Sharp Objects

Camille wakes up feeling sick and panicked, but she blames it on the drugs. She admits that she doesn’t mind throwing up because it was the only time growing up that her mother showed her affection by holding her hair back and talking in a soothing voice. Adora knocks on Camille’s door. Camille doesn’t answer, but Adora unlocks her door and comes in anyway. Amma apparently lied about last night, because Adora thinks that they were hanging out together and got food poisoning. Camille feels too weak to make Adora leave her room, so instead she just starts crying and says she feels sick. Adora pulls off Camille’s covers. Camille is naked and tries to cover herself, but her mother forces Camille’s hands to her sides. Adora pokes and prods at Camille, and tends to her wounds. She forces Camille to take a pill with a glass of milk, saying that it’s medicine. Camille tries to refuse it, but then she thinks back to all the times she refused her mother’s medicines as a child. She thinks that “[t]o refuse has so many more consequences than submitting,” so she takes the pill (193).

She wakes up feeling sicker than before. She goes to Amma’s room to find her naked and playing with her dollhouse. The reader learns that Adora has given Amma and Camille the same blue pill, and both feel groggy and sick as a result. Camille asks if Adora has given this to Amma before, and Amma admits that it happens frequently, although sometimes she doesn’t take the pill; she just pretends to, to make Adora happy. Camille feels sick because she realizes that it’s all happening again, just like it did with Marian. She then thinks, “[m]y mother killed Marian. My mother killed those little girls” (195). She goes to her room, pukes, and then leaves.

Despite being sick, she goes to Jackie’s house, hoping to get some perspective. While at Jackie’s, Camille sees Geri, an old high school acquaintance, working as Jackie’s maid. Camille wonders why Geri would stay in Wind Gap, and she realizes that Wind Gap is still just as segregated as it was when she lived there—the rich versus the poor and the pretty versus the unattractive. Camille and Jackie talk about town gossip and a little bit about Joya, Adora’s mother, who was cold and not motherly. Jackie ends the conversation by telling Camille to leave Wind Gap because it’s not safe for her there. 

Camille thinks about how much:

traffic a woman’s body experiences. Tampons and speculums. Cocks, fingers, vibrators and more, between the legs, from behind, in the mouth. Men love to put things inside women, don’t they? Cucumbers and bananas and bottles, a string of pearls, a Magic Marker, a fist. Once a guy wanted to wedge a Walkie-Talkie inside of me (204).

She also wonders if she and Amma were sick, needing their mother’s medicine, or if the medicine was making them sick.

She drives to a bar on the edge of town and sees a drunk John Keene sitting alone in a booth. She grabs a drink and sits across from him. He says that she’s the only person who understands what it’s like to lose a sister and be expected to just deal with it. It’s clear they have a connection, and John calls her beautiful. She says he is, too.

John doesn’t want to go home or back to his girlfriend Meredith’s, so Camille drives him to a hotel instead and pays for his room. She puts him to bed and gives him some water. He grabs her hand and traces one of the exposed scars on her arm. He rolls up her sleeve, and she lets him look because she “didn’t need to hide from someone courting oblivion as ardently as I was” (208). John is the first person she has ever let see her scars. He undresses her, and she lets him.

They are in bed together, naked, and he “put his mouth on my nipples, the first time since I began cutting in earnest that I’d allowed a man to do that. Fourteen years” (209). She lets him touch her all over, and then she “guided him into me and came fast and hard and then again. I could feel his tears on my shoulders while he shuddered inside me” (209).

In the morning, she tries to hide her body from him, and then there is a banging on the hotel door. It’s Richard and Chief Vickery. They say they’re there because Adora became worried when Camille didn’t come home last night. From the looks and smell of the room, it’s clear that Camille and John had sex, and Richard is visibly upset. They leave, and Camille takes John back to his parents’ house. He tells her that she saved his life last night, that if she hadn’t stayed with him he would have done something bad.

Camille goes to the police station to talk to Richard. She tries to convince him that she didn’t sleep with John. In an attempt to make him believe her, she gets on her knees and tries to unzip his pants, feeling like she’s “back on autopilot, just like the old days: desperate to submit to him, make him feel better, make him like me again” (214). Richard stops her and asks her to leave.

