Barbara Robinson

Barbara Robinson is Jerome Robinson’s younger sister, a lively nine-year-old whose friendship, family affection, and excitement over a boy band bring the Robinson household—and its dog, Odell—into the path of Brady Hartsfield’s violence. Her ordinary childhood pleasures become an important point of vulnerability in Brady’s plan to inflict grief on Jerome and K. William Hodges, and she is present at the Mingo Auditorium when the threatened concert attack reaches its decisive moment.

Identity and Everyday Life

Barbara lives with her family and is still young enough for her mother, Tanya Robinson, to set conditions on her outings. She and her friend Hilda regularly visit Zoney’s GoMart, a couple of blocks from home. Although they say the grape Icees are the attraction, their real pleasure is spending time with their other young friends: sitting on the low stone wall behind the store, gossiping, giggling, and trading treats. Brady has seen the girls from his Mr. Tastey ice cream truck and waves to them; they wave back, part of the neighborhood’s easy familiarity with the ice-cream man.

Those visits are permitted only once or twice a week, and Barbara cannot go alone. She and Hilda must return within an hour and must take Odell with them. Since dogs cannot enter the store, they tether him to the outside restroom door handle while they go in. The routine is both a small measure of parental protection and a danger Brady learns how to exploit: he notices exactly where Odell will be left and when the girls will be inside.

Barbara’s relationship with Jerome is affectionate and unselfconscious. When K. William Hodges arrives at the Robinson home, she pauses her game of jump rope to greet him with a high-five and a dap, then hurries back to her friends. Jerome is on the porch with Odell, drinking orange juice and minding her while their parents are out grocery shopping. He jokes that she is more hip than their parents think; Hodges cautions him not to take her safety for granted. Later, Barbara runs up to Jerome, sweaty from play, to ask whether she and Hilda and Tonya can watch Regular Show and whether he will make them pancakes. Her request, cheeky and affectionate, shows how readily she treats her older brother as a caretaker and companion.

Brady’s Plan and the Threat to the Family

Brady intends to poison Odell with a lethal ball of hamburger. He has worked out that Barbara and Hilda will leave the dog tied outside Zoney’s GoMart while they go in for their grape-flavored ice, and plans to use his personal, nondescript Subaru to deliver the poisoned food. He expects the dog might survive for as long as twenty-four hours, and the delay is part of the cruelty: Brady wants Odell’s suffering to become grief for Barbara and Jerome, then pass from Jerome to Hodges. In his view, the dog’s death would be retaliation for Hodges’s insulting message to him.

Hodges’s unease becomes visible when he watches Barbara and the other girls walk down the sidewalk, their matching shirts bright against the threat he cannot yet explain. They trade Odell’s leash back and forth; Hodges knows he cannot put the Robinson family under lockdown, but the girls look very small to him. He asks Jerome whether Odell would protect them if someone tried to hurt them. Jerome answers gravely that the dog would protect them with his life. The exchange makes the dog more than a household pet: he is the girls’ companion and an assumed shield, even as Brady has chosen him as the means of reaching them.

The threat expands from the plan against Odell to the ’Round Here concert at the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex. Jerome tells Janey Patterson that Barbara, Hilda, and their friends are desperate to attend the Thursday-night show. Barbara is nine, nearly ten, and the concert is a major event in her young life. When Jerome later realizes that his mother and sister will be at the show, the concert becomes a direct source of alarm for Hodges and the others. The risk is sharpened by the audience the event is expected to draw: Mingo Auditorium seats four thousand, and most concertgoers are anticipated to be mothers and preteen girls.

The Concert and Barbara’s Excitement

On the eve of the concert, Barbara comes into the kitchen in a spangly skirt, blue clogs, and a T-shirt bearing the image of Cam, her favorite member of ’Round Here. The shirt declares her devotion; she asks her mother whether the outfit looks too babyish, then asks permission to borrow dangling peace-sign earrings. Tanya agrees to the earrings and, after hesitation, to lipstick, but draws the line at eye shadow. Barbara accepts the limit with a laugh and gives her mother an extravagant hug. Her anticipation is plain: she cannot wait for the following night.

At the venue, Tanya drives a borrowed Tahoe into a car park that is already three-quarters full at six-twenty. The girls—Barbara, Hilda Carver, Betsy DeWitt, and Dinah Scott—bounce in their seats and play all six of their group’s ’Round Here CDs through the changer. Their excitement is so infectious that Tanya, despite the noise and traffic stress, finds herself enjoying the outing. When they spot a thin, pale, bald man in a wheelchair with a concert pennant and a urine bag, Betsy calls attention to him as a crippled man. Tanya sees a person who appears pitiable, not the danger Brady represents.

Once inside, Barbara is absorbed by the concert. When the stage lights blaze red and a call finally gets through the jammed phone network, her cell vibrates in her hand. She ignores it: a phone call is the last thing she wants during the show, and the deafening noise would make it impossible to hear anyway. She waves the phone above her head along with the crowd, including her mother. The singer, Cam Knowles, strides onstage and begins “You Don’t Have to Be Lonely Again”; most of the audience remains standing, phones raised. The missed call is a small but consequential detail: at the moment someone is trying to reach her, Barbara is entirely taken up with the spectacle she has been waiting for.

Recognition at Mingo and Narrative Significance

Brady eventually recognizes Barbara in the audience. During the concert, as a song plays, the memory he had been struggling to retrieve comes back to him: the Robinson family’s home, the dog he had meant to kill, and the boy who used to run to the Mr. Tastey truck after cutting Hodges’s lawn. He recalls Barbara’s childhood demand for chocolate and identifies her two rows up to the right, with her friends and a woman he takes to be her mother. Jerome is not with them. Brady is glad of that, but his attention turns toward the women who are there, and the danger shifts from the planned harm to Odell toward Barbara and her mother at the concert.

Near the stage, a woman hurries up the aisle toward the man in the wheelchair. Barbara tugs Tanya’s sleeve, drawing her attention away from the performance, and asks if the person she sees is Jerome. The recognition interrupts the concert’s shared excitement at the very point when the narration says that everything happens. The supplied passage stops there, so it does not establish what Barbara next sees, whether she is injured, or what ultimately happens to her.

Barbara’s role is grounded in the contrast between childhood routines and adult violence. The jump rope, grape Icees, borrowed earrings, fan shirts, and vibrating phone mark her life as ordinary and protected, while Brady studies those same routines for opportunities to hurt the people around her. At the Mingo, that contrast is made immediate: Barbara is not seeking danger or participating in the conflict, but attending a concert with her friends and mother. Her recognition of Jerome becomes the last recorded action in the supplied evidence, leaving her outcome unresolved at the moment the threatened attack breaks into the scene.