Grief and bereavement

Grief and bereavement shape Ava Spirini’s return to school, her relationships, and her sense of the future after the death of her best friend, Kelly Waititi. The novel presents mourning as neither orderly nor complete: anger and numbness can crowd out ordinary life, while affection, laughter, and calm can coexist with continuing loss. Ava’s movement forward does not require her to leave Kelly behind.

Loss in Public and Private

Ava’s grief first becomes visible as a protest against the way MacGreggor State College commemorates Kelly. After six months of holding herself in, Ava challenges the school’s attention to a plaque, a concrete base, and a newly planted tree, arguing that these gestures avoid the person they are supposed to honor. She insists that Kelly’s name be said. The outburst breaks the quiet, unobtrusive role Ava had meant to adopt when she returned to school; it also exposes how strongly the ceremony’s omissions have affected her.

School has already become difficult. Ava has been back full-time for only a month, after several weeks of part-time attendance, and she describes struggling to concentrate, missing school, and withdrawing from people who compare her loss with the deaths of their relatives or pets. To her, those comparisons fail to recognize that Kelly was her best friend. The ordinary demands of school feel remote beside a sadness that leaves her numb, while the adults’ apparent impatience with her inability to recover deepens her sense of being misunderstood.

Ava experiences time itself as altered. Six months seem both unbearably long and too short to justify other people’s expectation that she should be over the death. On Sundays, the loss returns with particular force: she counts thirty-one Sundays since Ava’s father told her that Kelly had died. The exact count gives recurring grief a calendar, but it does not make the days predictable or easier. The announcement remains a dividing point in Ava’s life, and she feels that parts of herself have stopped with it.

Anger, Guilt, and Complicated Bonds

Ava’s grief includes anger at Kelly for leaving her behind, a feeling she finds difficult to admit because it exists alongside love and longing. Her father’s past rule against using the word hate makes the distinction especially charged: Ava understands that ordinary dislike and profound rage are not the same, yet she recognizes that her feelings about Kelly’s death have crossed into anger. The novel does not treat this anger as evidence that Ava loved Kelly less. It shows the pain of loving someone who is no longer available to answer.

Her closeness with Lincoln Waititi, Kelly’s brother, brings temporary relief as well as further confusion. Ava finds that being with him can make school and other pressures recede, or at least allow her to feel something besides misery. That comfort is entangled with the fact that their intimacy would not have happened if Kelly were alive. After a night involving alcohol and a party, Ava is relieved that she did not make a further decision she would have regretted, but she remains shaken by the choices she has made while grieving. Later, when she and Lincoln acknowledge that they have been together despite not truly wanting that kind of relationship, grief surfaces as an argument about responsibility, care, and their shared loss. Lincoln’s admission that he misses Kelly too makes the encounter a moment of mutual recognition, not a resolution of their complicated bond.

Memory and the Work of Telling

Memories of Kelly return with new questions attached. Recalling an ordinary afternoon when Kelly drew on Ava’s mirror and carefully replaced a drawing with a heart, Ava wonders whether the gesture carried a meaning she could not recognize at the time. She cannot know what Kelly intended. The uncertainty becomes part of mourning: Ava revisits familiar details, trying to understand them without being able to turn memory into a definitive explanation for Kelly’s death.

Ava also struggles to speak about Kelly with people who did not know her or who are focused on Ava’s wellbeing. Her conversation with Gideon offers a different kind of opening. Drawing on their shared discussion of grief as something that can be put in a box, Ava says that Kelly’s loss was too large to fit there. Gideon listens, and Ava identifies the scale of Kelly’s presence as more than the sum of separate memories or traits. The image does not solve her grief; it gives her a way to express why it cannot simply be contained. Telling Gideon about Kelly marks a small change in trust, because Ava has not previously discussed her with him in this way.

Living With Loss

The novel places painful remembrance alongside ordinary activity rather than presenting them as mutually exclusive. Ava can be absorbed in memories of Kelly and still seek company, flirt with Lincoln, or try to have fun. Such moments offer brief relief, not proof that the loss has vanished. Ava’s later account of Kelly’s death shows how remembrance can turn into searching: she reviews what she knows and wonders whether Kelly’s pain had become overwhelming. The story allows those questions to remain painful and unresolved instead of claiming access to Kelly’s final intentions.

Ava’s understanding changes through therapy with Nola, whom she continues to see every fortnight. She learns to distinguish the feelings themselves from choices made under their influence, judging her intimacy with Lincoln as a poor choice and her breakup with Gideon as the right one despite its cost. At the gathering held a year after Kelly’s death, Kelly’s family and Ava share stories beneath a park rotunda, laughing and crying as they celebrate Kelly’s life. The event makes space for joy without making the anniversary a conclusion to mourning.

By the end, Ava still carries sadness, hurt, anger, confusion, grief, and love, but she feels calm; the feelings remain without dominating every part of her at that moment. She rejects the idea that she must move on from Kelly, whom she understands as her soul sister, and instead commits to moving forward. Her belief that Kelly wanted to end her pain, not her life, informs Ava’s resolve not to let her own pain end hers. The final glimpse of Ava’s eyes filling with happiness suggests that joy has become possible again, not that bereavement is finished. The novel’s account of grief rests on that distinction: a continuing bond with the dead can accompany a life that is still changing.