Good Girl, Bad Blood

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue and Chapters 1-9

Chapters 10-19

Chapters 20-30

Chapters 31-43

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 31-43Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 31-37 Summary

This summary section includes “Thursday 6 Days Missing:” Chapters 30-33 and “Friday 7 Days Missing:” Chapters 34-37.

That evening, Pip argues with her parents and goes upstairs to hide in her bedroom. Ravi comes to visit, and she lashes out at him as well. As he leaves, Ravi tells Pip that he loves her.

Later, she slips out of the house for a walk in the rain. She feels demoralized and wonders if her podcasts did any good if nobody believes her. During her walk, she encounters her neighbor Charlie Green taking out the trash. He invites her to sit on his porch to dry out. She confides some of her concerns, but Charlie convinces her to continue with her podcasts no matter what anybody else thinks. Pip says, “Maybe I don’t have to be good, or other people’s versions of good. And maybe I don’t have to be likable” (308). She decides to be herself and pursue the truth in her own way.

Feeling better, Pip gets into her car and goes to Max’s house. She knows the family is away celebrating his court victory. As she sits in her car, she replays the audio confession she got from Max the year before. Then, she uploads it to her website and the podcast site. After that, she takes a bucket of paint and writes, “Rapist, I will get you!” on the wall of the Hastings house (312). Then, she takes a hammer and smashes the six front windows. This vandalism leaves her feeling liberated and satisfied. Afterward, she goes to Ravi’s house to apologize and admits that she loves him too.

The next morning, still suspended from school, Pip receives a message from Nat asking her to stop by. When she arrives, Nat says that she appreciated Pip’s kindness after Max’s verdict was announced. Then, Nat says she’ll be breaking up with Luke and shows Pip a message stream between Luke and Layla. Apparently, the catfish targeted him too. She agreed to meet him the night Jamie disappeared in the parking lot in Lodge Park. The final message from Luke is timestamped after their rendezvous. The wording indicates that he’s furious with Layla for some reason, but the texts end after this.

Pip gets Ravi to accompany her to Luke’s house to question him. The drug dealer doesn’t want to talk at first, but Pip promises to pay him the $900 that Jamie owes. He agrees, explaining that he lent Jamie the money but never asked what it was for. Pip promises to get Luke the money in a week. He then describes what happened the night of the memorial. He had arranged to meet Layla in the parking lot, but Jamie showed up instead. He looked frightened and spoke a few strange words to Luke that sounded like “child broomstick or child brown sick” (327). Then he ran away. Pip points out that Jamie went to the abandoned farmhouse immediately afterward to meet someone else, but Luke knows nothing about it. When Pip asks, Luke confirms that he is about to turn 30. This means he fits the same profile as all the other males that Layla has targeted. The drug dealer says he knows nothing more but reminds Pip that she owes him $900 in a week.

After Ravi and Pip leave, they speculate about Jamie’s actions on the night of the memorial. During his phone conversation with Layla outside the party house, he promised to do something for her. Apparently, she instructed him to meet two different men that night because she is looking for someone specific, but she doesn’t know who. Jamie is supposed to say some words that will garner a reaction from the person Layla is looking for. The message sounds like “child broomstick,” but Luke probably misheard what Jamie was saying. Luke clearly didn’t act as if he knew what the message meant, so Jamie went to meet the next man at the farmhouse. This is when his Fitbit stopped recording, so this was apparently the man that Layla wanted to find, and he may have harmed Jamie.

Back in Pip’s room, she and Ravi search the net for mentions of “child broomstick” and come up with “Child Brunswick.” This was the son of an infamous child serial killer who operated in Rochester, New York, 20 years earlier. The boy assisted his father by luring victims and later disposing of their bodies but also gave evidence that got his father convicted. After serving five years in juvenile detention, the boy was released at the age of 18 to lifetime probation. His records were sealed, and he was given a new identity.

