Five Little Indians: Chapter 2: Lucy Summary & Analysis

On the day before her 16th birthday, Sister Mary gives Lucy a cardboard suitcase and tells her to pack her things. She will be leaving the mission the next day. Lucy is relieved: while all the students are supposed to age out at 16, sometimes the school keeps them longer, paying them a pittance to keep working as maids and cooks,  especially if they don’t have family members to ask questions. By lunchtime, Lucy’s friend Edna has gossiped her good news all over the school. The girls want to know where Lucy will go. Sister Mary told her that the school would give her bus ticket to Vancouver. There, she plans to look for her friend Maisie, who aged out and left the school a year earlier. Although she only wrote to Lucy once, Lucy saved the envelope with Maisie’s address on it.

That night, Edna declares that the girls must have a going-away party for Lucy. When the nuns are asleep, she sneaks to the kitchen and steals a pillowcase full of freshly baked pastries. Lucy counts seconds while Edna is gone. She counts a lot, a nervous habit she picked up in her early days at the mission school. The girls put a pink candle in one of the pastries and sing happy birthday, then tease Lucy that her wish probably involves Kenny, with whom she was friends until he escaped the school.

In the morning, Lucy packs her meager belongings: a few bobby pins, a change of clothes, a toothbrush and hairbrush, and the pink envelope from Maisie. As a parting gift, Edna gives her a patchwork purse she made. Lucy can hardly believe that she’s leaving as she follows Sister Mary to the docks after lunch, accepts a bus ticket voucher, St. Christopher prayer card, and $25 from the nun. Then she climbs aboard the boat for the short trip across the bay. When they arrive in town, the pilot tells her she should make her way to the East Hastings neighborhood when she arrives in Vancouver, since there are “lots of [her] kind there.”

On the bus ride, Lucy runs her fingers through her hair. The nuns shaved all the children (to prevent lice infestations) when they arrived. Then, when the girls’ hair grew back, the nuns made them style it so it wouldn’t look like “Indian hair.” Head-shaving was a common punishment. Sister Mary shaved Lucy’s head and made her wear a sign that said “I am a liar” when Lucy tried to tell her that Father Levesque had abused her. That was the day Lucy slipped Kenny—then undergoing his own punishment for an attempt to run away—her note. Now, as she remembers all this, she thinks about how frequently she and the others were punished for minor infractions, for the crime of being children.

Lucy dozes throughout the hours-long trip to Vancouver. When she disembarks, the bus driver tells her which bus she needs to catch to get to Maisie’s address. The unfamiliar noise and bustle of the city—the open way boys and girls speak together, the smell of urine in the air, the fast-moving cars on the streets—fascinate and alarm her. Finally, she boards the trolly bus, where the driver tells her that she must have exact change for her fare. She doesn’t—Sister Mary gave her only five-dollar bills—but a stranger named Walt puts a quarter into the machine for her.

Calling her “Juicy-Lucy,” Walt invites Lucy to sit next to him. She shows him the envelope, and he says he can take her to the address, which is in his neighborhood. Lucy wonders if St. Christopher is looking out for her. But when she and Walt disembark, the bus driver warns her to be careful. Walt helps Lucy find Maisie’s address, but when he rings the buzzer, the voice on the intercom says that they have the wrong place. Walt offers to let Lucy stay with him and his “old woman” (which, he must explain to her, means his girlfriend) that night.

Walt’s girlfriend isn’t there when he and Lucy arrive. He makes a sandwich for Lucy, then asks if she’s ever been on a date. He has a friend he thinks she’ll like, he says, and he insists on having that friend over that night to meet her, even though Lucy protests that she’s tired. When Walt’s so-called friend shows up, he takes Lucy to the bedroom, gropes her, and demands that she undress. Pretending that she wants to brush her teeth first, she grabs her suitcase and runs. On her way out the door, she overhears Walt bragging to his girlfriend about pimping her out. She runs all the way back to the building where she thought Maisie lived, and she hides overnight in a closet off the main entry.

In the morning, too exhausted to keep hiding, Lucy moves to the front step. When a building resident passes her, Lucy shows her the envelope. The woman replies that Maisie does live in the building; last night, Walt buzzed the wrong unit. The woman takes Lucy upstairs and knocks on the right door. Maisie opens it and Lucy jumps on her with a hug.