53 pages • 1-hour read
The Inmate
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Symbols & Motifs
Snowflake Necklace
When they are 10, Tim gives Brooke a necklace with a snowflake pendant. The pendant has diamonds on the snowflake’s points. Brooke wears this necklace daily and often plays with it when she is thinking or worried about something. The necklace symbolizes Tim’s deep love for Brooke; to see Brooke in this necklace offers Tim some encouragement that she might eventually return his feelings. This is likely why, years later, Tim buys Brooke a similar necklace, a sentimental gift that speaks of their deep affection for each other.
For Brooke, this necklace takes on a much more sinister meaning after Shane uses it to try to strangle her. The necklace breaks that night and disappears, but Brooke never forgets the feel of it around her neck or the sensation of being choked. When Tim gives her another necklace for her birthday, the thoughtlessness of the present causes Brooke to doubt Tim’s innocence, justifying her conviction that Tim is capable of horrific crimes later when he is arrested for the murder of Kelli Underwood.
Farmhouse
Shane lives with his mother in a rundown farmhouse. Brooke is taken aback by its shabby roof, broken door frame, and leaning porch—evidence that she has at least some of the same biases as her parents, who don’t approve of the lower-class Shane. For Brooke, the farmhouse is at first a symbol of poverty and the futility of Pamela Nelson’s attempts to support Shane with minimum-wage jobs.
The night Brooke goes to the farmhouse with Tim, Chelsea, and Kayla, it is meant to be an escape from her overprotective parents. After Brooke and Shane have sex for the first time, the farmhouse becomes a symbol of teenage rebellion, a location where Brooke can do whatever she wants without incurring her parents’ disapproval.
However, as the night progresses, the farmhouse becomes the horrific setting of the murders of three of her friends. It now symbolizes isolation, fear, and death.
Sandalwood Aftershave
Smells can often be triggers for memories. In this novel, Brooke associates the scent of sandalwood aftershave with her former boyfriend Shane and the night he nearly strangled her to death. When she first smells the aftershave, she likes it. The smell symbolizes Shane’s masculinity and her attraction to him; it makes her eager to have sex with him.
As the night progresses, Brooke finds herself in a nightmare where her friends are suddenly dying at the hands of an unknown attacker. When Brooke is attacked by an unseen assailant, the scent of the sandalwood aftershave is the only clue she has to the identity of the murderer. In this way, the aftershave becomes symbolic of the worst moment of her life, the moment when her boyfriend tried to kill her.
When Tim shows up at her house 11 years later wearing the same scent, the smell of sandalwood becomes a symbol of manipulation. Yet Brooke isn’t sure who is manipulating her; it may be that Tim has forgotten it was the aftershave that convinced her Shane was her attacker, or Tim might be wearing the aftershave to torture her.
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