Camille falls asleep in the back of her car, not wanting to go back to her mother’s house, but ultimately decides to go to her old friend Katie Lacey’s in the hopes of getting more gossip about the murders. The two talk over sweet tea and Katie admits that once, while volunteering at the grade school during Sewing Day, Ann stabbed Natalie in the cheek with a needle.

Camille goes home to find Amma in her room laughing out loud with her friends. Feeling annoyed, she goes to her room and takes a bath. She closes her eyes underwater, and when she opens them Adora is standing above her. Camille tries to ask what’s been wrong with Amma, but her mother deflects her curiosity by asking if Camille is cold because her “nipples are hard” (223). Adora is holding a glass of bluish milk, and Camille drinks it, thinking, “Either the drink makes me sick and I know I’m not insane, or it doesn’t, and I know I’m a hateful creature” (223).

Twenty minutes later, Camille is vomiting. She leaves the house and drives to a hospital in a nearby town, despite vomiting most of the way there. Once there, she asks to look at Marian’s files. There is a file for each year of Marian’s life. Despite innumerous tests, scans, and diagnoses, the doctors could never find anything tangibly wrong with her. Camille finds a note from one of Marian’s nurses that says Marian wasn’t sick at all; rather, it was her mother making her sick. The note says, “The child exhibits signs of illness after spending time alone with the Mother, even on days when she has felt well up until maternal visits” (227). The notes also points out that Adora didn’t seem interested in Marian when she was healthy, and only held her when she was sick.

Camille tracks down Beverly, the nurse who wrote the letter, and she explains how Adora had MBP, or “Munchausen by Proxy. The caregiver, usually the mother…makes her child ill to get attention for herself” (228). Beverly says that she tried telling this to Marian’s doctors, but no one believed her, and to get Amma out of Adora’s house. She also tells Camille that a detective has been looking at Marian’s files. Camille leaves the hospital, finds a payphone, and between sobs calls Curry. She tells Curry she knows who did it, and that she’ll take care of it.

Camille finds Richard at Gritty’s restaurant. She says, “I think my mother killed Marian, and I think she killed Ann and Natalie. And I know you think that, too” (231). She is visibly upset, and he takes her on a drive up to the bluffs. He says that he was suspicious of Adora all along, and that initially he was interested in Camille because of her connection to Adora, but that he ended up genuinely falling for her. He tells Camille that he’ll be searching Adora’s house for evidence tomorrow, but that tonight she should go home and act as normal as possible.

Camille goes home, has dinner with the family, and then, for the first time, is invited to her mother’s bedroom to have drinks. She says, “All those months after Marian died when she kept to her room and refused me, I wouldn’t have dared to imagine myself curled up in bed with my mother. Now here I was, more than fifteen years too late” (237). Adora hands Camille a drink that smells like browned apples, and then tells her a story about how Adora’s mother abandoned Adora in the woods when she was little. Her mother asks to take care of Camille and Camille swallows Adora’s drink, despite knowing it’s poisoned. 

Camille wakes up in her “own sweat and urine. Teeth chattering and my heartbeat thumping behind my eyeballs” (239). As soon as she starts to vomit, her mother appears and puts her into the bath. Adora gives Camille pills and more blue milk, and Camille accepts it “with the same bitter vengeance that fueled me on two-day benders,” thinking it’s the least she could do for Marian (239). Her mother coddles her while she gets sick by refilling her bath water and placing heat packs on her forehead and knees.

Camille falls asleep in the bathtub and awakes to screams. She wraps a towel around herself and goes into her mother’s room to see Richard and Chief Vickery rummaging through Adora’s belongings. For the first time, Richard sees Camille’s scarred body and it’s clear that he is disgusted.

By evening, Camille says that a myriad of pills and medicines were found in her mother’s panty drawer, including blue anti-malarial pills that can induce fever and blurred vision, industrial-grade laxatives, anti-seizure tablets that can cause dizziness and nausea, ipecac syrup used to induce vomiting, and horse tranquilizers. Traces of each of these drugs are found in Camille’s system.

The cops also find Adora’s diary, in which Adora admits that she killed Marian by slowly poisoning her. In the diary, she says, “Marian is such a doll when she’s ill, she dotes on me terribly and wants me with her all the time. I love wiping away her tears” (242). Perhaps most importantly, underneath a cushion in Adora’s room they find “a stained pair of pliers, small and feminine. DNA tests matched trace blood on the tool to Ann Nash and Natalie Keene” (243). However, they don’t find the little girls’ teeth.