Friendship Theme Analysis

After 16-year-old Jessie’s Dad remarries and they move to Los Angeles to live with Jessie’s stepmom, Rachel, and stepbrother, Theo, one thing that’s majorly lacking in Jessie’s new life from the start is a friend. Though Jessie constantly texts Scarlett, her best friend from Chicago, she recognizes that Scarlett is no real replacement for in-person friends—ones that understand the specific pressures she’s under at Wood Valley High School. Then, a few weeks into the school year, Jessie agrees to accept help from a mysterious Somebody Nobody, or SN, an anonymous male classmate who begins emailing and then instant messaging with Jessie, offering support and advice on how to navigate Wood Valley’s social structure. As Jessie’s friendships in Los Angeles blossom while she also remains in contact with Scarlett, Jessie must navigate the difficulty of making and keeping friends. Ultimately, she discovers that the essential elements of any friendship are a willingness to ask to be friends in the first place, and even more importantly, a willingness to listen.

Jessie’s first few weeks at Wood Valley are extremely lonely. Though she texts Scarlett constantly, she realizes that Scarlett can’t take the place of someone in Los Angeles who understands what Jessie’s going through. Thus, with Scarlett’s encouragement, Jessie decides to email back SN, who emailed her right after school started offering his help. SN feels like a close friend almost immediately. He and Jessie begin playing a game in which they tell each other three things about themselves as a way to get to know each other, and they talk openly about the death of Jessie’s mom and of SN’s sister. Importantly, though Jessie doesn’t entirely recognize it, both she and SN are talking and listening about an equal amount. It’s possible that this has to do with the fact that SN is barely a real person for Jessie—she has her suspicions about who he is at school, but she mostly maintains a mental barrier between who he might be in real life and who he is online. However, it likely has more to do with the fact that SN is telling her things that she finds necessary and interesting, and she has things to contribute to the conversation. Having a more or less equal conversation is easy for them because they’re both interested in the subject matter and both have information to share.

This isn’t so much the case with any of Jessie’s other friendships, either with Scarlett or with her new female friends at Wood Valley, Dri and Agnes. With Dri and Agnes, Jessie spends much of her time listening. The two girls have been at Wood Valley since kindergarten, so they can help illuminate all the ins and outs of the school itself and its student body for Jessie, who’s desperate to learn. This helps Jessie become friends with Dri and Agnes, as she presents herself as a willing audience of anything they have to say in order to earn their friendship. She listens dutifully to Dri talk about her fantasy romance with a classmate named Liam, and she listens to Agnes talk about makeup and her sexual experiences. It’s only after several weeks that Jessie begins to offer much in the way of her own opinions or thoughts on anything, once the trio’s friendship is better established. The fact that it takes Jessie so long to voice any of her own opinions suggests that being willing and able to listen is an important, if not vital, way to begin a friendship.

However hard Jessie applies herself to listening to Dri and Agnes, though, she misses that she must continue listening if she wishes to maintain her relationship with old friends like Scarlett. Many of Jessie and Scarlett’s text conversations are about Jessie and her experiences at Wood Valley. Scarlett dutifully asks questions and occasionally interjects information about what’s going on in her life—but though Jessie comments on what Scarlett says, she seldom asks Scarlett about what’s going on or allows Scarlett’s life to take center stage in their conversations. Scarlett finally calls Jessie out on this when Jessie visits Chicago for a weekend. Scarlett makes it very clear that if they’re going to remain friends despite the distance, Jessie has to be a good friend to her too, not just to her new Wood Valley friends who have newer and more interesting things to say. Listening, Scarlett implies, isn’t something that people can ever stop doing in a friendship—it must continue if the friendship itself is going to survive. Through this, Tell Me Three Things makes the case that though people may move and have to begin again, it’s possible to maintain a variety of different friendships and continue to make more if individuals are willing to listen attentively and ask questions as though every friend is as new and interesting as any other.