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Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Artemis Victor vs. Rachel Doricko”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, gender discrimination, and bullying.
The next day, July 15, begins with a continental breakfast spread at the motel where most of the boxers are lodging for the tournament. The boxers only eat peanut butter and hard-boiled eggs. Rachel, wearing her racoon hat, eats her breakfast in an orderly fashion, starting with the egg whites, followed by the yolks, and ending with the peanut butter, which she scoops out of tubs with her hands. She does the last step as an intimidation tactic, hoping that Artemis can see her.
Rachel returns to Bob’s Boxing Palace with her grandmother, taking off her racoon hat to don her boxing gear. Artemis is already there, which means that she never got to see Rachel at breakfast. This worries Rachel, who suspects that Artemis must have gotten up early to fix her hair for the match. Artemis’s preoccupation with her appearance makes her naturally resistant to Rachel’s weird-hat philosophy. Artemis’s body is also much larger than Rachel’s, giving her a physical advantage.
Rachel tries to discern Artemis’s thoughts as their match begins. She imagines that Artemis has lead in her gloves and will use it to kill Rachel during the match. Artemis imagines herself as water, harnessing its slow, destructive power. Everyone else is barely awake and thus slow to process the events of the bout.
Artemis wins the first two rounds. Rachel uses quick movements to confuse Artemis, which wins her the third round. Rachel wonders about the unhinged aspects of Artemis’s personality.
As an adult, Rachel will manage a grocery store. Her weird-hat philosophy will benefit her career, enabling her to attend to her employees’ needs without being bothered by customers.
Rachel wins the fourth round, evening the score. During the fifth round, Artemis reaffirms her self-comparison to water, hoping to drown Rachel with her fists, though she wonders if the judges want her to be lead instead. This is an echo of Andi’s thoughts, which Artemis carries inside her now that she has beaten Andi. The other contenders arrive and observe the match, looking for weaknesses in Rachel’s form. Iggy suspects she can find an opening if she gets Rachel to lean back.
Andi is already on her way back home to Tampa, Florida. In the future, she will fall in love. She and her partner will not marry, but will spend much of their lives together. Andi’s partner will see her past as a boxer on her body. Although Andi never fought Kate, Andi is connected to her through Artemis and Rachel. The tournament bracket is like a family tree, with Andi and Kate as sisters.
Kate drives home to Seattle, Washington, with her family. She wonders if she will ever box competitively again. Kate will find joy in her career as an event planner.
Artemis’s self-comparison to water proves disadvantageous because there is barely any time in one round for water to damage anything. By contrast, Rachel adjusts to the feeling of time in each round for her strategy. Artemis holds on to her water imagery because she, like Kate, believes that time exists around her. Artemis is a perfectionist, so she always believes she is free of fault. Rachel, on the other hand, is a stylist, so flaws are built into her boxing form. At the end of the sixth round, Rachel is winning by two points. Rachel carries Kate’s memory of pi with her into the next round. Rachel wins the seventh round and is declared winner. Artemis’s personality will allow her to be a winner in other areas of life.
Rachel’s grandmother applauds her. Artemis slinks away, refusing to meet Rachel after losing. Artemis weeps as she meets her parents. She cannot believe that for all her practice, she has disappointed the Victor legacy. She sits in the car to fix her makeup.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Iggy Lang vs. Rose Mueller”
When Rose was a child, her father took her to her favorite Dallas, Texas, building, Fountain Place. At the time, Fountain Place adjoined a vacant lot intended for a future twin building. During the year of the tournament, Rose learned that the twin building would finally be constructed, inspiring her to wonder what Fountain Place’s twin might look like. Fighting Iggy Lang, Rose feels that they could be related because of their similar athletic build.
Iggy starts the match with an edge over Rose. Tanya, who is watching because she is curious to know who will win the tournament, notices that Rose has corrected the flaws in her form. Rose lands several hits on Iggy.
In the future, Iggy will have a career as a successful private investigator in Chicago, Illinois. Her parents won’t take it seriously at first, but Iggy will be drawn to the field because of fun and flexibility. Her purple birthmark will make it difficult for people to lie to her during investigations. She will seldom see Izzy, except for Fourth of July holidays. On these occasions, Iggy and Izzy will play Chubby Bunny, a childhood game that involves stuffing marshmallows in their mouth. Rose will also go on to play Chubby Bunny with her son.
