50 pages • 1 hour read
Lindsay CurrieScritch Scratch
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2020A 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 8-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary
Claire is baffled by the boy’s disappearance. She asks her dad if he saw a little boy, but he says there were no children on the tour. Claire checks the spot where the boy was sitting. It is damp, and Claire finds a wet piece of paper with the number 396 written on it. When her dad asks her what she saw, she lies and says she saw nothing: She does not want him to think that she has seen a ghost. That night, as she is trying to sleep, she hears scratching on the wall behind her head. It gets louder and then her doorknob starts rattling. She tries to count to calm herself down. She sees her curtains move as though caught in a breeze, but her windows are closed. Claire screams and falls out of bed. Her mom bursts into the room and calms her down. She suggests that Claire just heard the house settling and let her imagination run wild. Claire knows that her mother is wrong but says nothing. She realizes that a ghost must have followed her home.
Chapter 9 Summary
Claire is exhausted the next morning, having slept in her closet. She cannot believe that she is entertaining the possibility of believing in ghosts. Casley has not texted her and Claire does not want to text first in case she seems desperate. Her mom offers her freshly baked cinnamon rolls for breakfast, but Claire lies and says she is not hungry. She is still angry with her parents for making her do the ghost tour. Her mom asks her to take the trash out to the frightening alley. Claire thinks she hears something scraping against the wall. She screams and drops the bags as a dark shadow darts across the alley. She returns home, terrified.
Chapter 10 Summary
Monday morning comes. Claire has barely slept all weekend. As she gets ready for school, she finds the clothes in her dresser inexplicably soaked with water. She knows that if her dad learns that she is being haunted, he will put her in his next book, which she does not want. At school, Claire sees Casley, who asks about her weekend. Their conversation is tense and Claire does not tell her friend about the ghost boy. Casley shows Claire a makeup bag that Emily gave her. Claire is perturbed that Casley is suddenly so interested in makeup and makes up an excuse to get away. She wishes Casley had mentioned their science fair plans or the microscope they wanted to buy together. Claire does not think she can tell Casley about what is happening to her.
Chapter 11 Summary
Claire struggles through the school day. At lunch, Casley is wearing makeup and a new outfit that Emily lent her. Claire worries that Casley is going to become popular and leave her behind. Someone bumps into her and makes her drop part of her lunch. She catches a glimpse of a young boy with dark, wet hair and knows that it is the ghost. Warner, Claire’s crush, picks up her dropped food and asks how she is. Claire is flustered but pleased. Normally, she would tell Casley that Warner talked to her but Emily and Warner appear to be friends, so Claire worries that her secret might not be safe. At Casley’s request, Claire reluctantly sits with her and Emily for lunch. Realizing that Claire is unhappy, Emily tries to cheer her up by offering her some lipstick. Claire snaps at Emily, saying that makeup is not going to fix her problems. She realizes that the whole cafeteria, including Warner, can hear her and storms off. Claire feels justified in being mean to Emily because Casley is obviously choosing Emily over her.
Chapter 12 Summary
Claire spends the rest of the day feeling miserable. Casley texts her many times, but Claire ignores her. If Casley really cared about her, Claire feels she would have followed her out of the cafeteria. Part of her secretly knows that she was unfair to Emily. The house is empty when Claire gets home and she falls asleep, exhausted. She wakes up to icy air blowing through the house and the sound of scratching. A framed family picture falls off the wall and her dad’s research papers fly through the air. When the wind dies down, the room is a disaster. She tidies the room but finds that the photo frame is broken. Claire’s phone dies just as she tries to call her parents. A storm starts outside. Claire is afraid to be alone in the house and runs upstairs to hide in the bathroom. She finds the number 396 written in Sharpie on the shower wall. She realizes that the ghost must be trying to tell her something.
Chapter 13 Summary
When Claire’s dad gets home, he finds her hiding in the bathroom. She wants to tell him what has been happening but does not trust him. She brushes away his concern, saying she was just scared of the storm. Her dad is confused as there was no storm outside. Later, Sam asks her what happened in the cafeteria at school. Claire confesses that she wishes she could talk to Casley about her problems and resents Casley’s friendship with Emily. She also tells Sam about the ghost boy. Once she shows him the writing in the bathroom, he believes her and agrees to help her find out who the ghost boy is. He also makes her promise to talk to Casley, pointing out that they should not let “makeup come between [them]” (87). Claire knows that her brother is right but does not know if Casley will ever want to talk to her again.
