51 pages • 1-hour read
No Place Left to Hide
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Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child death, graphic violence, harassment, physical abuse, emotional abuse, substance use, and cursing.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Now”
Brooke Goodwin watches the clock, eager to get out of history class. She is a senior at the exclusive Waldorf Preparatory School in Salem, Oregon. It’s Ivy Day, meaning she, and many other students, are awaiting responses from their Ivy League colleges of choice. Getting into Yale means everything to Brooke, who comes from a long line of Yale alumni.
After class, Brooke learns about a beach party to celebrate Ivy Day, but she isn’t sure if she’ll go. Outside, she notices her crush, Dylan, getting ready for soccer practice. Then, she finds that her car has been vandalized: Someone put dozens of heavy newspapers on her car detailing the conclusion of a special investigation into the drowning of a local teenager. Brooke rushes to clean them off her car.
Felix Agar arrives and notices this, calling it a prank. He helps Brooke clear them away and tells Brooke that Jena, his girlfriend and Brooke’s best friend, is eager for them all to attend the beach party, so Brooke should get off campus if she wants to avoid pressure from Jena. Felix wonders if the prank is the work of Brandon Heck, the brother of Claire Heck, Brooke’s former social rival and the victim of the drowning accident. The accident took place at Brooke’s family’s lake house six months before.
Brooke leaves, and on the way home, she gets calls from an anonymous number, which has happened every day for the last three months. She notes a collection of canned food in her backseat that she meant to drop off for a food drive, a philanthropic extracurricular activity she’d done to improve her Yale application. With the application deadline past, she has no reason to deliver the canned food.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Now”
The withheld number calls Brooke nine more times on her way home. When she arrives, she puts her phone on airplane mode. The calls started after the investigation into the drowning concluded, and she suspects that it’s someone from school, as that’s where most of her harassment happens.
Jena arrives, but Brooke doesn’t tell her about the calls. Ever since the lake house accident, Brooke’s parents have been even stricter than usual, obsessed with keeping Brooke out of trouble and maintaining their family’s image. Jena tells Brooke she has to go to the Ivy Day party, but Brooke declines. Her father is a lawyer, soon to be appointed a circuit judge. Brooke can’t do anything to mess up his chances. She can’t tarnish her mother’s reputation as Waldorf’s principal either.
Brooke finally receives her Yale acceptance letter, and the girls celebrate. Brooke’s mother, who is the principal of Waldorf, smiles when she hears the news. Relieved, Brooke agrees to go to the party. On Brooke’s way out, she and Jena run into Brooke’s father, who reacts sternly to the news and brushes them off.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Before”
The narrative flashes back to six months before Ivy Day. Brooke is throwing a party at her parents’ lake house. She greets guests at the door and makes them hand over their phones; photos of underage drinking could get them expelled from Waldorf.
Dylan is present, but Brooke hesitates until Jena encourages her to speak with him. Brooke goes to the library, and they flirt. They talk about their personal lives and about Brooke’s parents, who are career-focused and have little time for her. They go to dance in the living room when Claire Heck—Dylan’s ex-girlfriend and Brooke’s former friend—arrives uninvited. She moved away and is no longer part of their circle.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Now”
In the present, Jena and Brooke drive out to the coast to attend their friend Beau’s Ivy Day party. When they arrive at the beach house, Brooke disparages the small size and shabby state of the building, as she comes from a wealthy background. On the beach, classmates congratulate her or her acceptance into Yale. Someone asks Brooke what she will do at Yale, and she realizes she hasn’t thought about it; the achievement was an end in its own right, and now that she has it, she lacks direction.
Dylan arrives, and they walk and chat outside. Dylan offers her his hoodie, confiding that he was admitted to Brown, which is close to Yale. Just then, Claire’s brother, Brandon, crashes the party and causes a scene, demanding to see Brooke. Felix and Dylan intervene to protect Brooke as Brandon calls her a liar and a monster.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Before”
The narrative returns to Brooke’s lake house six months prior. After seeing Claire, Dylan slips away, but Jena and Brooke confront her. They ask Claire to leave, but Claire says she’s missed everyone since moving. This forces Brooke to let her stay or appear unkind. Brooke recalls how Claire’s dad, a lawyer at the same firm as her own father, was disbarred after falsifying evidence. With the family name ruined, they moved, and Claire was transferred to a public school.
Claire is now the center of attention at the party. When Brooke seeks out Dylan, she finds him in the library, talking to Claire. This brings back feelings of jealousy and inferiority; at Waldorf, Claire often manipulated, embarrassed, and undermined Brooke—going so far as to date Dylan after Brooke admitted to liking him.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Now”
In the present, Brandon is thrown out of Beau’s party, but people are gossiping about the night of the accident. Brooke goes inside and collapses in the bathroom, upset. She feels like the accident will hang over her until she leaves for college. She recalls that at Claire’s memorial service, Brandon glared at her and followed her out to the parking lot. Dylan comes looking for her and walks her outside to her car. There, Brooke finds that her phone has over 70 missed calls from the withheld number. Jena joins her, and they begin to drive home.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Before”
The narrative returns to Brooke’s lake house six months prior. spots Dylan storming off to the lake house’s deck alone while Claire stomps out of the library in the other direction. She tells Brooke that Dylan isn’t interested in her, starting an argument. Jena backs up Brooke while she and Claire argue bitterly. Claire walks off after making a cryptic remark about Brooke’s father.
