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Chapter 28
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Firekeeper’s Daughter, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Justice
Generational Trauma and Bigotry
Ceremony, Pride, and Healing
Love, Honesty, and Respect
Coming of Age
Family and Community
Summary
Analysis
Daunis is the first to board the Booster Bus in the morning. She saves Ron a spot, but Grant scoots in next to her. He says he always thought she was a good girl, but now he knows she’s a bad girl and a rule breaker. He also admires people who make “interesting choices.” When Ron boards the bus, Grant finds his own seat. Over the course of the ride, Daunis thinks about Robin. Robin was a Nodin and was well-liked—and she didn’t seem like the sort to get mixed up in meth. Should Daunis try to press Stormy for information?
Grant's words to Daunis read as predatory and inappropriate: he’s fetishizing Daunis for not following the rules keeping Supes and girlfriends apart. For now, he seems willing to give Daunis her space, but it remains to be seen whether he’ll continue to respect her space. Thinking about Robin reminds Daunis that she can’t expect to be able to tell everything about someone just by looking at them. Robin was more than her reputation and her family. Like Daunis supposedly has, she made an “interesting choice[]” (or simply an unexpected one) that ultimately resulted in her death.
Themes
Ron slips Daunis a note listing all things the police found on Heather. It doesn’t mention undergarments or her flip-flops, and it lists different drugs than what Heather showed Daunis. Daunis whispers to Ron that Heather offered her “ecstasy boner pills” and didn’t have meth on her at the bonfire, but supposedly she was in Paradise after the bonfire. Her voice rises with excitement, so when Ron shushes her, Daunis says they need a secret language like Mom and Uncle David had. Suddenly, Daunis is certain that David did keep a journal of his time working for the FBI, but it’s probably written in code and hidden. She has to find the journal so she can prove David’s innocence to the Sault. For the rest of the ride, Daunis makes a plan. She won’t share it with Ron or Jamie.
It’s clear to Daunis that Heather made contact with the meth cell between leaving the bonfire and her death, if only because Daunis is sure Heather didn’t have meth when she last saw her. Ron seems less convinced, which may be because he, like Jamie, is a federal agent who sees what he wants to see when it comes to Heather: a lost girl who died a tragic death, not an important part of the investigation. When Daunis realizes that Uncle David’s journal probably exists, she reorients herself to focus on her family and how they continue to help her, even from beyond the grave.
Themes
The Booster Bus gets back to the Sault in early afternoon, so Daunis hurries to Duck Island. One sample she collects is unrecognizable. As Daunis waits for the ferry, missed texts and calls come in from Jamie, asking where she is and if she’s okay. Daunis calls and says she’s been on Sugar Island, and he asks that she let him know where she’s going for safety reasons—she found a body on Sugar Island, after all. She hangs up when it’s her turn to drive onto the ferry. She ends up next to Robin’s mom, Mrs. Bailey. Daunis gets out to hug her and shares that Robin helped her at school a few weeks ago. Confused, Mrs. Bailey says that Robin wasn’t enrolled. She’s been addicted to painkillers and started doing meth, and they were trying to get her into rehab.
Interestingly, simply being a CI is dangerous, and yet this seems to be the first time that Jamie expresses genuine concern for Daunis’s wellbeing. They’re growing closer, and for now, it seems genuine. On the ferry, Daunis discovers that Robin wasn’t the perfect mentor she thought she was: Robin struggled with addiction. Hearing this reminds Daunis that she can’t judge people—there’s always more to a person under the surface. It also makes it clear that Robin likely had something to do with the meth cell, given that she’d been a regular meth user prior to her death.
Themes