Chapter 14 Summary
Claire and Sam discuss the haunting. They adopt a scientific evidential method to seek answers. They determine which stop on the ghost tour had the most child ghosts. They brainstorm ways to figure out who the little boy is. Sam wonders why Claire has not asked their dad for help, given his ghost expertise, and Claire explains that she does not want to be used as fodder for his next book or ghost tour. Sam asks if Claire is afraid of their dad’s ghost stories: Sam knows that she counts when she is scared. Not wanting Sam to tease her, she insists that she is not afraid before admitting that she might be, just a little.
Chapter 15 Summary
Claire has been using counting to calm herself down since she was little. She is embarrassed that Sam has noticed. To her surprise, he does not tease her. They discuss what they are going to do about the ghost and Claire suggests that they use the scientific method: “Observation, research, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion!” (94). Claire recalls the old-fashioned suit the boy was wearing, which might provide a clue as to when he died. When Sam admits that he recently failed a math test, Claire offers to help him study as thanks for helping her solve the ghost mystery. The siblings agree that they make a good team. They research clothes until Claire sees a suit that looks like the one the ghost was wearing. They are from the early 1900s. Unfortunately, many locations from the ghost tour involve ghost legends from the early 1900s. They have a lot more research to do.
Chapters 8-15 Analysis
These chapters of the book develop the theme of Overcoming Fear, building Claire’s increasingly negative feelings until she confides in her brother. This confidence marks a turning point in the book as Claire’s trust is rewarded with help and support. She is still frightened by the ghost but is much less worried about what other people will think about her: This is an important emotional lesson for the middle-grade reader.
Claire struggles with the haunting, especially as it makes her doubt the paradigm she uses to make life seem safe. She does not want to believe that ghosts are real, and now that she has proof that they are, she has no idea if this one is going to harm her or not. In the beginning part of this section, as before, Claire’s primary tool for managing her fear is counting. In this case, counting is not enough to deal with supernatural experiences that are entirely out of her control. Claire’s counting is symbolic of her reliance on scientific and mathematical truth as a means to avoid more complicated feelings. Claire is unwilling to ask her parents for help because she does not trust her dad not to use her experiences for his career. She believes that he will violate her privacy and tell the world about what is happening to her, even though this is not something he has done in the past. Claire may not be able to ask her parents for help, but she does accept help from her brother. This is a major narrative shift: For the first time, she has an ally and does not have to solve all her problems on her own.
As a result of her increased emotional openness, Claire now makes some modest progress toward Uncovering the Real Story. She recognizes that she is dealing with a ghost, and she is able to make fairly logical assumptions even when she is very scared. When she is hiding in the bathroom, for instance, she realizes that the ghost boy is trying to tell her something; he is not just trying to kill her. She may not yet know what the ghost boy’s message is, but she is on the right track. By choosing to use the scientific method as a framework for her investigation, Claire demonstrates her determination and her desire to learn the truth. These traits make her a good scientist. On an emotional level, she learns more about Sam: He admits that he is failing math, an admission that allows Claire to sympathize with him and brings the siblings closer together. Before Sam made this confession, Claire tended to respond to him with annoyance and with a strong desire to hide her own vulnerabilities. His response to her trust shows that these were assumptions based on her fears rather than on Sam’s character. Now, they can work together to try and solve the mystery. The novel emphasizes the importance of teamwork and mutual respect at this point, a positive step that prefigures the similar resolution of conflict between the three girls in the next section.
The novel’s emotional arc is still rising at this point, and therefore Claire still has some difficulties reading others and identifying and processing her feelings. She continues to make bad-faith assumptions about Casley and Emily, especially when Emily offers her lipstick. Claire assumes that Casley has no time for her and is choosing Emily over her. Hurt, she ignores Casley’s texts, isolating herself. The novel shows that Claire’s assumptions contribute to her Feeling Left Behind. She wants Casley to prove that the two of them are still friends, but she also ignores Casley’s efforts to reach out to her. Casley seems fine with their friendship changing, but Claire is not. She is uncomfortable wearing makeup but does not know how to voice that discomfort and have her wishes respected. She wants things to go back to the way they were, but she does not feel able to tell Casley about her wishes. It seems as though Casley is growing up and becoming interested in clothes and makeup instead of getting excited about the science fair like she once did. In reality, it is possible for someone to be interested in more than one thing at once and to have more than one close friend at once, but Claire has not yet come to this realization. In this section, the novel explores the often problematic nature of adolescence when friends may adopt adult interests at different rates. It does this through clothes and makeup to help the reader consider the increased social pressure on physical appearances as teenagers get older, especially for girls. Claire’s anger at the lipstick, couched as disinterest, hides a real fear of growing up.
