51 pages • 1-hour read
And Then, Boom!
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Pages 165-216Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section contains descriptions of poverty, starvation, and child abandonment.
Note: These pages contain the poems “The Knock On The Door,” “Places to Go. People to See.,” “The Right Thing,” “Dawggone Hole,” “The Magic Closet,” “Mrs. Swan. My Superhero,” “Rock. Paper. Scissors.,” “We Have to Talk,” “Logic Train,” “Worst Thing Ever,” “I’m Not Alone,” “Running Out,” “Surprised, Not Surprised,” “Problem Solved,” “Leaning On Each Other,” “The Grocery List,” “Disconnected,” “The Five Marbles,” “Going, Going, Gone,” “Just a Fraction,” “Making Sure I Don’t Go Hungry,” “Satisfying Sounds,” “Right Hook!,” “Oh Deer!,” “Did What I Asked,” “What Hunger Feels Like,” “Oak. Joe Oak,” “Dumpster Diving,” “Olympic Medalist,” “Eating Leftovers,” “Can’t Win,” “Maybe,” “Can’t Be All That Bad,” “Bad Beef Stew,” and “All That For Nothing.”
Pages 165-216 Summary
A loud knock at the door scares Joey. Worrying that the police have come, he picks up the baseball bat and opens the door to find Uncle Frankie, who saw him rescuing the dogs and now offers to help take care of them. Joey admits that he has no money.
Uncle Frankie takes the dogs to a vet friend, who agrees to treat them for free in exchange for going fishing with Uncle Frankie’s bass tournament team. The vet teaches Joey how to care for the dogs and gives him supplies. They swing by the Humane Society to pick up food from the pet pantry that is available to people who can’t afford to feed their animals. Joey thanks Uncle Frankie.
One of the puppies (named Dawg) chews a hole in Joey’s jeans, so Joey mends the hole with duct tape. In school, the tape sticks to the rug and rips Joey’s jeans even more, and everyone laughs except his friends. Mrs. Swan shows Joey a closet where she keeps lots of extra clothes. She encourages him to take whatever he needs, and he admits that he needs new sneakers too. Joey feels proud to wear new shoes. He considers Mrs. Swan a superhero for her habit of helping poor kids. He worries about what he will do for supplies when school ends for the summer.
Hakeem asks Joey if his mom left, and Joey feels immediately defensive. Hakeem points out that she barely takes care of Joey, so he doubted that she would take care of three dogs. When Joey takes off his shirt to play basketball, Hakeem and Nick notice how skinny he is now. They refuse to play and push him to talk to them. Hakeem and Nick ask Joey what he plans to do when he can’t get food from school, reasoning that Uncle Frankie will figure out that Mom is gone. Nick understands why Joey doesn’t want anyone to know that his mom is gone. Nick’s mom has depression, and at one point Nick went into foster care, bouncing around to a couple of different homes. At one of them, he got lice, and the foster parents shaved his head. Now he doesn’t let anyone cut his hair. He hated foster care because he felt that his mom needed him and he couldn’t be there for her.
Hakeem comes over and insists on making Joey dinner. Nick contributes some ingredients, and they sit down to eat tomato soup and garlic bread. Joey feels less alone.
Joey can barely bring himself to take cold showers. He has run out of soap and smells bad, and the other kids at school snicker at him and hold their noses. Hakeem invites Joey and Nick over to run around with the hose and wash Hakeem’s mom’s car. Joey takes a hot shower, and Hakeem’s mom washes all their clothes. Joey stays for dinner, and Hakeem slips him all the leftovers.
Hakeem slips Joey an ad for a city-wide rummage sale. Joey plans to sell off some of Grandmum’s things and make some extra money. As he goes through her things, he saves a few of her possessions that remind him of her. He tucks a photo of them into the folder with all his important papers, then sells the rest of her belongings to make money to buy food. As he mentally writes his grocery list, he runs into Uncle Frankie, who informs him that the rent is past due. Joey pays him all the money he made, and it doesn’t even cover the rent.
Joey tries to call his mom, but the number has been disconnected. Soon, Joey’s phone no longer works either. Joey asks Nick what happens if Mom doesn’t come back. Nick tells him that Child Protective Services put his possessions in trash bags, so now he always packs a suitcase. He explains that just like birth parents, some foster parents are good and some are bad.
Everyone is going away for the summer, and Joey will be alone with no one to help him get food. Mrs. Swan gives Joey all the leftover snacks from her classroom, but this is only a fraction of what he needs. Hakeem and Nick bring over lots of food to fill Joey’s fridge before they leave.
Joey wakes up happy, only to realize that the electricity has been turned off, and all the food has spoiled. Joey kicks the fridge until he hears a pop in his toe. The dogs come and comfort him. Later, as the dogs chase a family of deer out of the garden, Joey picks whatever vegetables are left and makes himself a salad. He hopes that more vegetables will ripen soon.
Nick asks Joey to keep an eye on his mom while Nick is away. Joey notices her lying in the same spot on the couch every day. He asks a neighbor to help rouse her, and she finally opens the door. Nick’s mom starts crying and won’t stop. The neighbor calls an ambulance. Joey borrows a phone to text Nick, who thanks him for keeping his mom safe.
Joey is so hungry that he can’t think about anything but food. He plans to sneakily take the food that is getting thrown out at the convenience store. Feeling like a spy, he climbs into the dumpster and finds a bag full of freshly tossed food, then realizes that he can’t get out of the dumpster. Joey tries to construct a tower to climb out. He falls into piles of goo and feels creatures skittering over his hands. He finally manages to climb over bags of trash and flop out of the dumpster.
