Possibly the Nerdiest Metaphor Ever
And a freakazoid. And a nerd-bot, and an egghead, and a nerd-face, and a midget, and a nerd-ball. But mostly, just in case it wasn’t clear, he is a smart kid who gets good grades. The insulting terms are courtesy of Ashley and the repetition gives some insight into her level of nerdiness. The reader really doesn’t need the constant onslaught to remind them as Stewart makes it perfectly clear where he fits into the high school taxonomy with the metaphor he chooses early on to describe the condition of his biological family before the death of his mother:
“We had been like an equilateral triangle.”
You Can’t Edit Reality
Two narrators, both young. It is a fiction, but even fiction one wishes for special powers. Who hasn’t wished at one time or another that life was a movie where one could fix problems simply by editing them away? Ashley, the young female of the narrative duo, expresses a metaphorical wish doubtlessly replicated thousands of times a day by girls (and boys) just like her:
“If my life was a movie, I’d toss out all the footage from the past couple of months and do a major rewrite.”
Palliative Care
Stewart, the young male narrator, is dealing with his own problem. Most overbearing of which is the approaching anniversary marking two years since his mother died following a long battle culminating in a two-week stay in the hospital’s palliative-care unit. He explains what that means quite directly, but it is the follow-up metaphorical addenda which really drives the meaning home:
“Your goose is about to be cooked. Your bucket is about to be kicked. Your farm is about to be bought.”
The Drama Queen
Her own mother terms Ashley a drama queen. And that is assuming that she hasn’t read Ashley’s narrative. Because nothing quite screams “drama queen” more than comparing what is by any stretch of imagination a perfectly normal middle-class life to The Shining or Haunting of Hill House or even Housebound.
“It was like being in my own private horror movie. It was my house, yet it wasn’t my house. It was my life, yet it wasn’t my life.”
Or Maybe the Second Nerdiest
By the end of the story, everything has worked itself out and Stewart must reconsider the geometry of relations. What were three laterally equidistant parts has grown substantially to encompass not just new members, but a cat and the memory of his mother:
“Now I think of my new family not as a quadrangle, but as an octagon.”
