The Girl Who Smiled Beads: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

Clemantine’s mother used to test her kids by cutting an orange into pieces. Sometimes there were not enough pieces to share evenly. Although the tree outside was full of oranges, the answer to the test was not to get another orange but to cut the orange into more pieces. This was to teach her kids that nothing belongs to them alone.

Clemantine thinks about this test when she tries to bridge the gap between people who have too much and people who have too little. She believes that life is dull and meaningless when people isolate themselves by their differences. Everyone always has something another person needs. She has experienced being very rich and being very poor. She knows that both people with everything and people with nothing can do remarkable things. Also, both people with everything and people with nothing can become monsters. The way to equality is not through the kind of charity that makes the giver feel superior to the taker; it is through sharing.

Clemantine tries to sort out her memories and emotions the way her mother sorted herbs from her garden. She realizes now that the emotion she felt when she arrived at Hotchkiss was anger. Mrs. Thomas flies Clemantine out to Hartford, Connecticut. Clemantine memorizes the new landmarks. Mrs. Thomas is proud of Clemantine’s success in school, but she hadn’t foreseen her going to boarding school. When Clemantine’s parents moved to Chicago, Clemantine’s life actually got worse.

Clemantine and Mrs. Thomas set up her single dorm room on the third floor. Clemantine has brought pictures of her family with Oprah and Elie Wiesel. She has moved countless times, but this is her first time living alone. She and Mrs. Thomas cry when they part ways. Clemantine approaches her new school humbly, asking her teachers for help. However, she is panicking inside. She wakes early every morning and dances aggressively for hours before class. Still, she feels like she’s nothing.

Clemantine spends a terrible Christmas in Chicago. Claire’s apartment has become a war zone between Clemantine’s parents and their kids, and Claire and her kids. Clemantine doesn’t belong on either side. She worries it is selfish of her to go away to school. Claire forces everyone to dress up for a Christmas family photo. Mariette is rude to her grandmother; she refuses to obey her, saying she doesn’t even know her.

When Clemantine returns to Hotchkiss, she falls apart. She has the skills to succeed at school, but nothing protects her from her tormented inner life. She has no idea who she is. One day, in her philosophy class, a professor gives the students several survival scenarios and asks them what they would do. Clemantine loses her temper and shouts at her classmates that they have no idea what it’s really like to survive and watch people die. She tells them they don’t have the right to speak. She runs out of class. Later, the professor calls her into his office and tells her she needs to be less emotional. Clemantine feels that her professor is protecting his own comfort and ignoring hers. She drops the seminar.

After that, Clemantine inserts her story into every class and every essay she writes. She insists that her teachers recognize not her intellectual grasp of the material but her personal experience. The professor whose seminar she dropped instructs her not to retire her emotions but to channel them. But Clemantine doesn’t want to conform to the ideals of people who haven’t experienced what she’s experienced.

Mrs. Thomas and Claire try to call Clemantine, but she doesn’t want to talk to them. She has one friend, a girl named Luisa, but Clemantine doesn’t share much with her. Clemantine continues having nightmares. She has spent her whole life trying to figure out how to survive, but now her strategy has failed; she has no filter and says whatever she wants. She wishes she had a single person to direct her anger at. Instead, her world is torn, and she has no way of healing it.

When Clemantine can’t sleep, she makes bracelets. She had started making bracelets when Mrs. Thomas’ mother moved into a retirement community and gave Clemantine her large collection of buttons and beads. She made two bracelets for herself and then started making them to give to people who suffer to remind them they are loved. With each bracelet she gives away, she gives up something painful in herself. For instance, she stops hating her legs which are scarred from barbed wire fences and disease.

A professor’s wife invites Clemantine over sometimes, sensing she is isolated. The woman sews clothes on a sewing machine. Clemantine decides to make a dress as an art project. She makes the dress out of white canvas from the art room. When she is finished, it looks too pure. Clemantine mixes red paint, takes the dress outside, and splatters it. It looks like a massacred corpse covered in blood. She titles the dress “Drop Dead Gorgeous” and enters it in the school art show. Everyone says it is a beautiful dress.