Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving becomes a hoped-for return to Brendan Fletcher’s old life—and a test of how much that life has changed. He looks forward to familiar rituals and the possibility of reconnecting with Becca, but the holiday approaches against a college experience he can no longer honestly present as successful.

The Anticipated Return

Brendan wants to go home for Thanksgiving to sleep in his own bed and eat decent food. He imagines sneaking onto the golf course with Troy and Wade, smoking blunts, and drinking cheap vodka as they did in the old days. The return is not simply a break from campus: it promises a temporary recovery of familiar company and habits.

His plans have a set sequence. He expects to get drunk with his friends on Wednesday night, then turn up at the homecoming game on Thursday morning and compare hangovers with people he has not seen for three months. The routine makes the distance from home feel both measurable and, to him, much longer than the calendar suggests.

Becca and the Homecoming Game

The game also gives Brendan a hoped-for opening with Becca, who will be cheering on the sidelines at the last football game of her career. He wants to catch her in a sentimental mood and persuade her to give him another chance. His attention to her red cheerleading dress is bound up with that hope, but his private language about her splits into two versions: he used “H is for hot” with Becca and “H is for ho” with his friends. The contrast exposes a gap between romantic longing and the degrading way he talks about her in their absence.

The Story He Expects to Tell

Brendan dreads being asked about college because he expects to pretend that it has been full of parties, hookups, challenging classes, inspiring professors, and new friends. In reality, he is on track to fail Economics and Math, Amber is not answering his texts, and Zack is rarely around. His anticipated account of campus life is therefore a performance designed to conceal academic and social disappointment.

The strain with Zack is concrete: Zack spends his time with Lexa, sleeping in her room and pushing her wheelchair around campus. After encountering Zack at the Student Center Chick-fil-A, Brendan asks directly whether Zack is angry with him. Zack says he is not, but Brendan says it does not feel that way and asks why Zack never told him about Lexa. Thanksgiving thus gathers several unresolved losses into the promise of going home: Brendan hopes to recover closeness with Becca while carrying the silence of Amber and the unease of a friendship with Zack that no longer feels secure.