My Return to the Walter Boys
40 pages • 1-hour read
Ali NovakMy Return to the Walter Boys
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Prologue-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, emotional abuse, and substance use.
Prologue Summary
A series of texts messages shows how Jackie Howard slowly disconnects from Cole Walter over the summer after returning to New York from the Walter ranch. Jackie is in New York to deal with what she left behind and was accompanied by Cole’s twin brother, Danny, who was accepted to Juilliard. At first, Jackie replies to Cole’s texts often, telling him that she can’t stop thinking about their kiss and what it meant. When Cole tells Jackie that they should talk about it in person when she comes back in August, Jackie reluctantly agrees and then slowly stops replying for days between texts. Cole tries to tell Jackie that he was promoted at the garage he works at, but Jackie hardly responds. Cole notices this and pushes Jackie to communicate, but all she does is apologize for being so absent and promises to talk when she sees him.
Chapter 1 Summary
Jackie feels wiser the second time she arrives in Colorado, having now been there once before and gotten to know the Walter family. She sees Katherine Walter as a mother figure and became close to many of her 12 children but remains apprehensive about seeing Cole again. Jackie is picked up in the boys’ shared truck by the Walters’ cousin Isaac, who laughs when Jackie realizes that he was late because he was having sex in the same truck she’s sitting in. Jackie is used to this sort of debauchery, but it disgusts her, nevertheless. She puts in her headphones and ignores Isaac for most of the ride back to the ranch.
Jackie goes into the familiar Walter home and hears Nathan Walter’s music coming out of his room upstairs. She always feels relaxed upon hearing his music and goes to say hello to him after missing him all summer, but instead, she finds his brother Alex in bed with her friend Kim. Everyone is horrified as Jackie runs out of the room and Alex chases her down. She insists that she’s fine with him being in a relationship with Kim (Jackie briefly dated Alex before) and refuses to discuss it further.
Jackie goes out to the barn to find Nathan isolating himself with his records and his notebook. He is happy to see her, but Jackie is in shock after walking in on Alex. She also notices that Nathan’s smirk is a lot like Cole’s. Later, the family has dinner together, and some of the younger siblings prank Jackie with a water hose. She sees it coming but lets it happen anyway, almost as a sort of initiation back into the group and this life.
Chapter 2 Summary
Jackie spends the rest of the night getting reacquainted with the family and then struggles to sleep as she lies awake thinking about the past year. Returning to New York allowed her to confront the grief she was outrunning, and she finally felt ready to accept her mother’s pendant, which she now wears. Jackie feels like she was distracting herself with romance instead of properly grieving and is determined not to do that anymore.
The following morning, Jackie awakes to Isaac being grounded and punching a hole in the wall, which she never would have expected him to do. Something seems amiss in the Walter home, but Jackie can’t quite figure out what it is.
Jackie goes with several of the boys to the town block party, and Nathan wants to introduce her to his friends who are in a band. They’re interrupted by Jackie’s other friends, who want to catch up with her and drill her for several minutes about Alex and whether she left town because of him. Jackie denies everything and feels irritated by the small-town gossip, but she is happy to see her friends again.
For the rest of the evening, Cole takes Jackie around to various activities that he enjoyed as a kid, including face painting, getting snow cones, and a racing game involving minnows. Jackie almost wins the race, but Cole cheats and beats her. Throughout the evening, Jackie feels pulled toward Cole but reminds herself that she only wants to be friends moving forward. After the block party, Cole takes Jackie to a party for teenagers but nearly passes out from exhaustion. At the end of the night, Cole manages to coax Jackie into holding hands on the ride home and then kisses her.
Chapter 3 Summary
The summer was difficult for Jackie, not only because of having to go back to her family’s home but also because of the guilt and confusion she felt over Cole. While kissing him now, she feels that their feelings are clear and that the confusion is gone; however, she snaps out of it after a few moments and leaves Cole adrift and uncertain about what she wants. Jackie gets out of the car and sees Isaac sitting outside smoking and brooding. He is clearly in a foul mood, and Jackie minimizes her interactions with him before heading inside.
That night, she has a nightmare that often recurs, in which she stands outside as her family drives off the edge of a canyon. This time, however, the family in the car is the Walters, and Jackie wakes up having no idea what it means. She goes for a run to clear her head and concludes that she has a lot of healing to do before she can commit to a relationship.
