Lola

Lola is Henry Page’s close friend, an accomplished student-publication designer, and one of the people who helps carry others through heartbreak. Her role brings together the practical and the personal: she gives the Westland Post’s redemption issue its shape, helps preserve a fragile connection between Grace Town and Henry, and later joins Murray Finch in caring for Henry after Lola’s own relationship ends. The novel presents her not only as a source of support but also as someone who receives it in turn.

Editorial Work and the Redemption Issue

During the last-minute effort to produce the Westland Post’s redemption issue, Lola contributes sleek design and organizes the assembled material. The finished paper is visibly uneven: her polished design sits beside Buck’s hand-drawn sketches, while the junior writers’ copy has not received enough editing. Yet the issue’s orange, black, and white palette catches the eye, the drawings are beautiful, and its confessions range from funny and foolish to heartbreaking. Its coherence is not perfection; it comes in part from the way Lola arranges mismatched contributions into an emphatic whole.

The result reaches the printer two hours early, although the editorial work remains rough enough that Henry describes the paper as a Frankenstein’s monster. The issue’s success is therefore not simply a triumph of polish. Lola’s organizing makes room for the variety and disorder of the contributions, and the finished publication carries that unruliness as part of its character. At least 60 percent of the student body picks up a copy, a 15 percent rise in circulation that helps persuade Alistair Hink and Valentine to let Henry remain in charge for another issue. Lola’s design and arrangement are part of the work that turns a threatened publication into a tangible success.

Grace’s Paper and Henry’s Redemption

Lola is also associated with a damaged poem that has been carefully repaired. Grace’s contribution to the Post is a sheet torn into small pieces and joined with clear tape on the back; gold ink traces the jagged scars across the text. Its title, “I do not love you,” has been circled in gold. Henry suspects that Lola returned the page to Grace, but the account presents this as his inference rather than a confirmed exchange. The repaired sheet nevertheless links Lola to an object through which Grace’s pain and the possibility of repair become visible.

After Grace leaves, Henry gives Lola an envelope from Grace and calls it his redemption. Lola opens and reads it, then grins. The contents are not disclosed, so the moment’s force rests on the exchange itself: Henry passes Grace’s message to his friend, and Lola’s response is visible without the narrative explaining it. In the aftermath of rejection, she is the person with whom he shares this small, consequential encounter. Her presence connects Grace’s final contribution to Henry’s changing understanding of loss and recovery.

Friendship as Reciprocal Care

Lola’s support for Henry and Murray is described as something she had already offered them: when she later suffers heartbreak, they care for her in the same way she had cared for them. The relationship is thus reciprocal rather than a simple pattern of Lola always acting as the helper. Her own distress does not erase her place in their friendship; it makes that mutuality explicit.

When Lola and Georgia break up without warning or explanation, Henry and Murray draw her back into company through deliberately ordinary, shared activities. They make her sing Christmas carols and drink eggnog, then bundle her into a hat, scarf, and gloves for a drive to the mall with Madison Carlson to have their picture taken with Santa. On Christmas Eve, they watch The Nightmare Before Christmas together, with Lola wedged between Henry and Murray under Henry’s bedcovers. These details show care as sustained presence and participation, not as a quick solution. The narration stresses that Lola does not get better quickly, but that her friends help.

Character and Narrative Role

Lola’s editorial and personal roles echo one another without becoming identical. On the newspaper, she gives disparate pieces an arrangement that readers can receive; in friendship, she and the others stay beside someone whose pain cannot be neatly resolved. Both roles depend on attention to other people’s contributions and needs, but the novel also gives Lola a distinct turn at being the person cared for.

The details surrounding her make her consequential without supplying a full account of her life beyond these relationships and actions. She is a capable collaborator whose design helps shape a widely circulated issue, a trusted recipient of Grace’s envelope, and a friend whose breakup prompts Henry and Murray to return the care she once gave them. Taken together, these episodes define her place in the novel through acts of arrangement and companionship: she helps make a collective publication legible, and she belongs to a friendship in which no one is expected to endure heartbreak alone.