Every Last Word

“As my friends close in, all the people around us stop what they’re doing to gather in a little tighter. Because that’s what happens when the Crazy Eights do anything. People watch.”

Samantha is part of the popular kids in high school, which adds an additional layer of stress to her managing her OCD. With an eye toward how mental illness affects social standing, teenage hierarchies and politics are examined throughout the book.

“I don’t think I’ve ever experienced this sensation outside the pool, but I feel it now, deep in my bones. My shoulders drop. My heart’s no longer racing. I can’t see a toxic, negative thought for miles.”

Samantha discovering Poet’s Corner is a pivotal moment in Every Last Word. Samantha is immediately at home in the Poet’s Corner and up until that moment, the only other place she felt truly at ease was while swimming in the pool. 

“I’m starting to recognize this for the obsession that it is, but it doesn’t bother me. It’s innocent, like solving a puzzle. My mind has certainly come up with more dangerous fixations.”

Through Poet’s Corner and her burgeoning love of writing and poetry, Samantha is learning to differentiate between compulsive and healthy obsessions.

“He sang and his words were beautiful and clear, not broken in any way. Nothing about him was broken.”

When Samantha is exposed to the people of Poet’s Corner, her perspective begins to shift. Shedding the superficial values embraced by the Crazy Eights, she begins to see the beauty and value in the misfits and social outcasts of Poet’s Corner. Whereas once she saw AJ as “broken” for his stutter, she now looks at him completely differently, as evidenced in the quote above.

“Instead of my own destructive thoughts, I now hear Sue’s voice in my head, telling me this is good. That this is something Summer Sam might do. That she’s proud of me.”

Poet’s Corner represents a space for Samantha where she can be free from the superficiality of the Crazy Eights. Here, “Summer Sam,”emblematic for the most healthy, best version of Samantha’s personality, emerges to help Samantha stake her claim as a member of Poet’s Corner. 

“The poem that’s building inside of me is a yellow one. My head falls back into the cushions, and I let my gaze travel around the walls one more time before I take my pen to paper. I tap it three times. Then I let everything go.”

Writing is a profound form of catharsis for Samantha. With OCD being a condition of control and obsession, it is incredibly difficult for Samantha to “let everything go,” as she is able to do when writing poetry.

“I feel that familiar swirling in my mind, starting like a whirlpool, spinning slowly, steadily, but preparing to build and speed, fed by information and the need for more information, until it’s a full-on maelstrom.”

Learning that AJ has an ex-girlfriend by the name of Devon sends Samantha into a frenzy for more information about Devon. The churning, unstoppable, and all-consuming force that animates Samantha’s OCD mind is highlighted in this passage.

“It was horrible. I’d yell at my parents. Throw tantrums like a six-year-old. I was tired all the time, because trying to function while you’re trying to ignore all those swirling thoughts is physically and mentally draining. I’m still myself on the meds, but they help me control the thought spirals. I wouldn’t go back to a life without them.”

Every Last Word takes place after Samantha has found a strategy for managing her OCD. This excerpt is a glimpse of what Samantha was like when her disorder went unchecked and untreated. 

“‘Kaitlyn.’ We make eye contact and I don’t let her go. It feels weird. I don’t think I’ve ever looked her in the eye with such conviction before.”

Empowered by Poet’s Corner, Samantha defends Hailey and stands up to Kaitlyn and the Crazy Eights for the first time. This is a crucial moment in Samantha’s character development.

“‘I didn’t go there looking for you. I went looking for me.’ My voice is soft, low, and shaky. ‘But now, here you are, and somehow, in finding you, I think I’ve found myself.’”

Demonstrating another personal milestone, Samantha tells AJ exactly what is on her mind, being vulnerable in a way she has never been before. 

“I look at that strong, determined expression on my face. I remember exactly what I was thinking when Sue asked me about it. Swim scholarship. A chance to go far away to college. A chance to reinvent myself. And that’s when I realize that as much as I want the scholarship, I don’t need to go away to reinvent myself. I’ve already been doing that.”

For so long, Samantha has felt powerless against the Crazy Eights, which represent all the pettiness, superficiality, and cattiness that can make high school cliques so toxic. Here Samantha realizes that she is not bound to the Crazy Eights forever: she is strong enough, and always has been, to free herself from them. 

“Tears are flooding down Emily’s face when Jessica hurries up to the stage. She hugs her hard, then looks right into her eyes and says something the rest of us can’t hear. She hands her a glue stick, and Emily finds a spot on the wall for her poem.”

The members of Poet’s Corner expose their deepest fears, desires, and emotions in their poetry, creating friendships that are of the most intimate variety. 

“Without thinking about it, I’m moving toward Cameron and tightening my grip on Sydney. Tears rolling down my cheeks, because my heart is breaking for a girl I didn’t even know three months ago.”

