69 pages • 2-hour read
The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, antigay bias, mental illness, and cursing.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Thou Shalt Not Trust a Two-Faced Bitch”
Sixteen-year-old Yamilet “Yami” Flores has just quit her job as a barista to avoid her ex-best friend, Bianca, who outed her as gay at the end of sophomore year. At home, Yami punches her vanity mirror, cracking it and cutting her hand. Yami prefers her fractured reflection, feeling that it better represents her current state. Her brother, Cesar, who is 10 months younger but in the same grade due to skipping a year, enters to check on the noise. Seeing Yami’s bloody hand, he asks if she is okay, and she asks him the same question, noting that he has scabs on his knuckles and a black eye. Despite their mutual concern, the siblings don’t pry into each other’s problems. Cesar announces that he received all As, confirming his scholarship to Slayton Catholic High School. Yami plans to transfer with him, and she is working to cover half of her tuition. She wants to be able to continue looking out for him, as he often gets into fights, and she wants to escape her former friends at Rover High School. She resolves to be “stealthy gay” at Slayton, determined never to see Bianca again.
Yami’s mother, Maria, calls Yami to her bedroom, where she’s making Mexican jewelry. Wearing sunglasses to hide the fact that she’s been crying over Cesar’s struggles at school, she asks Yami to set a good example for Cesar at their new school. Their father, Emiliano, was deported to Mexico six years earlier, leaving Yami with the responsibility of looking after her brother. She feels that her mother does not appreciate her and often blames her for Cesar’s difficulties. Though Yami already plans to find another job to pay her half of the tuition, her mother grounds her until she does so.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Capitalism”
After spending June and July submitting job applications without success, Yami gets an idea to revamp her mother’s neglected Etsy shop. With help from Cesar, she takes professional-looking photos modeling the jewelry. She also updates the shop’s social media and texts her father in Mexico to ask for money to cover the Etsy listing fees. Emiliano supports her entrepreneurial spirit, sending enough for 20 listings plus extra. Yami carefully prices items to account for fees and begins promoting the shop online.
When Yami is finished, she and Cesar deliver tamales to Doña Violeta, an elderly neighbor who’s been depressed since her husband’s death. On their way, they pass Bianca’s house, where Yami notices that Bianca has finished planting flowers in the talavera pots they painted together. When Cesar asks what happened between them, Yami deflects, claiming that Bianca is “dead to [her]” (19). When they return home, Yami discovers that the jewelry shop is performing well. Her mother initially tells her to take it down, overwhelmed by the additional work on top of her full-time job, but after Yami’s father intervenes, she relents. The online business becomes Yami’s new job, allowing her to earn money for tuition while helping her mother.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Butt”
On the first day at Slayton Catholic, Yami observes how small and well maintained the campus is compared to Rover. After separating from Cesar, she meets three white classmates in language arts class—Jenna, Karen, and Emily—who wear matching blue ribbons in their hair. When Karen mispronounces Yami’s name as “Yummy” and asks where she is from (implying that she must be from another country), Yami is disgusted but stays silent to avoid confrontation on her first day.
Yami watches, impressed, as Bo Taylor, a Chinese American student, delivers a bold pro-choice presentation. Bo wears rainbow sneakers and khakis instead of a skirt, and Yami hopes that these are signs that she is gay, but she tells herself not to read too much into it. Karen makes a racist comment about Bo’s eyes. When Yami stands to give her presentation, a student makes a racist remark connecting Yami to abortion clinics. Yami confronts the commenter, delivering an impromptu presentation on the intersections of bodily autonomy and social privilege, resulting in lunch detention and a zero grade. During break, Cesar introduces Yami to Hunter, a senior who buys cookies for them. Yami also properly meets Bo and feels drawn to her confidence. When Yami goes to her lunch detention, Cesar is also there because he got in trouble for chewing gum. They wear green vests while picking up trash. Afterward, Jenna, Karen, and Emily invite Yami to sit with them, and though she is uncomfortable with Karen’s behavior, Yami accepts for lack of other options. Privately, she struggles with her attraction to girls, reminding herself to act straight at this school.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Honor Thy Liner and Thy Hoops”
After school, Maria picks up her children and questions them about their first day, showing more interest in Cesar’s responses. That evening, Yami and Maria make jewelry together to fulfill orders from their now-successful Etsy shop. Despite the shop’s success, Yami notices that her mother still favors Cesar, thanking him profusely when he briefly helps with the jewelry before leaving to do homework.
The next morning, Yami wears her favorite gold hoop earrings that make her feel “like Selena Quintanilla” (49). At school, when she meets up with Jenna, Karen, and Emily, they criticize her appearance, with Jenna calling her look “ghetto” and Karen making further racist and derogatory comments. Hurt and angry, Yami walks away and sits apart from them in class. Bo joins her. At lunch, feeling isolated, Yami approaches Bo’s table, where she meets Amber (Bo’s best friend since kindergarten) and David (who people claim resembles Cesar). During their conversation, Bo openly states that she’s gay, creating internal conflict for Yami, who plans to keep her own sexuality hidden. Despite her attempt to maintain distance from Bo to protect her secret, Yami finds herself enjoying the group’s company.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Make Unto Thee Non-Racist Friends”
This chapter begins after a class debate about gay marriage that deeply upset Yami. She hides in the bathroom to cry, and someone in the next stall silently offers her toilet paper under the divider. She hopes the unknown person is Bo. When leaving, Yami encounters Bo, who asks if she’s okay, leading her to conclude that it wasn’t Bo who helped her. On Wednesday after school, Bo offers Cesar and Yami a ride home since their mother works late. Yami is afraid that Bo will look down on their small house and working-class neighborhood, so she asks Bo to drop them off at the light rail instead. Though Cesar senses Yami’s unhappiness at Slayton, she denies it, not wanting to ruin his positive experience there.
