42 pages • 1 hour read
Samira AhmedInternment
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 7-14 Summary
The camp orientation, conducted in the auditorium of the administration building, is unsettling and surreal. The detainees gather under a banner that says “Unity, Security, Prosperity.” The Director, a sallow-faced administrator who acts like “an entertainment director on a cruise ship” (90), talks up the opportunity for the detainees to create a happy community. He points out that the camp provides each block—the detainees are sectioned off by ethnicity and culture—with “minders” who come from the Muslim community and who will help them in their adjustment to camp life. A woman challenges the Director, denouncing minders as collaborators. Guards surround the woman, slap her, tase her, and lead her away.
At Mess after the orientation, detainees, including Layla and Ayesha, wonder where the woman is. Rumors spread of other internees who have disappeared, led away at night by camp security. Each block eats when they are called by the minders, a protocol that Layla finds insulting. As she returns to her family’s trailer, she catches a glimpse of the guard with the compass tattoo. He smiles at her. That night, Layla cannot sleep. She thinks her family could be in the camp for a long time, “buried and forgotten” (111). Anxious, she slips out of the trailer for a walk. But the camp is dark, and she gets lost. She is accosted suddenly by a guard who demands to know why she is breaking curfew. Layla stammers out a lie about searching for a necklace she dropped until she sees it is the same guard with the compass tattoo. But the guard only warns her and escorts her back to the trailer. Layla wonders why.
The next day, when Ayesha visits, Layla tells her about David and how much she misses him. She is sure if she could talk to him, he would help get them out—he is Jewish and his family on both sides suffered persecution in Eastern Europe. Layla is determined to get in touch with him but does not know how. As her parents settle into a surreal normalcy—her father works in the camp library, and her mother sees detainees as a chiropractor—Layla begins to plan, encouraged by the determination and angry rhetoric of Soheil.
Layla sees the kind camp guard as key. She senses he is different. With Ayesha, she approaches him and tells him she wants to make a phone call, pleading with him. He introduces himself as Jake Reynolds. Layla is surprised when he agrees to help. He leads her to a trailer behind the mess where there are two landline phones. He tells her she has two minutes. The call is a disaster; she has to leave a voice message. Returning to her trailer, Layla explodes in anger at Jake:
[T]his nightmare is on you. I can’t even make a goddamn phone call to hear my boyfriend’s voice without begging. And I’m so sick of it. I hate the president. And I hate you. I hate you so much right now because you can shoot me for no reason at all and no one will say a word (129).
Jake says nothing and leads Layla back to her trailer.
The next day at lunch, Jake approaches Layla and tells her to follow him. She fears she is about to disappear for her insubordination. Instead, he leads her back to her trailer, hands her a flip phone, and tells her she has five minutes to make her call. This time David answers; he promises to help and to get in the camp the next day. The brief conversation energizes Layla, but she cannot figure out why Jake helped her: “Corporal Reynolds is a puzzle with lots of pieces, but half of them are missing” (137). Later that day, her parents confront her over rumors that she has been seen with a camp guard. They beg her to keep her head down.
Layla has other plans. The next day, while working in the camp garden, Layla pretends to trip. Jake immediately runs to her assistance and helps her back to her trailer. Along the way, Layla tells him she needs to call David again. This time, as she waits in the trailer, Jake returns with ice packs and a flip phone hidden between them. She calls David. He tells her that the next day, Jake will help get him into the camp under a tarp on a service truck.
The next night, the two meet by a camp toolshed. They hold each other and exchange passionate kisses, but their time is limited. David suggests that perhaps the best way to survive the camp would be for Layla’s parents to cooperate with the administration. She responds, “What the fuck, David…you want us to collaborate with them?” (154, 155).
Jake arrives to escort David out of the camp. After David departs, Jake suggests a different strategy. Protests against the government’s internment camp are growing, thanks largely to social media and news outlets. “People are organizing” (158), he says. Jake encourages her not to give up hope, and before she returns to her trailer, he whispers to her, “Insha’Allah,” a Muslim prayer of encouragement that translates loosely to “trust in God.”
Chapters 7-14 Analysis
If the opening chapters test—and reject—the idea of surviving the brutalities of internment by laying low or by pretending everything in the camp is somehow normal, in these sections Layla begins to rise to the challenge of resistance. It is not some overnight conversion; she comes under the influence of Corporal Jack Reynolds, and she relies on David, to this point her security blanket and her first and only love. Here, however, David the boyfriend emerges as David the freedom fighter, whose actions are especially heroic because the fight is not his.
The orientation welcoming the campers—and Layla alone sees the dark irony behind calling the detainees “campers”—is chilling. It echoes similar propaganda efforts conducted in the early years of Hitler’s concentration camps, when such facilities were described as work camps. Press reps were shown only happy Jewish families growing vegetables, playing with their children, and even praying together. Layla knows her history and understands the implications behind the happy rhetoric of the Director: “It’s like Guantanamo, except in California. I’m scared of what will happen if we get stuck here. There’s got to be something we can do” (99). That observation, which Layla whispers to Ayesha, marks the first moment that Layla acknowledges the need for action.
From the moment Layla first sees Jake on the train heading to the camp, she feels intuitively that there is more to him than his cocky good looks, his broad shoulders, and the compass tattoo that adorns his beefy forearms. Everyone tells Layla to be cautious; that includes her parents, Ayesha, and especially Soheil, who is certain Jake is a double agent. His kindness arouses suspicions. His willingness to help Layla may be initially encouraged by a physical attraction to her—the novel suggests that but never develops it—but in these chapters Jake reveals a determined effort to provide Layla assistance without the expectation of any reciprocal interest. He appears to want to help in her early efforts to organize some kind of resistance. The only explanation he offers Layla is more cryptic than helpful: “Things aren’t always what they seem” (108).
Layla’s explosive emotional tirade when the first call to David fails is a pivotal moment in the deepening relationship between Layla and Jake. As Layla rants about the conditions in the camp, the reality of her imprisonment, and most chilling how Jake could shoot her and never face any accountability, she is certain she will join those who have disappeared. “I’ll hate myself,” she rants, “because I’m so fucking stupid to yell at a guard and now I have to bow down and count on your mercy to not…disappear me like all those other people who just wanted to live” (129). That Jake takes no disciplinary action and even helps her the next day by providing her with a phone, indicates that Jake is a mysterious figure. To borrow Layla’s metaphor, he is a puzzle with pieces missing.
Against the growing mystery of Jake, there emerges a dimension to David that the reader did not suspect when the young man seemed to be no more a two-dimensional prop in Layla’s emotional life—the caricature high school boyfriend. The tender scene in the neighbor’s pool cabana in the opening chapters contrasts with the scene in the mess hall when Layla and David talk heatedly about how to organize resistance to the camp. David lets Layla down by suggesting that she and her parents cooperate with the Director to assure better treatment. He immediately sees how he has misjudged Layla. He tells her at their next meeting how sorry he is for suggesting collaboration. He has since relocated to a motel near the camp, indicating his determination to be part of whatever path Layla chooses. “Tell me what to do” (182), he tells her.
Through the figure of the reliable if enigmatic Jake Reynolds, along with David’s commitment to Layla, these chapters show Layla’s growing understanding that keeping quiet and going along are not options.
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By Samira Ahmed