Emily, a member of Poet’s Corner, is suffering because her mother is fatally ill with cancer. In this scene, the group embraces Emily after reading a particularly emotional poem about being at her mother’s hospital deathbed. When enmeshed in this group embrace, Samantha is surprised by her own emotional range in this moment: she is surprised that her “heart is breaking” for a girl that she barely knows. The intimacy forged among the members of Poet’s Corner is incomparable to the Crazy Eights.

“I kiss him, feeling completely alive and totally normal—saner than I’ve ever felt before—and now I can’t wait to walk through the halls with AJ, holding his hand, kissing him goodbye between classes. I want to know him. Really know him. And I want him to know me the same way.”

AJ is the first person, outside of Caroline, with whom Samantha is truly intimate with. Here they share physical intimacy for the first time, but Samantha desires to take it further, saying that she wants to “really” know him. Likewise, she desires to reveal her true self, the Samantha with OCD.

“I rock back and forth, scratching harder, crying and muttering ‘Caroline’ under my breath over and over again. Like the crazy person I now know I am.”

In this emotional scene, Samantha deals with the realization that Caroline is not a real person. Coming to this understanding is devastating, wreaking emotional havoc on her because it proves that she is indeed “crazy,” which as she stated earlier is her worst fear. In this moment, “crazy” is a pejorative label, but later it becomes apparent that “crazy” is largely subjective. 

“Was. Of all those words, that’s the one that stings the most. I miss her. Real or imaginary, I don’t want her to be gone.”

The revelation that Caroline is a figment of Samantha’s imagination rocks Samantha’s reality, sending her spiraling into a mental breakdown. In this scene in Sue’s office, Samantha acknowledges the hard truth that, even though Caroline is imaginary, her feelings for Caroline are nonetheless very real. She misses Caroline. 

“I’d feel the urge to hug her, but I never did, and now I wonder what would have happened if I had. Would I have felt her the same way I felt her hand on my shoulder? Or would she have ghosted right through my arms as my body discovered that my brain had been tricking me all along?”

In this passage, it becomes clear how very real Caroline was to Samantha. In Samantha’s mind, Caroline was as real and true as anyone. Samantha is trying to reconcile the fact that her friend never existed in the way that she believed.

“As I begin reading, her fifth poem, I arch my back and square my shoulders, standing taller, reading louder and stronger and clearer, and it feels good to speak her words—to listen to them come to life again—even if there’s no one else around to hear how incredible they are. I read the rest of them the same way, in a loud, booming, confident voice, the way I imagined she would have wanted it.”

As she reads over Caroline’s poems in Poet’s Corner, Samantha finally gains the confidence that Caroline gave her as a friend., With Samantha reading aloud words written by the historical Caroline herself, this is a pivotal moment in the book where Samantha turns a corner on how she perceives her “crazy” self. She accepts Caroline—both the hallucination and the historical person—as part of herself, and she is imbued with confidence when she truly owns Caroline’s words. She finds deep inspiration in Caroline’s words. 

“Before I leave, I walk to the closest wall and run my hand along the brown paper bags and candy wrappers, the ripped-up scraps of paper and Post-it notes, the napkins and receipts, thinking about all the people who have spent time in this room. Every person with a poem on this wall has a story to tell.”

In learning aboutCaroline, the real-life historical person, Samantha is encouraged to learn more about the other members of Poet’s Corner. Her friendships with each of them deepen as she understands the origins of Poet’s Corner and the common thread that unites them all. 

“I look at Emily, wondering if I could do for her what Caroline did for me. Wondering if I could pay it forward.”

Caroline—both the real person and Samantha’s hallucination—have a profound impact upon Samantha, increasing her empathy and helping her know true intimacy. In this moment, Samantha transforms into a deeply empathetic person, one who, like Caroline, wants to create safe spaces for those in need.

“You are still here/stitched into the words on these walls/Every last one.”

This is an excerpt from Samantha’s poem dedicated to Caroline. The poem, along with text messages and other written ephemera from Samantha’s life, are reprinted in the text exactly as they would appear to Samantha. It is as if the reader is reading them alongside Samantha, which creates a sense of intimacy between Samantha and the reader. 

“I reach out and press the elevator button. Once. I feel the urge to push it two more time, but I grab AJ’s hand and kiss it instead.”

Samantha’s OCD dictates that she does things in threes. In this moment, Samantha is suppressing that compulsion in favor of another: the desire to share intimacy with AJ, her boyfriend. Samantha’s evolution is imperfect; she is not “fixed,” because she still feels the urges, but she does manage her OCD in better, healthier ways. 

“I see a pair of boots, right next to my shoes. Then legs, crossed at the ankles, mirroring my posture exactly. My gaze travels up slowly, carefully, like I’m afraid any sudden movement will cause me to lose her.”

Caroline re-appears to Samantha in the final chapter of the book, on cue when Samantha is having trouble composing a poem for Emily. Samantha is not exactly “over” Caroline and the relationship they had, even though she was a hallucination: Samantha expresses fear that any sudden movement will cause Caroline to vanish, implying that there is a part of Samantha that does in fact want illusory Caroline to stay. The implication is that Samantha has come to accept her “special,” in the words of Shrink-Sue, brain.