Opening
Grief hardens into daily reality as Tiger Tolliver faces the fallout from her violence at school and the cold bureaucracy of death. The chapters chart her descent from shock into the relentless ache of Grief and Loss, even as new bonds—both sisterly and found—offer fragile lifelines she doesn’t yet trust.
What Happens
Chapter 31: Getting My Olivia Benson On
In Principal Vela’s office, Tiger sits with a swollen hand while Ellen Untermeyer’s tooth gleams in a baggie on the desk. Vela is stern and tired of excuses; she reminds Tiger that grief doesn’t justify violence and frames expulsion as a real possibility. The platitudes about time and healing clang against Tiger’s raw hurt.
Shayna Lee Franklin breezes in late, smelling like their mother’s shampoo, which slices Tiger open all over again. At first Vela bristles at Shayna’s attitude—then Shayna pivots into advocate mode. She pulls up Ellen’s Instagram and shows a post where Ellen photographed Tiger crying the day her mother died, laced with cruel hashtags. Shayna has already contacted Cake Rishworth and gathered student statements proving Ellen provoked Tiger. She reframes everything: a bullied, grieving orphan snaps. The school’s zero-tolerance bullying policy leaves Vela little room. Shayna is called into the office alone to seal the deal, while Ms. Delgado scolds Tiger: is this who her mother would want her to be?
Chapter 32: A Woman Without Wheels
Driving home, Shayna reports the outcome: no expulsion. Tiger must write an apology, avoid Ellen, and attend a grief support group—an institutional nudge that brushes up against The Foster Care System and Child Welfare. Then Shayna opens a vein: her dad, Dustin "Dusty" Franklin, made her drive at eleven to chauffeur him from bars. The confession briefly fuses the sisters together.
Shayna pulls over and insists Tiger learn to drive. For a girl June Tolliver kept close, the wheel means oxygen—choice, responsibility, the first steps of Identity and Coming of Age. The relief detonates into panic as the future yawns without her mother. Back home, Tiger glimpses threatening texts on Shayna’s phone from a man named Ray and realizes Shayna’s life is not remotely under control. Later, texts from Kai Henderson cut both ways: he condemns the fight but agrees to testify after Cake reaches out. Tiger apologizes for how she treated him, then curls into the feeling of being an “empty dress,” waiting for Shayna to come home.
Chapter 33: The Big Suck
Tiger’s four-day suspension ends with her first Grief Group in the school basement. Mr. Jackson (“Walrus”) keeps a calm circle where other teens crack open their losses. Mae-Lynn Carpenter explains her “Sick Life” during her dad’s cancer and her permanent “Grief Life.” Taran and Alif Parker talk about their father’s sudden death and the pressure of holding up their mother. The room takes on the feel of Family and Found Family: strangers who speak the same language.
A late arrival, Lupe Hidalgo, storms in, all armor and silence. Mr. Jackson gives a writing prompt—one thing they miss. Everyone writes except Tiger, who is paralyzed by the everything of missing. Tears come; Mae-Lynn squeezes her hand and mutters the group’s bleak thesis: grief is forever. The “Big Suck” gets its name.
Chapter 34: Marshmallowy
After the session, the teens migrate to an arroyo—no adults, no rules, just their own Mental Health and Coping Mechanisms. Mae-Lynn brings rum; the Parker brothers share beers and a joint. Tiger chooses numbness, takes a sip, takes a hit. Warmth spreads. Edges blur. For a moment she feels “marshmallowy,” held.
Honesty rushes in where supervision is absent. Lupe finally names her loss: her brother, Crash, died by suicide, and it isolates her even among grievers because he chose to leave. Sirens crack their spell; a sheriff’s car rolls by. In the scramble, Mae-Lynn shoves the rum into Tiger’s backpack. After the others peel off for a party, Mae-Lynn drives Tiger home and lays down her doctrine: the Big Suck never ends. Tiger texts Cake that she drank, hides the bottle in the shed, and crashes.
