Black Swan Green: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Jason is in the car with his mum on a rainy day. It’s Valentine’s Day. His mum asks if he got any cards. He lies and says no, but in fact he got one that was signed by Nicholas Briar but seemed to have been written by Gary Drake and simply said “Suck My Dick.” Nick Yew, the most popular boy, got about 20 cards. The car arrives at a clinic, where Jason is going for his second appointment about his stammer.

Jason explains that there’s a difference between stammering and stuttering—stuttering involves repeating the beginning of a word, but stammering is just getting stuck after the beginning of a word. Once in class while playing Hangman, Jason raised his hand to solve “NIGH_ING_ _E” as “NIGHTINGALE” but he stammered heavily trying to answer, and couldn’t say the word. After that, people in school made fun of him. It happened five years ago, and from then on, Jason always imagined his stammer looking like a Hangman.

Jason tries to trick Hangman, learning a lot of words so that if he senses a stammer-word coming up, he can change what he’s about to say. He’s nervous now because the next morning he’ll have to read from a book in front of class, and the book will contain stammer-words that he can’t get around. There are rumors in school of a boy who skewered his own eyeballs with pens rather than take an exam, and Jason would rather do that than have to face Hangman in front of everyone.

At the clinic, Jason goes to the office of Mrs. de Roo, who asks how things are going. She asks him about a diary he’s been told to keep, where he records when and where he stammered on certain words and how it made him feel. Jason reads some things for Mrs. de Roo. He’s learned that one of Hangman’s rules is that he often hides around speech therapists, preferring instead to ambush Jason in front of peers. Mrs. de Roo explains about how she has a friend who has been sober for three years but identifies as a “teetotal alcoholic” because he doesn’t actually feel “cured.” Similarly, Mrs. de Roo wants to help Jason become a “non-stammering stammerer.”

Later, at family dinner that evening, Jason is jealous of how Julia is more capable of speaking her mind to Mum and Dad since she doesn’t have a stammer. Additionally, they seem to tolerate it better when she says things that could upset them. After dinner, Jason goes to his room to do homework, but then he creeps out to spy on Julia when she uses the telephone. She gets a call from someone named Ewan who apparently sent her a Valentine. He seems to be her boyfriend and go to a posh local cathedral school. Later, Julia lies to Dad about the call. She seems to be a natural at it and has already applied to become a lawyer at university. Later, Julia confronts Jason and asks if he eavesdropped on her call because he opened the door to his room. He denies it.

The next morning, Jason is nervous and time moves slowly. Moron sits next to him on the bus. When they make it to school, a teacher named Mr. Kempsey pulls him aside and asks if it’s true that he’s been experiencing “debilitating dread” about the reading he has to do that morning. Jason figures Mrs. de Roo must have said something and admits that it’s true. Mr. Kempsey offers to let him postpone the reading but warns that he can’t avoid public speaking forever. Jason accepts the extension.

In class, Mr. Kempsey does the reading that Jason was supposed to do. At the end, Gary Drake asks why Jason didn’t read as planned. He says he wants to hear Jason read. Mr. Kempsey says that Jason is excused on “quasi-medical grounds.” Later, in math class, however, Jason can’t escape Hangman, and he incorrectly answers that nine times eleven is “one-hundred and one” because he knows he’d stammer on “ninety-nine.”