45 pages • 1-hour read
Ellen Outside the Lines
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Chapters 1-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Thirteen-year-old Ellen Katz sits in her room, worried about the fact that she is ready for the upcoming class trip to Barcelona ahead of schedule. She has a plan to contact her best friend, Laurel, at 4:55 pm so that they can book their flight seats together, but Laurel isn’t answering her texts. Ellen thinks about the advice of her therapist, Dr. Talia, and tells herself to worry only about things she can control. She tries to soothe herself by rocking back and forth to the sound of the ceiling fan, but this doesn’t help, so Ellen calls Laurel’s home phone and talks to her mother. She learns that Laurel is at another friend’s house. At that moment, Ellen’s father (Abba) enters the room and can see panic on Ellen’s face. He takes the phone and talks to Laurel’s mother to confirm the seat bookings, then returns the phone to Ellen. Ellen is grateful to have a dad who knows just what she needs and is there for her like Abba is. She decides to help him pack in order to distract herself from the stress of the situation.
Chapter 2 Summary
Ellen and her parents drive over to Laurel’s house to pick her up and go to the airport for the trip. Laurel just came back from Florida and loved it there. While Abba takes a nap, Ellen and Laurel text back and forth, and Laurel apologizes for not calling back the day before. Laurel says that she was shopping with Sophie-Anne and forgot. The girls joke and laugh together, and eventually the car reaches the airport. Before checking in, Abba takes Ellen aside and asks her if she wants him to let her be more independent on this trip. Ellen declines, saying that she would rather have Abba around. Abba looks disappointed to hear this, but Ellen is already panicking inside at the idea of being without him, so he relents. She relaxes.
Chapter 3 Summary
The Spanish teacher and trip leader, Señor L, calls everyone together to get organized and board the plane. He introduces a new student, Isa Martinez, whom Ellen notices has purple hair and a half-shaved head. Ellen can’t tell if Isa is a boy or girl and later finds out that Isa doesn’t identify as either one. When Isa makes a joke from The Emperor’s New Groove, one of Ellen’s favorite movies, she wonders if she and Isa could possibly connect. As the class waits to board the plane, Señor L takes a moment to introduce the parent chaperones, including Ellen’s father. When Señor L announces a planned scavenger hunt in Barcelona, Ellen is shocked, as she hadn’t heard anything about it until now. She looks over at Abba, whose hands are in his pockets, and realizes that he knew about it but chose not to tell her. Ellen starts to worry because she knows that a scavenger hunt means that there will be plenty of unpredictable experiences.
Chapter 4 Summary
Ellen and Laurel sit together on the plane with Abba beside them. Abba gives Ellen his noise-cancelling headphones as a present to help with the stress of the trip, and Ellen and Laurel start listening to music and talking about the possibilities of the scavenger hunt. Ellen drifts off, and when she wakes up later, she finds that Laurel is gone; another classmate, Andy, is sitting beside her. Andy awkwardly explains that he and Laurel switched seats since his friend fell asleep, too. Ellen sees Laurel listening to music with her other friends and suddenly feels overwhelmed with worry. Andy talks to Ellen’s dad and mentions that he’s a big fan of Abba’s books. Ellen sits back and thinks that this trip is already nothing like she imagined or planned. She also believes that she and Laurel are drifting apart.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Day 1”
The plane lands in Barcelona, and everyone notices the heat. The students take a bus to their hotel, which has a huge owl statue on top of it. Ellen snaps a photo of it. Inside, the students are assigned their rooms. Ellen wonders where Isa will be assigned, and the teacher realizes that he forgot about them. Laurel and Ellen share a room, and go to check it out together. They discover that the room shares a bathroom with the unit next door, which Laurel’s other friends (Sophie-Anne and Madison) are occupying.
Afterward, everyone heads to the dining hall to eat. It is filled with people from their trip, along with other guests who are staying in the hotel independently. Ellen and the others meet two teenagers, Xavi and Meritxell, who are brother and sister. Laurel and the other girls think that Xavi is cute, but when Ellen mentions that she thinks Meritxell is cute, the other girls look at her strangely. Seeing their negative reaction, Ellen wonders what she did wrong. Later, she finds out that the scavenger hunt will have assigned teams. She hopes that she ends up on Laurel’s team.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Day 2”
Ellen wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back asleep. Everything around her seems to be humming and ticking, so she decides to leave the hotel room to find a quiet space. Ellen goes into the community room and sits down by a window to text her mom. They video chat for a while, which helps Ellen feel closer to home. Afterward, Ellen runs into Señor L, who is posting the teams for the scavenger hunt. Ellen notices that she is on the same team as Abba, but Laurel is on a different team.
