Opening
In 1989, Samuel 'Sam' Hill' halts a vasectomy and steps back into a life that looks orderly but feels unmoored. An emergency patient drags his past to the surface, forcing Sam to reckon with the wounds that shape his relationship with Eva Pryor and his carefully constructed adult calm. Flashbacks to 1964 reveal how cruelty, fear, and a single Tootsie Pop begin to define the boy who becomes the man.
What Happens
Chapter 21: The Past Arrives
Sam leaves a doctor’s office after canceling his vasectomy, a decision that exposes his doubts about the future with Eva, a pilot whose relationship with him feels more like cohabitation than partnership. He drives to the ophthalmology practice he co-owns with his sharp-tongued best friend, Mickie Kennedy, housed in a building he bought from his mother, Madeline Hill. Downstairs, his father Maxwell Hill’s old pharmacy still runs—Sam’s way of honoring family, a quiet inversion of Parental Love and Sacrifice.
Mickie needles him about Eva—calling her his “roommate”—and then hands him an emergency consult: a seven-year-old girl with rapidly failing vision after a bike accident. The mother requested Sam specifically. He meets Trina Crouch and her daughter, Daniela, and then sees the last name on the chart: Bateman. The name detonates a buried memory—his childhood tormentor, David Bateman, has found his way into Sam’s exam room. Mickie’s barbed loyalty underscores The Power of Friendship as Sam braces for impact.
Chapter 22: A Cruel Valentine
The narrative flashes to 1964. Six-year-old Sam moves through school like a target, ducking David’s quiet threats and watchful menace, the daily grind of Bullying and Its Lasting Impact shaping every decision. He is excluded from parties and playdates; only Ernie Cantwell stands with him, a lifeline amid the cold currents of Our Lady of Mercy. The outsider status that defines him becomes the engine of Overcoming Otherness and Prejudice.
On Valentine’s Day, Sam brings no cards to avoid rejection. Valerie Johnson, the class star, hands him an envelope that lifts him for a heartbeat—maybe they see him. Inside is a dead fly. Laughter erupts; Valerie and her friends flee to the playground. The moment splinters his fragile hope, a sharp lesson in social cruelty and the first deep cut of Coming of Age.
Chapter 23: The Bathroom Confrontation
Still reeling, Sam ducks into the boys’ bathroom and hides in a stall, feet braced on porcelain, the door accidentally unlocked. David and his cronies swagger in. After fouling the room, David pelts Sam’s stall with a wet paper towel, popping the door open and exposing Sam perched on the seat.
They jeer, calling him “Devil Girl” for sitting to pee. Terrified and mid-urinal, Sam’s exposed body betrays him—he involuntarily urinates into David’s face. Chaos follows. David screams, his friends slip on the floor, and the bell shrills. Sam bolts for class, leaving behind a soaked, humiliated bully whose rage only hardens.
Chapter 24: A Narrow Escape
After school, Sam sprints for safety and finds Madeline waiting in the family Ford Falcon. Emboldened by glass and steel, he sticks out his tongue at David—then wilts when his mother asks him to run a permission slip back upstairs. He clutches his stomach and feigns illness. Convinced, Madeline heads to deliver the slip herself.
As soon as she disappears, David presses his face to the passenger window, claws groping for the handle, promising violence. Madeline returns to a pale, trembling son and, thinking he’s truly sick, drives to Eddy’s Chevron for an overdue oil change. The detour spares Sam a beating—this time.
Chapter 25: The End of Innocence
Fast Eddy’s Chevron is Sam’s sanctuary: the smell of oil, the ballet of jacks and wrenches, a Tootsie Pop at the end. While the car lifts, he uses the bathroom. Returning, he overhears Eddy and a mechanic, Gary, ogling and objectifying his mother as she leans to see the undercarriage. The crude puns—about “lube” and “dipsticks”—shatter Sam’s assumptions about adult decency.
The world tilts. The Tootsie Pop, once a small treasure, curdles into a token of complicity. When Eddy offers it, Sam refuses with open disdain. Unaware of what he has heard, Madeline scolds him and makes him accept the candy. He takes it, tasting the bitterness of a childhood scraped raw.
Character Development
These chapters braid the man and the boy: the accomplished, emotionally guarded doctor and the frightened child learning what people are capable of.
- Sam: Cancels his vasectomy, revealing ambivalence about intimacy and family. As a child, endures relentless bullying, suffers a public humiliation on Valentine’s Day, accidentally humiliates David in the bathroom, and confronts adult ugliness at the garage. The Tootsie Pop turns from comfort to contamination, marking a decisive loss of innocence.
- David Bateman: Emerges as a calculating, relentless bully whose control depends on fear and spectacle. The bathroom incident wounds his pride and escalates his vendetta.
- Madeline Hill: Loving, glamorous, and protective, yet unaware of the full scope of Sam’s suffering. Her vulnerability at the garage triggers Sam’s first protective anger toward an adult world.
- Mickie Kennedy: A fierce, sarcastic ally whose bluntness masks deep loyalty. She gives voice to truths Sam avoids, challenging his complacency about Eva and anchoring him in the present.
- Eva Pryor: Present in absence. Her emotional distance—and Sam’s uncertainty—frame the adult storyline’s fragility.
- Ernie Cantwell: A steady, singular friend whose loyalty offers Sam a model of kindness amid cruelty.
Themes & Symbols
The chapters make bullying the gravitational force of Sam’s childhood, showing how humiliation, fear, and isolation carve grooves that the adult Sam still follows. The present-tense crisis—treating Daniela Bateman—proves the past is not buried; it is active, pressing, and intimately tied to Sam’s choices.
Coming of age arrives not in triumph but in shocks of recognition. The dead-fly valentine punctures social hope; the bathroom incident exposes the body as a site of shame and accidental power; the garage scene shifts Sam’s fear from peers to adults, revealing how sexualized contempt poisons what once felt safe. Friendship and family soften that hardness—Mickie’s brash protection and Sam’s reverence for his parents—but they cannot wholly shield him.
- Symbol: The Tootsie Pop
- Before: A sweet ritual, proof that some places are safe and some adults kind.
- After: A sullied token forced into his hand, emblem of powerlessness and the bitter aftertaste of lost innocence.
Key Quotes
“Your roommate.”
- Mickie’s jab at Eva reframes Sam’s relationship as convenience, not intimacy. It crystallizes his emotional drift and Mickie’s protective skepticism, pushing him to confront what he has been avoiding.
“Devil Girl.”
- The slur weaponizes gendered shame to isolate Sam further. It turns a private moment into public humiliation and shows how language enforces hierarchy and fear.
“I’ll kill you.”
- David’s threat at the car window escalates playground cruelty into terror. The scene compresses Sam’s world to a pane of glass—safety inches away, danger breathing on it.
“Give her a lube job” … “check her oil with my dipstick.”
- The mechanics’ vulgarity strips Sam’s sanctuary of innocence. Their words are the true violence in the chapter, revealing how adult complicity corrodes a child’s trust.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters fuse past and present into a single arc of consequence. Daniela Bateman’s arrival pulls the thread that ties Sam’s adult restraint to his childhood terror, ensuring that his professional life cannot remain separate from his earliest wounds. The dual timeline builds tension and causality: the boy who learns fear and disgust becomes the man who hesitates to commit, who keeps love at arm’s length, and who still flinches when the name Bateman appears. Friendship and family provide ballast, but the past insists on its due—and now it stands in Sam’s waiting room.