Ava Spirini and Kelly’s close friendship

Ava Spirini and Kelly Waititi’s close friendship is the emotional measure of the novel’s grief: Kelly’s death changes Ava’s sense of time and self, yet does not end the relationship Ava carries with her. Their history is made of ordinary intimacy—shared jokes, familiar habits, and time spent together—as well as a painful gap between loving someone and knowing everything they are enduring.

A Friendship Built from Ordinary Intimacy

Kelly is Ava’s best friend, and Ava understands their bond as a form of kinship that exceeds a conventional friendship. Its importance appears most clearly in the everyday scenes Ava returns to: the two of them spending an afternoon together, watching online videos and laughing, or recalling the shared history preserved in a framed photograph from Year 7 camp. In the picture, they are sunburnt, freckled, and wearing backwards caps. Ava remembers it as part of a long store of private jokes and familiar stories, not as a moment that seemed destined to carry special meaning.

That ordinariness is central to how Ava remembers Kelly. Their closeness did not depend on grand declarations or on every moment being significant at the time. Kelly’s presence belonged to the texture of Ava’s daily life: someone with whom she could laugh, revisit old memories, and imagine a future in which they would still be together. After Kelly’s death, the smallness of these recollections does not make them less important. It makes the loss harder to separate from the life Ava had expected to continue.

Ava remembers Kelly leaving a love heart on the mirror after looking at the photograph. Kelly had often written or drawn on the mirror, so the gesture did not initially seem unusual. Ava later wonders whether it carried a deliberate message of affection, but she cannot know that for certain. The scene holds both the warmth of a shared habit and the limits of hindsight: a familiar act can become newly charged after a death, without revealing exactly what the person intended.

Affection and the Limits of Knowing

The friendship includes a painful asymmetry. Kelly sometimes let Ava know that she was having a bad day, but Ava also learned about serious episodes through fragments: a message that Kelly’s parents had taken her to hospital, Kelly turning up at Ava’s home after running away, periods of silence, or sad-face emojis. Ava remembers these signs as evidence that Kelly was suffering, while also recognizing that the two friends did not truly talk through the full extent of that suffering.

Ava wishes Kelly had told her more. That wish is not presented as proof that Kelly withheld information out of a lack of trust, or that Ava could have prevented what happened. Rather, it expresses the painful difference between being deeply loved and having access to another person’s whole inner life. Ava’s affection was real, but it could not make her omniscient. Afterward, she searches their memories for missed clues and asks herself whether an ordinary afternoon might have meant something different to Kelly. The questions reveal the force of Ava’s love and the impossibility of resolving the past with certainty.

When Ava considers Kelly’s final night, she understands that Kelly died after drinking heavily and choking in her sleep. Kelly left no note. Ava wonders whether Kelly wanted to die or whether she wanted the pain to stop, and she returns to the possibility that the outcome may not have matched what Kelly ultimately wanted. These are Ava’s attempts to make sense of the death, not certainties about Kelly’s final thoughts. Her later conviction that Kelly wanted to end her pain rather than her life becomes a way to interpret the loss without claiming that she can know everything Kelly felt.

Loss, Memory, and the Passage of Time

The news reaches Ava in the early morning. Kelly’s father calls the house phone at 5:37, waking her; seven minutes later, Ava’s father comes into her room and tells her that Kelly has died. Ava remembers the delay before the words arrive and the shock of hearing them. The moment divides her life into a before and an after, as if time itself has stopped with Kelly’s death.

Six months later, Ava feels that school and daily life are moving at a different pace. She resents people who compare her loss with the deaths of their relatives or pets, because those comparisons cannot convey what Kelly meant to her. She also feels judged for still grieving, though, to Ava, six months is no time at all. She counts thirty-one Sundays since Kelly died and experiences each Sunday as a return of the loss. Counting gives grief a calendar, but it does not make the days predictable or easier.

Ava’s memories repeatedly move between the last ordinary afternoon and the knowledge of what followed. She recalls the photograph, Kelly’s familiar actions, and the love heart on the mirror, then reconsiders them in light of the death. The memory does not settle into a single explanation. Instead, the contrast between how ordinary the afternoon seemed and what Ava later learned keeps her searching for meanings she cannot confirm. The friendship remains present in that search, both as a source of tenderness and as a reminder of what Ava could not know.

Continuing the Bond While Moving Forward

At the first-anniversary gathering, Kelly’s family and Ava stand together beneath the rotunda in the park, telling stories about Kelly. They laugh about the things she used to do and cry; the gathering celebrates her life rather than reducing her to the circumstances of her death. The shared act of remembering gives Ava and Kelly’s family a place to hold affection alongside sorrow. It also shows that Kelly remains part of Ava’s social and emotional world after her death.

Ava continues therapy with Nola every fortnight and uses the idea of a box to think about grief. The feelings have not disappeared: sadness, hurt, anger, confusion, grief, and love remain part of her experience. At times they may feel contained rather than overwhelming, but containment is not forgetting. Ava’s understanding of grief allows for choices that help or harm her without treating every painful feeling as something she must eliminate.

By the novel’s end, Ava rejects the expectation that she should simply move on from Kelly. She believes that a love of this depth does not end, and that Kelly’s death will always shape her. At the same time, she distinguishes moving forward from leaving Kelly behind. She decides that she must keep living, partly because she believes Kelly would want that for her. The friendship therefore continues not as a denial of death but as a bond carried into Ava’s future: in memory, in the annual telling of stories, and in the choices she makes while accepting that grief and love remain together.