Kelly

Kelly is Ava Spirini’s best friend and the defining absence in Ava’s life after Kelly’s death. The novel presents her not only through the crisis that ends her life, but through the ordinary intimacy of their friendship: private jokes, shared memories, and plans for a future they expected to reach together. Ava’s later recollections preserve Kelly as a complicated person rather than a symbol of loss, while also showing how little a surviving friend can know about another person’s private pain.

Identity and Friendship

Kelly, also called Kel by Ava, is the friend whose death leaves Ava feeling that life itself has slowed. Six months afterward, Ava resents people who assume that their own experiences of bereavement allow them to understand the loss. To Ava, Kelly was not interchangeable with a relative or a pet; she was her closest friend, and the scale of that attachment makes other people’s impatience with Ava’s grief feel like impatience with Kelly herself.

Their closeness was built from the stuff of everyday adolescence as much as from serious confidences. They spent time in each other’s bedrooms, mocked teachers, went to parties, and imagined how brilliant adulthood would be. On what Ava remembers as their last ordinary afternoon together, they watched videos and laughed at their own reactions. Kelly picked up a framed photograph from Year 7 camp, recalling their first kisses during a dare. The memory is affectionate and comic, but its ordinariness later becomes painful: Ava cannot identify anything in it that clearly announced a final goodbye.

Kelly’s youthful impulsiveness also appears in the story of her crush on Andre Daar, a Year 12 student. In Year 8, Kelly wrote him a love letter in Arabic using Google Translate and put it in his locker. When she regretted sending it, Ava helped her retrieve it with a crowbar and tin snips. At school, Mrs Bryan condemned the locker vandalism in an assembly, and people assumed it had been an act of prejudice. No one discovered that the two girls had done it to recover Kelly’s letter. The episode captures their loyalty and shared mischief, as well as the gap between how an action looks from the outside and what it means between friends.

Mental-Health History

Kelly experienced periods of profound emotional numbness and was hospitalized more than once. During one hospital stay, she told Ava that feeling nothing was itself heavy, and that she would rather be able to feel anger or sadness. Ava usually sat with her during visiting hours but struggled to find a useful response. Afraid of saying the wrong thing, she often said little; in retrospect, she wishes she had been able to do more than sit beside Kelly in silence.

Kelly was later admitted to a psychiatric unit for a week of daily therapy. She disliked being there: the other patients seemed older or more unwell, and the atmosphere made her feel worse. On one visit, Ava and Kelly watched another patient become distressed during an interaction with a nurse. Kelly made a lighthearted remark about not being afraid of the food the nurse was trying to give the patient, and the girls giggled, then felt bad about laughing. Their exchange briefly restores their familiar joking manner, but it does not make the hospital setting easy for Kelly.

A small visit over chips became, for Ava, the moment when the seriousness of Kelly’s condition broke through. Kelly, who normally welcomed chips, declined them. Ava recognized that this was not a trivial change and, for the first time, imagined that Kelly might die. The fear was too much for her to face then, so she turned her attention elsewhere. The novel makes the memory important precisely because it does not provide Ava with a clear warning she could have acted upon: she sees the significance only afterward, while also remembering that Kelly sometimes became better and their life together returned to its familiar rhythms.

Final Memories and Death

Ava’s recollection of Kelly’s last afternoon is unsettled by hindsight. Kelly looked at the Year 7 photograph and said she would never forget it; she then erased a drawing on Ava’s mirror and carefully replaced it with a heart. Both actions fitted habits Ava already knew. At the time, nothing seemed unusual. Later, Ava wonders whether the heart and Kelly’s remark were attempts to leave her a message of love. She cannot establish that they were. The uncertainty protects the scene from becoming a neat farewell: it may have been an ordinary afternoon for Kelly, too.

That night, Kelly ate dinner with her family, said goodnight as usual, and drank a large amount of vodka in her room. She did not leave a note. Ava understands that Kelly became sick while asleep and died. The account leaves Ava wrestling with what Kelly intended and whether, at the end, she might have changed her mind. In thinking through the death, Ava imagines that Kelly’s suffering had become so overwhelming that she could see no other way out. This is Ava’s effort to understand, not access to Kelly’s unspoken thoughts; the novel preserves the painful difference between a survivor’s explanation and certainty about another person’s final state of mind.

Ava learns of the death early one morning after Kelly and Lincoln’s father calls Ava’s father. The call wakes her at 5:37; seven minutes later, her father comes into her room with tears in his eyes and tells her Kelly has died. Ava experiences the news as a rupture that leaves her unable to move or take in what is being said. Later, she counts thirty-one Sundays since Kelly’s death and finds that each Sunday begins with the same returning heaviness. The number turns grief into a calendar, marking how an event in the past keeps recurring in the present.

Kelly’s Continuing Presence

Kelly remains part of Ava’s life through recollection, not through a simple resolution of grief. Ava recalls their last afternoon repeatedly, searching it for clues, and also remembers the ordinary days that had seemed to promise an uncomplicated future. The two kinds of memory resist each other: the hospital visit makes danger imaginable, while the videos, jokes, and photograph show how normal their friendship could still feel. Neither cancels the other, and Ava cannot turn hindsight into a certainty that she possessed at the time.

Kelly’s death also changes the relationship between Ava and Kelly’s brother, Lincoln. In the aftermath, Ava finds that spending time with him can briefly make the rest of her life recede, even as she recognizes that their closeness would not have taken this form if Kelly were alive. Much later, Ava describes their connection as an unusual bond between people who are neither quite friends nor quite family. Her account acknowledges both the comfort and the complications that grief brings to surviving relationships.

At graduation, Gideon performs a poem Ava had written about Kelly. The poem remembers the difference between Kelly’s past and present, her struggle to feel, and the fight Ava believes she carried on privately. It rejects consoling explanations that would make Kelly’s death seem necessary or beneficial, and insists that speaking of her as a waste would repeat the harm of allowing her life to be reduced to that ending. The poem is Ava’s tribute and interpretation, not a replacement for Kelly’s own voice, which remains partly unknowable.

By the novel’s close, Ava does not understand moving forward as leaving Kelly behind. She continues therapy with Nola and accepts that grief can include sadness, anger, confusion, and love at once. Kelly’s death will continue to shape Ava, but Ava concludes that it need not prevent her from living. She understands her task as carrying the bond forward while refusing to let her own pain determine the end of her life. Kelly’s significance therefore lies not in a lesson that loss can be overcome, but in the continuing relationship Ava makes room for as she begins to imagine a future.