Jackie plays video games with the only Walter daughter, Parker, but their fun is interrupted by an argument between Isaac and the Walter parents after they discovered that he got a tattoo. Later, Jackie finally talks to Cole alone and tells him that she can’t be with him, but Cole reacts coldly, the sweet side of him disappearing in an instant.
Dinner that night is awkward and quiet until Cole announces his plans to move home while he saves for college. Parker suggests that Jackie share a room with her so that Cole can have his own space in the art studio that Jackie was using before. Jackie agrees, even though she doesn’t really want to, because she knows it’ll make life easier for Katherine. After dinner, Cole approaches Jackie and tells her that she should stop trying so hard to impress his parents. He describes them as being “stuck” with Jackie and calls her “obnoxious.” Rather than getting into an argument with Cole, Jackie tries to shrug him off.
Prologue-Chapter 3 Analysis
The opening chapters establish a vivid sense of place and tone through strong imagery. The block party, in particular, presents Western small-town culture, as Cole shows Jackie all the activities he grew up with, from snow cones to minnow races. This small-town backdrop contrasts with Jackie’s New York City upbringing and positions Colorado as a place of nostalgia and tradition for the Walters. The ranch itself acts as both a gathering place and a source of drama, full of sensory imagery. Jackie notes, “The air here smelled how I always imagined summer should—a mix of barbecue and chlorine and freshly cut grass” (30). From the very beginning, Jackie is thrust back into this rural world, and these early descriptions exemplify the novel’s theme of Building a Sense of Belonging Through Found Family. This is true even in the boys’ shared truck, which smells like sex when Isaac picks her up, showing that he wasted no time in returning her to the romantic chaos she experienced the first summer.
The Prologue establishes the shift in Jackie’s character during her time in New York, having dealt with some of her grief over the loss of her family. This leads her to feel more attached to the Walters, which she discovers when she arrives at the ranch. When Chapter 1 opens, Jackie compares her current trip to Colorado with her first; Katherine has become like a mother to her, and Jackie no longer feels like a stranger. Her new self-awareness is also shown in how she runs every morning, “focused on putting one foot in front of the other” (71), a symbolic nod to her determination to move forward. Jackie’s mother’s pendant, which she now wears, symbolizes that she is slowly learning to live with her loss. Her recurring nightmare, in which a crash is relived in opposite seasons and in scenery from real life, now features the Walters’ car going off a canyon edge as Jackie watches from safety. In addition to showing that she’s grown closer to the Walters, this change reflects her growing fear of losing her found family as well. This establishes the theme of Navigating Grief and the Healing Process. Wrapped up in Jackie’s healing is her complex romantic relationship with Cole. The narrative describes in detail her first kiss with Cole upon returning, demonstrating its weight for both of them and its importance to the story’s unfolding plot.
In these early chapters, Jackie’s character development builds on lessons from the first book. She learned that she does not always have to be perfect, but she still retains a prim, slightly arrogant attitude: When she returns, she thinks, “While absence did make my heart grow fonder, it also made me forget how irritating some of them could be” (13). She is still not comfortable with the Walters’ hijinks; Isaac lies about why he was late, and Jackie has no choice but to let it go. Each of the brothers has a glib, mischievous personality, and Jackie finds Isaac particularly irritating, which later changes when they finally connect on a deeper level.
Jackie is also confused about her feelings toward Alex dating her friend Kim while still falling for Cole and maintaining a close friendship with Nathan. She reflects that last summer, she used romance and drama as distractions from her grief, but this summer, she wants to handle things differently. Cole senses Jackie’s apprehension, and his antagonistic side appears when he calls Jackie “obnoxious” and tells her that his parents are “stuck with her,” so she doesn’t need to try so hard to impress them. Cole’s irritation subtly signals his jealousy when Jackie pays attention to others instead of him, a tension that becomes more pronounced as the plot progresses.
Jackie’s main apprehension in returning to the ranch is seeing Cole after two months of silence. She tells herself at the block party that she has to distance herself from Cole, but she falls under his “spell” anyway, spending the entire evening with him, holding his hand, and finally kissing him goodbye. In reference to Cole, Jackie observes, “We weren’t even dating, and our relationship was a labyrinth of land mines and obstacles” (36). She hasn’t considered how Katherine might feel about her dating Cole, leaving her in a complicated position of thinking of Katherine as a mother and Parker as a younger sister but not having a sibling relationship with Cole. When she learns that Cole is moving back home, she feels dread, knowing that she won’t be able to avoid him, which sets up the central tension for the rest of the novel.
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