49 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen Graham JonesI Was a Teenage Slasher
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Skinnydipping in the Moonlight”
Tolly undoes his binding with minimal effort and goes after his next two victims, Wes Stripling and Jenna Gonzales. Tolly starts becoming accustomed to the lack of control he has over his body. This includes succumbing to slasher logic. He justifies the reasons that the marching band should experience some kind of retribution for their actions.
Although Amber warned them to leave Lamesa, Wes and Jenna could not avoid falling into the slasher trope of stupid teen behavior. Tolly finds them skinny-dipping in the stock tank not too far from his house, despite the fact that they are not romantically involved with each other.
Wes observes that someone is watching them from a distance. Someone throws a baton up into the air. Tolly soon discovers that it is Mel, who isn’t skinny-dipping but just happens to be hanging out with the other two. Tolly impales Wes on a pipe, killing him immediately. Jenna tries to escape from the stock tank, but Tolly intercepts her. Mel buys Jenna time by striking Tolly back with her baton.
Tolly uses a pipe fixture to tear off one of the stock tank walls. The water pulls Jenna toward Tolly. She recognizes Tolly from his body language, surprising him. She promises to reform her life. Tolly strangles her with her hair, stepping on her chest to hasten her death.
Mel uses Wes’s truck to pin Tolly against the wall, but Tolly lies back to let it drive over him. Mel crashes the truck into the stock tank. The impact causes Wes’s corpse to fall onto the windshield of the truck. Tolly impales Mel on her own baton. He soon regains control of his body and realizes that Amber was right about the way he fixed the belts around his head.
After washing off the blood, Tolly lays his mom’s belts out on the wall of the tank for her to eventually find. He decides to kill the truck’s engine to make it easier to remove once the authorities clean up the site. This is how he finds out that it wasn’t Mel whom he killed, but the marching band’s other twirler, Janice Dickerson. Tolly realizes with horror that his slasher days aren’t over yet. He immediately turns back into a slasher, blurring his vision out.
When Tolly regains consciousness, he is in a truck driven by a pumper who knew Tolly’s father. The pumper offers Tolly a hardhat with the name “D R I V E R” written on it and tells Tolly that his father had ambitious dreams for Tolly. He observes a resemblance between Tolly and his father, which makes Tolly feel bad because it implicates his father in all the killings.
Tolly asks to get dropped off at the Town & Country store so that he can call his mom. The welder that Amber previously flirted with comes back to the store and recognizes Tolly. He observes that Tolly doesn’t look okay. He buys Tolly a cup of Dr. Pepper. Though Tolly insists that he doesn’t need anything, the welder, who introduces himself as Bo, indicates that he has left money with the store clerk to buy anything that might make Tolly feel better. Tolly resents Bo for his kindness, knowing he deserves retribution for killing five people. Bo reassures Tolly that things will be alright, believing that Tolly feels bad about Amber. When Bo leaves, Tolly cries.
Tolly uses the store credit to call Amber. Amber picks him up from the store. Tolly reports his latest victims. Amber realizes that Tolly is branching out from his transgressors since Janice didn’t participate in Tolly’s humiliation. Amber reveals that Justin’s parents were killed after an altercation involving Deek’s parents. Ruling them out as suspects, Sheriff Burke has tied Tolly to the killings.
Tolly and Amber go to the stock tank but are surprised to find that Wes’s truck, along with the three bodies, is missing. Amber wonders if this means that Tolly didn’t really kill them after all. Tolly insists that it happened. They consider ways to stop Tolly from finishing his revenge, noting that Stace could only stop Justin once he had fulfilled his mission by killing Deek. Tolly tries to strangle himself with one of his mother’s belts to convince Amber to turn him over to the sheriff.
On their way to the police station, Tolly and Amber drive past the Sky-Vue, where Tolly notices something wrong with the projection. When Amber indicates that the projector is working fine, Tolly realizes his vision is changing and he is becoming a slasher once again. He leaps out of Amber’s truck to spare her, then fastens the belts over his face.
