Summary

Part 1: Chapters 3-6

Chapter 3: LUCY, October 2010

Because Pippa is dating Wrigley, Lucy and her friends are invited to join the annual trip to Lake Mead organized by Chops, a fraternity that Wrigley leads under the radar, since Baird forced it to shut down over drug-use issues. The trip is a party weekend, with plentiful beer and wine on the two boats. Among the Baird students, Lucy feels an unexpected sense of freedom she never felt at home on Long Island. Lucy and her friends drink heavily, but she is relieved when Bree turns down the cocaine so she can do the same without feeling pressured. Lucy meets Stephen when he helps her catch her balance after she funnels a beer. Although she remembers having seen him at the party, this is the first time they speak. Lucy is struck by his “beautiful” eyes, and Stephen nicknames her “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” 

Chapter 4: STEPHEN, October 2010

Diana Bunn, Stephen’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, is introduced in this chapter. Stephen recounts how inconvenient he finds their periods of breaking up, when, for instance, he has to decide between dealing with her friends’ disapproval in the dining hall at lunch and paying for lunch off campus. That September, they broke up when Diana discovered that Stephen slept with Nicole Hart, which Stephen reasons means she did not know about his other infidelities. Diana was still too angry at him to go to Lake Mead, but she comes to his room after the trip to reconcile. Stephen recalls kissing Diana for the first time and subsequently learning everything he could about her to make himself resemble someone she would want to date, including pretending to have read the book she is reading. While Diana cries, Stephen reflects on his own inability to cry since the time he was attacked by hornets as a young child and his mother yelled at him. After Diana calms down, they have sex. 

Chapter 5: LUCY, October 2010

Not yet dating anyone at Baird, Lucy remembers her previous romantic interests—Gabe and Parker. Lucy meets Gabe, her friend Macy’s older brother, the summer after eighth grade, when she is fourteen and he is twenty-three. Finding Gabe attractive, Lucy convinces CJ to hire him as her tennis coach. When Gabe drives her home on a rainy day, he kisses her and touches her breasts, but stops because she is too young. Lucy’s crush persists. In tenth grade, eager to have sex, she begins dating Parker. Though never as attracted to Parker as to Gabe, Lucy dates Parker throughout most of high school. Although Lucy’s friends consider Parker a catch, and CJ wants them to stay together, Lucy breaks up with him the night of the spring formal. Georgia makes her promise never to settle again. Back at Baird, Stephen calls Lucy to ask her out to dinner. She declines, unsure of how college dating works. Briefly, she wishes she could ask CJ for advice, before feeling angry at her again. 

Chapter 6: STEPHEN, October 2010

Stephen and Diana are having sex in Diana’s dorm room. The sex is still good for Stephen, but less so than it was earlier in their relationship. Diana is angry at him. After he orgasms, he criticizes her for being too angry to focus on enjoying the sex. She cries and they again argue over Nicole Hart. When Diana says she does not want to be in a relationship with him again and thinks they should also stop having sex without a formal relationship, Stephen tries to lure her back, wiping her tears away, saying he loves her, and asking her to come to Wrigley’s party as his girlfriend. Diana attacks Stephen for flirting with freshman girls, so Stephen leaves and walks to the party alone, aware that Lucy will be there and, because Diana is not coming, he will be free to do as much cocaine as he wants.

Analysis  

Lake Mead, the site of the trip where Lucy first talks to Stephen, is a symbol of freedom and possibility in the book. Before arriving at the lake, Lucy does not understand why people will take such a long drive when the ocean is nearby, but upon seeing the lake, she is struck by its otherworldly beauty and a sense that it offers new possibilities. On the trip, she reflects on the open-minded quality of students at Baird. Their sense of delight in experimentation contrasts with the mindset of her peers at home in Long Island, who are competitive and locked into expected social behaviors. Even drug use at the lake comes without the peer pressure Lucy expects. When Jackie tries cocaine there for the first time, Lucy feels betrayed, an effect of her anxiety that she will be singled out if she doesn’t try it. However, she realizes after Bree turns it down that no one at the lake wants to pressure her to do it if she doesn’t want to. This lack of pressure and competition contributes to the confidence Lucy notices among Baird students. Lucy’s time at the lake has a magical sense of lightness and freedom. 

When Lucy and Stephen talk at Lake Mead, he gives her the nickname “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—a symbol throughout the book. When Stephen first calls her by the name, he gestures with his hands across the sky, a movement that suggests his confident charm. Lucy notes that her father used to sing her that song, and this detail connects the song to Lucy’s sense of home and safety, as she will find herself connected to Stephen. Even when Stephen has been cruel to her, he is always about to draw on a sense of familiarity that Lucy finds comforting. However, when Stephen begins to sing the opening lines, noting that they are currently on a boat on a river, she points out that they are on a lake, not a river. This imprecision points to the ways that even at his most charming, Stephen is more concerned with the image he projects to Lucy and his other girlfriends than with paying attention to reality. 

Stephen has a pragmatic and mechanistic view of human relationships, as shown in his description of his relationship with Diana in Chapter 4. While he finds Diana emotionally difficult, he continues to date her because his life is easier that way. The problems caused by his deception are illustrated when Stephen grapples with how difficult it will be to get lunch if he and Diana are broken up. He will either be stared at in the dining hall, or he will have to spend more to eat off campus. Stephen knows how to go through the motions of romantic love, including leaving Diana flowers and handwritten letters, but he considers love as most people experience it a “form of weakness.” He sees Diana’s periods of anger toward him not as reflecting faults he should try to correct, but rather as her own emotions needing time to settle down. Rather than seeing her willingness to return to him as an indication of her love and sense of optimism that things can get better, he sees her as hypocritical. While Stephen has a strong sexual drive and sees the practical appeal of having a girlfriend, he does not experience the full range of human emotion, including romantic love.

The theme of sexual desire drives much of the plot of the book and is an important part of both Stephen’s and Lucy’s characters. Stephen is open in his chapters about his physical desire for Lucy and for Diana, even though he finds Diana frustrating and difficult. Lucy’s strongest experience of sexual attraction before coming to Baird has centered on Gabe, her friend Macy’s much-older brother. Despite the age difference and her extreme youth at the time of their kiss, Lucy associates sexual desire with her feelings for Gabe, which persist through high school. Although she is eager to have sex by the time she starts dating Parker, she is dissatisfied, never feeling with him the excitement she felt for Gabe. CJ's affair is “Unforgivable” in part because of Lucy’s sense of CJ betraying her father, Ben, but Lucy’s real sense of betrayal is rooted in CJ getting what Lucy wanted for herself—sexual abandon with Gabe.