Shadow Jumper

“A sharp pain radiated along the back of his hand. He inspected the bleeding crack, smearing a droplet of blood with his thumb. His skin was getting worse. Dad would know what to do, but by the time he decided to come home…well, anything could have happened.”

At this point in the text, the reader does not know why Dad is gone, why he has expertise about the skin condition, or what prevents him from deciding to come home. This observation creates suspense, and the visual imagery of Jack’s skin raises questions about what happened to him. This quote shows both Jack’s belief and loyalty in his father but also the instability of that relationship. These are both important factors in Jack’s eventual growth as a character as well as the development of the plot.

“It was as if someone had shaken him up like a bottle of fizzy drink and then unscrewed the cap. Words exploded out of his mouth at a force he couldn’t stop—weeks, months of silent worry released in a torrent—all about being allergic to sunlight and wearing the horrible gooey gloop to stop his skin burning.”

The simile of “like a bottle of fizzy drink” creates visual imagery, providing a clear example of the level of excitement and frustration reached by Jack. The metaphor of “in a torrent” provides another water-based metaphor, showing how forcefully Jack’s words stream out. This interaction with Beth is clearly a catalyst for Jack’s character development.

“The roofs had been his bolthole. A place to retreat when life got tough. When his skin was driving him crazy and he needed to escape the flat. But a line had been crossed when he and Beth had jumped that first shadow together. It meant sharing his refuge with her.”

Jack finds more pleasure in breaking his patterns of isolation with Beth than he does in remaining isolated. In accepting this new friendship, Jack learns that he does not have to remain completely alone; he can open up and form meaningful relationships. This point marks a major upward trend in Jack’s character arc.

“But loneliness smothered him like the lotion he rubbed into his skin.”

The simile of “like the lotion” emphasizes the sensation of Jack’s loneliness. He must cover his entire body in the lotion that helps protect him from sunlight; he feels as if his whole self is defined by the sense of ostracism. The imagery is that of a person coating themselves with protective emollient in order to face the harshness of the world around them, an action Jack realizes may be necessary, but that is also uncomfortable and possibly as harmful as the elements whose effects he seeks to minimize.

“Life with Dad was like being on a roller coaster at times, with stomach-churning ups and downs.”

Jack metaphorizes his experience of living with his dad by comparing his home life to a roller coaster. Anyone who has lived with an unstable parent will recognize the fear and sense of instability that comes from the necessity of constant vigilance. The high highs are not enough to compensate for the low lows. The simile also provides a peripheral sense of the loss of safety, the momentum one cannot control, and the ways fun can mask fear. These are all aspects of Jack’s relationship with his father that he does not unpack until later.

“I realise I look scary. That’s the point, I suppose. It’s a good way of keeping people away. Then they don’t ask me questions about my mum and dad.”

In their first encounter, Jack is rather put out by Beth’s appearance, and he wonders why she willingly wears so much makeup. She points out that wearing “scary” makeup prevents people from talking to her, enabling the isolation that she initially craves after her parents’ deaths. This conversation helps show Beth’s emotional development arc, which is more dynamic than Jack’s at this point. She is closed off from most people, but here she is modeling for Jack how people might process trauma, something he does not do until much later in his emotional arc.

“His smirking mouth sliced across his face, splitting it into two uneven parts.”

The metaphor of a mouth slicing a face characterizes Blackstone as sinister. In this first impression, Jack and Beth see Blackstone’s photo in a newspaper. Because they already anticipate viewing him as a sinister figure, they go into this first encounter with confirmation bias; his appearance is sinister because they expect it to be.

“Jack went hot, sweat prickling his scalp. He sat back in his chair, his mouth opening and closing like a fish, but now words came out. He looked at Beth in disbelief.”

Jack is not the most eloquent even at the best of times. The simile of “like a fish” emphasizes how “out of water” he feels as he reads the old newspaper and realizes that his dad might have been conducting experiments on children. Jack has not, up to this point, explored the possibility that his dad may not have the best intentions. To extend the metaphor, the information Jack finds in the paper and from the former janitor completely changes the waters.