Joey rinses his rancid clothes in the shower and tears into the bag of food. He shares the rest with the dogs. He convinces himself that he is eating leftovers and tries to forget the idea that he is eating trash.
Joey develops a new routine of going dumpster-diving right before midnight. Tonight, there is a lock on a dumpster and a sign warning dumpster-divers to deep out. Joey imagines the python of poverty squeezing him. He wonders if his mom is truly gone and considers reaching out to his friends or their parents and getting into foster care. He worries that foster parents will not want him.
The dogs grow, but Joey gets smaller. In a moment of desperation, he eats their dog food. It tastes terrible, and he spits it out at first, but he forces himself to eat the rest of it, trying to convince himself that it is just beef stew. Right before bed, Joey burps and tastes the dog food. He vomits up everything that he ate. He feels bitter that he put himself through that miserable experience and now his stomach is empty.
Pages 165-216 Analysis
In this section, Joey descends into deeper isolation and hardship as his life becomes dominated by The Impact of Food Insecurity and the long-term effects of his mother’s abandonment. As he is increasingly cut off from the meager support systems that previously helped him to get by, Joey must take desperate measures to survive on his own. This segment of the novel emphasizes his emotional and physical isolation, as well as the structural barriers he faces as a child without a stable caregiver or financial means.
As Joey struggles to obtain enough food for himself and his dogs, his hunger takes on an obsessive, visceral quality, and his internal monologue fixates constantly on food. For example, he describes the all-consuming sensory experience of his temples “thump, thump, thumping” and his head “spin, spin, spinning” (203), and the printed text of the novel intersperses this descriptive language with infinity signs to emphasize the constant churn of unending hunger. As his hunger narrows his world, his thoughts become reactive and immediate, and he is limited to the urgent question of what he will eat next. In this state, long-term planning becomes impossible, and he stops thinking about school, safety, or comfort; instead, he focuses all his energy on scrounging for calories. As he resorts to dumpster-diving to keep himself and the dogs fed, the narrative conveys the mental toll of this constant deprivation, showing that Joey’s hunger erodes his stamina and his hope alike.
One of the most emotionally difficult moments for Joey in this section is his decision to eat dog food, and his attempts to rationalize his desperation are clear when he states, “I tell myself kibble is kinda like cereal” (212). This moment marks a clear emotional and physical low, reflecting the fact that poverty has stripped Joey of his humanity in ways that feel humiliating and irreversible to him. When he later vomits up the dog food, this new humiliation adds an additional layer of tragedy and irony, for even after pushing himself to such a degrading extreme, Joey ends up with nothing; he is still hungry and alone, and now he is physically sick as well. This moment encapsulates what it means to be caught in the impossible bind of poverty, as even the willingness to endure suffering does not guarantee results.
Even in these dire circumstances, Joey continues to demonstrate Children’s Resilience amid Hardship and persists in caring for others. A prime example occurs when he fulfills his promise to his friend by checking on Nick’s mom and taking action when he realizes that her depression may be putting her in danger. By involving a neighbor and calling for help, Joey interrupts the cycle of isolation and shame surrounding Nick’s mom. Ironically, he ensures that she receives a level of community support that he continues to avoid seeking out himself, and this scene indirectly shows that he is depriving himself of much-needed help. Additionally, Nick’s mom functions as a narrative parallel to Joey’s own mother, as neither parent is a functional caregiver. Just as Nick has stepped into an adult role for his mother, Joey now does the same in Nick’s absence. His ability to recognize the emotional labor required to care for an unstable parent underscores his own hard-earned maturity, and he also continues to suffer as his own needs remain unsupported.
Joey also continues to feed and nurture the Luckies, and just as the dogs “are getting bigger by the day,” Joey is “getting smaller by the day” (212). This simple but telling comparison offers a stark metaphor for the fact that Joey prioritizes others’ well-being over his own. In his isolation, his physical diminishment also mirrors his shrinking sense of self and the narrowing of his personality. Once lively and creative, Joey now becomes small and survival-focused. Yet although his hardships are worsening, his decision to feed others at his own expense speaks to the legacy of Grandmum, who modeled caregiving even when she had little to give. This dynamic also reaffirms that Joey’s instinct is still to love and protect others even when the world fails to protect him.
To process his ongoing challenges, Joey relies on comic book language, saying things like, “Doomsday threw a right hook! Turned off the electricity” (197). In this instance, he uses the metaphor of Doomsday, a villain who inflicts endless damage, to describe his experience of calamities like lost electricity, spoiled food, and physical illness. In his mind, these misfortunes mirror the way supervillains keep knocking heroes down. The comic book references allow Joey to make sense of a senseless situation by imposing an artificial narrative and casting himself as the underdog and the protagonist to give himself a measure of hope.
This section explores what happens when Joey loses the community structures that previously supported him. Without the everyday kindness of teachers like Mrs. Swan, or the presence of friends like Hakeem and Nick, Joey retreats deeper into shame and silence. Even when Uncle Frankie continues to offer help, Joey cannot bring himself to speak up. His unwillingness to deal with the issue of Addressing the Social Stigma of Poverty keeps him trapped in shame, and his poverty and abandonment create a strict barrier that separates him from the world. His friends know that his situation is precarious, but he cannot bring himself to admit the full extent of his need. This silence arises from a complex mixture of pride, fear, trauma, and internalized blame.
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