The idea of being watched while boxing frightens Rose, who used to hide from bullies at her old school. This distracts her, allowing Iggy to hit her back. The crowd is unsure who has the upper hand, though they are rapt with the spectacle of the fight. When Rose imagines that the spectators do not exist, she lands enough hits to win the first round of the match.
After Rose moved schools, her father suggested she try playing sports, hoping it would protect her. Rose wanted to try boxing—a sport where the rules are clear. Unlike the sense of mystery she experienced at church, boxing would allow her to understand her opponents’ thoughts at all times. As a boxer, Rose feels like she has found a way to live in another world, akin to the world she sees through the clear water at Fountain Place.
Rose uses different fighting stances to throw Iggy off and wins the second round. Iggy is furious, pushing away her coach between rounds. In the third round, she throws a direct hit at Rose’s eye, but this does little to faze Rose, who retaliates and wins the round. The odds favor Rose, and though Iggy can still make a comeback, she wishes that Izzy were the one fighting Rose instead of her. Iggy’s personal stakes are rooted in her competitiveness with Izzy. Before the next round, Rose registers that Iggy’s mind has gone somewhere else. Rose’s eye turns black.
In the fourth round, Iggy starts to resent Izzy for leaving her to build a family legacy on her own. Rose uses Iggy’s exhaustion to win two more rounds and thus the match. Iggy leaves the ring wishing she could be the statue of a war hero dog. She refuses Rose’s offer to shake hands.
Before the next fight, the last of the tournament, Rose pretends to pray, giving her a chance to observe her environment more closely. She sees Rachel playing with her racoon hat and observes the slanted way she stands.
Rose’s black eye gets darker by the time she returns to the gym from lunch. It is extremely hot. Rose passes by the tournament trophy and sees that it is too small to hold water. She also sees signs that the trophy was made from a plastic mold.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
The second day of the tournament marks the final round of the Daughters of America Cup. The relative brevity of fight descriptions now speaks to the familiarity the reader has with the fighters at this point in the narrative. In other words, the chapters no longer function as character portraits. Bullwinkel still introduces new details about the characters, such as the detail about Rachel’s future career as a grocery manager, but for the most part the chapters focus on the dichotomies that arise from the remaining combinations of fighters in the final round. The semifinal matches were framed as encounters between diametrically opposed equals, for example pitting Kate’s conformity against Rachel’s deliberate strangeness. In contrast, the final juxtaposes qualities that are not natural opposites, such as Rachel’s strangeness and Artemis’s self-importance, or Rose’s solitary peace and Iggy’s competitiveness.
Bullwinkel establishes that fighters carry aspects of their previous opponents back into the ring for their next bouts in an almost mystical communion: “Parts of their souls are carried inside each boxer who beat them, as if […] cannibalized by the victors as part of a ritual of war” (165). Artemis, for instance, is now infused with the affinity for water that Andi had. Character traits also seep across the bracket. When Artemis fights Rachel, she suddenly absorbs the perfectionism of Rachel’s previous opponent, Kate. This gives her the same disadvantage Kate faced when she had to confront Rachel’s affinity for flaws. Fighters are no longer capable of Self-Definition on One’s Own Terms in a vacuum; instead, their experiences cannot help but influence their development.
By the end of Chapter 8, the novel addresses the larger question of how teenage girls should respond to and internalize the process of elimination. Although these young women will be forever be bonded by their shared competition, which has created its own kind of family tree—“Andi Taylor never got to fight Kate Heffer, but because Andi Taylor’s hands touched Artemis Victor, and because Artemis Victor’s hands touched Rachel Doricko, who beat Kate Heffer, there is a connection between the hands of Andi Taylor and the hands of Kate Heffer” (167)—the novel suggests that girls should not shoulder the burden of legacy outside of this specific sisterhood. The final matchup between oddballs Rachel and Rose, who were never seen as favorites when the novel began, suggests that teenagers who accept their outsider status as a crucial part of their identity emerge as the most fully realized. Rose, who does not try to manifest her strangeness as explicitly as Rachel does, can only fight well when she ignores the gaze of the tournament spectators. She is forcefully trying to block the expectations their perception forces upon her. The championship fight thus becomes a venue for the assertion of the individual self, one who can exist outside of the definitions that have been imposed on her.
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