Chapter 35: The Lights Go Out
The narration shifts to a detached, second-person “you” when a manila envelope arrives. Inside: June’s death certificates and the 911 report. You learn June was on the phone with Kai’s mother when the aneurysm hit; the report’s clinical phrases—“the deceased,” “face-down on the couch”—erase the warmth of memory. You call the medical examiner. Dr. Marisa Matthews is gentle. June died instantly, she says—“the lights just go out.”
Comfort curdles into self-accusation—Guilt and Forgiveness becomes the gravitational center. You weren’t there. You had been fighting. You reach for Cake and Thaddeus Roach and hit silence. You go to the shed, pour rum into Coke, and drink until the world slips. Shayna finds you in vomit and worry. You push her away, insist she can’t possibly understand, and lock yourself in your room, choosing darkness over help.
Character Development
Tiger moves from explosive reaction to hollowed-out endurance. The school discipline, the group confessions, and the death paperwork pull her from public chaos into private collapse, and she starts testing dangerous coping strategies even as tenuous support systems form around her.
- Tiger: Flashes of empowerment (driving, advocacy from Shayna) are eclipsed by paralyzing guilt after the reports arrive; she shifts from lashing out to numbing out.
- Shayna: Reveals a survivor’s toolkit—savvy, confrontational, protective—while her past with Dusty and threatening texts from Ray expose fragility beneath her bravado.
- Mae-Lynn: Emerges as a realist-guide, naming grief’s permanence and offering blunt comfort that is oddly stabilizing.
- Lupe: Breaks silence to share her brother’s suicide, reframing the group’s understanding of grief’s shape and isolations.
- Taran and Alif: Model caretaking grief—boys trying to parent a grieving parent—showing responsibility as its own burden.
Themes & Symbols
Grief and Loss saturates every scene, evolving from shock to structure. School discipline, mandated counseling, and official documents force Tiger to confront grief’s social and bureaucratic faces, not just its private ache. The group’s stories widen grief’s spectrum—prolonged illness, sudden accident, suicide—making the “Big Suck” a collective lexicon rather than a solitary wound.
Coping splits into sanctioned and unsanctioned paths. The basement circle offers language, witness, and quiet rituals like writing prompts. The arroyo offers substances and confession under the stars. Both are attempts to hold pain long enough to breathe. Driving becomes a charged symbol: with June it means confinement; with Shayna it becomes agency, adulthood, and risk. “The lights go out” crystallizes death’s instant finality, a metaphor that soothes and devastates at once, illuminating why Tiger seeks oblivion when comfort fails.
Key Quotes
“This shit is going to last forever.”
Mae-Lynn’s line names the reality Tiger fears most and becomes the group’s grim credo. It rejects quick-fix narratives and validates the long, uneven work of living with loss.
“The lights just go out.”
Dr. Matthews’s metaphor intends mercy—no pain, no awareness—but its simplicity magnifies Tiger’s guilt. If death is instantaneous, there was no goodbye to soften the break.
“Empty dress.”
Tiger’s self-image captures dissociation: a body without a self inside. It signals how grief strips identity and why the idea of driving—filling the dress with motion and choice—briefly matters.
“Is this the girl your mother would have wanted you to be?”
Ms. Delgado’s rebuke sharpens Tiger’s shame and accelerates her need to either prove goodness or obliterate feeling. The question echoes through her choices afterward.
“Big Suck.”
The group’s shorthand compresses complex theory into lived slang. Naming it creates community, even as it denies cure.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters pivot the book from immediate aftermath to the long haul of Grief Life. The Grief Group establishes a found family that mirrors and challenges Tiger’s pain, while Shayna steps into a messy, improvised guardianship that both protects and pressures her. Most crucially, the official paperwork and the medical examiner’s call fuse grief with guilt, rerouting Tiger’s arc from anger to self-destruction. Her solo drinking isn’t rebellion; it’s anesthesia for an unbearable narrative—she wasn’t there, and there’s no way back. This descent sets the stakes for what comes next: whether community, sisterhood, and hard-won language can interrupt the darkness she is choosing.