Shake It Off

“Shake It Off” is the song playing at Homecoming when Niru and Meredith move through the public energy of the dance into the secluded gardens below the Washington National Cathedral. Its significance lies in the contrast between collective performance and private uncertainty: the song belongs to a room full of movement, but the memory attached to it becomes one of hesitation, attraction, and a question that friendship alone cannot answer.

Place in the Homecoming Scene

The song appears as Niru and Meredith attend Homecoming together with an assumed sense of mutual belonging. They twirl to “Shake It Off” before bouncing to “Jumpman,” participating in the exuberant, highly social atmosphere of the dance. At some point, however, they leave the music behind and walk arm in arm toward the gardens at the foot of the Washington National Cathedral. The song therefore marks the threshold between an adolescent public ritual and the more vulnerable encounter that follows.

The movement away from the dance is not presented as a clean break from intimacy but as its extension. Niru and Meredith remain physically linked as they cross the lawn, and the music’s energetic repetition gives way to quiet paths, rose bushes, wildflower beds, and a gazebo where another couple is caressing in the shadows. The discovery makes the private implications of Niru and Meredith’s companionship newly visible without resolving them. What had seemed like ordinary friendship acquires the pressure of comparison and possibility.

From Communal Motion to Private Tension

Meredith’s reaction to the couple they see intensifies the scene’s mixture of amusement and erotic awareness. She identifies the woman as Ms. McConnell and laughs about what she has witnessed, then pulls Niru into a stone nook beneath an ancient evergreen. The warm fall weather keeps the fountains running; an oxidized copper sun sends water into a small pool, while Meredith sits on the ledge and draws Niru’s legs beneath her because the stone feels cold against her bare thighs. She borrows his jacket, and her strapless black dress threatens to slip while she appears not to notice or care.

Against this increasingly intimate physical arrangement, Niru searches for somewhere to put his hands and smiles to conceal his foolishness. Meredith’s breath carries the taste of cherry Dum Dums, and her legs tense as she speaks. The scene’s bodily details make the emotional transition more forceful than an explicit declaration would: the movement and music of “Shake It Off” have not disappeared so much as been converted into nervous energy, proximity, and an awareness that neither character names directly.

Retrospective Meaning and Unanswered Expectation

The song becomes most important when Meredith later asks Niru why he did not kiss her in the Bishop’s Garden at Homecoming. Her question turns the remembered performance into evidence in an unresolved relational dispute. The issue is not simply whether a kiss occurred; it is why Niru failed to act when the setting, their physical closeness, and the apparent freedom of the evening seemed to permit it.

Because the song is remembered alongside the transition from dancing to seclusion, it carries a double charge. On the surface, it evokes carefree participation in school life. In retrospect, it precedes a moment in which Meredith expects recognition and Niru withholds it, whether from uncertainty, fear, or an inability to translate their closeness into the form she anticipates. The later question reveals that Meredith has treated the night as a missed opportunity, while Niru has carried it as an encounter whose meaning remained dangerously unsettled.

Recurring Contrast with Niru’s Later Life

The Homecoming memory also stands against the coercive religious and familial pressures that shape Niru’s later experience. In Nigeria, Niru’s father takes control of his passport and tickets and brings him toward a week of prayer with Reverend Olumide and religious intervention. Bishop Okereke then treats Niru’s homosexuality as a demonic condition and demands confession and rededication. The freedom suggested by a popular dance song is consequently placed beside a world in which Niru’s identity is interpreted, condemned, and subjected to correction by others.

That contrast extends to Niru’s relationship with Damien. Niru later finds moments of intimacy with Damien in Washington, including time at Sportzone, a park near the Potomac River, and Damien’s disordered dorm room. Damien imagines a shared apartment in Venice Beach and tells Niru that he is safe with him, even as Niru immediately qualifies that safety. The earlier Homecoming scene with Meredith thus belongs to a continuing pattern: music, dance, and friendship create openings into self-expression, but those openings remain fragile because Niru has not found a consistently safe space.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

“Shake It Off” functions less as a standalone musical reference than as a compact marker of a social world Niru is able to enter without fully inhabiting. Its rhythm carries him into the dance, while the remembered scene slows around touch, embarrassment, and the possibility of a kiss. The song’s title suggests release from judgment, but the surrounding episode does not grant such release. Instead, it exposes how quickly communal pleasure can become an intimate test and how a seemingly light evening can acquire lasting emotional consequence.

The reference also helps organize the book’s tension between movement and constraint. Niru can dance, leave the room, cross the grass, and enter a secluded garden, yet he remains unable to make the decisive gesture Meredith later demands an explanation for. In that sense, “Shake It Off” names the surface freedom of the moment while the scene beneath it records the weight that cannot simply be shaken away: desire, uncertainty, friendship, and the fear of what acknowledging desire might require.