The Graveyard
Olivia spends a lot of time in the graveyard, where her mother is buried, and where Jamie is eventually buried as well. Throughout the novel, she spends an unhealthy amount of time in the graveyard, representing her tendency to dwell on the past and refuse to move forward. This culminates in one of the final chapters, in which she simply lays on the ground by Jamie's grave, refusing to move for over a day. Eventually, her father picks her up and forces her to go home. This detrimental tendency, however, is turned for the better at the end, where her therapist encourages her to go and talk to her mother at her grave, changing Olivia's obsession with the past into a way to accept the good parts of her mother and Jamie and use them to move on in her own life.
Jamie's Bloodstained Shirt
The shirt Jamie wears during the scene in which he kills his father becomes thoroughly stained with his father's blood, becoming a symbol of his action. While he and the others are escaping in Max's truck, he changes shirts and balls the old one up, trying to conceal the blood and put the event out of his mind. Instead of throwing the shirt away, Max has to stuff it under the seat of his truck, revealing that the bloodstain on Jamie will never truly go away; he can only put it out of sight and out of mind.
The Needle
Maggie reunites with her mother in New Orleans, who has become a hopeless drug addict. Maggie walks into the room while her mother is meeting with her dealer and demands that the dealer "make her understand," asking him to inject her with the drug. It's a test for her mother, which she fails by not objecting as the needle begins to penetrate her skin. Maggie stands up in fury and throws the needle at her mother, representing her final decision to turn her back on her mother and her mother's lifestyle.
Jamie's Journals
In his private journals, Jamie has written all the ways he'd like to kill his father for the way he treats him and his mother. It's just fantasy, but when Jamie actually does kill him in a fit of unplanned rage, they take on a new and terrible significance: proof of Jamie's premeditation of the murder. These journals symbolize Jamie's tendency to bottle up his rage instead of enacting it; they are the physical representation of Jamie's dark side that he keeps hidden.
The Flowerpot
In one of the novel's first scenes, Max and Olivia are having an argument outside Olivia's grandmother's house when Max angrily throws a rock, and it shatters one of her grandmother's flowerpots. He apologizes, but the damage is done. This broken flowerpot represents Max's tendency to accidentally destroy things around him with his reckless anger, almost including Olivia's life in a drunk driving accident.
