The Rest of Us Just Live Here

Patrick Ness

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 18-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 18 Summary

In the introduction, Satchel discovers, as she’s taken to the Court of the Immortals, that the Prince betrayed her. He was the one who left her the amulet, which has actually been preparing her body to become the ideal Vessel for the Empress. The Messenger of the Immortals reveals himself to be Dylan, who has been molded into that role by the Empress. Dylan begins the ceremony that will kill Satchel and allow the Empress to enter her body. Rips between worlds open all over town.

Mikey, Mel, Jared, Nathan, Henna, and Steve head to the lake cabin where they eat dinner, watch a movie, and go skinny dipping. While swimming, they notice flashes of blue light over the town. They call home to find that the news is playing the flashes off as “freak lightning” and, deciding that they’re safer in the cabin, choose to head to bed. Mikey is annoyed by the idea that Henna might sleep in the same bed as Nathan, and Jared insists that there’s no way that would happen. Before he can say more, a mangled mountain lion with blue light in its eyes comes through the forest; Jared tries to heal it but fails. Jared then tells Mikey that Nathan is gay and that he and Nathan have fallen in love. He didn’t tell Mikey because Nathan is not fully out and because he didn’t want to define the relationship for fear of putting too much pressure on Nathan too early. They return to the cabin, and Mikey falls asleep next to Henna.

Chapter 19 Summary

In the introduction, Satchel, aided by the appearance of (a) Finn, escapes the ceremony and realizes that Finn is the only one who really has feelings for her. Satchel figures out how to use the amulet to close the fissures, but she doesn’t know if she can close them all before the Immortals come through. As the Messenger comes through a fissure in her own house, she and Finn are forced to kill him.

Mikey learns that most of Nathan’s “suspicious” behaviors have been due to his relationship with Jared: Nathan would wait outside the restaurant for Jared to get off his shift; he went to the Field covertly because he was meeting Jared there; and Jared was always busy Saturday nights because he was with Nathan.

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Mikey returns home to find that he and Mel aced all of their finals. To their dismay, they also find that Mr. Shurin’s campaign has released new footage of Mel punching the reporter that recontextualizes Mel as the primary aggressor. Jared insists he didn’t know anything about it but Mikey, enraged, goes to Jared’s house and accuses him of being a bad friend and his father of being a loser. Jared retaliates by saying that if Mikey was “a real friend instead of an endless bag of need” (278), he would have said something about Nathan sooner. Mikey returns home to find that Jared has already gotten his father to take the footage down and to resign from the race. Mikey, still angry at Jared, asks Henna to come over. He confides in her that he thinks he’s ended his friendship with Jared. They have sex.

Chapter 20 Summary

In the introduction, Satchel and Finn close all of the fissures except the one in the high school’s basement. The Court of the Immortals emerges through this fissure just in time to kill Finn and drag Satchel under the school to perform the transfer ceremony.

On graduation day, Mikey reflects that the sex with Henna was everything he ever wanted, but also that it showed both of them a truth they wouldn’t have seen otherwise—that they love each other but are better as friends. He, Mel, and Henna meet up with Jared and, at Mel’s prompting, Mikey goes off with Jared privately to talk through their fight. They both admit that there was some truth to cruel things they said but that they regret how they said them. Mikey confesses that he had sex with Henna. They commiserate about their fears about high school ending, and Jared begins to confess another secret he’s kept when they find an indie kid—Finn—lying half-dead in the bushes. Jared heals Finn fully, using his powers in a way Mikey has never seen before. Finn rushes off to help Satchel, and Jared reveals that he’s made a deal with the Gods: If they give him full healing powers and allow him to go to college, he’ll ascend to their realm afterward and take his grandmother’s place. He also tells Mikey that part of the bargain was that the Gods gave him the ability to heal Mikey’s OCD. He made this choice after the encounter with the mangled mountain lion; he says he never wanted to feel unable to heal someone again. Before Mikey can fully process this, Satchel comes running out of the school shouting that the place is “going to blow.”

Chapter 21 Summary

In the introduction, the indie kids blow up the school.

Mikey and his friends get away from the school before the explosion; they watch from afar as flashing blue lights from within the explosion dwindle until there’s only fire. The whole town gathers in a nearby clearing and has a makeshift picnic. Satchel and Finn come over and tell the group that the fight with the Immortals is over now. Jared heals Henna, but when he offers to heal Mikey, Mikey declines, saying he wants to work through his mental health condition himself. As the friends sit and watch the school burn, Mikey reflects on how everything in his life is still uncertain, but he feels at peace with that because, for a time, he’ll be with the people he loves.

Chapters 18-21 Analysis

Through the opening of this section, Ness continues to use Satchel’s plotline to juxtapose Mikey’s. In these chapters, Mikey and Satchel’s plotlines mirror one another in that both feature a series of revelations, but the natures of these revelations are quite different. The revelations Satchel must deal with are entirely plot-focused: The Prince betrays her, Dylan betrays her, and the amulet is preparing her for bodily occupation by the Empress. The revelations in Mikey’s plotline, by contrast, are entirely character-based: Mikey learns Jared’s feelings for Nathan, and Mikey and Henna explore sexual expressions of their desire. If anything, the plot developments in Mikey’s portion of the narrative are brushed past quickly—Mikey and Mel don’t even discover for themselves that they’ve passed their exams and are graduating on time; instead, their mother reveals this to them. This juxtaposition continues the novel’s commentary on contemporary YA as a genre by emphasizing the idea that for most teens, like Mikey and Jared, Coping with an Uncertain Future and Navigating Love, Friendship, and Desire require building emotional intelligence—something Satchel never seems to need in her plotline.

In this final section of the novel, Mikey’s plotline catches up to Satchel’s. The moment in which Mikey and Jared find one of the Finns dying in the bushes represents the first moment in the narrative in which Mikey and Jared’s actions directly impact Satchel’s plotline. This is an unexpected reversal that does significant thematic work in this closing section. The reversal is not only unexpected for the reader, but also for Finn—upon being healed, he says, “I don’t think that was supposed to happen […] I think I was supposed to die” (295). Finn’s certainty that he’s “supposed” to die at a certain point in the story harkens back to the fatalistic logic that underpins so many Chosen One narratives: The Chosen One’s ultimate fate must be tied to the narrative’s conclusion, and all of the characters in the Chosen One’s story are beholden to the protagonist’s predestination. Jared’s choice to heal Finn and his choice to reject his own indie kid framing, contradicts the logic of the Chosen One narrative. This points to the novel’s core idea that everyone has free will and that the choices one makes, not one’s destiny, define a person. Nearly every character in this final section is defined by a choice, from Jared choosing to have more powerful healing abilities in exchange for leaving Mikey and the world he’s always known behind, to Mr. Shurin ending his own political ambitions by choosing to attack Mel.

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The novel’s closing scene is one of its most metafictional moments. As the group watches the high school burn down, Nathan asks “What metaphor are we going to use for this? [...] Our childhoods burning down?” (316). Henna, Meredith, and Jared debate this reading until Jared finally questions why they need to find any meaning at all in what is happening: “Haven’t we got enough life to be living?” (316) he wonders. Here, Ness uses metafictional elements to reinforce the idea that it’s up to Mikey and his friends to ultimately make the choices that will define their own lives. The idea that there must be some “correct” interpretation of the visual of the high school burning down aligns with the indie kids’ view of life as predetermined—they act as though their lives have already been scripted, and that nothing in their lives can be left to their own interpretation. When Jared rejects not only the idea that their lives are scripted, but also the idea that it’s necessary to even find meaning in life’s events, he rejects the idea of living life as though it is a narrative open to other peoples’ interpretations—that is, he embraces the idea of living only for oneself.