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Chapter 56
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Noughts and Crosses, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism, Division, and Tragedy
Awareness and Privilege
Love, Lust, Power, and Violence
Friendship
Youth, Innocence, and Growing Up
Family
Summary
Analysis
Sephy knows she has to get out of here. She doesn’t want to lose Callum, but he’ll understand. She can’t stop thinking about him, especially after he kissed and touched her earlier—but he couldn’t possibly be interested in a kid like Sephy. That’s ridiculous. So Sephy decides to take her own advice. She approaches Mother and asks to go away to boarding school. Mother is shocked and clearly drunk as Sephy says she’d like to attend Chivers, which is only 100 miles away.
Sephy’s increasingly complicated life is making her feel claustrophobic. To make that sensation stop, Sephy reasons that the only thing to do is escape. She knows that as a Cross, nobody will support her in a relationship with Callum. This is why she tries to talk herself out of admitting that they like each other; a relationship would just complicate things even further.
Themes
Mother asks what she’ll do without Sephy. For a moment, Sephy and Mother understand each other perfectly, and Sephy almost changes her mind. Mother, though, says Sephy can’t go. Mother wails when Sephy storms out and slams the door. Sephy knows she has to talk to Callum. He’ll support her once she explains herself—and she has to get out before it’s too late.
The dysfunction in the Hadley family comes to the forefront in this passage. Mother wants Sephy around because having her daughters nearby means that Mother can feel in control. Essentially, Mother wants to keep Sephy a dependent child as long as possible. The effect of this, though, is that Sephy shifts her focus outside her family and to Callum.
Themes
