53 pages • 1 hour read
April HenryThe Night She Disappeared
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Girlhood, Vulnerability, and Power
The story of an adolescent girl being victimized by an adult man is an unfortunately common one, both in fictional crime narratives and in real life. In The Night She Disappeared, Kayla and Gabie are acutely aware of their place within this common story. After being targeted by Robertson, both girls must find a way to survive and fight back against the idea that they are powerless victims.
In The Night She Disappeared, as in real life, stories of missing and murdered girls are everywhere. These stories are easily accessible even to teenagers; in Chapter 19, Gabie googles “body found” and finds an article about a 16-year-old-girl who was murdered and stuffed into a suitcase. Countless similar stories of girls being victimized converge into a single narrative that reliably ends in tragedy and “a shallow mountain grave” (23).
Everybody in the novel is influenced by this pervasive narrative. After Kayla’s disappearance, the police quickly form a theory that she was taken by a man, possibly sexually assaulted, and then killed. Because statistics point to Kayla likely being dead, the police erroneously close her case while she is still fighting for survival.
Kayla’s peers have heard the same narrative and are primed to believe Kayla is dead within days of her disappearance. Even Gabie, who holds out hope for her survival, can’t stop imagining scenes of brutality playing out between Kayla and her captors. Other characters follow Kayla’s case with curiosity and fascination, feeling that they “own a little piece of [her]” (189) due to her coverage in the media. There is a voyeuristic shade to the way they eagerly speculate on her fate, as if her life is just another abstract crime story.
When Kayla interacts with Robertson, she is surprised that he doesn’t want to touch her. She expects sexual violence from him and can’t fathom why he kidnapped her otherwise. Though his motives remain murky through the end of the novel, Kayla’s automatic expectation of assault reflects the universality of the narrative around the victimization of girls.
In his chapters, Robertson pedestals Gabie as his perfect victim: young, shy, and submissive. He is disgusted by Kayla’s strong will and imagines that Gabie would placidly accommodate his desires. This idea is built on sexism and displays a fundamental misunderstanding of Gabie’s character, as Henry shows her to be tenacious and self-sufficient. Ultimately, Robertson likes the idea of a young girl as a victim but is disgusted by the reality—Kayla’s sweat, blood, vomit, and indomitable will to live all vex him.
Henry subverts the view of young girls as victims through the strong wills of Gabie and Kayla. Gabie is determined to discover the truth, and Kayla is determined to survive. Despite knowing that they aren’t taken seriously and seen as easy prey, both girls utilize all the skills in their arsenal to fight back: against Robertson, against the police, and against the idea that Kayla will become another “nameless dead girl” (148).
Kayla engages with Robertson in calculated ways to protect her safety, making a show of submitting to him while preserving her inner strength. His inability to see that strength becomes her greatest advantage, as she manages to catch him off guard with her makeshift weapons. Her actions don’t fit into Robertson’s expected dynamic of calculating male predator and hapless female victim, so he can’t anticipate them. Meanwhile, Gabie resists Thayer’s attempts to silence her even when he threatens Drew.
By refusing to accept that they are powerless, Kayla and Gabie empower themselves. The novel ends with a reversal of the typical outcome; both girls survive their encounter with Robertson, and he ends up dead. In choosing to end the novel with their survival, Henry subverts the trope of the tragic female victim and sets The Night She Disappeared apart from other mystery novels.
The Fallibility of Authority Figures
Being an authority figure—whether a parent or a police officer—often comes with an innate sense of trust from others. The people who rely on these figures trust they will act in the best interests of those who look up to them. When they fail to live up to expectations, it can be a frightening and disorienting experience for those who rely on them. In The Night She Disappeared, Henry explores the fallibility of authority figures, focusing mostly on the Portland police department. Drew’s and Gabie’s interactions with the police demonstrate that people in power are just as prone to mistakes as those without it.
After Kayla is taken, Gabie is initially comforted by the involvement of the police, but Henry soon establishes that the lead investigator, Sergeant Thayer, is chasing the wrong leads. Thayer forms a theory about the case early on: Kayla was abducted and killed, and her body dumped in the Willamette River. Thayer refuses to deviate from his theory even in the face of contrary evidence. In his first encounter with Gabie, Thayer speaks over her and brushes off her attempt to tell him that she was Robertson’s intended target, dismissively urging her to “look at the facts” (20).
As the investigation progresses, Thayer fixates on Cody Renfrew as his prime suspect. Thayer and the other officers involved in the investigation display bias against Cody because of his substance addiction and poverty. Thayer even lies to Cody to elicit a confession, worsening his paranoia and catalyzing his eventual suicide. Meanwhile, the chapters set in Robertson’s house prove that Thayer is pursuing the wrong theory. Henry breaks down the image of law enforcement as an infallible and rational unit by showing how Thayer falls victim to biases, mistakes, and fits of ego.