That evening, Yami helps her mother fill jewelry orders. When a telenovela shows two women kissing, Maria covers Yami’s eyes and declares that she won’t have “that ungodly crap” in her house (78), reinforcing Yami’s fear of coming out. Later, during a private FaceTime conversation with her father in Mexico, Yami confesses that she’s tired of taking care of everyone and pretending to be happy about Slayton. Emiliano validates her feelings and encourages honesty, providing the emotional support she craves. The next day after school, Yami covers for Cesar when he has detention again, telling their mother that he’s at “Mathletes.” When Cesar appears, he contradicts her lie, claiming that he made the football team instead. Though Yami is frustrated by his improvised lie, Maria is pleased, believing that football will provide an outlet for his “aggressive energy.”
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Reyes establishes the broken mirror as the novel’s central symbol in the opening scene, representing Yami’s fractured sense of self following her traumatic outing by Bianca. When Yami states, “I like this new reflection better. It’s cracked enough that I’m hardly recognizable. Splintered in all the right places” (1), she reveals the fractured nature of her own self-image as her character arc begins. This physical fracturing parallels her emotional state after Bianca’s betrayal and foreshadows her planned approach at Slayton: “I’ll be stealthy gay” (4). The broken mirror becomes a metaphor for Yami’s compartmentalized identity, revealing how coming-out experiences, especially traumatic ones, can fragment one’s sense of wholeness and security.
The narrative explores Identity Formation in the Context of Intersectional Oppression through Yami’s experiences navigating her ethnic and sexual identities in predominantly white, heteronormative spaces. When Karen asks where Yami is “from” and later calls her hoop earrings “ghetto,” Reyes highlights the casual racism and classism that Yami encounters. This form of oppression compounds the antigay bias that Yami fears, creating layered marginalization that intensifies her need to hide her sexuality. These intersecting identities converge after Bo’s presentation on abortion rights, when a student makes a racist remark suggesting that Yami, as a Mexican American teen, is a likely abortion clinic client. Refusing to accept this stereotype, Yami delivers an impromptu speech detailing the intersecting forms of privilege and oppression that impact people’s access to reproductive health care, including abortion. Yami’s forceful speech illustrates the many factors that she has to be aware of as she navigates a social environment that is often hostile to her intersecting identities.
The novel’s treatment of Yami’s family’s jewelry and beadwork business further illustrates this intersection. The jewelry that Yami and her mother make emerge as a motif in the novel, simultaneously representing cultural pride, economic necessity, and, ironically, the means by which Yami saves money in case her mother discovers her sexuality and rejects her. These complex dynamics demonstrate how navigating multiple marginalized identities requires different survival strategies in different contexts.
Family responsibility emerges as both motivation and burden for Yami, who carries disproportionate pressure as the “responsible” sibling despite being the older of the two by only 10 months. Yami attends Slayton explicitly to protect Cesar from fights, taking on a parental role: “[S]ince Dad’s been gone, there’s been this unspoken rule that I’m supposed to take care of Cesar the way he did” (10). In looking out for Cesar, Yami demonstrates The Importance of Supportive Communities, but she also takes on a degree of responsibility that is too much for someone of her age to bear. This responsibility extends to covering for Cesar’s detention with improvised lies, working to pay her tuition, and maintaining emotional equilibrium to avoid worrying others. When Yami confesses to her father, “I’m so tired of having to take care of everyone” (83), the text reveals how familial obligation, while rooted in love, becomes overwhelming when combined with personal crisis. Emiliano’s deportation six years earlier fundamentally restructured family dynamics, placing Yami in an impossible position where her own identity struggles must remain secondary to family stability.
At Slayton—a predominantly white institution where socially conservative interpretations of Catholic doctrine hold sway—Yami must work toward Finding Self-Acceptance Despite External Judgment. The debate about marriage equality illustrates this oppressive climate: Yami becomes increasingly internally distressed while classmates debate whether people who are gay deserve equal rights. The language used by her peers—comparing gay relationships to “bestiality” and “pedophilia”—illustrates the normalization of antigay bigotry in this environment. Meanwhile, Yami feels like crucifixes and pictures of saints are judging her for being gay, emphasizing how religious iconography becomes threatening rather than comforting. When Maria shields Yami’s eyes from a kiss between two women on television, declaring, “I won’t have that ungodly crap in my house” (78), the novel demonstrates how religious condemnation of LGBTQ+ sexuality permeates even intimate domestic spaces. Bo’s contrasting openness—wearing rainbow Vans and publicly opposing the debate—presents an alternative relationship with faith and sexuality that Yami finds simultaneously attractive and terrifying.
Yami’s evolving social connections illustrate the difference between performative and authentic relationships. Her relationship with Bianca represents betrayal masked as friendship—someone who “would talk shit about anyone and everyone” but ultimately made Yami “feel like a leech” for her feelings (12, 54). This contrasts with Bo’s friend group, characterized by radical honesty where they are “weirdly open about their personal business” (73). While Karen, Jenna, and Emily enforce social conformity and cultural assimilation, Bo’s group celebrates difference, including David’s atheism and Bo’s identity as a lesbian. When Yami worries that Bo will identify her as gay, she reveals the double bind of wanting authentic connection while hiding her true self. These contrasting friendship dynamics illuminate the novel’s exploration of how authentic community requires vulnerability, setting up Yami’s central conflict between self-protection and genuine connection.
Unlock all 69 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs