Nothing Chapter 17 Summary

  • The kids spend Friday cleaning up the sawmill in preparation for showing it off to Pierre Anthon. 
  • The problem, of course, is that it smells like dead bodies and dog poo. But hey, at least they cleaned the windows.
  • Jon-Johan is there whining and crying about the impending finger loss, but they tell him to shut up. They even start calling him Jonna-Johanna, because, in case you hadn't noticed, they've all become total savages.
  • The story they've worked out is that he's going to tell his dad he just randomly found the missing butcher knife stuck in some wooden post somewhere, and when he tried to pull it out, he cut off his finger.
  • Jon-Johan's over it, though. Now he's planning to snitch, or to just not show up the following day.
  • Sofie says no problem, they'll just hunt him down and chop off his whole hand because, you know, why not?
  • So he shows up on Saturday, but he's crying for his mom and rolling in the sawdust, which causes Agnes to think about how we wear masks to cover up who we really are.
  • Or, in other words, about how right Pierre Anthon is.
  • Sure enough, Sofie chops the finger off. It takes her four tries with the butcher knife, but girlfriend succeeds. Ugh.
  • Then Holy Karl hauls him away in the trailer, with Otto calling after him to cheer up, since he gets to pick the next person to go.
  • Agnes reminds us that this isn't true, since Jon-Johan was last—unless, of course, Otto meant Pierre Anthon.