Romeo, climbing a rope ladder to Juliet’s (Jolie’s) window. The ladder grows longer, and the stage gets farther away. Cooper falls out of bed and awakens from his nightmare. It’s 3:18 a.m.
He wants to talk to Roddy, but Roddy isn’t there. If Roddy is gone, then Cooper is free. Yet he feels abandoned. He’s left friends countless times, but he didn’t want to lose Roddy.
A silver shape enters through the window and returns to the phone. Roddy has taught himself to leave the phone on his own: he can make the camera flash by shutting his eyes and concentrating. Roddy lists the wonderful sights that he has just witnessed: squirrels, airplanes, and dogs peeing on a red post. Cooper asks if anyone has seen him, and Roddy says a “her” spotted him. It turns out that “her” is a cat, not a person.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Hipping and Hopping”
An image of Somerset Wolfson III welcomes everyone to his midway-point party, which he calls “the Capulets Ball.” Wolfson is not there in the flesh; Aiden says he does not hang out with “common people.” Marchese chastises Aiden and reminds him that Wolfson attends the performances. Another student says that he heard Wolfson owns Shakespeare’s “sweaty underwear.”
The ball doesn’t impress Roddy. It’s in a gym, not a ballroom, and the loud rap music hurts his ears. He doesn’t understand why the boys and girls don’t dance. The teachers get Brock and Jolie to dance by putting them in their costumes. Soon, all the seventh graders dance to the loud rap music. Students begin taking photos. Cooper also snaps pictures so that Roddy can leave. There are too many lights for people to notice him. Brock and Jolie keep dancing together; they also eat pizza together. Cooper thinks of the play’s final lines and feels woe.
Grabbing the DJ’s microphone, Brock screams, “Wherefore art me!” Jolie then recites a line. Then the other actors recite their lines. Roddy pushes Cooper to say Romeo’s lines. He does, and Jolie responds. Brock tries to disrupt the moment with one of his goofy lines, and Marchese, sensing Brock’s anger, intervenes. Aiden calls Cooper “a natural,” and Roddy gushes over the great evening.
Chapter 16 Summary: “The Wolfson Collection”
While boarding the bus to see Wolfson’s Shakespeare Museum, Brock knocks Cooper down and pins him to the dirty bus floor. He thinks that Cooper is trying to steal his part. He tells Cooper to forget about Juliet. A cloud of light shines in Brock’s eyes, and he falls backward. Brock accuses Cooper of shining a laser pointer in his eye. Marchese appears and reprimands the boys.
The bus enters the majestic property. Marchese says the museum replicates an Elizabethan palace. It is built in the shape of an “e”: there is a long main building with a small entrance in the middle and big wings at either end. A 12-foot-tall statue of Shakespeare greets the students. Roddy insults the statue. Everyone watches a video about Shakespeare, and Wolfson’s infatuation with him. After the video, Brock screams, “Wherefore art me?” Teachers and students shush him.
The students tour the museum and see Elizabethan paper, clothes, and furniture. Roddy thinks that the table could be the same one from his kitchen. The curator then shows the students a small, precise model of the Globe Theatre. Cooper takes the stage. With Brock scowling at him, he recites the Second Watchman’s line.
When the curator shows the students Shakespeare’s first folios, Roddy wants to spit on them. Cooper reads from the Hamlet (1609) folio, focusing on a line about being true to oneself.
Roddy notices a covert door. Cooper thinks it might lead to the secret collection about which he has heard rumors.
A round man appears. It is Wolfson!
Chapter 17 Summary: “Public Enemy Number One”
Wolfson says that he has heard positive things about Romeo and Juliet, and he recalls the “warm welcome” given to him by the seventh graders. He says that he has reciprocated by gifting them his love for Shakespeare. Roddy wants to explore the secret door. Cooper hushes him, which makes Wolfson call on Cooper. Cooper says he doesn’t have a question, but after Roddy implores him to ask about the door, he does so. Wolfson says that it’s a storage room for mops and brooms. Roddy has to see the room, so Cooper fakes a coughing fit, and no one notices the light leaving his phone.
Wolfson opens the floor for “real” questions, and Cooper asks if Shakespeare is as “true” as Wolfson believes him to be. Wolfson connects Cooper’s question to the argument that someone else wrote his plays. Wolfson calls the claim “nonsense.” Cooper mentions Barnabas and Ursula, and a shocked Wolfson ends the tour. Marchese turns pale, Brock laughs, and Jolie worries that Wolfson will not attend the show.
