When 16-year-old Jessie’s Dad remarries, they move cross-country and start over in Los Angeles in her stepmother, Rachel’s, house, which is huge, entirely white, and impeccably kept. This experience forces Jessie to consider what it really means for someone to be home. For much of the novel, Jessie believes that moving back to Chicago will mean that she’s home again, but a surprise weekend trip to Chicago impresses upon her that this isn’t actually the case. Rather, she comes to realize that home is where someone feels safe, comfortable, and welcome—and that home doesn’t have to be a single place. Rather, one can make a home anywhere, and it’s other people that really make a place feel like home.
At the beginning of the novel, Jessie thinks often of her family’s old house in Chicago. In Jessie’s opinion, it has all the hallmarks of home: a dingy basement, family photos everywhere, and comfortable furniture. Most importantly, it was where she felt safe, loved, and wanted—and she never had to fear that she’d have to leave it. This all changed when Jessie’s mom died—and while Jessie’s physical address never changed in the two years after her mom’s death, her home nevertheless changed. Without her mom around, the household tasks and family dinners she used to take care of fell by the wayside. By the time Jessie and Dad move out to Los Angeles to live with Rachel, Jessie’s childhood house is already completely different from the house she grew up in. It lacks elements she deems essential—most importantly, her mother. Clearly, even before Jessie has to contend with a new life in Los Angeles, her house isn’t even the same home it was a few years ago. This suggests that the idea of home isn’t as simple or straightforward as Jessie might want it to be. It may have more to do with people and with emotion than with a particular house.
Once at Rachel’s, Jessie fixates on the trappings that make a house a home. In her mind, Rachel’s house isn’t a home—everything is too clean, too white, and too big. There are no family photos, no books, and no one cooks in the expansive kitchen since they have an assistant, Gloria, who feeds the family. Even Jessie’s bedroom barely reflects that she lives there, as it has abstract paintings on the walls that Jessie hates and expensive soap in her private bathroom that Jessie feels uncomfortable using. Because Jessie feels so uncomfortable in Rachel’s house, she believes even more strongly that home is in Chicago, not in California. Part of the problem certainly has to do with the fact that it is Rachel’s house in Jessie’s mind, not Rachel and Dad’s house—it may be where Jessie eats and sleeps, but she feels no ownership over it. The only thing she has in her room that is undeniably hers is a photograph of her and her mom, another clue that people, not addresses, make a home. A lot of Jessie’s discomfort also comes down to the fact that Dad and Rachel leave their children to their own devices once everyone is living under one roof. No one ever asks Jessie might make her feel better about living in California. She’s put in a guest room, not a room that she has the ability to decorate or make her own—and the novel shows that being made to feel like a guest likes this makes it so that someone never can feel at home.
Things begin to change for Jessie when Rachel buys her a plane ticket so she can go back to Chicago for a weekend and stay with her best friend, Scarlett. Jessie is thrilled—she can eat real pizza, enjoy a cold autumn, and hang out with people who make her feel normal—but she soon discovers that her time in Los Angeles has made it difficult, if not impossible, to feel at home in Chicago anymore. Jessie’s childhood home, for one, has a child’s bike in the driveway, a clear indicator that she no longer lives there and can’t even pretend that she does anymore. Then, there’s unexpected tension between Jessie and Scarlett—especially when Jessie gets drunk in Scarlett’s basement, which no longer feels as homey as it once did, now that Jessie knows that Scarlett and her new boyfriend make out on the futon that Jessie fantasized about sleeping on if she moved back. Jessie also realizes for the first time that all her classmates in Chicago have accents, which only further emphasizes how alien she now feels in her hometown. Later, as Jessie vomits in one of Scarlett’s bathrooms that she’s been using for years, she realizes that even though everything about the bathroom is familiar, none of it feels like home. Home is not in Chicago—especially when she’s fighting with Scarlett.
Making up with Scarlett begins to impress upon Jessie that SN, a virtual friend in Los Angeles, might be right: home is defined by people rather than by a place. Once Jessie and Scarlett are back on speaking terms again, it’s much easier for Jessie to feel comfortable—but she still doesn’t feel nearly the desire to stay as she thought she might. Home, Jessie has to admit, might not exist for her at all when neither the place she came from nor the place she currently sleeps feel appropriate or safe.
