Finally, after months of watching the two twins in the lunchroom, he decides that Lena is his twin, mostly because she sometimes taps her foot nervously when she speaks at the table full of popular girls, but he’s not exactly sure. Furthermore, Lena has begun carrying a handbag with an L stitched into it, which also seems like a very good sign. Maybe she’s sending him a signal about her identity, clueing him in, he thinks.
Wrigley decides to ask Lena to the prom, telling himself that if she says yes, he will know for sure that she was the one who confessed to Unproductive Ted. She does say yes but seems unenthusiastic about the proposal, which confuses him even more.
Wrigley rents a tuxedo and buys a yellow rose wrist corsage, and yet, just before he rings the doorbell at the twins’ home, he realizes that the twin he met in the woods would never want to go to the prom—he knows this because he doesn’t really want to go to the prom, either, and is only in a tuxedo to find out if he has the right sister. He couldn’t care less about any of the rest, or what he calls “pageantry.” The twin who talks to a turtle all alone by the creek would not love the Wrigley who attends the prom, because he is in a costume and is not being true to who he really is—the “plainly clothed Wrigley in the woods.” It’s so obvious, he thinks, and I agree. He cannot attend the prom. It would ruin any chance he had of a true relationship with the right twin.
Wrigley decides that he has failed before he has even begun, and so he doesn’t ring the doorbell but goes to the spot where he and the twin first spoke, thinking that the real sister might be there waiting and maybe they’d talk and end up kissing like at the end of a modern fairy tale. Instead, he finds a bunch of elementary school kids using sticks to spin Unproductive Ted around on the back of his shell, “his four legs cutting a cruel circle in the air, as if he were a turtle top.” Wrigley flies into a rage, grabs the biggest of the kids, and screams “WHY? WHY? WHY?” over and over again.
The elementary-school-kid ringleader says he was only having a little fun and they weren’t going to actually kill the turtle, so Wrigley sticks his gum in the kid’s hair, throws him into the creek, and says, “I’m only having a little fun, too, but I won’t actually hold you underwater until you turn blue and drown.” Then he holds the kid’s head underwater until his friends start to plead for their buddy’s life, begging Wrigley to let him breathe again. When the half-drowned kid resurfaces soaking wet, he gasps and begs not to be held underwater again. Wrigley lets him go, and the kids run away.
Unproductive Ted bites Wrigley’s hand and removes a triangle of skin when our hero sets the turtle upright.
As Unproductive Ted makes his escape, Wrigley bleeds and drip-dries and curses and waits for the right twin to show up, but she never does.
The parents of the kid he almost drowned arrive instead, and the father throws Wrigley into the creek and starts kicking water up into Wrigley’s face, saying, “How do you like being a bully now? My son is eleven years old and half your size. You’re a scumbag. A complete and utter embarrassment to the community. Why aren’t you at the prom, anyway? You already have the tuxedo on! It’s un-American to skip the prom. Are you a pinko communist?”
Rather than explain himself, Wrigley strips out of his prom costume, swims into the middle of the polluted creek, where he knows “no one will follow,” floats naked on his back, and says, “Now I understand, Unproductive Ted, why you sit alone on the rock all day long doing nothing. I quit. I’m just going to float here forever and ever and ever.” And then the novel ends with Wrigley laughing maniacally as the stars begin to pop through the night sky above.
On the Internet, there are different theories about the ending, but the predominant thought is that Wrigley is rejecting conventional society—family, government-run school, even his sexuality—to just be in that moment, floating unclothed in the creek.
Some say it’s a lesson in Zen Buddhism and that Wrigley maybe even experiences enlightenment.
It felt like the story wasn’t finished, which upset me because I wanted to know what happened to Wrigley after he got out of the water. I even reread the book three times over Christmas break thinking I had missed something.
3
You’ve Got to Meet Him Yourself
When school started up again in January, I was waiting in the hallway with my back against Mr. Graves’s classroom door.
“Did you sleep here last night, Nanette? The sun isn’t even up yet,” he joked when he arrived.
“What happens to Wrigley?” I asked. “I have to know. Because Wrigley is me. And it just can’t end like that. It. Just. Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I need more.”
“Always leave them wanting more. That’s one of the great rules of show business.”
“This isn’t show business. This is literature. And it’s my life, too,” I said. “This book is me. Me. It’s so much more than a story. The author has a responsibility to provide answers. All the answers!”
Mr. Graves smiled, laughed, and said, “I thought you would like The Bubblegum Reaper. Like I said—a rite of passage for weirdos like us.”
Mr. Graves was always using the word weirdo to describe himself and people he liked. He said that all the great writers were “weirdos,” too—that our best artists, musicians, and thinkers were first labeled weird in high school or “when they were young.” That was “the price of admission.”