Thayer’s mistakes escalate to full-on corruption after Cody’s suicide, when he threatens to “make [Drew’s] life hell” unless Gabie stops poking around (193). He proves conclusively that he can’t be trusted and that Kayla can’t rely on the police to save her.
The police are not the only adults who misstep in the narrative. Both Drew’s and Gabie’s parents fail to show up when their children need them—Drew’s mother because she is addicted to meth and Gabie’s parents because of their demanding jobs. Both teenagers cultivate strong senses of independence as a result. Because they can’t count on the adults in their lives to help them after Kayla vanishes, Drew and Gabie must advocate for their missing friend themselves. After being rebuffed over and over by Thayer, they stage their own rescue operation just in time to intervene before Robertson shoots Kayla.
The police completely fail to identify their real suspect until after Gabie and Drew have already rescued Kayla and dispatched her abductor. Henry makes it clear: If they had declined to advocate for themselves and bowed to the status quo, Kayla would be dead. Readers are left to wonder “how many girls would have died in Ronald Hewett’s basement” (232) if the case had been left in the hands of law enforcement.
The novel ends with Drew and Gabie being honored for their achievement by the police chief while Thayer glowers from the audience. Though their story has a relatively happy ending, it serves as a reminder that independence and self-advocacy are important skills because one can’t always rely on authority figures for help.
The Ramifications of Class Bias
While most people don’t think of themselves as biased, everybody has some degree of prejudice, informed by their unique circumstances. Humans seek comfort in categorizing and generalizing, but generalizations become harmful when they inhibit the ability to empathize and connect with people from different backgrounds.
In The Night She Disappeared, Henry explores this common prejudice by examining how bias against lower socioeconomic classes can be harmful on both interpersonal and societal levels. The actions of both police and civilians during the Kayla Cutler investigation are influenced by a prejudicial view of the working class.
Class plays an immediate role in the response to Kayla’s kidnapping. Kayla is from a well-off family and fits the general description of someone considered “important” by society, so her disappearance garners intense media coverage. The police mobilize immediately to investigate her disappearance. As the case develops, however, they fixate on the wrong suspect in part due to his low socioeconomic status. Cody Renfrew has a substance use addiction and a past of petty crime, factors that make him innately suspicious in the eyes of law enforcement. Their perception of him as a low-class criminal motivates them to pursue him aggressively despite an almost total lack of concrete evidence suggesting he took Kayla.
Robertson leverages his knowledge of implicit biases to fly under police’s radar. He correctly guesses that people are unlikely to suspect “one quiet vegetarian guy with glasses” (122), a man with a gainful job who keeps to himself. He hides his true self under a veneer of a harmless, respectable career man, and his facade fools the police.
Gabie and Drew’s relationship is affected by their respective socioeconomic statuses. Gabie is the Stanford-bound daughter of two surgeons, while Drew works a second job as a small-time marijuana dealer and lives in a working-class, single-parent household. His mother is addicted to methamphetamine and cannot keep a job. The resultant stigma of being a “tweaker” affects not only her but her son. In the eyes of his community, her addiction reflects badly on Drew, who is characterized as “white trash” despite never having been in trouble with the law himself. When Drew questions the actions of the police, Thayer uses his mom’s status to silence him, demonstrating how those authority figures can leverage social power to oppress those without it.
Henry contrasts the outcome of the Portland police’s investigation with Gabie and Drew’s relationship. Gabie and Drew initially don’t know how to approach their different circumstances. Drew worries that Gabie sees him as a “slacker,” and Gabie “[feels] ashamed of […her] nice car, and [her] big house” (171). But as they grow closer, they discover striking similarities in their lives. They both like big vocabulary words, both often come home to empty houses, and both feel overlooked by their peers. Their commonalities vastly outweigh the differences of class. From their relationship, Gabie and Drew each gain a new awareness of, and empathy for, each other’s circumstances.
Thayer and the Portland police, on the other hand, never get past their biases. They pursue Cody doggedly, and the intense stress placed on his already-fragile psyche drives him to suicide. Even after his death, Cody’s image is cruelly smeared in local papers. It’s a tragic ending for his character and one that could have been avoided if the officers involved had questioned the source of their initial suspicions and pursued other leads.
In The Night She Disappeared, Henry doesn’t condemn the existence of biases. Instead, she acknowledges them as a common human failing while portraying the danger of letting prejudice go unchecked. Through Drew’s and Gabie’s arcs, Henry provides hope that biases can be unlearned through empathy and seeking out connections with people outside of one’s own sphere.
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