“All he’d done was rake up the past and find out nasty stuff. And now he’d dug it up, he couldn’t bury it again. And he’d upset his one friend.”

Jack is unfamiliar with most dynamics of friendship, but he is especially unversed in how to correctly respond to female expressions of emotion. Beth is upset because he seems determined to learn unpleasant things about his dad that will prevent him from spending time with his dad. Beth is envious of the fact that Jack still has a dad, no matter how inscrutable the man’s actions appear to be. She is upset that Jack would prefer to dwell on negatives they have not confirmed.

“He couldn’t work Beth out. She was usually the optimist, the one to spur him into action, but that girl had vanished.”

As they deliberate about potentially breaking into Bioscience Discoveries, Jack is displeased to note that Beth is less enthusiastic about the plan. Beth fears that any additional stress will exacerbate his skin condition, but he has not put two and two together to realize that the magazine she was reading contains an article about photosensitivity. Jack is not used to seeing others this concerned about him. His own father does not display half of Beth’s level of concern, which Jack has internalized as a part of his barometer for the motivations of others.

“He waited, clinging like a monkey to a tree, pressing his body against it to make himself as invisible as possible, until the beam had passed.”

On the ground, Jack is often described in awkward terms; he does not quite fit in. While on the rooftops, however, he is in his element. The simile of “like a monkey to a tree” emphasizes how natural the act of shadow jumping is for him. It also shows how practiced Jack has become at minimizing himself and how comfortable he is with his invisibility.

“His dad, the great scientist, had experimented on him, he was convinced. He was willing to risk his son’s life for the sake of an anti-ageing drug. Jack had no idea whether it was for money or fame to save his reputation as a scientist. It didn’t matter why; the fact was he didn’t care about his family. A sharp twinge shot up his damaged skin—Dad didn’t care about him.”

This realization is incredibly painful for Jack. At this point in the text, Jack knows that his dad was a scientist who fled his job after allegations of experimentation on children. It makes sense for Jack to assume that his dad conducted experiments on him, since the subjects of experimentation had the same kind of skin symptoms as Jack. Jack’s conclusions here indicate the depth of the damage wrought by his father’s absence. Previously loyal, Jack has to go through a stage of doubt in order to ask questions about his relationship with his father. It is likely Jack’s character would be unable to further develop without this break in his loyalty and the news, if inaccurate, it allows him to ponder.

“He flushed—why had he let anger get the better of him? He wanted to comfort her, put an arm round her, but he didn’t think she’d want him anywhere near. Her reaction to his outburst alarmed him.”

Jack is still learning how to navigate friendship. He is surprised that Beth is upset to learn that her parents’ ashes were spilled and then vacuumed. He does not understand why she is mad about this, mainly because he keeps his own emotions and even needs under tight regulation. Beth’s physical strength and spirit of adventure are not a part of the mask she applies to her face; they are genuine features of her personality. Therefore, when something affects her profoundly, despite her facial mask of makeup, the effects are easily read in her reactions. Beth’s emotional health, while still under construction following her incredible loss, has a more realistic trajectory than Jack’s, because he largely ignores his own feelings and needs.

“Before this idiotic scheme to investigate the lab, she’d have thumped him for saying something like that—it was still fresh in his mind how she’d reacted to Kai on the roof. Now she looked like a deflated balloon. Her face was pinched and closed; even worse a tear had appeared and rolled down her cheek.”

Jack spends a lot of time ruminating on Beth’s appearance. He is intimidated by her face full of makeup. After learning that her parents’ ashes spilled and were vacuumed up, Beth looks “like a deflated balloon,” and Jack seems surprised that she is having such an emotional response to a devastating incident. It is possible because Jack himself has not dealt with his own losses in an open or healthy manner, he cannot relate to Beth’s feelings. It is also possible that this is the point at which he comes to terms with the power of loss to completely change a person’s usual state of being. In some ways, Beth is a mirror for Jack, once which he avoids looking too deeply into for most of the novel. His bewilderment in the face of Beth’s natural reactions indicates how much Jack needs to grow.

