Eleanor Markey

Eleanor Markey’s importance in the novel lies both in the life Violet Markey remembers and in the absence that reorganizes Violet’s own. An eighteen-year-old senior at Bartlett High School, Eleanor is Violet’s older sister and best friend. Their shared projects, plans, and private habits make her more than a figure in the past: even after her death, Violet keeps returning to Eleanor’s voice, belongings, and memory as she tries to imagine a future that does not require forgetting her.

Identity and Shared Life

Eleanor is a member of the student congress and a central part of Violet’s life before the accident. The sisters sometimes talk about college after their parents have gone to bed, imagining the places they might go and the people they might meet beyond Bartlett, Indiana. Violet remembers their hometown as a place where they felt out of step with everyone else, and the sisters’ imagined departures give their closeness a forward-looking dimension: they picture a wider world together.

Their creative partnership takes shape in EleanorandViolet.com, an online magazine they start after moving to Indiana. It offers two distinct perspectives on subjects including fashion, beauty, boys, books, and life. The site’s readership triples after Eleanor’s friend, a star of the web series Rant, mentions it in an interview. Its success belongs to both sisters, but its identity is inseparable from their relationship. After Eleanor dies, Violet cannot bring herself to work on it; she sees it as a site about sisters, and the accident seems to have taken her words along with Eleanor.

Personality and Sisterhood

Violet recalls Eleanor as smart, stubborn, moody, funny, and capable of being mean when angry. She was also sweet and protective of the people she loved. Yellow was her favorite color. The mixture matters: Eleanor was not an idealized sister without conflict, but someone Violet could argue with and still trust. Violet says she could tell Eleanor anything because Eleanor did not judge her, and describes her as her best friend.

Their closeness coexisted with ordinary differences and moments of friction. At a party in April, Eleanor wore white while Violet wore black, one of the sisters’ occasional reversals of their good-sister and bad-sister roles. Later that night, after Eleanor argued with the older brother of Ryan Cross, she was upset but would not let Violet drive. Violet remembers suggesting the route over A Street Bridge. The sisters’ intimacy therefore remains bound to both affection and conflict, a complexity that makes Violet’s later guilt difficult to separate from her love.

The Crash and Its Consequences

Eleanor dies in the early hours of April 5 when her car goes through the guardrail on A Street Bridge. A news report identifies her as an eighteen-year-old Bartlett High School senior and student congress member, and says that icy conditions and speed may have caused the crash. Eleanor is killed on impact; Violet, who is sixteen and riding as a passenger, sustains only minor injuries.

Violet’s recollection is fragmentary. She remembers leaving the party, Eleanor’s argument, the warning that the bridge freezes before the road, the car sliding, and Eleanor saying she could not hold on. She remembers the car passing through the barrier and Eleanor screaming, then nothing until she wakes in the hospital three hours later. The gap in her memory does not lessen the event’s force: it leaves her with a handful of images and decisions to revisit, especially her own suggestion that they take the bridge.

The bridge remains a physical trace of the loss. Theodore Finch runs there and sees the damaged stone guardrail, an angry gap in the wall, and a cross lying beside it. In the dried riverbed below, he finds fragments of glass and metal, including a taillight and a damaged side mirror. The wreckage makes the accident real to him; the cross, whose maker he cannot identify, marks a grief that extends beyond Violet’s private memories.

Memory, Guilt, and What Remains

In Eleanor’s room, Violet encounters a material version of the bond she has lost. The walls are yellow and covered with pictures of Eleanor’s friends from Indiana and California; a California state flag hangs above the bed, and art supplies remain piled in a corner. Violet’s parents are slowly organizing Eleanor’s things. Violet sets Eleanor’s glasses on the dresser and speaks to her as if returning a borrowed possession, imagining the laugh that might have followed. The gesture acknowledges the loss without turning the room into a place where Eleanor has simply vanished.

Grief also surfaces in Violet’s conflict with her parents. When her father suggests she is using her sister’s death as an excuse to act out, Violet insists that her life has changed: she has stopped cheering, left student council, and struggled with orchestra and friendships. She says the world has continued while she has found it hard to keep up. The exchange shows how Eleanor’s death affects Violet beyond sorrow; it unsettles her participation in the life and activities that once defined her.

Later, Violet tells her parents plainly that she suggested taking the bridge and is sorry they went out that night. She explains that avoiding the subject makes it harder to remember Eleanor, including the different ways Eleanor said Violet’s name when she was happy or annoyed. Violet wants her parents to acknowledge that Eleanor existed and to share the memory rather than treat silence as recovery. Her mother tells her that what happened was not her fault.

Violet eventually speaks of Eleanor and Theodore Finch together, refusing to reduce either relationship to a source of pain or to hide either loss. She accepts that she loved Finch and that she misses Eleanor, while recognizing that neither can be brought back. Remembering, she argues, can keep them from being completely gone. At the novel’s close, Violet imagines her own future as open to wandering and change, while the blue around her recalls Finch and the people she has lost. Eleanor’s continuing place in Violet’s life is part of that movement: remembrance becomes not a reversal of death, but a way to carry love forward without pretending the loss did not happen.