Penpal

“As is often the case, remembering one thing helps you remember another, and as you learn new things about your old life, memories that you thought were insignificant (or at the very least irrelevant) parts of your overall story are suddenly its foundation.”

This passage helps illuminate the choices underlying the novel’s narrative structure. Rather than telling the story in chronological order, the narrator relies on the context that each event reveals and its emotional impact. While some events happen later than others (for instance, those of Chapter 2 occur after those of Chapter 3), their relationship doesn’t become clear until the narrator has fully reviewed one memory and is then reminded of something else that happened to him. This is the process by which he arrives at an epiphany at the novel’s end.

“Part of my love for the house stemmed from my general love for the area surrounding it. The neighborhood itself was relatively large in proportion to the town itself. Small towns lack many of the luxuries of larger towns or cities […] [b]ut, to a kid, these things don’t matter because small towns often provide a luxury that can’t be found in larger, more convenient or populated places: freedom.

[…] Just a short walk from my back porch was a dense and untamed wilderness that I spent some part of nearly every day surveying. These woods and waterways surrounding the neighborhood were my playground during the day. But at night—as things often do in the mind of child—they would take on a more sinister feeling.”

The narrator provides an overview of the novel’s setting. He notes that one of the main characteristics of his small town is the freedom that exploring it affords him. He notes the advantage of his home’s location near the woods, which are large enough to invite significant exploration and appreciation of its natural elements. However, he notes that the woods assume a characteristically eerie presence at night, and their unknown scale foreshadows the sinister direction the novel takes as it unfolds.

“It was the pool float.

I was right back where I had woken up.”

When the pool float first appears earlier in the chapter, it functions as an incoherent detail, out of place in the natural environment of the woods. Its recurrence elevates the horror and tension of the narrator’s situation. When the narrator passes it again, he realizes that he has made no progress in his escape from the woods, heightening his lack of control in the situation.

“That was the whole project—doing these simple things would allow us to build a sense of community without having to leave the school, and do it safely. We would also practice our reading and writing through our correspondences without even realizing we were doing schoolwork.”

The novel situates the narrator’s first interaction with his pen pal as arising from a school activity meant to foster a sense of community. This presents an element of irony since the activity almost inevitably causes the narrator to distrust his environment and community as he gets older, fearing that any person he encounters could be his pen pal. This becomes significant in developing Loss of Innocence and Trust in an Idyllic Small Town as a theme. In addition, the idea of finding a pen pal by attaching a letter and the sender’s photo to a balloon raises questions about the school’s protocols to keep children safe and its conception of “pen pal”; pen pal programs typically vet all participants and pair up children in two locations.

“As the balloons reached ever-upwards, it became almost impossible to track my own balloon, and this brought with it a new kind of excitement. Where would it go? Who would find it? I remember that day so clearly. When I think about it, I can almost feel a phantom sun on my face and can sometimes, just faintly, smell my teacher’s perfume. It was one of the happiest days that I had ever had.”

As a child, the narrator looks at the world through proverbially rose-colored glasses, idealizing the intended results of the Balloon Project as a school activity. The narrator heightens this idealization by immersing readers in sensory details such as touch and smell. This focus leaves him wholly unprepared to deal with the consequences of the Balloon Project because he looks at every photograph he receives from his pen pal in good faith. Like his teacher and his school, he also never considers the fact that the person sending the photos received his photo via the balloon.

“We were at the very edge of the photo, but it was us. As my eyes swam over the sea of Polaroids, I became increasingly anxious. It was a really odd feeling. It wasn’t fear; it was the feeling you get when you are in trouble. I’m not sure why I was flooded with that feeling, but there I sat, floundering in the distinct sense that I had done something wrong.”

The narrator first realizes the threat of his pen pal when he recognizes himself in each of the photos the pen pal has sent him. This passage represents Dathan Auerbach’s stylistic approach to horror, presenting something innocuous before gradually revealing that something is wrong with it by implication. The narrator experiences guilt and anxiety because he initially allowed himself to accept that the photos were normal (though blurry). The narrator’s reaction to seeing himself in the photos cautions readers not to take any detail for granted.

“The distance did little to weaken the strength of our friendship. As a matter of fact, in many ways our bond actually grew stronger; being farther apart meant that nurturing the friendship was no longer as easy as a taking a five minute car ride or waiting a couple extra stops in the school bus. We had to work to stay friends now, and I think that helped us appreciate what we had.”

This passage characterizes the distance between the narrator and Josh as an opportunity to work harder to maintain their friendship. This point of view overcomes the adversity that the cold, cruel world presents to the narrator before he met Josh. Knowing that the joy and warmth his friendship brings him is only a drive away emboldens the narrator to go the extra mile to enjoy time with Josh.

“Yeah, but he grew up somewhere else, Josh. He was raised in my old house. Maybe he still thinks of that place as home…like I do.”

In this passage, the narrator tellingly refers to his old house as “home,” affirming its symbolic status as a place of refuge and security. When Josh and the narrator later discover that the pen pal has been inhabiting the house, the meaning of this motif shifts, turning it into a place of danger and fear. This is the last time the narrator sees his house as a home.

“Because I never put any fucking blankets or bowls under the house for Boxes. You think you were the only one to find them there? Don’t you tell me that I lied to you about there being someone in that house, goddamn you.”

When the narrator’s mother reveals that she knew about the pen pal’s presence in the house, she uses terse language and cursing for emphasis. This hints at the emotional cost to her of knowing the truth about the pen pal, cautioning the narrator that he may experience the same consequences if he continues to pursue the truth about his past. This passage is crucial in building The Cost of Knowing the Truth as a theme.

“She knew he made his home under ours, and she kept it from me, and as I walked out of her house, I could only think of what else she might know.”

The narrator wrestles with the truth his mother has kept secret for so long, making him wonder about the dynamics between the value of honesty and his mother’s need to protect him. It’s clear that had she told him the truth, he would have avoided the house, but he also would have been conscious that his life was in danger, disrupting his sense of normalcy. This passage signals the narrator’s growing distrust of his mother, knowing that she may be hiding other secrets from him.

“I knew what it was like to miss someone—how much it hurt and tore at you. But to miss someone so much while being so sure that he’d return, never knowing or remembering just how impossible that reunion truly was—I struggled to imagine what that must be like.”

The narrator sympathizes with Mrs. Maggie in this passage, inadvertently foreshadowing his pensive reaction to the end of his friendship with Josh. The second sentence is especially significant in preparing readers for the ending since the narrator, like Josh’s father, believes that he’s alive up until the point that he learns of his corpse in the woods.

“I have no idea what they looked like, but there were times when Mrs. Maggie must have thought that Josh and I looked like they did when they were children. Or maybe she just saw what some part of her mind so desperately wanted her to see, ignoring the images transmitted down her optic nerve, and just for a little while, showing her what used to be.”

This passage resonates with the narrator’s reflections on memory in Chapter 1. He suggests that Mrs. Maggie’s error may be a consequence of her Alzheimer’s disease, but he also invites the possibility that her subconscious mind may be working against her sensory perception to obscure a painful truth. His observations help thematically develop The Cost of Knowing the Truth.

“[A]s a kid, you just accept that people come and people go. That’s just the way the world is—they have their own lives, and as they live them, sometimes that takes them out of yours. Only later do you look back and ask yourself: what happened? Where did they go?”

Much like the earlier passage about the narrator’s sympathy for Mrs. Maggie, this one reveals with the narrator’s desire to learn what really happened to Josh long after his childhood. The narrator’s thoughts here suggest that distance is necessary to understanding the past. He could never access the truth while he was a child because he simply accepted events as facts of life. Only when he’s an adult does he probe into the causality of things like the end of his friendship with Josh.

“There’s an expression that says ‘you have to have money to make money,’ and while friendship itself is surely priceless, making friends seems to operate by the same rules.”

This observation presents the challenges that social dynamics force on the narrator in his school community. Without Josh’s friendship, the narrator finds himself at an impasse with his peers at school. Josh’s absence emphasizes the warmth that his friendship brings the narrator in a cold, cruel world.

“He had been my very best friend; time and distance can wreak havoc on a friendship if you let it, and we had both been complicit in the atrophying of our relationship.”

Once he defuses the anxiety he feels over speaking to Josh again after several years, the narrator acknowledges his role in failing to maintain the friendship beyond their childhood. This admission is important to framing the narrator’s intention for the latter half of the novel: He wants to honor his friend by uncovering the truth about his death. This passage represents the narrator’s willingness to celebrate their friendship despite Josh’s absence from his life.

