Opening
A kindergarten lesson in community turns into a lifelong nightmare. The Narrator sends a cheerful balloon into the sky and unknowingly invites a watcher into his life, while his best friend Josh and his vigilant mother become his only buffers against a growing, unseen threat. Across these chapters, everyday objects—balloons, Polaroids, a crawlspace, a walkie-talkie—become instruments of Stalking and Obsession.
What Happens
Chapter 3: Balloons
In kindergarten, the class launches “The Balloon Project”: each child writes a letter to a potential penpal, tapes on a dollar for postage, ties everything to a helium balloon, and releases it. The narrator carefully writes his letter in pen, only to have water from a classmate’s art project splatter and smudge it. Still, he attaches a Polaroid of himself to a red balloon, ties on his dollar, and releases it with the rest, buzzing with excitement alongside Josh.
Weeks pass. Replies arrive for other students, but not for him. At last his teacher hands him an envelope with a warning—“Please don’t be upset.” There’s no letter inside, only a blurry Polaroid of what looks like empty desert. No return address. His mother tries to console him. Another envelope arrives: a corner of a building against a sun-flared sky. Then another, and another. Nearly fifty arrive by year’s end, each containing a single, apparently random Polaroid. He grows bored and hurt, stashing them—opened and unopened—into the “mausoleum of incomplete collections.”
The following summer, he and Josh run a snow cone stand. A customer pays with a dollar bill scrawled with his own handwriting—“FOR STAMPS.” Shocked, he races home to lay out the Polaroids in a grid. A terrible pattern emerges: he appears in every single one, never centered but always present at an edge, in a crowd, partially obscured. The discovery shatters him, a brutal Loss of Innocence. He shows his mother the next morning. She goes white and rushes to call the police. As she leaves to grab the phone, she drops the day’s mail; he picks it up and finds a new Polaroid—yesterday’s image of him and Josh playing in The Ditch, this time much closer. His mother, terrified, explains why she’s calling: the envelope has no postmark. Someone delivered it by hand.
Chapter 4: Boxes
Before kindergarten, the narrator breaks his arm falling from a tree. To cheer him, his mother brings home a kitten he names Boxes. Boxes becomes a constant companion, slipping under the house into the crawlspace whenever he can; she hates crawling in after him and usually lures him out with the electric can opener. After first grade, with a move on the horizon, Boxes bolts under the house again. This time, his mother crawls in herself—then emerges filthy, shaken, and grim. She announces they’re moving that day. They leave in a panic, abandoning belongings.
Years later, at ten, the narrator and Josh still share sleepovers and long-range walkie-talkies their parents bought them. Boxes has been missing for days. The narrator decides Boxes might be trying to return to their first home. His mother has long forbidden him from going back, claiming new owners live there and shouldn’t be disturbed. He convinces Josh to sneak out at night. The trek through the woods stirs hazy, fragmented memories of being lost there as a child, underscoring The Unreliability and Fragmentation of Memory.
They find the old house abandoned, not occupied. After a game of rock-paper-scissors, the narrator crawls beneath the house. He discovers a makeshift living area: a blanket, bowls, cat food. Above, Josh enters the house and whispers over the walkie-talkie that the narrator’s boxes of clothes have been unpacked—his shirts now hang neatly in the closet. The bedroom walls are papered with hundreds of Polaroids of the narrator. Then Josh breathes: someone else is in the house. Heavy footsteps pound overhead; a scuffle follows. In the corner of the crawlspace, the narrator’s flashlight skims over a mound of rotting animal corpses. The intruder is the Stalker / Penpal.
Josh breaks free and hauls the narrator from the crawlspace. They sprint for safety, losing one of the walkie-talkies in the escape. Later that night, back home, the narrator wakes to what sounds like Boxes meowing. The sound comes from the walkie-talkie. The stalker has the other handset and mimics the cat to torment him. Boxes never returns. Years later, as an adult, the narrator confronts his mother. She finally admits the truth: the day she retrieved Boxes before their sudden move, she found the blanket and bowls beneath the house and realized someone had been living there.
Character Development
The children’s world narrows from bright possibility to hypervigilance. Trust shrinks; vigilance grows. Family, friendship, and survival strategies harden under sustained threat.
- The Narrator: Curiosity and pride in his writing give way to fear, then hard-won clarity. The Polaroids force him to recognize he has been watched for months. The derelict house—and the crawlspace beneath his childhood bedroom—reframe his entire past.
- Josh: Loyal, brave, decisive. He follows the narrator into danger without hesitation, keeps his head during the home invasion, and enables their escape.
- The Narrator’s Mother: Protective to the point of secrecy. Her abrupt move and fragile calm make sense once her discovery under the house is known; her lies are a desperate attempt to keep her son safe.
- The Stalker / Penpal: Transforms from an unseen correspondent to an immediate, physical threat. His lair, the photo shrine, and the dead animals reveal fixation escalating into predation.
Themes & Symbols
The stalker’s watchfulness metastasizes into control, with the narrator’s childhood rituals—writing, picture-taking, play—weaponized against him. Surveillance bleeds into proximity: the hand-delivered photo collapses distance entirely, proving the threat stands on their street, at their door, beneath their floorboards.
Memory fractures around trauma. The woods, the house, the crawlspace—all trigger shards the narrator cannot order until he returns and sees the spaces again. That reencounter clarifies what his younger self could not see: innocence does not end in a single moment, but in successive recognitions that the safe world was already compromised. Friendship counters isolation. Josh’s steady presence allows action when panic and terror would otherwise immobilize.
Symbols:
- Polaroids: Evidence of capture. They freeze the narrator in unguarded moments, turning life into a collection curated by someone else’s gaze.
- The Crawlspace: The secret beneath the ordinary—an unseen chamber where a hidden life thrives. It is the story’s literal underworld.
- Boxes the Cat: Comfort and childhood routine. His disappearance propels the boys’ return and becomes the bait in the stalker’s cruel audio mimicry.
Key Quotes
“Please don’t be upset.”
The teacher’s warning frames the envelopes as bad news before the narrator even opens them, signaling the shift from innocent project to dread. It primes both the child and the reader to expect violation rather than connection.
“FOR STAMPS”
Seeing his own handwriting on a dollar bill completes a chilling circle: the object intended to invite friendship returns marked by intrusion. The coincidence feels cosmic but is actually the stalker’s design intruding into the narrator’s daily life.
“There is no return address.”
The absence denies the narrator the reciprocity the project promises. Instead of a penpal exchange, he gets unilateral surveillance—a one-way flow of images without identity or consent.
No postmark.
The lack of a postmark proves proximity. The threat is no longer abstract or distant; someone is close enough to slip a photo into their mail, collapsing public and private space.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
Balloons establishes the pattern: a child’s attempt to connect is hijacked into surveillance, seeding dread that will organize the rest of the narrative. Boxes delivers the revelation that recontextualizes everything—the watcher lives in the crawlspace under the narrator’s home, transforming scattered unease into a coherent, horrifying timeline. Together, these chapters fuse personal memory with evidence, explaining the family’s sudden move, the mother’s guardedness, and the true proximity of danger, while anchoring the novel’s central conflict between vulnerability and vigilance.