Character Clues

Character Analysis

Physical Appearances

Straight up: Jamie's a boy who looks like a girl. Now, that's something some boys want to cultivate, and if you're one of them, rock on with your bad glitter self. For Jamie, however, it's the bane of his existence. Check it:

I mean I LIKE girls like in a SEXUAL way but I don't want to BE one! Does that make me like PART LESBIAN or something? Because I LIKE girls AND I LOOK LIKE ONE? (8.37)

When Jamie first meets his best friend in Portland, Branson tries to put the moves on him. Jamie tells Branson he's a boy, and Branson is shocked:

"You'd be a pretty b**** you really would" Branson said a few days after he tried going down my pants […] Those light-ass eyes of yours. Your silver hair." I said "It's not silver it's blond" but he was like "That s*** is mad silver!" (5.100)

Needless to say, Jamie dyes his hair black in an effort to look more punk and less like a girl. But by the time he meets Kent, the guy with whom he travels through Illinois, the dye job is starting to grow out. That leads to this exchange:

"I was like "You think I need a haircut?" and he said "You LIKE lookin' like that?" and I went "Lookin' like what?" I thought he was going to say "Like a girl" but he didn't instead he said "Like a punk" and then I said "But I am a punk" and I told him how in Portland they called me Punkzilla but he was like "You're not in Portland anymore" so I got my hair cut really short like sort of a shaggy crew cut and now I'm blond again. (19.26)

Boy/girl, light/dark: Jamie exists on the slashes. His appearance may vary, but it makes this crystal clear.

Speech and Dialogue

Hey, did you see that skeezer? She was mad sexy, right?

Jamie's language is the language of the streets. All women are skeezers, and mad is his adjective of choice. This is a white kid from Cincinnati who's determined to sound hard. But you don't have to take our word for it; just listen to him:

I was expecting to find a dead body in the backseat but all there was were a few empty forties of beer with the labels torn off and a twenty-poud dumbbell and a TV Guide with some skeezer on the cover from that emergency-room show that Mom likes to watch Mr. Gray's Body Parts or whatever it's called and the skeezer is that Asian one with the big juicy fish lips. (8.75)

You could get offended by Jamie's obvious sexism, or you could see in his language that he's a vulnerable, disenfranchised, deeply insecure kid. He's desperately trying to be masculine in any way possible, because he knows he looks feminine, and the thing he wants most is for a girl, any girl, to sleep with him.

Whereas Jamie's obviously comma-challenged, P's the opposite. Here's an excerpt from his letter to Jamie:

I'm glad the Major, as ineffectual as the right-wing Bush fanatic is, knew that particular officer and was able to talk them out of pressing charges. And I'll even admit that as much as I hate the idea of a military school bearing down on any young man's life, I'm sure there were valuable things you were able to take from your brief time there; even if it was the simple dose of fear that might possibly act as a vaccine in your enormous, sky's-the-limit future. (4.18)

Okay, we could argue with that semicolon between "there" and "even", but you get the point: P's facility with language is that of a writer, which he is; Jamie's is the language of a writer who doesn't know he is one yet.