Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is both a recurring family season and a late-November turning point in Henry Isaac Page's story. Its crowded rituals—visiting relatives, a chaotic dinner, Black Friday shopping, and the annual fair—set a comic domestic backdrop for Grace Town's birthday and the painful disclosures and acts of mourning that follow.

The holiday in the Page household

At the end of November, relatives arrive from across the country for the Thanksgiving weekend craft fair, to eat the family's food, and to make Henry Isaac Page's life difficult. Because Henry is a senior with studying to do, the usual arrangement of relatives taking over the basement is changed: they are assigned Sadie Page's old bedroom and air mattresses in the living room. The visitors include Henry's aunt Juliette and three children—Pongo, Duchess, and Otis—whose older siblings have changed their names to Bradley and Asher and chosen colleges far away. Lola Leung's aunt and uncle, Wing and Richard, stay at the Page house with their children, Sarah and Brodie.

The holiday dinner turns these arrangements into a parade of family mishaps. Albert leaves in tears after Uncle Michael introduces him to Lola Leung's relatives as his long-term housemate. Juliette overcooks the turkey and asks Pongo about smoking pot midway through the meal; Granny Page then knocks Brodie briefly unconscious with a Wiffle Ball bat while demonstrating what she has learned at the YMCA. By the family's standards, the gathering is a success: the police are not called, and Uncle Nick does not arrive to violate his restraining order.

Black Friday extends the holiday's disorder into the town's stores. The family sets out at five in the morning, joining crowds so large that they nearly get caught in a stampede. Pepper spray leaves their eyes burning, Brodie goes missing for several hours, and reports circulate that someone has been stabbed in a department store. Henry nevertheless comes away with a GoPro and an animatronic Yoda at an 85-percent discount, a small triumph that the narration sets against the day's danger and consumer frenzy.

The fair and Grace's birthday

The Thanksgiving weekend craft fair began as a showcase for livestock and fall produce, but over its roughly seventy-year history it became a major annual social event for teenagers across the city. Its carnival lights, cold air, and fried food give the fair an atmosphere distinct from the Page household's crowded rooms. Grace Town invites about a hundred people, most of them from East River, to her birthday party there. Lola Leung warns Henry that a storm is coming, although his weather app predicts little more than light rain; when Lola tries to take his phone, he has already accepted the invitation.

Henry treats the evening as unusually important. He cuts his hair short, buys a gray marl jacket, black skinny jeans, and a black scarf, shines his shoes, and wears an expensive wool coat his parents gave him early for Christmas. His careful transformation makes the fair a point of anticipation as well as a holiday gathering: he hopes to appear attractive to Grace, while the gathering's cold, dark weather lends the birthday an ominous edge.

Grief, memory, and release

In the aftermath of Grace's disappearance, Henry acknowledges that people had been worried about her. Grace tells him that after Dominic Sawyer died, others watched her for signs that she might kill herself, even interrupting her in the bathroom. She says she was not depressed but angry. Henry recognizes that he, too, had feared she was dead and had mistaken that fear for understanding her; in her account, Dom had been the person who truly knew her.

Grace then recounts meeting Dom when she was nine. Her father had died, her mother had been absent for days, and, with no food left at home, she was taken by her uncle to Mary, a woman he worked with. Dom was jumping on a trampoline when Grace arrived. He invited her to play Mario Kart, patiently taught her, and let her win; later, they held hands while watching cartoons in his tree house. Grace describes the day as one of the best of her childhood and recalls deciding she would marry him. Her story presents their bond not as a romance that began in adolescence, but as a source of welcome and family at a moment when she had lacked both.

At the abandoned train station, Grace takes the keepsakes from Dom's shrine out of a small metal box: the anchor necklace she wore when Henry first saw her, a Strokes keychain, and Dom's unwashed Ramones T-shirt. She walks with Henry into the pond and releases the objects one by one, then lets the box—marked DOM GRADE 10—sink among the fish and debris. The act gives physical form to a change in her relationship with her grief: she parts with the objects, though the story does not claim that grief or uncertainty has simply ended.

The season's aftermath

Thanksgiving's crowded calendar places celebration, family disorder, and mourning close together, but it does not resolve them into a neat holiday reconciliation. A week later, during the remainder of the semester, Grace is no longer the first thing Henry thinks of when he wakes; she is the second. The narration describes his pain as an infection beginning to clear and a wound beginning to heal. That incremental shift, rather than a sudden cure, marks the season's lasting consequence: Henry realizes he will survive.