Grief

Grief is the force that reshapes Ava Spirini’s sense of time, her relationships, and her expectations of the future after Kelly Waititi dies. The novel presents loss not as a sequence of stages leading to closure but as a continuing bond that can coexist with anger, confusion, love, brief relief, and renewed happiness. Ava’s movement forward is not a departure from Kelly: it is an attempt to live while carrying the friendship and its consequences with her.

The rupture and the altered sense of time

The news reaches Ava in the early morning. Kelly’s father calls Ava’s father at 5:37, and the call wakes Ava; seven minutes later, her father comes to her room and tells her that Kelly has died. Ava remembers the delay before the words, her father’s tears, and the shock that makes it difficult to take in what he is saying. The precision of the time becomes part of the memory’s permanence: the announcement is not simply a fact she learns but a moment that divides her life into before and after.

Six months later, school has resumed, but ordinary routines do not feel ordinary. Ava has been back full-time for only a month, after several weeks attending part-time, and she struggles to pay attention or stay at school. Other people’s attempts to relate her loss to their own bereavements make her feel that they have not understood the particular importance of Kelly, her best friend. She experiences the days as slowed, as if time itself had stopped with Kelly’s death, and resents the expectation that she should already be getting over it. Counting thirty-one Sundays since Kelly died gives this experience a repeated measure: each Sunday brings back the feeling of beginning again.

Pain, distraction, and difficult choices

Grief shapes Ava’s choices without determining them in a simple or consistent way. Being with Lincoln can briefly make school troubles and the prospect of her father’s reaction recede. Ava is unsure whether their closeness means that Lincoln likes her romantically, but she knows his company lets her feel something other than misery. That relief is complicated by the knowledge that this intimacy would not have happened if Kelly were alive. The comfort does not cancel the loss; it exists inside it.

A later night with Lincoln makes the same tension more unsettled. Ava recalls leaving a disappointing party, drinking and talking with him at MacGreggor Park, and deciding that she did not want to have sex in the park’s spinning structure. The next morning she feels both embarrassed and grateful that she made that choice. She also remembers that the night became more difficult: after falling, she was upset, pushed Lincoln away when he tried to hold her hand, and later cried while he tried to comfort her. Looking back, she recognizes that sadness and intoxication had been shaping a series of decisions. Her response is not to treat the night as proof that she has recovered or as proof that she cannot make choices, but to register both the risks and the moments when she protected a boundary.

Memory, uncertainty, and the search for meaning

Ava’s grief returns through remembered details that once seemed unremarkable. She recalls an afternoon when Kelly handled a photograph, erased a drawing on Ava’s mirror, and carefully replaced it with a heart. At the time, these gestures felt like part of an ordinary visit. In retrospect, Ava wonders whether Kelly had already known what she was going to do and whether the heart was meant to convey love and remembrance. The memory cannot settle that question. Its significance lies partly in the distance between what Ava understood then and what she fears the gestures might have meant afterward.

Ava also turns over the circumstances of Kelly’s death, searching for information that could explain it and imagining what Kelly might have felt. The novel gives her no complete answer that can undo the loss. Ava’s growing understanding is that Kelly was in profound pain; she comes to describe the death as an attempt to end that pain, rather than a simple rejection of life. This interpretation helps Ava articulate what she believes Kelly’s death means for her own future, but it does not make the death less painful or remove the uncertainty that grief keeps reopening.

Therapy and grief without a fixed route

In therapy, Nola gives Ava a visual alternative to the expectation that grief should follow a predictable course. She draws time along one line and the experience of grief along another, marks the death as the beginning, and fills the space that follows with irregular purple lines. The untidy graph gives form to a central claim: there is no typical path. Nola does not promise an immediate resolution; she acknowledges that grief will remain difficult and that she cannot say when it will become a little easier. Ava, who has found other reassurances unconvincing, feels relief at being told that what she feels need not match anyone else’s timetable.

The need for such care is serious. Ava tells Gideon that she does not want to kill herself, while acknowledging that the idea of dying can sometimes seem acceptable. She also rejects the comforting formula that time heals every wound, observing that some losses remain too large to be described as healed. When Gideon recognizes that neither of them can fix the loss, the exchange makes room for a different kind of support: presence and honesty rather than a solution. Later, Ava continues seeing Nola every fortnight. Nola’s box analogy helps her think about emotions without treating any particular feeling as wrong; the danger lies in choices made under their pressure, not in the mere presence of sadness, anger, or confusion.

Continuing bonds and moving forward

At the gathering marking one year since Kelly’s death, Ava and Kelly’s family share stories at the park’s rotunda. They laugh about Kelly’s antics and cry happy tears as they celebrate her life. The gathering does not close the relationship; it gives grief a communal form in which affection and sorrow appear together. Lincoln’s tight, lifting hug that day also reflects the complicated connection between him and Ava. They have not spoken much in the months afterward, though they sometimes exchange texts. Ava describes their bond as neither quite friendship nor quite family, and holds mixed feelings about what happened between them without reducing it to either regret or pride.

Ava’s later reflections keep the same complexity in view. She knows that sadness, hurt, anger, confusion, grief, and love remain, even when they are not overwhelming her. She accepts that Kelly’s death will continue to define her in some way, while rejecting the idea that moving forward means moving on from Kelly or ending their bond. She decides that she must keep living, in part because she believes Kelly would have wanted her to. The ending’s happiness does not erase the earlier pain: when Ava finds a pale blue envelope addressed to her, her tears come from a new feeling, happiness. The novel thus makes forward movement compatible with memory, and treats joy not as evidence that grief is over but as one more feeling that can now be carried alongside it.