All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

“What could you do with a child who had that at home?”

Teachers and other authority figures abdicate responsibility when it comes to Wavy. They resort to empty aphorisms and hollow conventional wisdom to excuse their inability to address her trauma. Overwhelmed by the complications inherent in addressing cases of abuse, adults repeatedly fail to help Wavy.

“Wavy and her black leather boots didn’t fit in the catalog. She tore open the catalog and made surprising things happen.”

Wavy’s cousin Amy knows even as a child that she (Amy) has her own issues with societal expectations. She revels in Wavy’s difference; the traits that unnerve most people incite Amy’s curiosity. She sees Wavy as a full human being rather than a problem to be solved.

“I watched my mother’s face as reality crowded out the story she’d invented.”

Amy recognizes that her mother uses Wavy as a projection point for her own narratives. Brenda wants Wavy to be a docile niece, grateful for her aunt’s charity. Because she sees Wavy as impoverished and without social capital, she expects Wavy to want her approval. Wavy’s insistence on her own identity rankles Brenda, who sees Wavy as a threat to order.

“All mama had to do was hold it in her hands and it was hers.”

Wavy’s Grandma gave her a cookbook, which Wavy uses to cook for Kellen. Later, her roommate Renee identifies food preparation as Wavy’s means of expressing love. When Wavy sees her mother with the cookbook, she detaches, reverting to her idea that “nothing belongs to her.” Val comes close to killing Wavy on several occasions, and Wavy holds a near-superstitious belief that Val can do anything. Children in abusive homes fear annihilation—erasure. When Val holds the cookbook, it becomes hers: Wavy stops existing.

“Right up until that moment it was sweet and funny. Odd couple that they were, they had a real connection. Then he tugged off her boot and kissed the bottom of her bare foot. I could see him doing that kind of thing to his own kid, but she wasn’t. She was somebody else’s little girl.”

Butch finds the relationship between Wavy and Kellen disturbing, but he takes no action until the day he finds Wavy naked in Kellen’s office. He understands that Kellen and Wavy found each other out of desperation. However, their intimacy crosses a line even for a man whose morals are much looser than most people’s. Butch’s perspective mirrors questions a reader might have watching the romance unfold.

“I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. Not like she’d kicked me, but like life had. Kicked her, too, while it was at it.”

After Val’s accident, Kellen refuses to let Wavy move in with him, and she questions his love for her. Kellen repeatedly succumbs to a fatalistic sense that his life can never have value. He believes in bad luck; he allows himself to give up and remain helpless against chance. Wavy takes action, even if sometimes she chooses the wrong action.

“Casey was eager for Patty to go to Marjory with it, but Casey wouldn’t. That way if the Quinns said ‘How dare you accuse our dear family friend,’ Patty would be the one who made the accusation.”

Both nurses caring for Val notice that Wavy spends nights with Kellen, but neither of them wants to be responsible for reporting anything. They know Liam deals drugs, and they know Val cannot function. They leave the children in peril because they are impoverished and they have no one to advocate for them. While Patty thinks she holds back out of concern that she might be wrong, her motives have more to do with her fear of the Quinns, attention, and responsibility.

“The rule was nothing belongs to you, but I think she was breaking the rule.”

Donal understands what Wavy’s engagement ring means to her. He knows she would not give it up as easily as she has surrendered toys, clothes, food—anything a girl might want to keep. While Wavy’s romance with Kellen breaks societal taboos, love also breaks down some of Wavy’s long-held fears, inverting the theme of Fear’s Stifling of Love.

“You liked it with the girl at the party.”

Wavy mirrors the behavior she sees among the women at the ranch. Unsupervised, Wavy has witnessed much more sexual activity than a typical girl her age. At the same time, her mother insists Wavy is dirty and cannot touch her. Kellen enjoys Wavy’s gaze and touch when no one else in her world does. She tries to secure her relationship with him by mimicking behavior that men seem to like.

“I’d had plenty of time to put a stop to it, and I didn’t. Because I liked kissing her. I liked all of it, no matter how messed up it was.”

As their relationship accelerates, Kellen blames himself as the adult in the situation. Kellen respects Wavy so much that he forgets she is not an adult. He has never had anyone who enjoyed being with him the way she does, and he becomes desperate to maintain the relationship in whatever form it takes.

“I didn’t kill him, but I made him beg, sweaty and gasping. He didn’t even beg for anything. He was just begging, with my name in between.”

Wavy feels a kind of power she has never known before once she discovers how to gratify Kellen. All her life, she has been treated as a liability or as invisible. Now someone needs something from her, proving her existence. She delights in being asked for something and in hearing her name called. Wavy comes to believe she has value, even if her relationship is not a fully realized adult attachment.

“It left me with divided loyalties. I loved Wavy, but Leslie was my sister. I was sad and relieved when the two weeks were up.”

Amy enjoys Wavy’s ability to turn the status quo on its head. However, when Amy’s sister’s heart breaks because her crush finds Wavy more interesting, Amy sees how stirring things up can have unintended consequences. Having Wavy around meant anything could happen. Amy and Leslie enjoy a protected, middle-class life. Wavy has little to lose and has long stopped worrying about meeting expectations. Introducing her into a middle-class context can cause excitement but also heartbreak. She does not behave in predictable ways.

“Small amounts of blood are almost invisible when you have a puddle of blood burned on your retinas like a sunspot.”

Amy sees so much blood at the scene of Val and Liam’s murders that she does not remember seeing blood on the office desk. She remembers some blood outside the garage where the gun was found. Leslie’s ear bleeds in the hotel after Brenda tears her earring with the phone. Amy dreams about blood on the way home, having seen more trauma in one day than in the rest of her life to that point. Amy demonstrates how trauma can be relative. Those who spend time in a violent world can become desensitized to it. Naive Amy shuts down at the first sight of blood. After it, the rest of the day becomes nothing but blood.

“I could have told his there was no sense in rushing towards being dead. It would find you soon enough, and before it did there were pleasures to make your heart hurt less.”

Kellen considers suicide more than once in the novel. However, when a boy at Wavy’s high school kills himself, Wavy finds herself thinking about the small pleasures she has found in the world, activities that bring her to herself: writing, working with her hands, and even watching other people. Her statement shows how she has developed empathy for others as well as for herself.

“Since all my letters came back unread, I mostly wrote them for myself. For the pleasure of writing.”

While Wavy still longs for Kellen, her affection moves beyond its early desperation. She knows Kellen will not read the letters, so the process of writing them becomes its own consolation. Wavy learns to soothe herself—something she could not do when she had to negotiate daily survival.

“Other times being alone woulda been better, especially at night, when I was lying awake next to Beth.”

Kellen’s return to Beth’s apartment would be hard to understand if Kellen had any other place to go. In some ways, the Kellen released from prison experiences the lack of autonomy that Wavy endured as a child. Kellen’s childhood was not much safer than Wavy’s. By the time he lives with Beth, Kellen can see no good options to choose from.

“Wavy made that face that meant, ‘Do you know what it’s like being me?’”

Living with Wavy, Renee learns to adjust her expectations for socially acceptable behavior. She still has moments where she judges Wavy and Kellen from the protected place of class and money, but Renee sees Wavy’s tenacity, work ethic, and loyalty as more important than traits she might have valued in the past. In this instance, Renee can interpret Wavy’s reaction—her invitation to Renee to imagine herself in Wavy’s place.

“At last, I wasn’t just a fat college girl watching a soap opera. I was part of the drama. I was going to rewrite the third act and change it from tragedy to happily ever after.”

For Renee, not only is Wavy real and valuable, but she is more real than the stable suburban life Renee has known. Wavy shows Renee that the worst things can happen—for real, not pretend—and life can go on. Renee’s previous concocted dramas lose relevance as she learns how to be a true friend to Wavy.

“I was skidding on loose gravel, about to wreck my life again.”

Kellen equates his reunion with Wavy to his initial encounter, when he wrecked his bike and could have died from his injuries. This time, the devastation is emotional and mental, but Kellen worries he may not be able to survive. Kellen sees Wavy as both his salvation and his destruction, just as she caused the accident but also saved him when she went for help.

“No more prison. You’re free.”

Wavy realizes she has to give the ring back to Kellen until he can give it to her freely again. Trapped in fear and despair, Kellen cannot be the man she knew before. As long as he believes the version of events Brenda and the courts have fed him, he cannot see Wavy—only damage that he caused.

“My opinion of Kellen changed about every five minutes, but Wavy loved him, and her aunt had no right to keep that kind of secret from her.”

Renee establishes that sometimes the answer may be that no answer exists. She cannot settle on a judgment of Kellen, so she suspends judgment. Instead, she focuses on behavior and justice—topics that invite more rational assessment. She can be righteously angry at Brenda and Amy because she can say for certain that lying is wrong. Love and its distribution resist that kind of absolute conclusion.

“My mother once described Wavy as ‘two steps away from the trailer park,’ so I couldn’t wait to tell her they had the same taste in dress shoes.”

Renee uses humor to identify her mother’s class snobbery. Renee’s mother has humiliated and bullied her. Once her mother turns her critical eye on Wavy, Renee can see and articulate how petty her mother can be.

“You think. I’m a character. A story. Those women you talk about. Not real people to you. Stupid women. Stupid photo albums. But you. You’re smart. You make smarter choices. For us.”

Wavy’s confrontation with the judge embodies the book’s central themes. Wavy stands up to a woman with power who stands in for teachers, for Val, for her aunt Brenda—every woman who tried to put Wavy in her place. Wavy holds the judge accountable, as every adult in her life has escaped accountability. She also speaks to readers who judge her and women like her—i.e., women whose lives appear smaller, more impoverished, or less organized than the reader’s own. Wavy makes the point that no one is smart enough to judge the value of another life.