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Dead (p. 49–53)
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ghost Boys, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Progress, Storytelling, and Justice
Racism and the Law
Childhood
Fear
Education
Summary
Analysis
December 8. Gun. Carlos aims the gun at the bullies, demanding that they go away. Mike claims that what they did was all in good fun, while Snap tells Carlos there’s no reason to be angry. Eddie asks Carlos how he smuggled a gun into the school. Jerome, edging toward Carlos, demands that the bullies go away. The bullies are pretending that Carlos doesn’t scare them, while Carlos looks terrified. Eddie tells Mike and Snap to leave with him, claiming not to “care about some Texas kid.” Eddie says he’ll be seeing Jerome, and then the bullies leave the bathroom.
Carlos uses the gun to make the bullies afraid so that they’ll do what he says—showing that fear can be a tool to control others. Jerome has mentioned that the school has metal detectors; in that context, Eddie’s question about how Carlos got the gun into school is a good one. In the last section, readers learned that Jerome had a toy gun when he was shot; now, they may wonder whether Carlos’s gun is real either.
Themes
The lunch bell rings. Jerome—thinking how angry Ma and Grandma will be if they find out he was close to a gun—moves for the door. Carlos, stopping him, tells him the gun isn’t real. A lightbulb goes off in Jerome’s head, and he says that Carlos was able to bring the gun into the school because it’s made of plastic. Carlos confirms it, laughing wildly. Jerome, also emotionally overwrought, starts laughing too. He doesn’t feel so fearful anymore, knowing that Carlos is intelligent enough to fool bullies with a toy gun.
On one level, Carlos’s trick is clever: the toy gun prevents the bullies from hurting him or Jerome. Yet on another level, because Jerome is going to die after a police officer mistakes the toy gun he was holding for a real weapon, the story may be suggesting that Carlos’s trick is naïve: he’s too young to realize that a toy gun could put him and Jerome in danger, even if the toy can’t hurt anyone.
Themes
