Sketchpad Messages in Play Nice: Symbol Analysis
What the Sketchpad Messages Are Literally In the Story
The sketchpad messages are words that appear in Clio's sketchpad in her own handwriting, though she has no memory of writing them. The first and most recurring message is the word Hello in bold cursive lettering, which Clio identifies as her go-to scribble. The sketchpad itself is an ordinary artist's tool—Clio uses it for sketches and doodles—but it becomes the primary channel through which the entity inhabiting the Edgewood house communicates with her.
The messages appear at three distinct moments in the novel. In Chapter 14, Clio shows her sketchpad to Austin during their first evening together. He flips through it, compliments her shading, and lands on a page that makes her take the sketchpad back. She finds Hello written in her own hand, a word she insists she did not draw. Her reaction is immediate and visceral: sweaty palms, a desire to move the sketchpad out of view, into another room, into the trash, to set it on fire. She cannot explain why the word disturbs her so deeply.
The second appearance comes in Chapter 18, while Clio is renovating the Edgewood house. She finds her sketchpad open to a cosmic drawing she made the night before—a piece she titled Leave Me Alone. In the bottom corner, floating in a constellation, there is a new addition: the word NO. This is the first time the messages function as a direct response, a reply to Clio's own drawing. The entity is not just scribbling; it is conversing.
The third and most aggressive appearance occurs in Chapter 20. Clio returns to the house after spending the night at Austin's and finds pages ripped from her sketchpad scattered across the floor. The word Hello is scribbled on all of them, six times over. She gathers the pages, crumples them, wants to burn them, and screams until she finds one sheet with a different message: Remember? That single word stops her cold. She packs her suitcase and calls a car to the train station, finally acknowledging that the messages are real and that the entity wanted her attention.
How the Messages Escalate
The sketchpad messages trace a clear arc of escalation. The first Hello is a test—a quiet, almost polite intrusion that Clio can rationalize away. She has no memory of drawing it, but she can blame stress, exhaustion, or the beer she drank with Austin. The word is her own go-to scribble, which makes it deniable. It could be her. It probably was her. She closes the sketchpad and tries to forget it.
The second message, NO, is different. It is a response to something Clio deliberately created. Her cosmic Leave Me Alone drawing is an act of self-assertion, a declaration of independence from the house and everything it represents. The entity's reply—NO—turns that assertion into a dialogue. Clio is no longer talking to herself; she is being answered. The message also carries a specific meaning: the entity refuses to leave her alone, refuses to be dismissed, refuses to let her renovate the house into something unrecognizable.
The third appearance is pure escalation. The pages are ripped out, not just written on. The repetition of Hello six times transforms a greeting into a demand. The final word, Remember?, shifts the strategy from communication to coercion. It is not asking Clio to acknowledge its presence; it is asking her to recall something she has suppressed. This connects directly to the novel's exploration of unreliable memory and contested family narratives—the entity is not just haunting the house, it is haunting Clio's mind, and it wants her to confront what she has forgotten.
The Sketchpad as a Site of Vulnerability
The sketchpad is a private object. Clio uses it for her art, her sketches, her doodles. It is the one place where she expresses herself without performance. Throughout the novel, Clio is acutely aware of how she presents herself to the world—her social media presence, her curated apartment, her carefully managed image. The sketchpad is the opposite of that: it is raw, unpolished, and unguarded. This tension between public image and private reality is a central concern of the novel, and the sketchpad sits squarely on the private side of that divide.
The entity's invasion of the sketchpad is therefore a violation of Clio's interiority. It does not appear to her in a dramatic, cinematic way—no shadowy figure, no whispered threats. Instead, it writes in her own hand, using her own scribble, in her own private notebook. This is a form of gaslighting that is uniquely suited to Clio's psychology. She cannot trust her own memory, cannot trust her own hand. The messages make her question whether she is losing her mind, whether she wrote them herself in a fugue state, whether the entity is real at all.
This connects to the theme of the supernatural as a lens for mental health and gaslighting. The sketchpad messages are the perfect vehicle for this ambiguity. They are physical evidence, but they are also deniable. Clio could have written them. She has no memory of doing so, but her memory is already unreliable. The messages force her—and the reader—to hold two possibilities at once: either Clio is being haunted by a real supernatural entity, or she is experiencing a psychological break. The novel refuses to resolve this tension easily, and the sketchpad is the site where that refusal is most visible.
