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Chapter 5
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tell Me Three Things, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Blended Families
Intimacy and Growing Up
Wealth, Fitting In, and Bullying
Home
Friendship
Summary
Analysis
Jessie emails SN to complain about how unhappy she is, but she thinks she shouldn’t have written. It’s about midnight and she decides she needs some tea. Jessie creeps down the stairs, but as she starts to cross the living room, she sees Dad and Rachel on a couch under a single reading light. They can’t see her. They look intimate sitting there, looking at a photo album. It must be Rachel’s. She looks like she’s crying, and Dad might be too. Jessie feels sick and imagines the photos in the album. She wonders if Dad showed Rachel their photos too and feels ready to cry. Everything feels broken. Jessie creeps back upstairs.
When Jessie observes that this moment between Dad and Rachel is intimate, it begins to show that she’s learning that intimacy can be more than sex. It can be about sharing one’s history with another person, like what Dad and Rachel are doing with the photos. It can also mean talking to SN online, which Jessie is doing—but which she doesn’t necessarily see as being intimate or especially important.
Themes
