64 pages • 2 hours read
This Is Where It Ends
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Chapters 25-Epilogue Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary
Chapter 25 covers from 10:50 to 10:53 a.m., when officers reach a panicked Autumn, who realizes that Tyler shot her knee. “I didn’t need for him to die to kill me,” (270) Autumn thinks, knowing the injury destroys her chances of attending Juilliard and becoming a dancer.
When officers reach Sylv and Fareed, Sylv tries to convince herself that “maybe I imagined the gunfire” (264) but sees Tomas and Tyler slumped dead against one another. “Here, at the broken places, all I feel is emptiness” (264) Sylv thinks, when she sees Autumn’s “fingers curled around Tyler’s head” (265).
Outside in the parking lot, a student confronts Claire. The student says Claire’s boyfriend killed her sister and accidentally shot Claire’s brother, Matt. Claire and the student apologize for the other’s loss. Claire blurts out to Chris that she wants to be a teacher. Claire says she does not want to be alone anymore, the same words Tyler said before ending his life. Here, Claire wants more answers about the day’s tragedy, and summarizes a few of the novel’s narrative threads: “Of all the people who died here today, did anyone really know anyone else? What they feared? What they wished for? Who they wanted to be?” (267), Claire wonders.
Chapter 26 Summary
Chapter 26 is brief, covers from 10:53 to 10:56 a.m., and closes This Is Where It Ends on a promising note. Autumn and Sylv kiss while paramedics roll Autumn outside on a stretcher, but Autumn’s too scared to observe the carnage. What’s most important to Autumn is Sylv’s presence. Autumn thinks, “Ty will still win if we give up now. So I will hold on to Sylv’s hand for as long as I can. Together we can rebuild our dreams” (275-76). Holding Autumn’s hand as they leave Opportunity high, Sylv fears for Autumn’s future: “I don’t know how she’ll ever dance–how she’ll ever soar through the air again” (272).
Meanwhile, overcome by the stress of the situation, news crews, SWAT teams, and families in the parking lot, Claire dashes away into the woods, thinking she let her family down because of Matt’s death. The chapter closes from Autumn’s perspective, as Autumn thinks about Sylv, and it begins to snow in Opportunity: “My heart is hers. And if she’ll accept me, it’s the best I can give us. We may not have forever. But we have tomorrow” (276).
Epilogue Summary
Told only from Sylv’s perspective, the Epilogue leaps forward in time to 11:59 at night, the last minute of the day, presenting a moment of healing and hope as students and teachers congregate at Opportunity High and light lanterns, each with a name of a deceased written on it, to commemorate the thirty-nine dead and twenty-five injured. Sylv reports that Fareed broke into the school early in the evening and sent out word, which spread through Opportunity, and evolved into the memorial service: “It could be any other first day of the semester. The way cars converge on the road to the school. The way students stream out. The moon shines bright in the clear night sky, lighting up the field around us. All of us. Students and teachers. Opportunity” (278).
It’s Fareed who speaks here, as Sylv reports what she hears. Fareed’s constant coolness amidst chaos continues. His tone captures a courageous, optimistic, sympathetic, and forward-thinking voice: “We are not better because we survived. We are not brighter or more deserving. We are not stronger. But we are here, and this day will never leave us. Nor should it. We will remember the wounded. We will remember the lost” (280).
Chapter 25-Epilogue Analysis
The final two chapters and Epilogue diffuse the chaos and provide a moment of healing and hope for the students and teachers of Opportunity. Here, Nijkamp summarizes the arc of various themes like dance, trauma, and family relationships. By including an Epilogue, Nijkamp expands the reach of the novel and creates even more space for This Is Where It Ends to occupy. The closing lantern memorial scene provides romantic imagery, suggesting hope and optimism, as well as the power of community in the face of chaotic horror.
By including the Epilogue, Nijkamp, in a way, points to the larger goal of This Is Where It Ends. The novel explores a lot more than what happens during the fifty-minutes of a school shooting. The novel explores personal motives, complex intersections of relationships between characters, which suggest Tyler, the shooter, was suffering from traumatic forces both within and outside his control. Claire’s rhetorical questions at the end of Chapter 25 point to how this school shooting involves a large group of people and is a problem that needs to be addressed by the community and society at-large.
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