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Summary
1. Don’t Nobody – 65. At the Elevator
Will Holloman is 15 years old, and his older brother Shawn was shot two days before the story begins. Will says that the reader will not believe his story, which is recounted as a first-person novel in verse, but swears that it happened. He describes standing outside on the basketball court, talking to his friend Tony, about whether or not they were going to get any taller. He says his brother Shawn grew a foot or a foot and a half when he was his age. Then, he hears shots and gets down on the ground, making it clear he’s familiar with responding to gunshots in his neighborhood. When he arises, he sees there is only one body: his brother’s. He describes Shawn’s girlfriend and their mother screaming and crying over Shawn’s dead body.
He can’t recall if the cops questioned him but says that everyone knows not to say anything to the cops about the murder. Will says that the blood looks like chocolate syrup. He introduces his first of many anagrams throughout the novel, SCARE = CARES, which he has written on the wall. He says usually when something goes horribly wrong, he takes comfort in the moon, but the night Shawn died, there was no moon. He says it was getting new, but nothing is ever new in his neighborhood. He covers his head with a pillow to block out the sound of his mother mourning. Shawn was coming back from getting his mother’s eczema medication in a rival neighborhood when he was shot.
Will introduces the reader to The Rules for his community. The rules are: #1 don’t cry, #2 don’t snitch, and #3 get revenge. Will follows The Rules, not crying when his brother dies, even though he feels like small fists are pounding behind his eyes. He doesn’t snitch either, though he believes he knows who killed his brother: Carlson Riggs, a gang member who Shawn grew up with. Riggs taught Shawn to do a Penny Drop, a flip off a monkey bar. He says he knows it was Riggs because a kill would make Riggs more powerful in the gang and because Will always knows who the murder in on murder shows on TV. He also says he just knows it’s Riggs. Will plans to follow Rule #3 and get revenge for Shawn’s death and kill Riggs.
Will describes the room he shared with Shawn, how he never went into his brother’s stuff. There’s a middle drawer in Shawn’s dresser that was the only thing in the room out of place, askew and jammed shut. Will gets Shawn’s gun from the drawer. It’s the first time he’s touched a gun. He sleeps with it under his pillow. When he wakes up, he puts the gun in his waistband, saying it looks like a steel tail. He plans to take the elevator down and go to Riggs’ place, ring the buzzer, cover his face with his shirt, and shoot Riggs. He waits for the elevator, staring at the down arrow, the gun already hurting his back.
Analysis
This section introduces The Rules as a motif in the novel, which are a codification of the cultural and familial expectations that have shaped Will. In the aftermath of his brother Shawn’s death, Will clings to The Rules now that he can’t hold onto his brother, reciting them to himself, using them as a directive now that the person who was guiding his life is gone. The Rules illustrate that, in the hard life of Will’s neighborhood, defined by the twinned violence of gang wars and police brutality, Will must control himself and become hardened in order to survive. For example, when Will feels like crying after his brother dies, but cannot because of Rule No. 1 (no crying), he describes it in violent terms, saying it feels as though someone is punching behind his eyes and kicking at his throat. This suggests that Will’s swallowed down tears, required by The Rules, manifest immediately as an internal experience of violence. The Rules also require Will to grow up before he is ready. For example, when he retrieves the gun from the middle drawer, he notes that it’s the first time he’s ever held a gun and says it has the weight of a baby. This image suggests that there’s something innocent as a baby being threatened by Will contemplating committing murder. By adhering to The Rules, Will has a path forward for navigating his life without his brother, but the cost of the Rules is Will’s tenderness and innocence, parts of his humanity.
This section introduces the symbol of the lost tooth, illustrating that grief comes as a loss of one’s self, too. When Will compares grief to the reader waking to find a stranger ripping a tooth out of their mouth, he captures the shock and pain of losing his brother. The fact that Will uses a stranger in this metaphor emphasizes how violating and violent his loss feels, expressing that someone unknown to him has come into his life and ruined it. The image also involves the stranger strapping the reader down and using pliers inside their mouth, suggesting that grief feels to Will like something hard and unforgiving in a tender part of himself. He describes the tooth as “one of the big important ones,” which gets at how much he needs his brother and how disorienting and shattering it is for Will to be without him. Despite how painful this image is, he says the worst part is the tongue searching for the missing tooth. In this image, he illustrates how much he is searching for his brother and continually rediscovering his absence.
This section also introduces the symbol of the middle drawer, which parallels Shawn’s locked up emotions and pent-up violence and is an apt illustration of toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity describes how the societal expectations associated with maleness, such as stoicism and aggression, are harmful. When Will describes the middle drawer, he says it’s the only thing askew in Shawn’s otherwise perfect side of the room, suggesting that there’s something wrong with the drawer. Inside, Shawn keeps his secrets, including the gun Will retrieves, suggesting that, similarly, Shawn has parts of himself that he keeps from his family, violent secrets that he has had to carry alone, and that there’s something wrong with this secrecy and violence. Will also compares the drawer to a crooked tooth in an otherwise perfect face, which parallels his previous thoughts about grief as a tooth that has been ripped from his mouth. This suggests that, in life, the secrets and violence that Shawn kept locked inside hurt him. It also suggests that Will is aware that they led to Shawn’s death, from him being ripped from his family and from his life.