The students return to the bus, but Roddy isn’t back in the phone. Cooper yells, “Stop!” The bus driver and Marchese tell him to sit. As the bus reaches the gates, the shimmery light latches onto the emergency door before finding a crack and returning to Cooper’s phone. Roddy tells Cooper that he saw his unfinished Barnabas and Ursula manuscript in the museum.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Proof Positive”
While Cooper didn’t like being Whatshisface, he dislikes being the “nutjob” who got the seventh grade ejected from Wolfson’s museum even more. To add to his disquiet, Roddy can’t stop talking about the secret gallery, with its myriad items belonging to other museums or libraries. Wolfson must have stolen them. Roddy understands why Wolfson can’t show the stolen props, costumes, furniture, and legal documents. But he doesn’t get why he can’t show Barnabas and Ursula. Cooper explains that if Wolfson displayed Roddy’s manuscript, he’d have to confess to centering his life on a fraud. If one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays is the product of plagiarism, who knows what else he stole?
Roddy produces ideas to expose Wolfson: Cooper can tell the media, or Roddy can reveal his ghostly existence to the public. Cooper doesn’t think that any of these options are feasible. The play is on Saturday and the evening rehearsals start tomorrow—there’s nothing they can do.
Chapters 13-18 Analysis
The link between the past and present continues with Roddy’s affinity for Wheel of Fortune and cop shows. Cooper says, “[Roddy] has turned into a dedicated TV addict and couch potato” (100). In other words, the appeal of television transcends time. Even the 13-year-old boy from Elizabethan England who wrote the template for Romeo and Juliet can fall in love with video content. Past and present mix further as Roddy learns to use modern slang like “chillax” (112) and makes contemporary pop culture references. In particular, he alludes to the reality show Survivor, where contestants vote one another off an island, by encouraging Cooper that, “Thou hast not yet been voted off the island” (106). Cooper likewise mixes Elizabethan-era diction into his vocabulary when he tells his sister, “Verily” (103). By juxtaposing (placing side by side) Elizabethan diction with modern diction, Korman creates a jarring and funny formula.
This section sees a shift in the characters’ development, particularly in antagonist Brock, as his classmates grow tired of his antics. Brock repeats his catch phrase, “Wherefore art me!” throughout the book. In Chapter 15 alone, he repeats this phrase four times. His uncreative, one-note repetition of this phrase unintentionally spotlights his incessant need for attention. Yet instead of earning him the sense of belonging he so desperately tries to pursue, Brock does nothing but get on other characters’ nerves (not to mention routinely disrupting the narrative). Korman thus employs the literary device of repetition to highlights Brock’s boorish characterization and make him an unsympathetic figure.
Yet this repetition also alludes to Brock’s insecurity. Though he’s popular and plays Romeo, he lacks a stable identity. Under his goofy catchphrase lies a serious issue: Brock doesn’t know who he is, or where to go to find himself. Unlike Jolie, he lacks a firm identity, which is why he constantly needs external validation from others. The narrator notices that he screams “Wherefore art me!” when “it seems like too much time has gone by without him putting his two cents in” (122). If the spotlight isn’t constantly on Brock, he feels lost. When he screams the phrase yet again, after his class views a museum video in Chapter 16, both students and teachers hush him. This indicates that Cooper and Roddy aren’t the only ones bothered by Brock and shows that personal insecurity is not merely an individual problem: it has a tendency to overflow and start creating chaos for others.
Throughout this section, Cooper and Roddy continue working as a team to help Cooper assert personal agency. He speaks Romeo’s lines at the ball, and then, bringing in the theme of Keeping Secrets, he questions Wolfson about his museum’s secret room and the true authorship of Romeo and Juliet. When his inquiries end the field trip, his agency serves to temporarily hobble his search for belonging. Instead of Whatshisface, Cooper becomes “the nutjob who got the entire seventh grade kicked out of the museum” (142). Belonging is therefore shown not to be the ultimate good: sometimes, doing the right thing requires people to stand out and challenge norms, even if doing so means they don’t belong in the short term.
Korman uses imagery to illustrate two of the key locations in Chapters 13-18. Thanks to Roddy’s negative description, the reader can see the half-dark gym and the “paltry assortment of colored streamers dangling from the basketball turrets” (116). This allows them to experience the ball with the characters. They can also hear the thumping rap music. Via the narrator, the reader can join the seventh graders and the field trip and witness the grandeur of the Wolfson estate. They can ogle at the “twelve-foot-high bronze statue of William Shakespeare” (127) and take in the other items Wolfson displays. They can also take a peek at Wolfson. The narrator describes him as “a stocky man of medium height, a shock of white hair brushed straight back from his high forehead” (134). He doesn’t look attractive—his unpleasant outside matches his disagreeable interiority. Thus, Korman uses descriptions to hint at characters, settings, mood, and tone without telling the reader outright.
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