The Messages and Clio's Relationship to the House
The sketchpad messages are also tied to Clio's decision to renovate the Edgewood house. She returns to the house after her mother's death with the explicit goal of transforming it—painting over the walls, gutting the kitchen, replacing the wallpaper. The renovation is an act of erasure, an attempt to make the house unrecognizable, to scrub away the memories and the trauma embedded in its walls.
The entity's messages interrupt this project. The NO that appears in the corner of her Leave Me Alone drawing is a direct refusal of her renovation project. The entity does not want the house to change. It wants Clio to remember, not to erase. The ripped-out pages in Chapter 20 are a physical manifestation of this conflict: the entity is tearing apart Clio's art, just as Clio is tearing apart the house. The messages force her to confront the fact that she cannot simply paint over the past.
This connects to the theme of the cyclical nature of trauma and the struggle to break free from family patterns. Clio's renovation project is an attempt to break the cycle, to create something new in a space that holds so much pain. The entity's messages insist that the past cannot be so easily discarded. Remember? is not just a question; it is a command to stop running.
The Messages and the Entity's Identity
The sketchpad messages also reveal something about the entity's nature. It does not speak in a voice Clio can hear; it writes in her own hand. This suggests a parasitic relationship—the entity does not have its own voice, so it borrows Clio's. It uses her medium, her scribble, her pages. It is not an external force so much as an internal one, something that has taken up residence inside her own consciousness.
This is reinforced in Chapter 35, when Clio finally confronts the entity in the crawl space. She says hello, recalling her first encounter with it. The word that the entity used to communicate with her becomes her own greeting to it. The symmetry is deliberate: the entity's first message to Clio was Hello, and Clio's first words to the entity in their final confrontation are the same. The sketchpad messages are not just a plot device; they are a language that Clio and the entity share.
The entity also shows Clio memories it kept from her, which suggests that the sketchpad messages are part of a larger pattern of memory manipulation. The entity does not just write in Clio's sketchpad; it controls what she remembers and what she forgets. The Remember? message is therefore a threat as much as a question. The entity is telling Clio that it has been holding her memories hostage, and it is now ready to release them.
Study Questions
1. Why does the word Hello specifically unsettle Clio so deeply when Austin finds it in her sketchpad?
Clio's reaction to the first Hello is disproportionate to the word itself. She has no memory of drawing it, which means her own hand has betrayed her. The word is her go-to scribble, so it is undeniably hers, yet she cannot account for it. This creates a fundamental rupture in her sense of self—if she cannot trust her own actions, she cannot trust anything. The word also functions as a greeting, which implies an audience. Someone is addressing her through her own art, and that someone is not herself.
2. How does the NO message in Chapter 18 change the nature of the sketchpad messages?
The NO is the first message that functions as a response. Clio's Leave Me Alone drawing is an assertion of independence, and the entity's reply directly contradicts it. This transforms the sketchpad from a private space into a site of dialogue. Clio is no longer alone with her art; she is being answered. The NO also carries a specific meaning about the house—the entity refuses to let Clio renovate it into something unrecognizable, refuses to be erased.
3. What does the escalation from Hello to Remember? reveal about the entity's goals?
The messages escalate from a greeting to a demand. Hello is an introduction; NO is a refusal; Remember? is a command. The entity is not content to communicate—it wants Clio to confront something she has suppressed. This connects to the novel's exploration of unreliable memory and contested family narratives. The entity is not just haunting the house; it is haunting Clio's mind, and it wants her to face the memories she has buried.
4. Why does Clio decide not to tell Daphne about the sketchpad messages?
Clio explicitly considers telling Daphne about waking up on the floor and the sketch she does not remember drawing, but she decides against it. She knows Daphne would blame emotional distress, lack of sleep, or alcohol—and she admits Daphne would probably be right. More importantly, she knows Daphne would tell their father and Leda, and they would change the locks and put the house on the market. Clio is not ready to give up the house, and she is not ready to confront what the messages might mean. Keeping the messages secret is a way of maintaining control over a situation that is rapidly slipping out of her control.
For more on how the sketchpad messages intersect with the novel's larger concerns, see the analyses of performance of identity and maternal legacy, or return to the main study guide.