Ann Kittenplan

Arc

Kittenplan has no arc across the book — she has a week, and inside that week one afternoon. What the timeline records is the novel's most compact demonstration of how E.T.A.'s ambient violence gets a body. The characterization arrives all at once and all surface (1): butch, mustached, tattooed at the knuckle in wash-off ink she chews rather than washes, urine bought by the quarter — a portrait composed entirely of signals of adult hardness on a twelve-and-a-half-year-old, played deadpan. The one scoreline the book gives her (2) is of a piece: she does not win so much as grimace and flex her way to it.

Eschaton (3, 4) is her hour. The game is the book's showcase of children being almost parodically adult — staid, sober, statesmanlike — and Kittenplan is cast as its designated instrument: the launcher, the muscle, the one carrying the ordnance-bucket to the parley, cracking her knuckles while the heads of state confer. Her sole spoken line is a plea for the game's decorum ("For Christ's sake leave us alone!") — shrieked, at Pemulis, mid-scrum. When Ingersoll's headshot arrives (3), the entire edifice of map-not-territory abstraction that Pemulis is screaming to preserve comes down through her specifically: struck in the actual head on the theoretical map, she answers theory with a real screamer (4), and the book lets the theoretical dispute die in the din she starts. Every escalation of the collapse routes through her — the pincer, the left cross, the headlock, and finally the chase whose fleeing target, watching her contorted face over his shoulder instead of the map ahead, totals the game's God-cart and hard drive and puts Otis Lord headfirst through the monitor. Ingersoll broke the rule; Kittenplan broke the game.

The aftermath is a study in how institutions metabolize a girl like this. At the gala she is already an emblem — bandaged, fedora'd, arms-crossed in a matched set of three (5). At the summons she is the category error in the room: too young for the Big-Buddy culpability everyone else is there for, excluded from the little-girls' interview next door, "somehow cross-dressed" in the dress presumably chosen for the occasion, chewing her knuckle tattoos — and then, at the door, "almost regal calm," preceding the boys in like someone stepping down off a dais (6): the one summoned student with nothing to strategize and nothing to lose. The community's verdict is unanimous and cheerfully cold — the malefic Ann Kittenplan, hung out to dry, nobody minding (7) — and the coda is the joke that even her punishment fails to attach: way more culpable than any of the other kids, she is quietly excused from the cleanup because the cleanup has become a boys'-club privilege she is constitutionally outside of (8). She exits the range as she entered it: blamed, excused, and unassimilated, the academy's designated menace whom no structure — game, discipline, club — has a slot for. Fate open, as written; the book never shows what discipline, if any, actually lands.