“He fought to keep the anxiety and fear at bay, wrestling with his cotton wool brain to come up with a plan to get them out of the mess.”

Jack recognizes that he is not a quick thinker in situations with emotional stakes. Beth is understandably upset that her parents’ ashes were spilled. The metaphor of Jack’s “cotton wool brain” emphasizes how slowly and unsurely he is thinking and feeling. Like cotton wool, his thoughts are wound tightly around themselves, but he at least understands he must actively pull them apart to examine them and properly deal with them.

“The word ‘psychosomatic’ bounced around inside his head like the silver ball in a pinball machine. He picked the magazine up again and tried to focus on what the article said—that some physical conditions and diseases could be made worse by mental factors, such as stress and anxiety. There was that word again: ‘stress.’ Could that be him?”

The simile of “like the silver ball in a pinball machine” emphasizes the chaotic nature of Jack’s thoughts. He is incredibly stressed out by the thought that his mental and emotional state could be exacerbating his skin; paradoxically, trying to think about how to feel less stressed generates more stress. The imagery of the silver pinball shows that despite Jack’s ability to maintain balance and employ agility, without help, he will, like the ball, eventually have to face the gravity of his situation.

“And it was then that the first seeds of doubt about whether he was ever coming back had been sown.”

Jack recalls that after receiving an email from his dad that did not even acknowledge his birthday, his skin started to become worse. He worried that his dad would never come home, and then the sores escalated. This metaphor shows how emotions can become tangible struggles, manifesting in physical growths in this case.

“Unease seemed to ooze out of her and an awkward silence stretched between them.”

The image of unease “oozing” out of Beth emphasizes the awkward atmosphere created by their reunion. Since they fought the last time they saw each other, they are not quite sure how to proceed in their friendship. The word choice of “oozing” brings to bear all of the other oozy things in the narrative, which always invite awkwardness, reveal something unhealthy, or lead to isolation, like Jack’s slick coat of lotion or the pus that comes from the cut in his leg.

“Water streamed down Beth’s face and plastered her hair to her scalp. Black rivulets flowed down her cheeks where her eye make-up had dissolved.”

Beth’s makeup is a major element of her characterization and also dictates how Jack views her. When she is wearing lots of makeup, he finds her intimidating and unapproachable. After the dramatic rain washes away her makeup, Jack sees her as a new Beth, which invokes the restorative power of rain as an enduring literary symbol.

“It was like watching the demolition of an industrial chimney.”

After Beth sneaks up behind Kai and hits him over the head with her rucksack, Jack feels very gratified that she has saved him from inevitably getting beaten up. The comparison of Kai to an industrial chimney emphasizes how large he is and how unassailable he had seemed. The fact that a chimney is also hollow and spews forth pollution is an easy parallel to Kai’s character, given his unwillingness to forgive a very small transgression by two younger kids and his habit of shouting nasty threats.

“He ran faster, dragging Beth along behind him. A deep pain pierced his chest as he struggled to get enough breath into his lungs.”

Frequently, Jack experiences “a deep pain” or pain that is described as “piercing” shortly before something terrible happens. In this scene, the pain actually precedes a redemption moment for Jack since he saves Beth; before this, Beth usually saves Jack.

“In that split second he realized she’d rather fall than let go.”

As Jack is holding Beth and she’s about to fall off the roof, he has the choice to grab her rucksack and ensure the safety of the ashes or to pull up Beth. He grabs the rucksack and throws it to the side so that he can focus on pulling her up, but he thinks that she might choose the ashes over herself. In that moment, Jack realizes Beth’s vulnerability and sees in it his own.

“‘What? You’d have rescued them instead of me?’ Beth gazed at him. ‘You did the right thing. I thought I was a goner there.’”

Beth has previously expressed a lack of self-preservation, choosing to lug her heavy bag along while shadow jumping, which invites danger. After the ashes fall, Jack chooses to save her rather than ensure the ashes are safe. Beth recognizes not only that her safety is more important than the ashes, which she has never done before, but that she matters to someone.