Pip, Connor, and Ravi start searching through any internet records that might help them find the real Child Brunswick. For some reason, Layla is convinced that he now lives in Fairview. Purely by chance, Pip sees a comment online suggesting that someone from Fairview, now in prison, learned the real identity of Child Brunswick. Pip immediately connects the dots to local drug dealer Howie Bowers, whom she helped convict during her previous podcast. She still has video footage of Bowers from the time she was surveilling him and finds him receiving money, not from a drug customer, but from newspaperman Stanley Forbes. Pip concludes that Bowers was blackmailing Stanley to keep his identity secret.

Chapters 38-43 Summary

This summary section includes “Friday 7 Days Missing:” Chapters 38-41, “Sunday 16 Days Later:” Chapter 42, “Saturday 6 Days Later:” Chapter 43.

Posing as Layla, Pip texts to arrange a rendezvous with Stanley at the abandoned farmhouse. Meanwhile, Conner and Ravi plan to break into his house to see if they can find any clues leading to Jamie. While Pip waits outside the farmhouse, she’s on the phone with Connor and Ravi as they try to gain access to Stanley’s house by smashing a window. Once inside, they discover that Jamie is unharmed but locked in a bathroom. He says he doesn’t want to be freed because he made a deal with Stanley.

As Ravi and Connor struggle to break the lock on Jamie’s prison, Pip spots Stanley arriving at the farmhouse. She is about to send another Layla text to buy her friends more time when Stanley spots her hiding outside. He thinks she’s Layla until she explains the stakeout. He doesn’t deny that he is Child Brunswick. He’s been trying to live a quiet life in Fairview, but someone named Layla is stalking him. The only reason he locked Jamie up is that the latter attacked him with a knife and tried to kill him on Layla’s orders. Jamie was immediately sorry, and now the two are trying to figure out a way for Jamie to return without drawing suspicion toward Stanley. Pip says her friends have already broken into his house. Stanley is worried; the police installed a security alarm on his windows that will alert them to any intruders, because Stanley’s real identity might incite violence.

The two are about to leave when someone enters the farmhouse. It’s Charlie Green, and he’s carrying a gun. He takes Pip’s and Stanley’s cell phones. Then he confesses that he is Layla, but his wife helped with the female voice when phone calls were necessary. He has been tracking Child Brunswick for over a decade, seeking revenge because Child’s father killed Charlie’s twin sister, and Child helped lure her to her death.

When Jamie became infatuated with Layla, Charlie got the idea of having him kill Child Brunswick and take the blame. As Layla, Charlie tested Jamie’s willingness to comply with the catfish requests by getting him to give Layla $1,200 for a spurious cancer treatment and breaking into the Green house to steal a watch. Layla also had Jamie beat up a random individual that Layla claimed was bothering her. Having carried out all these requests, Jamie was then told that Layla was being stalked and that he needed to kill her abuser. That was why Jamie brought the knife to murder whichever man responded to the name Child Brunswick.

Stanley is deeply remorseful for the pain he caused Charlie’s family, and he apologizes. Charlie is unmoved and points the gun at him. Pip tries to intervene, but Stanley pushes her out of harm’s way before Charlie shoots him repeatedly. Charlie then exits, leaving Pip to try to keep Stanley from bleeding to death. Stanley protests that it’s better this way and he doesn’t deserve to live. Before Charlie drives away, he sets fire to the farmhouse, so Pip is forced to drag Stanley outdoors. She continues to administer CPR until she hears the police and paramedics arrive. By then it’s too late because Stanley is already dead.

Sixteen days later, a small group gathers for Stanley’s funeral, which Pip has singlehandedly arranged. Pip believes that Stanley thought of Fairview as his home and would have wished to be buried there. For his grave marker, she uses the alias he liked best—Stanley Forbes. The headstone inscription reads, “You Were Better,” because Stanley was haunted by the fear that he was no better than his murderous father.

