Bad Behavior by Alexia Arthurs, 2016
The magic trick:
Using an abrupt ending to recenter the story’s main theme
Interesting story today. It gives us a detailed account of 14-year-old Stacy’s bad behavior that lands her away from her Brooklyn parents and embedded with her grandmother for a year in Jamaica as a kind of maturity intervention. And then, as she reunites with her mother after the year is up …. The story just kind of ends?
It’s strange. I wasn’t a fan. I wanted more of this story, more time with these characters.
But once you get over what you wanted to happen in a story, you can look at what the author actually did in the story.
The story’s fairly abrupt ending takes the reader’s attention away from Stacy’s arc. She’s important, yes, but the placement of the ending points us toward the mother character. This really is her story. Stacy’s bad behavior reflect on the mother’s decisions, namely the choice to entrust her future and that of her children to American values.
Ah, so, ok, this maybe isn’t even a story about the mother. It’s a repudiation of America.
And that’s quite a trick on Arthurs’s part.
The selection:
They took their daughter to Jamaica on the pretense of a vacation. Before they left Brooklyn, when Pam checked Stacy’s suitcase, she found that her daughter had packed two nameplate necklaces that read BAD BITCH and flawless, and some thongs that Pam didn’t know she owned. Pam left the “flawless” necklace in the suitcase and hid the “bad bitch” necklace and thongs. Stacy didn’t seem to notice the missing items.
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