My Sister’s Keeper: 19. Thursday: Jesse Summary & Analysis

Jesse arrives home to find Julia, whom he immediately develops a crush on. She explains that she’s Anna’s guardian ad litem and asks if he knows where Anna is, but he doesn’t know. He invites her up to his room and unsuccessfully flirts with her for a while. Eventually, Julia asks him what it was like growing up in his family. He tells her how, one Christmas Eve when Kate was in the hospital, he went out to cut down a spruce from a neighbor’s yard and set it up. When his parents got home, they gave him a gift from the hospital gift shop and didn’t say anything about the tree. Julia asks if Anna was similarly neglected; Jesse says no, since she’s useful. She then asks how their parents decide when to use Anna for medical purposes, and Jesse suggests that it isn’t a choice.

In a flashback to when he was seven, Jesse decides to try to dig a hole all the way to China. Every night for four weeks, he goes out to work on it until he’s dug a tunnel so deep that he gets lost in it, since he’s unable to light his own way through it. Stuck in the ground, he cries out for help until Brian comes and pulls him out, chastising him for endangering himself in a hole that could’ve collapsed on him. Jesse looks down and realizes that the hole isn’t deep at all; Brian can stand in it and it only comes up to his chest. Jesse ponders how “darkness […] is relative.”