A week after the funeral, the Reynolds family hosts a barbecue. Everyone in the neighborhood is happy to see normalcy return to their lives. Pip and Jamie share some thoughts about Stanley, and both of them vow to live good lives for his sake, because he never got the chance to do so. Jamie says he might now be brave enough to tell Nat his feelings for her instead of looking for love on the internet. For her part, Pip has started tracing the whereabouts of Charlie and Flora Green, who are now on the run. As the novel ends, Pip says that she is still haunted by the sound of Charlie’s gun.

Chapters 31-43 Analysis

The book’s final chapters are concerned with unraveling a connection that Pip has made from the very start of her investigation. The Pursuit of Truth and Justice has always been a single principle in Pip’s mind. By pursuing truth, she expects to achieve justice. This segment contradicts that notion by separating the two concepts and placing them at odds with one another. Initially, the disjunction between truth and justice is examined in connection with the Max Hastings acquittal. Pip bitterly complains to Charlie about the verdict:

‘I was so naive,’ Pip said. ‘I practically handed Max Hastings to them, after everything came out last year. And I truly believed it was some kind of victory, that the bad would be punished. Because it was the truth, and the truth was the most important thing to me. […] And the truth was that Max was guilty and he would face justice. But justice doesn’t exist, and the truth doesn’t matter, not in the real world, and now they’ve just handed him right back’ (307).

In making this statement, Pip has dismissed the notion that truth will inevitably lead to justice. In Max’s case, this didn’t happen, and she is devastated. This is the second point in the novel when the apparatus of law and order has failed her. She would never have investigated Jamie’s disappearance at all if the police had done anything constructive. Pip has needed to take the law into her own hands, not just in these two instances, but on multiple occasions, because truth and justice clearly aren’t connected. Ironically, it’s Charlie Green who gives her a pep talk to retain her faith that justice exists. He says:

‘Oh, justice exists,’ Charlie said, looking up at the rain. ‘Maybe not the kind that happens in police stations and courtrooms, but it does exist. 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 […]?’ (307).

Charlie gives Pip carte blanche to exact the justice that the law withholds. She takes his advice to heart and vandalizes Max’s house that same night. She feels liberated rather than guilty after committing her crime. In this instance and many others, Pip feels that her illegal actions are justified. The end justifies the means if justice can be served as a result. Pip doesn’t delude herself about her own questionable tactics in achieving her ends. Later that evening, she tells Ravi, “And maybe I’m selfish and maybe I’m a liar and maybe I’m reckless and obsessive and I’m OK with doing bad things when it’s me doing them and maybe I’m a hypocrite, and maybe none of that is good, but it feels good. It feels like me” (313).

Pip’s conscience is clear when she does bad things to serve the cause of justice. However, the book’s conclusion tests the notion of her virtue to the breaking point. Charlie has been manipulating Pip to help him find Child Brunswick so that he can exact revenge on the man who helped kill his sister. In this respect, Charlie’s logic is the same as Pip’s. The courts failed to give Charlie justice, so he must find a way to exact justice on his own terms. The fact that Stanley has been living a blameless life and is corroded by guilt for his past actions carries no weight. Charlie shoots him anyway. Stanley’s truth doesn’t tally with Charlie’s need for justice.

In the book’s final pages, Pip admits to Jamie that the two of them played a key role in getting Stanley killed. “‘Doesn’t feel right that we’re both here and he’s not,’ Pip said, her chest tightening, filling her head with the sound of cracking ribs. ‘We both led Charlie to him, in a way. And we’re alive and he’s not’” (392). She also becomes acutely aware of the parallel between her own obsessive behavior and Charlie’s:

‘We’re the same, you and me. You know it, deep down,’ Charlie’s voice intruded, speaking inside her head. And the scariest thing was, Pip didn’t know if he was wrong. She couldn’t say how they were different. She just knew they were. It was a feeling beyond words. Or maybe, just maybe, that feeling was only hope (396).

The book ends on an ambivalent note as Pip now tries to find Stanley’s killer. Charlie exacted justice for himself, and now Pip appoints herself the agent of justice for Stanley. The cycle of forcing justice to be done at any price continues. The reader is left to wonder how much difference exists between Pip and Charlie after all.