Chapter 7 Summary
Ellen and Laurel wake up early the next morning to get ready for their first day out. Laurel questions Ellen’s choice not to bring any dresses or skirts, but Ellen prefers shorts and T-shirts. Laurel does her makeup with Sophie-Anne and Madison, and when Ellen notices that she is putting on more makeup than usual, Laurel says she wants to look nice for Xavi. Ellen wants to tell Laurel that they won’t be on the same team, but she can’t bring herself to do it. She packs her bag, including her dot diary, a journal where she keeps lists of everything she knows. Ellen places the events of her life into two categories: the time before she knew Laurel and the time after. This is because when she and her family moved to Georgia, Ellen didn’t know anyone. Then she met Laurel, and they became best friends. Watching Laurel now, Ellen can’t help but feel as though things are changing much too quickly.
Chapters 1-7 Analysis
Ellen Outside the Lines features a protagonist with autism, and the way that the author presents Ellen’s autism is crucial to the understanding of her character, her challenges, and the idea of Accepting the Unpredictability of Life. The reality of Ellen’s autism is conveyed implicitly through her actions and thoughts, rather than through a direct definitional or clinical approach. Ellen sees her autism as something that affects her specifically, and she does not spend much time thinking about how it might be defined on a broader spectrum. In these early chapters, Ellen engages in several different stimming behaviors—repetitive motions used to help calm her down or sometimes to amplify her excitement. For example, Ellen rocks back and forth in a rhythmic fashion when she is overwhelmed or panicked, and she flaps her hands in a state of joy when she is happy or proud of herself. Because most of Ellen’s emotional expression comes from her body language, she also observes the body language of others to discern their emotional states. She is therefore more likely to focus on people’s hands and is less likely to catch all the nuances of their facial expressions. These differences in decoding the world around her will have an effect upon how she experiences the Barcelona vacation.
Ellen also experiences sensory overload at times and can become heavily irritated by loud or repetitive sounds. Another aspect of Ellen’s autism is the need for predictability; she prefers to plan ahead so that she will know what to expect from each situation. Ellen attempts to follow this approach for her trip to Barcelona, but it is clear from the first chapter that this is impossible, and no matter how thoroughly she prepares, the trip is not going to go as planned. With these details, A.J. Sass creates a depiction of autism that is realistic and sensitive, and the narrative also provides useful educational details in its portrayal of the cycle of emotions that Ellen goes through when she experiences a panicked moment. As her narration states, “I breathe in. Abba’s words are clearer. Even though I was ahead of schedule and Laurel forgot about our call, things still worked out. The fan is still rattling and the tree branches still scritch, but they’re just background sounds now. I breathe out” (7). This passage makes it clear that although she can become overwhelmed by unpredictability, she also has strategies and support and can find ways to adapt.
The nature of unpredictability in Ellen’s world is directly and complexly intertwined with her friendship with Laurel. Notably, most of the unexpected events in these chapters surround Laurel and Ellen’s expectations of how their friendship should progress. Ellen is hoping that the trip will rekindle their bond, but even on the flight to Barcelona, she can tell that the two of them are drifting in different directions and can no longer relate to one another. Laurel’s departure to a different airplane seat foreshadows the fact that the two girls will quickly begin to lose interest in each other’s company as various novelties of the trip present themselves. At first, Ellen feels left out when Laurel goes to spend time with her other friends, but Ellen’s spontaneous conversation with Andy shows that she will soon develop new connections of her own. As the action of the novel begins to accelerate, Ellen must adapt to a range of unpredictable events, such as her assignment to a different team than Laurel, and the fact that she and Laurel have a hotel room next to Sophie-Anne and Madison. These details set the stage for the weakening of Ellen and Laurel’s friendship as the two pursue separate interests and work on Finding Belonging Among Friends that are outside of their usual social circles.
The chosen setting for Ellen Outside the Lines is the city of Barcelona, the capital of Spain. Barcelona is known for its unique architecture, vibrant city life, and proximity to the Mediterranean Sea. The first thing the students notice when they get off the plane is the “sounds. Light. The heat. It’s a lot for [Ellen] to process all at once” (39). Ellen is used to the quiet and doesn’t go out much, so the chaos, crowds, and constant sensory input from all directions prove to be overwhelming for her at first. The setting is appropriately selected for Ellen’s story, because the unique atmosphere of the city, along with its romantic and lively energy, creates the perfect backdrop for a narrative that explores different ways of Embracing Self-Discovery and Freedom of Expression. Although it is clear that Ellen is somewhat ill at ease in her unfamiliar surroundings, she actively uses her adaptive strategies and tells herself that exploring a new city will be fun and exciting. This is the first step in her gradual push toward a broader experience of life.
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