Chapter II Summary & Analysis: Alice and the Violet Girl
Spoiler Notice: This page analyzes Chapter II of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil in detail. It assumes you have read the chapter and contains unmarked spoilers for its events. If you are not yet caught up, proceed with caution.
Chapter Summary
Alice, determined to sustain her "New Alice" persona, navigates a crowded Harvard house party. She stumbles into a bedroom and finds a girl with violet curls—Lottie—lounging on the bed. Flustered by her own longing stare, Alice retreats but quickly course-corrects by seizing a joint and downing two shots of scotch, silencing Old Alice's internal protests. Momentarily emboldened, she experiences an uncanny episode: the green-painted wall of the corridor softens beneath her palms as if trying to swallow her hands. The sensation vanishes when Lottie reappears and steadies her, and the two dance wordlessly through the thumping bass until a smoke alarm cuts the music and scatters the party.
A sudden downpour drenches the fleeing students. Alice stands in the street and is transported back to Hoxburn, reliving the childhood ritual of letting rain numb and remake her. Lottie yanks her from the path of an oncoming bicycle pack, and the two race to Alice's dormitory, Matthews. Under the awning, bodies plastered together, Lottie asks "May I?" before kissing her—a deliberate, sought moment of consent. Inside Alice's room, their clothes come off, and Lottie's confidence steadies Alice's nervous inexperience. The chapter closes as Alice, for the first time, stops thinking and simply yields to the moment, unraveling under Lottie's touch.
Key Events
- The bedroom encounter: Alice discovers Lottie lounging in the dark and is paralyzed by attraction, then flees in embarrassment.
- Substance-fueled reinvention: Alice takes a drag from a stranger's joint and drinks scotch straight from the bottle to prop up her New Alice persona.
- The surreal wall: The vivid green paint of the hallway wall becomes spongy and swallows Alice's hands up to the wrists before she jerks free.
- The dance: Lottie finds Alice again, mouths "Dance with me," and the two fold together amid the party chaos.
- Smoke alarm and dispersal: The alarm blares; lights snap on; the crowd pours into the street.
- Rain as memory portal: In the storm, Alice flashes back to standing in her Hoxburn yard, recalling how the downpour silenced her inner voices.
- Lottie's rescue: Lottie pulls Alice from the path of speeding bicyclists and leads her through the rain.
- The kiss and consent: Pressed against the Matthews doorway, Lottie whispers "May I?" before their first kiss.
- The intimate aftermath: They ascend to Alice's room; Lottie undresses with ease while Alice fumbles; Lottie guides Alice to the bed and brings her to a place beyond overthinking.
Character Development
Alice: This chapter externalizes Alice's fractured sense of self. She consciously deploys substances as tools to muzzle "Old Alice," the voice of caution and self-doubt. Yet her transformation is incomplete—she still falters, still apologizes, still feels like a child playacting seduction. The rain memory reveals a deeper layer: the desire to be unmade and remade, to shed an identity that feels constrictive. By the chapter's end, she does something genuinely new: she stops analyzing and exists entirely inside her body, an experience made possible by Lottie's confident lead.
Lottie: Introduced as an almost otherworldly presence, Lottie is assertive, magnetic, and perceptive. She seems to intuit Alice's nervousness and responds not with dismissal but with steadiness. Her English accent surfaces only late in the chapter, adding another layer of mystery. The detail of her violet hair dye streaking her skin—"like drops of blood" that stain Alice's rug—retroactively frames her as someone whose vivid exterior literally bleeds away, hinting that her own identity may be more constructed than it first appears.
Themes, Symbols, or Motifs Evidenced Here
- Identity as performance: The chapter explicitly frames Alice's night as a game with defined rules, a conscious act of becoming someone else. Substances, music, and the anonymity of the party are all instruments of that performance.
- The surreal intruding on reality: Alice's hands sinking into the wall—paint turning "spongy" and swallowing her—is the most overt supernatural beat so far. It suggests that the boundary between the ordinary world and something stranger is thinning, and that Alice may be uniquely sensitive to it.
- Rain as unmaking and renewal: For Alice, rain is not merely weather; it is a sensory overload that quiets internal noise and blurs the line "between girl and world." The downpour echoes her longing to be washed clean of her old self.
- Female desire and queer awakening: Alice's attraction to Lottie is immediate and visceral, rendered without shame. The narrative traces the full arc from longing stare to physical consummation, treating Alice's desire as natural and central.
- Consent as sacred threshold: Lottie's "May I?" is a deliberate pause—a moment of asking that transforms the kiss into a mutual act rather than a mere collision of impulses. It elevates the encounter beyond a drunken hookup.
Why This Chapter Matters
Chapter II is the emotional and sensual core of the novel's early arc. It delivers the central queer romantic encounter the narrative has been building toward while simultaneously deepening the mystery. The wall episode confirms that the strange is not confined to dreams or prologues—it is seeping into the waking world. The chapter also complicates Alice's internal struggle: substances help her shed inhibition, but genuine connection requires vulnerability she cannot chemically manufacture. By ending on a note of surrender and release, the chapter marks a genuine evolution in Alice's character and sets a new baseline for her relationship with Lottie, whose prominence is now cemented.
Study Questions and Answers
-
How does the chapter differentiate between Alice's use of substances and her experience of genuine intimacy? Alice explicitly treats alcohol and weed as shortcuts to becoming someone else—"the easiest way to become someone else," she thinks. They blunt her inner critic and let her move through the party with borrowed boldness. Yet when she is alone with Lottie in her room, the substances have worn off, and she is "high on the heady pleasure of being touched, wanted." The chapter draws a line between chemically induced confidence and the organic thrill of being desired and seen. The latter, it suggests, is what actually silences her overthinking.
-
What is the significance of the wall swallowing Alice's hands, and how does it relate to earlier hints of the supernatural? The wall episode is the most tangible intrusion of the uncanny yet. Earlier chapters hinted at wrongness beneath the surface; here, the surface itself becomes malleable. The detail that the paint turns "spongy" like mallow suggests organic softness where there should be solidity. This moment interrupts Alice's performative confidence, briefly anchoring her back in her body just before Lottie's touch pulls her into a different kind of physical immediacy. It implies that whatever supernatural current runs through this world is responsive to Alice and may intensify in moments of emotional extremity.
-
Why is Lottie's question "May I?" structurally and thematically important to the chapter? The question lands at the peak of narrative and erotic tension—after the dance, the rain, the near-miss with the bicycles, and the pressed-together stillness under the awning. By inserting a verbal check before the kiss, the narrative shifts the encounter from inevitable momentum to deliberate choice. Thematically, it reinforces the chapter's interest in agency and selfhood: Alice has been trying to reinvent herself through performance, but Lottie models a different kind of power, one grounded in asking rather than taking. The question transforms the kiss into a gift rather than a conquest.