“When you are confronted with something in the world that simply doesn’t belong, your mind tries to convince itself that it is dreaming, and to that end it provides you with that distinct sense of all things moving slowly, as if through sap. In that moment, I honestly felt that I would wake up any minute.

But I didn’t wake up.”

When the narrator discovers that Veronica was hit by a car, he reacts by comparing it to a bad dream. This resonates with his experience in Chapter 2, where he saves himself from his abduction simply by waking up. Since he can’t wake up from Veronica’s attack, he must face the consequences of a seemingly random assault, only to discover his role in the events that indirectly led to her injury and eventual death.

“I think that had we talked more in that room—if I had just told her about Boxes or the night with the raft; if she had just told me more of what she knew—I think that things would have changed. But I didn’t know that any of those things mattered; they were just distant memories of strange adventures to me.”

In this passage, the narrator entertains the possibility of enlisting his mother’s help in making sense of his past. This thought plants the seed for the event that incites his narration: his decision to commit to remembering his childhood experiences, with her help. At the time, the narrator hesitates because he isn’t emotionally ready to confront the past. In addition, his closeness to the events makes it impossible for him to fully see how they connect to one another.

“‘The note…on his pillow…’

She started crying and I followed her, but I think now we were crying for different reasons, even if I didn’t fully realize it. There was still so much that I didn’t remember—so many connections I hadn’t yet made—but I remembered the letter, even if I didn’t know what it had truly meant.”

The narrator has a visceral emotional reaction to the revelation that Josh left behind a note explaining why he ran away. Although the narrator doesn’t know it yet, his reaction is his mind’s subconscious way of connecting what happened to Josh to the events of Chapter 2, when he escaped the abductor. Auerbach uses this to imply that Josh was abducted and may already be dead.

“One would think that the thing most likely to drive two young friends apart would be what’s out of their control.”

The narrator reflects on the causes of his fallout with Josh, suggesting that the state of their friendship was always within their control. When he cites their search for Boxes as the moment after which they began to drift apart, the narrator takes responsibility for driving Josh away from him. He accepts that his insistence to investigate the house turned Josh away from him.

“Since I began this attempt to learn more about my childhood, the relationship between my mother and me has grown increasingly strained. Each time she would give me a piece of my past, I could feel myself becoming more complete—the structure of my autobiography finally falling into place with the connecting of milestones or the introduction of a never-known fact—but I don’t think I realized how much of herself she was losing in this process.”

In a passage that thematically develops The Cost of Knowing the Truth, the narrator comments on the process of consulting his mother to learn more about his past. His comments reveal the emotional toll of the process on his mother, showing that the truth affects both him and her. In this sense, knowing and sharing the truth affects all involved. Consequently, the strain in his relationship with his mother becomes a price the narrator must pay in order to understand what happened.

“Our minds work hard to avoid dissonance—if we hold a belief strongly enough, our minds will forcefully reject conflicting evidence so that we can maintain the integrity of our understanding of the world.”

Until they find clear and definitive evidence of his death, both the narrator and Josh’s father believe that he’s still alive. The narrator comments that the idea of Josh being dead is a form of “dissonance,” an outcome that he can’t accept (despite Josh’s sudden and mysterious absence in the world). Much like Veronica, they were willing to accept that he ran away or chose to disappear of his own volition, even if this didn’t align with what they knew about Josh’s relationship with his family and friends.

“Josh was finishing the map—that must have been his idea for my birthday present. He had resumed the expedition on his own. That was our first great adventure, and he had decided to finish it, for me…for us.”

This passage centers the map as a symbol of Josh and the narrator’s friendship. When the narrator learns that Josh died trying to complete the map, he finds some solace in knowing that Josh intended to rebuild their friendship. This reassures him that their desire to remain friends as adults was mutual.

“As an adult, I could see the connections that were lost on a child who tends to see the world in snapshots rather than as a sequence. The picture was complete, but I wished I had never seen it at all.”

The narrator comes to regret the complete awareness of the events of his childhood and how they connect to one another. This underscores The Cost of Knowing the Truth as a theme since the narrator can never reverse his quest to learn what really happened.