Imagery as Foreshadowing
The opening section of the narrative indicates that it takes place seven years before the actual “present day” events. The reader doesn’t even get to Chapter 1 and is just a few short paragraphs in when imagery is utilized to foreshadow what is going to happen seven years later:
“Ash is Ash. Sure, she’s always been pretty, I guess, but that’s not what’s important. She can climb a tree faster than either of us, she baits her own hook, and she can fill up water balloons like a pro. The three of us have been best friends since preschool. That won’t change.”
Small Town Secrets
The story takes place in the small town deep in the heart of Dixie. The girl in this love triangle between two cousins is the daughter of the preacher. All three had been just friends for a long time before romance blossomed and sexuality raged. Imagery commingling small town life and small-town secrets is used early on by Ash to convey a sense of setting:
“We didn’t have secrets in Grove, Alabama. It wasn’t possible—well, except maybe at the field. In the dark shadows of the pecan grove that surrounded the large open field where the Mason boys held their famous parties, I’m sure were many secrets. It was the only place where the little ole ladies couldn’t watch us from their front porch swings and where the only eyes around were too busy with their own mischief to notice ours.”
Raging, They Are
All love triangles—bizarre or otherwise—are about raging hormones. Basically, it comes down to whose hormones are raging the farthest from control. This sense of adolescent entry into a world where fantasy becomes reality is more than suggested. But as is almost always the case, the best imagery is not necessarily the most explicit:
“Her hands left me, and I started to take a deep breath to ease my burning, oxygen-deprived lungs when I realized why she’d stopped driving me crazy with her innocent caresses. That deep breath lodged in my throat as her top came off. Without taking her eyes off me, she dropped the little tank top onto the grass beside her. I had thought nothing could be sexier than Ashton in a bikini; I’d been so wrong. Ashton in a lacy white bra was by far the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.”
Just Ask Bart
This is a love triangle constructed from two cousins and a preacher’s daughter. After all, it does take place in the South. But Ashton is not merely a preacher’s daughter, she is the embodiment of the very trope itself, probably commiserating somewhere right now with Rev. Lovejoy’s daughter, Jessica.
“No one knows the girl who used to steal bubble gum from the Quick Stop or abduct the paperboy to tie him up so we could take all his papers and dip them in blue paint before leaving them on the front door steps of houses. No one knew the girl who snuck out of her house at two in the morning to go toilet-paper yards and throw water balloons at cars from behind the bushes. No one would even believe I’d done all those things if I told them…No one but Beau.”
