Chapter 22: Vampires versus Werewolves — Summary and Analysis

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

“Vampires versus Werewolves” reconstructs the speaker’s high school years during the cultural peak of the Twilight franchise. The poem opens with a question — what was it like to grow up during the Twilight season? — and answers it through increasingly specific recollections, each prompted by the refrain “Could you be more specific?”

The speaker describes a high school ringed by pine trees and shrouded in fog from chain-smoking students. In science class, students studied hickeys rather than mitosis, comparing them to hydrangeas sprouting from navy V-neck sweaters. She recalls worrying that strangers could read her mind.

Brown boys ran topless during PE, calling themselves a wolf pack, and white girls took them home to see if their parents would bare their teeth. The speaker notes the boys were served up like raw meat, though they at least got to eat at fancy restaurants and in bedrooms decorated with teen magazine posters.

The speaker had Edward Cullen on her wall. She connects herself to FKA Twigs, who dated Robert Pattinson, seeing herself in the twigs on the ground — organic, snapped, brown. Brown reminds her of leaves and sausage roll wrappers in gutters. She explains the slang “guttered,” a version of “gutted,” as if their stomachs had been knifed and emptied out.

At fourteen, the speaker was chronically shy and anorexic, making herself sick with lust for pale sparkling vampires. She describes how this desire makes you do things out of character — fingers end up down throats and up skirts. She invokes the boy who cried wolf in reverse: you cry sheep and nobody believes your bleating.

The poem recalls a girl sobbing after swimming because she was teased about the thick dark hair growing across her arms and stomach. Now everyone draws on their eyebrows just like hers. On Sports Day, the administration banned girls from wearing crop tops and bikinis, but boys still ran around in Y-fronts and purple acrylic paint.

The speaker observes that you’re just not exotic to people who look like you, and you want what you can’t have. She critiques Edward Cullen’s attraction to Bella: he only wanted her because he couldn’t read her mind, and because she smelled like wild strawberries. She describes Edward as angsty, flaking on Bella, ignoring her, showing up uninvited in her bedroom at night, watching her sleep, spying, being weird, mean, and obsessive, while constantly telling her he wanted to suck the life from her veins. The poem concludes: “We crave otherness. We hate otherness.”

There was a boy who met another boy in the pine trees, but after accidentally making eye contact in the hallway, he put that boy’s head through a locker. In Twilight, vampires and wolves made a pact to live in peace as long as they left each other alone. But then high school happened, and they liked the look of one another’s teeth.

Key Events

The speaker describes her high school during the Twilight era, surrounded by pine trees and smoker fog.
Science class focuses on hickeys rather than mitosis.
Brown boys call themselves a wolf pack; white girls take them home.
The speaker identifies with twigs and brownness, connecting to FKA Twigs.
The slang “guttered” is explained as a version of “gutted.”
The speaker recalls being fourteen, shy, anorexic, and lusting after pale vampires.
A girl is teased about dark body hair; later her eyebrows become fashionable.
Sports Day: girls banned from crop tops and bikinis; boys run in Y-fronts.
The speaker critiques Edward Cullen’s obsessive, predatory behavior toward Bella.
A boy who met another boy in the pine trees puts his head through a locker after eye contact.
The poem ends with the Twilight pact and the line about liking each other’s teeth.

Character Development

The speaker is the central figure, and her development is traced through memory. At fourteen she is shy, anorexic, and consumed by desire for unattainable pale vampires. She sees herself in twigs — organic, snapped, brown — and in FKA Twigs, whose relationship with Robert Pattinson mirrors the speaker’s identification with the “other” in the Twilight romance. Her self-image is shaped by internalized racism and body shame, yet the poem also shows her gaining critical distance as she deconstructs Edward Cullen’s behavior and the racial dynamics of the franchise.

The girl with dark body hair represents a moment of shifting beauty standards: teased for her hair, she later becomes a trendsetter when everyone draws on eyebrows like hers. The boy who meets another boy in the pine trees embodies the violence of closeted desire and the pressure to perform heteronormativity. Edward Cullen, though a fictional character, functions as a figure of toxic masculinity and predatory obsession, critiqued by the speaker for his spying, manipulation, and emotional abuse.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

Otherness and marginalization: The poem’s central tension — “We crave otherness. We hate otherness.” — captures the double bind of being marked as different in a culture that simultaneously fetishizes and rejects difference.

Desire for the unattainable: The speaker’s lust for pale sparkling vampires, and Edward’s desire for Bella because she is unreadable, both illustrate how desire is fueled by distance and inaccessibility.

Body image and eating disorders: The speaker’s anorexia and the girl’s shame about body hair connect pop culture beauty standards to real physical suffering.

Racial fetishization and internalized racism: Brown boys served up like raw meat, the speaker’s identification with twigs and gutter debris, and the observation that “you’re just not exotic to people who look like you” all point to the racial dynamics of desire.

Gender double standards: Sports Day’s ban on girls’ crop tops while boys run in Y-fronts exposes the unequal regulation of bodies.

Surveillance and predator-prey dynamics: Edward’s mind-reading, his habit of watching Bella sleep, the vampire-werewolf dichotomy, and the wolf pack all frame adolescent desire as both watched and predatory.

Nature imagery: Pine trees, hydrangeas, twigs, leaves, and forests recur throughout, linking the natural world to the speaker’s sense of self and to the racialized imagery of brownness.

Why This Chapter Matters

This poem is a key moment in the collection because it grounds the speaker’s identity formation in a specific pop culture moment while using that moment to critique broader patterns of race, gender, and desire. By re-reading Twilight through a Māori/Pasifika lens, Tibble exposes the franchise’s racial hierarchies — the pale vampires as objects of desire, the brown wolf pack as fetishized others — and connects them to the speaker’s own experiences of body shame, internalized racism, and adolescent confusion. The poem also subverts the vampire-werewolf dichotomy by suggesting that the real “pact” of high school is the unspoken agreement to desire and harm one another simultaneously. The final image — liking the look of one another’s teeth — collapses the predator-prey distinction and suggests that the violence and desire of adolescence are inseparable.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the poem use the Twilight franchise to critique racial dynamics in adolescent desire?

The poem juxtaposes the pale sparkling vampires that the speaker lusts after with the brown boys who call themselves a wolf pack and are served up like raw meat to white girls. The speaker’s identification with twigs and gutter debris, and her observation that “you’re just not exotic to people who look like you,” reveal how racialized beauty standards shape who is desired and who is discarded. Edward Cullen’s attraction to Bella — because she is unreadable and therefore “other” to him — mirrors the way the speaker and her peers are positioned as exotic objects within a white-dominated culture.

2. What does the poem suggest about the relationship between pop culture fantasy and real adolescent experience?

The poem repeatedly moves between the Twilight fantasy and the speaker’s lived reality: hickeys instead of mitosis, the girl’s shame about body hair, the Sports Day double standard, the boy whose head goes through a locker. The poem suggests pop culture fantasies are not escapist but formative — they shape how adolescents understand their bodies, their desires, and their place in social hierarchies. The critique of Edward’s obsessive behavior reframes the “romance” of Twilight as a model of toxic relationships that adolescents internalize.

3. How does the poem’s final image — “we liked the look of one another’s teeth” — reframe the vampire-werewolf conflict?

The Twilight pact between vampires and wolves is an agreement to leave each other alone, a truce between predator and prey. The poem’s final line suggests that in high school, this truce breaks down not because of violence but because of mutual desire — the “teeth” are both threatening and attractive. The image collapses the distinction between predator and prey, suggesting that adolescents are simultaneously drawn to and endangered by one another.