No Place Left to Hide

“Ivy Day has been looming on Waldorf’s Google Calendar for six months. If I wanted to, I could walk down the hall and pick out every other Ivy hopeful by sight alone. 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.”

Brooke Goodwin is nervous about the results of her college application, but her tone makes clear that her desire for acceptance goes beyond hopeful life plans; she fears the consequences of failing to get in because it would deeply disappoint her parents. She would lose any chance of receiving their validation or affection, which is what motivates her. She understands that others around her may feel similarly, as she describes their futures as “chasing” them like an aggressor rather than awaiting them.

“I could have had my answer months ago, but I missed the deadline because of…the incident. Yet another thing I lost because of her.”

Brooke refers to the death of Claire Heck at her lake house party six months earlier. Brooke’s wording here betrays a deep negativity in her relationship with the yet-unnamed “her,” even without exposing what the conflict between them was. This additionally shows how the pressure Brooke feels to succeed drives her to view her ambitions as more important than Claire’s actual life, dismissing Claire’s death (which has not yet been revealed in the narrative) as a mere interruption in her application plans. This also foreshadows the way in which Brooke will continue to blame her failures on Claire’s actions.