Though Jessie never feels entirely at home in California, she begins to feel more welcome when Rachel finally realizes how distressing and anxiety-inducing it must be for Jessie to sleep in a guest room. Rachel and Jessie might not be best friends by the end of the novel, but Rachel’s overture, combined with Jessie’s improving relationships with both Dad and her stepbrother, Theo, show again that home doesn’t stem from living in a particular house or part of the country. Rather, people are only able to feel at home when they’re comfortable with the people who live with them.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Home ThemeTracker
Home Quotes in Tell Me Three Things
Spelled out in black-and-white: Reason #4,657 why I don’t fit in here. My dad’s not a film marketing mogul, whatever the hell that is; he’s a pharmacist. Back home we were far from poor. We were what I knew as normal. But no one had their own credit cards. I shopped at Target or Goodwill with saved-up cash, and we wouldn’t just buy a five-dollar coffee without first doing the unfortunate math and realizing that the drink cost almost an hour’s worth of after-school pay.
The problem was that Mom wasn’t here. That she would never be anywhere again. When I thought about that for too long, which I didn’t, when I could help it, I realized it didn’t matter much where I slept.
Certain facts tend to render everything else irrelevant.
“You know how it is. Mean girls get mean in seventh grade and they stay that way until your ten-year reunion, when they want to be best friends again. At least, that’s what my mom says.”
“It’s funny how high school is high school everywhere,” I say, and smile at Dri. Try not to feel uncomfortable at the mention of moms, like it didn’t set off an invisible flare in my chest. “I mean, this place is completely different than where I come from, but in some ways it’s exactly the same.”
She looks to me to back her up, and I wonder if my existence is a problem for her friendship with Agnes. Scar and I always sat alone at lunch. We weren’t really interested in talking to anyone else. To be honest, I’m not sure how I’d feel if she had invited some new girl to sit with us. Dri not only invited me, but did so excitedly.
“You think they’re going to get a divorce?” Theo asks, and it surprises me that my heart sinks at the thought. Not because I particularly like living here, but because we have nothing to go back to. Our house is gone. Our Chicago lives. [...] When Rachel told my dad to not come back, did she expect me to leave too? Are we kicked out?
“They’re both idiots.”
“Stop it.”
“They are. They thought they could just insert replacement here and forget that someone they loved actually died. Even I’m more emotionally mature than that.”
No, I don’t want to leave, but I don’t want to feel like this either. Like an interloper in someone else’s home. If I do throw up today, which is more likely than not at this point, I don’t want to have to worry about soiling Rachel’s bathroom. I don’t want to feel in constant danger of eviction.
We are sitting outside during our free period, our faces tilted up toward the sun like hungry cartoon flowers. I now have sunglasses—Dri and Agnes helped me pick out a knockoff pair—and I love them. They feel transformative, like I’m somehow a different person with large squares of plastic covering my face.
There aren’t pictures of him around, which would be weird, but then I realize there aren’t very many pictures at all. [...]
The walls of my old house were covered with pictures of my family. Each of my school photos were framed and mounted in chronological order, even the ones where I was caught with my eyes closed [...]
When I come home to find Rachel in my room, I remember that this is not my room at all. This is Rachel’s guest room, and my sleeping here confirms what I already know: I am merely an interloper.
I will tell her about the mess I’ve made of things, how my new life feels on the verge of unraveling, and she will tell me how to fix it. [...]
And she’ll remind me that everything that is new always feels tenuous, that a lot of this, maybe even most of this, is in my head.
In T minus four hours, I will be home again. Even though my mom won’t be there, at least, finally, I will be someplace I recognize.
I turn off my phone. Run up the stairs to the small bathroom. Throw up my DeLucci’s pizza and six cans of beer and don’t even feel the tiniest bit of nostalgic relief when I see Scar’s map of the world shower curtain or even the Cat in the Hat soap dispenser that has been there for as long as I can remember.
I think about the life I’ve built here. SN and Ethan, or maybe SN/Ethan, Dri and Agnes, even Theo. Liam too, I guess. How my new English teacher said I’m one of her brightest students, which is a huge compliment, considering I go to a school that sends five kids to Harvard each year. How Wood Valley may be filled with rich brats, but it also has a beautiful library, and I get to work in a bookstore, and I’m reading college-level poetry with a boy who can recite it back to me. In a strange way, thanks to Rachel, LA has turned out to be nerd heaven.
This is a house full of pain, of bad juju, as Theo said, but it’s also a house of starting over. Maybe we need to light a few candles. Better yet, start putting things on all of the white walls. “You know, I mean, this place is beautiful, but maybe you should put out some pictures too. Of your husband—I mean your, uh, other husband, Theo’s dad, and of Theo as a kid. So he can remember.”