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Final Frontier”
The older Tolly confesses that he fictionalized his encounter with Bo. In actuality, the welder had seen him at the Town & Country store and generally ignored him. Tolly had gotten Bo’s Dr. Pepper when he forgot about it by the trashcan. Bo only acknowledged Tolly as he was leaving the store. He reflects on his motivations about lying over what happened but suggests that he wanted to depict how the interaction felt to him, not how it actually occurred.
Amber gets out of her truck to retrieve Tolly, but then her truck is hit by a Riviera. Tolly uses his slasher speed to pull Amber out of harm’s way, causing himself to get hit by the cars in the process. This gives Tolly a severe hip injury and consequently a sustained limp that will heal years later. His survival is witnessed by the passing motorists, marking the first time that Tolly’s slasher persona—later known in the television film as “Strappy”—is seen in public.
Tolly limps into the suburbs, chased by a pack of wild dogs. Tolly throws them off when he encounters the possum he had seen near the Fireworks Camper, redirecting them to kill the possum. Tolly reaches the Wall, a landmark where the high school graduates get to leave a final message before they leave Lamesa. Mel is there, painting her own message that calls Tolly out as the killer. Tolly reflects on the fact that Mel’s transformation into his final girl is out of character for her, considering that she was a bully to others in the past.
Mel writes the names of Tolly’s victims on the Wall. She nearly includes one of Justin’s victims when Tolly interrupts her, grappling her with one of his belts. They dance around one another to gain an advantage in their battle. Mel stuns him with spray paint, allowing the dogs to catch up and attack him. The dogs are scared off when Tolly rolls them toward the road, putting them in the path of the truck belonging to the deputy’s fiancée. Amber emerges from the truck searching for Mel and Tolly, but she does not see either of them, so she leaves.
Tolly chases Mel to his street. Sheriff Burke is waiting there. Mel takes her revolver and shoots it into the dark, hoping to hit Tolly. One of the bullets hits Tolly’s shoulder, but he remains hidden in the shadows, trying to endure the pain. The sheriff places Mel into her cruiser for protection. The commotion forces the neighbors to come out and investigate. Tolly removes the belts from his face to blend in. When the neighbors recognize him, Tolly learns that his mother has gone to New Mexico to fetch him.
Tolly makes it to the cruiser without alerting the sheriff to his presence. He succeeds in unlocking it and strangling Mel with a belt. He nearly escapes the sheriff’s notice when one of his neighbors shoots at him, having witnessed Mel’s death. Sheriff Burke dives for cover. Tolly escapes.
Tolly comes across a Labrador and registers its color, suggesting that he is returning to normal. He nevertheless follows an impulse to go to the grain elevator and considers the possibility of dying by suicide. He knows that it won’t be enough to make up for his actions, however. Amber finds him sitting by the grain elevator, indicating that she knew to return to the first site of the slasher’s murders. Tolly shares that Mel is dead, but Amber points out that he didn’t kill her according to a genre convention called the Tunnel of Love. Before the final showdown, the slasher always shows off his previous kills to the final girl, intended as a perverse love letter to her.
Tolly laments that his life is already over. Amber argues that dying wouldn’t achieve anything, but Tolly stresses his point. Amber weeps over the unfairness of the situation, leading Tolly to point out that high school is never meant to be fair. Tolly is about to ascend the grain elevator when Amber takes his forearm. The contact makes them both realize that Amber, not Mel, is his final girl, especially considering her distanced involvement in Tolly’s near-death experience and her sudden behavioral changes over the past few days. Tolly urges her to run.
Tolly chases Amber into the grain elevator. Amber finds the bodies of Tolly’s past victims strewn along the path inside, fulfilling the Tunnel of Love trope. Amber leads Tolly up to the high platform of the grain elevator, which is a dead end. Amber appeals to Tolly, leading him to wrestle with his slasher persona. He is unsuccessful, and when he rushes at her, Amber dives away so that Tolly is hanging off the side of the platform. Amber reaches into her sweatshirt, which she has been wearing inside out the whole time. When Tolly gets back up onto the platform, he holds her over the edge. She reaches for his face, her hand covered in the peanut butter she had been hiding inside her shirt. The allergic reaction causes him to put Amber down and fall off the grain elevator.
