Burns employs a nonlinear structure for his novel, which he signals in the very first chapter when Keith experiences his vision. The vision foreshadows the rest of the novel by introducing key visual elements out of context. Without that context, these images (snakes, a gun, bones) reinforce Keith’s assertion that the future looks “really messed up” (5). Their arrangement on the page amplifies the atmosphere of disorientation, as the images are fragmented and spiraling, evoking the recursiveness and fragmentation of the plot. This suggests that the nonlinear structure of the novel is meant to reinforce the displacement and uncertainty the main characters feel during adolescence. Keith performs masculine stoicism for Chris, expecting to earn her admiration, but in truth, he experiences something much more unfathomable and inexplicable. This establishes one of the novel’s key themes, The Adolescent Fear of Change, as Keith becomes acquainted with a future he can neither explain nor control.

Within the first chapters of the novel, Burns establishes that Keith and Chris are co-protagonists. The first chapter frames Chris as Keith’s romantic interest, but successive chapters reveal that she has as much agency and narrative depth as he does. The early plot twist that Chris has the Bug, an illness with social repercussions for those who have it, drives her character arc as well as much of the narrative tension. Already, it is clear that Chris’s experience with the Bug, like her story broadly, centers heavily on her emerging sexuality. Vaginal imagery features prominently throughout these chapters, from the cut on her foot to the gash on her back. The mouth on Rob’s neck is depicted similarly; it is also noteworthy that it “opens” at the moment he climaxes. The Bug thus evokes Chris’s adolescent anxieties surrounding sex, as well as her own changing body. When she tosses the skin from her tent, it takes on a spectral quality as it hangs in the air, echoing the graveyard setting of her sexual encounter with Rob and hinting at the ways the end of childhood can be a kind of “death.”

Where Chris tries to reckon with the impact the Bug has on her life, Keith reckons with listlessness in his own. The fact that he speaks more frequently in internal monologue rather than in speech bubbles points to his distracted behavior around his friends. Keith is constantly thinking of things that exist outside the present moment, which is marked by drug use with his friends and his friends’ destructive behavior. His crush on Chris is the only thing that gives his life any semblance of shape or direction. When he encounters the skin, he reflects on the intimacy of looking at its unique qualities—moles, scars, etc.—all of which speak of the owner’s life. However, the fact that Keith does not recognize Chris’s skin in the woods underscores how oblivious he is to her inner life. From Keith’s perspective, Chris is an object of affection rather than a subject undergoing her own process of personal struggle and growth. That he experiences engaging with her body in the most superficial way possible as intimacy deepens the moment’s irony even as it demonstrates his longing to know someone in ways that transcend the social rituals he usually participates in. This introduces Developing Healthy Attitudes Toward Sex and Intimacy as a theme. Keith mistakes Chris for someone he can become intimate with because he finds her attractive, but he doesn’t really know her.

The Bug drives the action of the novel and is a motif that suggests not only emerging sexuality but also inexplicable change broadly. It can thus be read as a representation of teenage angst. As Chris reflects shortly after her back gash is exposed to her peers, she must focus on trying to make things right again rather than living in the void of the cold, dark water she retreats into. Notably, this moment mirrors the opening scene, in which Keith finds comfort in the darkness of the black hole he sinks into. While the earlier scene has nothing to do with the Bug, it does juxtapose the comfort he tries to retreat into against the dizzying prospect of trying to earn Chris’s admiration. The Bug thus suggests the rapidly shifting landscape of adolescence, marked as it is by complex social politics, heightened emotion, and an evolving sense of self. The arrangement of frames reinforces the latter in particular. In the moment when Chris contracts the Bug (or at least realizes that Rob has it), Burns juxtaposes her reaction and Rob’s in side-by-side frames, each featuring one half of the person’s face. The effect is something that resembles a complete face, but one with mismatched features and a dividing line down the center, thus visually underscoring the instability of identity at the characters’ age.

One of the most notable qualities of The Bug is that it does not pose a physical threat to those who have it. Rather, it causes alterations in their physical form that they eventually learn to live with, like Rob’s second mouth and Chris’s back gash. Chapter 3 ends with Chris tearing off the skin more out of anguish than out of physical pain. This suggests that the significance of the Bug is more emotional in nature than physical. As the novel unfolds, the biggest threat to the lives of those who have the Bug is social in nature. People are ostracized when it is discovered that they have the Bug, even when the symptomatic mutation they experience is subtle or largely invisible. 

The contrast between Keith and Chris’s experiences of the Bug develops this idea. When Keith discovers the campsites in the woods, the novel depicts the people who have the Bug as monstrous figures. Dee and Todd reinforce the dehumanization of the people who have the Bug by destroying Rick Holstrom’s tent and behaving like their actions are justified because he is a “geek.” By contrast, the Bug enters Chris’s narrative through her romantic interest, Rob. Chris actively brushes aside Rob’s warning because she is so overcome by her emotional connection to him. When she discovers the truth about Rob, it ruins their encounter and makes her upset. This reflects her own bias against the illness and the guilt she feels over realizing she is no better than the people she stigmatized. This establishes a third theme, The Violence of Stigmatization. Given its social impact, the Bug can thus be read as an allegory for “invisible” pandemic-level crises, such as the HIV/AIDS crisis that began in the 1980s.