Lennie’s emotional and sexual awakening

Lennie’s emotional and sexual awakening is the transformation that follows Bailey’s death: feelings and desires that once seemed remote become immediate, while awareness of mortality makes both pain and possibility more vivid. The change is neither a simple escape from grief nor a clean passage into adulthood. It unsettles Lennie, strains her loyalties, and ultimately helps her imagine a life that can include sorrow without being defined only by it.

A New Intensity After Bailey’s Death

At Bailey’s funeral, Lennie is surprised to find herself noticing boys even as she struggles to absorb her sister’s death. She catches the attention of grieving acquaintances and finds herself returning their looks, a response that feels unfamiliar and embarrassing in the setting. Joe stands apart from the others: his open, exuberant smile draws her in, and she begins imagining what it might be like to kiss him. The thought is interrupted by the recognition that she can no longer go home and tell Bailey about a new boy in band. Attraction and bereavement therefore arrive in the same instant, one opening toward connection and the other reminding her of the sister she has lost.

The change soon becomes difficult for Lennie to contain. Alone in The Sanctum during the summer, she catches herself kissing a pillow and is unsettled by how persistently her thoughts return to boys. Earlier sexual experiences had left her feeling detached; passion had belonged more readily to the novels she loved than to her own life. Now her imagination returns to Toby, Bailey’s boyfriend, despite Lennie’s awareness that this desire crosses a boundary and conflicts with a promise to Bailey. Her confusion is not just about whom she wants. She is alarmed that her feelings and impulses seem to have intensified beyond her control, and that grief has not made desire disappear.

Attraction, Intimacy, and Emotional Risk

Lennie’s awakening develops through different forms of closeness, not as a single, uncomplicated romance. Her attraction to Toby is entangled with their shared bereavement and with her guilt about the intimacy between them. In conversation with him, she asks whether he, too, has felt more alive since Bailey’s death. Toby confirms that his feelings have become more intense and describes taking risks alone on his skateboard, sometimes while drunk. Their exchange connects Lennie’s private sense of emotional excess to another bereaved person’s experience, without making their responses identical or resolving the complications between them.

With Joe, the same intensity moves toward mutual affection. Lennie recognizes that she feels different from the person she had been before Bailey died; in a conversation with Joe, she describes herself as newly awake, but also newly conscious that catastrophe can happen without warning. Joe helps her consider the other side of that knowledge: if the worst can happen at any time, so can the best. Lennie immediately connects this possibility to the present moment with him. Later, as Joe becomes serious and addresses her, Lennie experiences their kiss as an opening rather than a retreat from sorrow. The scene makes intimacy part of her changed apprehension of life: she can be drawn toward another person even while knowing that love exposes her to loss.

From Guardedness to a More Exposed Self

Lennie comes to understand her former self as protected but emotionally muted. Imagining the life she might have led if Bailey were still alive, she thinks she would probably have remained happy in a mild, contained way, moving through life like a turtle sheltered in its shell. The person she is becoming feels more exposed: grief and devastation coexist with a desire to make music, and the world seems more charged because death has made its uncertainty impossible to ignore. She worries that anything good emerging from Bailey’s death would be morally wrong, as if growth could diminish the loss. Remembering that Bailey herself had been vividly alive, and had urged Lennie to be so too, helps her understand that living more openly can honor Bailey’s life rather than justify her death.

This change also touches Lennie’s relationship with music and ordinary life. After two hours of practicing Cavallini’s Adagio and Tarantella, she finds the experience astonishing and considers returning to summer band practice. Reconnecting with Sarah, she is eager to tell her about Joe, though she is not ready to speak about Toby. The distinction shows that awakening does not make Lennie uniformly candid or settled: she moves toward friendship and music while still avoiding parts of her own experience. Her renewed attention to music nonetheless gives the intensity somewhere to go beyond private longing and confusion.

Grief Carried Into the Future

Lennie’s understanding of the change deepens as she recognizes that her future itself is painful: she will continue living while Bailey will not. She does not conclude that grief will pass or that awakening cancels guilt. Instead, she accepts that Bailey’s death will recur in her experience, because loving Bailey means continuing to mourn her. She resolves to love the world and to imitate Bailey through daring, spirit, and joy. The realization turns the question of whether Lennie is allowed to feel alive into a commitment to live while keeping her sister central to her life.

That commitment is embodied in Lennie’s later run through the woods toward the cemetery. As she runs, the weight of death that has clung to her for months begins to loosen, and she experiences herself moving toward the coming days and years. At Bailey’s grave, she places a notebook containing Gram’s letters to their mother in the stone’s small cabinet, wanting Bailey to remain part of every story. She also finds the orange topaz ring Toby had apparently intended for Bailey, a sign of the future Bailey never got to see, and puts it beside the notebook after kissing it. Lennie’s final gesture with her dying houseplant—carrying it to the falls and letting it go—marks a changed relation to the burden she has been carrying, but not an erasure of loss. Her awakening ends not in freedom from grief but in a more capacious life: desire, music, memory, and sorrow remain bound together.