Amber finds Tolly’s body, wipes off the peanut butter, and gives him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to stop him from dying. She turns away to allow Tolly’s body to heal itself. On his way out of state, Tolly encounters his mother one more time. She has read his letter and allows him to escape from Texas. He spends the next 17 years working at a salvage yard in Colorado, where he lives. Tolly falsifies his life story for his employer, Red. Red becomes a surrogate parent for Tolly.
One day, Tolly recognizes Amber’s truck in the salvage yard. This inspires him to begin writing his memoir on a parts computer, printing the story out on receipt paper. He puts the pages together and places it into a makeshift bookcase, which he leaves in the glove compartment of Amber’s truck. As Tolly reaches the end of the memoir, he narrates that Amber has found her way to the salvage yard with her son, hoping to show him her old truck. Tolly had hung Amber’s silver-feather earring on the rearview mirror to tell her to examine the car further.
The only pages Tolly hasn’t included are the last pages of his story, which will be in the printer when Amber comes to the office to find him. By then, he will already be dead by suicide, having ingested peanut butter to trigger a fatal allergic reaction. He thanks Amber for being in his life and encourages her to make the most out of her relationship with her son. He ends by recounting his last fond memory of her: sitting with her on the football field, holding her hand.
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
Tolly’s admission that he fictionalized his interaction with the welder reframes the events of the novel through an emotional lens. While he calls the truth of his story to question, exposing his unreliability as a narrator, he also invites a consideration of how the story he has told resonates with the emotional truth of his experience rather than the literal truth. This means that the question of whether or not he had control over his actions never mattered as much as the idea that seeking revenge restored agency in the life he felt trapped in.
These chapters mark the point where Tolly begins to accept his slasher logic, suggesting that he is fully culpable for his actions after all. At the same time, the drive to seek revenge against his transgressors clashes with the pumper’s assurance that Tolly is meant to live a life of great potential. Tolly has been using his grief as a convenient excuse for his inability to break out of a life that has no direction. What the engagement with the pumper reveals is that this doesn’t have to be the case. Tolly doesn’t have to live the life he thinks he is destined to live. Furthermore, to do so would dishonor his father’s memory. Similarly, what Tolly’s admission about the welder reveals is that Tolly lives according to the story he tells himself. He cannot aspire toward a better life unless he can tell himself that he deserves the welder’s kindness. This presents an alternative to the story he has been telling himself thus far: that his place in the social hierarchy of the school necessitates his role in perpetuating its violence. Jones uses this complication to push toward a resolution of Fate Versus Free Will and Grief and the Struggle for Social Acceptance as themes.
The moment Tolly uses his abilities for ends other than killing comes when he saves Amber’s life. Ironically, this is also the moment Tolly cements his identity as a slasher in the public eye. This exacerbates Tolly’s internal dilemma about the consequences of his actions. Supposing he chose not to save Amber, he would have been unable to live with the guilt of letting her die. This would have possibly sent him on a wider mission of revenge. On the other hand, with the revelation that Amber is Tolly’s real final girl, this possibility would have disrupted the traditional shape of the slasher narrative. In a certain sense, the slasher genre conventions ensured that Tolly would save Amber because they were destined to face off one last time. It is only during their confrontation at the grain elevator that Tolly’s weaknesses can be weaponized against him.
Amber’s decision to use Tolly’s natural weakness against him is a complicated choice. Her decision represents her allegiance to and solidarity with the group that wronged and ostracized Tolly. At the same time, her knowledge of his weakness points to the intimacy of their relationship. Nobody else would have known about Tolly’s weakness except for Stace, who is too far removed from Tolly’s narrative to be his final girl as well. Tolly realizes that they can never be part of each other’s lives without potentially harming one another, which represents the distance that grows between them as Amber becomes more fully integrated into the social hierarchy of the school. It also reminds Tolly that Amber is committed to pursuing a life beyond Lamesa, which he cannot envision for himself.
The memoir is a manifestation of Tolly’s grief for his friendship with Amber, the thing he values most in his life. His decision to die by suicide is a decision to protect Amber from himself. He knows that if he encounters her again, his slasher persona will reemerge. He also knows that if he dies, then he can let Amber go on with her life. He nevertheless feels peace with his decision because he continues to hold on to his last happy memory with her, suggesting that it is good enough to make his life feel less lonely and more meaningful.
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By Stephen Graham Jones