Jena and Brooke resolve to get Claire out of the party, but before they can, Claire starts a game of “Truth or Shot.” In answer to a question, she reveals that Beau and Jena kissed when Jena and Felix broke up for a few days. This results in a brawl between the two boys.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Now”
In the present, as Brooke and Jena drive home, they are aware of how close it is to their curfew. They talk about Dylan’s advances toward Brooke before stopping for gas, and Jena goes inside to buy water. Brooke checks her phone to find that there’s 94 missed calls from the withheld number and one voicemail.
She listens to it, and a distorted voice says that her time is up. It references the game of Truth or Shot that Claire started the night she died, changing the rules to “Truth or Die.” They warn Brooke to tell the truth about what happened at the lake or she won’t make it home alive.
She tries to calm herself down by reminding herself that her family name can protect her, as her parents are influential. Jena gets back in the car, but they can’t leave until she finds her phone. She thinks that someone grabbed it off the seat while Brooke was getting gas. Jena says she can’t go home without her phone, but she relents when she sees how worried Brooke is. They set off, but Brooke notices a white Bronco trailing them.
Chapters 1-8 Analysis
The novel begins with a strong feeling of underlying tension and high stakes, as Brooke awaits confirmation of her college acceptance. This will not only decide her future for the coming years, it will also determine if she can carry on the Goodwin family legacy at Yale and receive validation from her demanding parents. This setup introduces the theme of Ambition Versus Morality. When reflecting on Ivy Day, she thinks, “All of us vibrate with a similar kind of urgency, rushing from the school like someone’s chasing us, only that someone is our future. We can’t escape that” (9). This reinforces the novel’s central tension and foreshadows the plot, which revolves around Brooke being chased by mysterious figures, who will—one way or another—decide her future.
Unlike some, Brooke feels dread or directionlessness about her future, a feeling that’s reinforced later at the beach party when she thinks about what she wants to study. She envies Jena, who comes from a less prestigious family and is allowed to pursue her passion for culinary arts. While Brooke respects Jena, her mindset is grounded in her family’s classism; they believe culinary school is less impressive and respectable than the Ivy League, and Brooke reflects this belief. Waldorf reflects the dark academia atmosphere of the novel, as a former brick factory with sprawling grounds that has been turned into an academic paradise. The school’s luxurious exterior and hidden past are metaphors for the emphasis on appearances that Brooke and the rest of Waldorf value.
Ultimately, her classism alienates Brooke from others, and her isolation is heightened by both the emotional abandonment she feels at home and the ongoing harassment about the drowning incident. The events of that night haunt Brooke, and although the reader does not know what really happened to Claire yet, these chapters reinforce the theme of Crafting a Public Persona to Hide Secrets. Brooke is a high-achieving, popular student from a good family set to attend Yale; still, her doubts and secrets poison her capacity to be happy. When the narrative shifts to the past, Brooke is somewhat more easygoing—though still very conscious of her public image—and thinks that she loves her life: “The smiles, the adoration, the friends, the attention. The perfect Goodwin daughter having her perfect senior year” (37-38). She’s confident in herself and her choices, in contrast to the present, where she avoids undue attention and struggles with anxiety.
Her acceptance into Yale brings a glimmer of hope: “For the first time in six months, my mom smiles at me. Her eyes are alight with happiness that I created, and she wraps me in what’s possibly the tightest hug of my life. I finally fixed it. Yale fixed it” (30-31). This betrays that her lack of confidence comes from the mysterious mistake that needed to be “fixed” and from her parents’ conditional affection. Her mother doesn’t smile at Brooke for months until she does as expected, and her father doesn’t care about the accomplishment at all, seeing it as a completed goal to be surpassed. Her position in her family—subject to her parents’ whims and demands with no internal sense of self-worth—sets her up to be an anti-hero whose motives are relatable even if her actions are not.
As a mystery thriller, the novel has a fast-paced plot, and the events that caused Brooke’s internal conflict are set up quickly: Brooke’s former best friend, Claire, arrives at Brooke’s party uninvited. By the end of the night, Claire is dead, but based on the information in Chapters 1-8, it’s not clear how or why. While Brooke hasn’t expressed any guilt over what happened, the harassment she receives implies that she is involved in Claire’s death. In reality, Brooke killed Claire, but at this point in the narrative, Claire is presented as the villain. Jena is established as a catalyst, goading Brooke into making decisions, such as attending the Ivy Day party and confronting Claire.
In the flashback, when Brooke considers ignoring Claire instead of asking her to leave, Jena reminds Brooke about all the times that Claire embarrassed Brooke, got her in trouble, stole her ideas, or generally hurt her feelings. The negative portrayal of Claire is reinforced when she manipulates the partygoers and plays “Truth or Shot” as way to spark conflict between Felix and Beau. In the present-day, after being harassed by Brandon, Brooke recalls that “Claire Heck was a colossal bitch and what happened was her own fault” (78). This statement serves two narrative purposes. It maintains the mystery about Brooke’s role in the incident and insinuates that it was not merely an accident, as stated in the police report. Brooke’s only worry about that night is that the event may have endangered her father’s appointment as a judge or her mother’s career as Waldorf’s principal. This reinforces the idea that, in any situation, maintaining her family’s public image takes precedence above all else.
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