Jumped Versions of Reality Quotes

Leticia is annoyed that she has to go to zero hour to recover her math credit. She equates love with her parents making her happy. We don't know if she really believes that's what love is, or if she's exaggerating. Trina's version of love, though, is totally different when she thinks of her mom.

When Dominique approaches her teacher, this is what she says. She insists that he's in control of her grade. Is this true, or is Dominique operating under a false premise? And why might Dominique demand a grade change first instead of asking what she can do to change her grade? (There's a key difference there.)

Bea recognizes what Leticia, known busybody and self-centered teen, doesn't: Leticia has a responsibility to act because she's a witness to the threat Dominique makes. But Leticia doesn't see this responsibility because of her passive and selfish nature.

In this instance, Dominique uses language that excuses herself and paints herself as right and others as wrong: "responded" and "corrected." Clearly, she's describing a fight between her and three girls whom she perceived as making fun of her, but since we know that Dominique is an unreliable narrator, we might hesitate before accepting only her side of the story as truth.

One of these things is clearly not Leticia's fault, but the second one is pretty clearly her fault. Why might she not want to take responsibility for her role in taking French class? What does Leticia have to admit to herself if she does take responsibility?

Leticia continually tries to pass off responsibility for her life on other people; it's how she sees the world—she's always the victim, and other people need to fix it for her. But when she tries to pass the problem to Miss Olenback, the school secretary passes it right back to Leticia. We get a hint of the real world in how teachers respond to Leticia's super entitled behavior.

Leticia always blames other people: It's not her fault she's in zero hour, not her fault she's in French, and not her fault her nail was broken. Someone else is always responsible. Fortunately, we readers are able to see through Leticia's blathering and recognize that she really wants to shift responsibility because she's afraid to take it herself.

Some of the things on this list Dominique actually does control. Of course she can't control her classes and her teacher, but she does control her grades. It's easier, though, to think that she doesn't because then she has no one to blame for her suspension from the court but herself. This sounds suspiciously like another narrator, one whose name starts with L and ends with eticia.

Take a look at the words Leticia uses to describe her cell phone: "my little girl," "cradled," and "warm," like Celina is actually a person, and an innocent one at that. Weird. And think about how Leticia likens her experiences to Mr. Yerkewicz's emergency. This is some massive ridiculousness on Leticia's part, to compare losing Celina to Mr. Yerkewicz actually having a heart attack. If that's not a skewed version of reality, nothing is.

Trina continually thinks that people are looking at her, thinking about her, wanting to be her. This is not unusual for teens, but it does change our perspective of her narration. After filling in the gaps with Dominique's and Leticia's narration, we realize that Trina thinks she has far more admirers than she actually does.