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Chapter 10
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in There’s Someone Inside Your House, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma, Loss, and Grief
Guilt, Shame, and Redemption
Alienation
Gossip vs. Communication
Inner Change
Summary
Analysis
Rodrigo Morales pauses the violent video game he’s been playing and takes off his headphones. It’s midnight. His parents are away in Las Vegas to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary, and he’s spent nearly every moment of his precious freedom playing Battleground Apocalypse. Rodrigo is the youngest of four children and the only boy. His last sister moved out earlier in the year, and this weekend is the first time he’s been truly alone. He loves it.
The only other chapters told from a point of view other than Makani’s were chapters that featured murders—so it seems likely that Rodrigo isn’t going to make it out of Chapter Eleven alive. The fact that he just so happens to be home alone in his house this weekend—and probably too distracted by his games to notice much else going on around him—further supports this prediction.
Themes
Rodrigo moves from the living room to the kitchen to grab an energy drink. He chugs the can and finishes off the pizza he made earlier in the evening. He gets a text from David: “Kevin still uses Ubuntu lol.” David is watching anime with their friend Kevin. Rodrigo hates anime, so he doesn’t feel left out. Rodrigo and David joke about the operating system. David knows a little more about operating than their other friends, but Rodrigo is a whiz. He made money jailbreaking iPhones and Kindles in elementary school. Now he has multiple PAYware games on app stores. His latest game is making lots of money.
Another hint that suggests that Rodrigo is likely about to become the killer’s next victim is this detail that he’s something of a computer whiz, having been able to complete complex repairs on electronics since elementary school. So far, the killer has targeted students who stand out among their peers. If Rodrigo is something of a computer whiz, then, this puts him in a dangerous position, since he resembles the killer’s typical victim: someone whose skills make them stand out amongst their more average, unremarkable peers.
Themes
Rodrigo gets on his favorite message board and recoils in shame when he sees that everyone is still angry about a new video game-developing company run by women. He used to be one of those guys, but he’s not anymore. He feels bad about giving Makani a hard time the other day. He was being stupid.
Another thing that ties Rodrigo to the killer’s previous victims is that he suffers from internalized shame about a secret he’s too ashamed to let his peers know about. Just as Matt was too afraid to go public about his fears of CTE, Rodrigo is ashamed by the past misogynistic behavior he engaged in on the internet.
Themes
Rodrigo returns to the living room. His gaming chair is facing the wrong direction, which is odd. Rodrigo turns the chair around and puts his headphones back on. He wonders if Makani told Alex what he’d said. He thinks she’s smart and sexy and great, if not a bit mean—but he’s all those things too. He thinks maybe she likes him back. Rodrigo’s body buzzes. He thinks it’s from thinking about Alex, but then he remembers the energy drink he chugged in the kitchen. Rodrigo falls asleep an hour later, somehow remembering to pause the game before he loses consciousness.
Another of the killer’s calling cards appears in this scene: Rodrigo’s gaming chair is facing the wrong way. In Haley’s and Matt’s attacks, the killer tampered with their personal items prior to their murders. Another important detail in this scene is Rodrigo’s anxiety about whether Makani told Alex about his crude joke—like Makani and many other Osborne High students, Rodrigo cares a lot about what others think of him.
Themes
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Rodrigo wakes up to sunlight pouring in through the glass door. He knocks over a full energy drink, and the brown-green liquid has spilled all over his mother’s Mexican rug. He’s furious at his carelessness, though he doesn’t remember grabbing a second energy drink. Then he realizes that his head is killing him. Rodrigo looks around the room. Something doesn’t feel right. All the furniture in the living room is rearranged. The TV is in the exact center of the room. Rodrigo calls out to his sister Sophia and to David, thinking that one of them must have played a prank on him. When nobody responds, he starts to second guess himself.
It should stick out to Rodrigo that the furniture is rearranged and that it likely wasn’t he who placed the second energy drink in his hand, but, as his murdered peers did before him, he ignores his gut instincts and tries to find a logical explanation for these oddities. He doesn’t want to risk the possibility that his friends are pranking him and will tell everyone about his foolishness if he loses his cool.
Themes
Rodrigo checks all the doors around the house. They’re all locked. Then he notices that the window in the guest bathroom is open. The prankster can’t be Sophia, since she still has a key. Rodrigo swears at his “dumb friends” for messing with him. But he can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t right. He sends a group text to his friends: “LOL you got me. Who did it?” He hears a ding behind him as the message goes through. Rodrigo turns around and sees a slender figure. He slowly moves toward the figure. “David?” Rodrigo asks. But the figure doesn’t respond. Suddenly, the figure lunges at Rodrigo, plunging a knife directly through Rodrigo’s heart.
The figure’s slender body and quiet demeanor heavily implies that Rodrigo’s killer is the same person who killed Matt Butler (and, likely, Haley Whitehall, too). When Rodrigo’s text elicits a ding from the killer’s phone, it suggests that the killer is one of Rodrigo’s friends—possibly David Ware, as Rodrigo apparently suspects. That someone so close to Rodrigo would kill Rodrigo—without Rodrigo suspecting it up to the end—reinforces the idea that people are inherently unknowable.
Themes
The killer drags Rodrigo’s crumpled, lifeless body into the living room and places it in the gaming chair. Then they saw off Rodrigo’s ears, place them in Rodrigo’s headphones, and put the headphones back on Rodrigo’s head. Then they sit on the floor and resume Rodrigo’s paused game; after all, nobody will be home for hours.
That Rodrigo’s killer feels comfortable enough to sit inside Rodrigo’s house for hours playing video games suggests his killer is well-acquainted with Rodrigo’s schedule—they seem to know that Rodrigo’s parents are out of town and won’t be back for some time. This reinforces t that Rodrigo’s killer is someone close to him—perhaps even David Ware, the friend Rodrigo was texting before his death.
Themes
