In My Dreams I Hold A Knife

“An even less endearing confession: sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—I felt I was perfect, or at least close.”

Her father’s failures exacerbate Jessica’s obsessive need to be perfect. Her desire to always be the best fuels her worst actions in the novel. Although she is filled with self-doubt, she sometimes convinces herself that she is the person that she thinks her father wants her to be.

“I didn’t want to be a sweetheart. How uninteresting, how pathetic. But I did want to be one of the good ones, which sounded like an exclusive club.”

This passage is another example of Jessica’s expectations of herself and how she wants to be seen by others. Being a “sweetheart” is too nice and too ordinary for her. At the beginning of the novel, her sense of self is so fragile that she allows it to be defined by what she believes other people are think about her.

“I let her hug me, ruffle my hair, but I never forgot it. I never forgave her. Most of all, I never absolved myself of the sin of being so utterly forgettable.”

This memory from childhood serves as a touchstone throughout the novel. Jessica’s most fervent wish is to be seen, but others often overlook her, including the high school boys ranking the prettiest girls in school. Later a professor she adores doesn’t know her name and ends up writing her a tepid recommendation letter even after she sleeps with him.

“As I watched them together, the ache inside me sharpened to a knifepoint.”

The imagery of knives and scissors throughout the novel foreshadows Jessica’s involvement in Heather’s murder. The first time she sees Heather, her envy is likened to a sharp object.

“As I walked under the imposing white stone, carved with the school promise—We will change you, body and soul—I thought of how it had impressed even my father, on his first and only trip to campus.”

The campus novel genre often uses elite college settings with bucolic grounds, gothic buildings, and bell towers. Jessica’s father, disappointed that she didn’t get into Harvard, is difficult to impress. Jessica is changed not only by the four years she spent at Duquette but also by coming back for the reunion.

“Mint wasn’t the person I’d betrayed so profoundly that the weight of it had seeped into everything—my dreams, the words I spoke, the very cadence of my steps as if I walked everywhere carrying an extra heaviness […] No. That man stood in front of me now, looking at me with wild abandon, grass-green eyes dangerous as ever.

Coop.”

Despite her relationship with Mint throughout college, Coop “saw” her and accepted her despite her faults. By the end of the novel, she accepts herself, as he does, and is finally ready to be with him.

“But I couldn’t admit I wanted it until she’d said, I’ll wear one of yours. An even trade. Then it had been okay. She’d pulled my pink dress on, and said, Perfect fit, with a little smile. And then, to her reflection, tugging on the bow, Charmingly down-market.”

Heather makes insensitive comments like this in front of Jessica, making her feel inferior because of her family’s lack of money. These comments, though meant or said lightly, hurt Jessica deeply. They show that Heather is at best insensitive if not cruel and sow the seeds of Jessica’s eventual deadly betrayal of their friendship.

“Mint’s voice had grown harder and sharper as he spoke. When he said cuckold, that strange, old-fashioned word, it was like jagged glass. I leaned back. ‘My dad’s the biggest coward. I hate him. Everyone at home talks about me behind my back, and it’s all his fault.’”

Mint, nicknamed “the prince,” is the perfect man at Duquette University. However, throughout the novel, his character shows flashes of cruelty and anger simmering below the surface. By the end, his rage is fully revealed, and he is shown to be the murderer.

“‘I understand,’ he said slowly, drawing the words out, ‘that you’d do anything to win. You’re kind of a sociopath.’”

When Coop tells Jessica this, it hurts her, but it also gratifies her and fills her need to be seen because she knows it’s true. Overcome with desire for him, she kisses him. Later, at the end of the novel, there is a mirror moment when he tells her that she is a narcissist, and she responds in the same way, except by then, she is finally ready to commit to him fully.

“Last night—bruising memories, the edges blurrier and blurrier as the night went on, until they were swallowed up in darkness. Instead of trying to search them, I willed in more darkness to eat the memories whole.”

There are hints before this that Jessica was involved with Heather’s murder. Here, Jessica acknowledges her memory gaps from the night Heather died. She also understands that she intentionally blocked out the memories, fearing her involvement.

“I’d also learned that sometimes, the space between what you were and weren’t supposed to do was one of those messy gray areas.”

Jessica thinks back to her senior year of high school when she watched her competitor for salutatorian drop a test sheet while turning in a final exam. Jessica, hoping to beat her, fails to alert the girl of the missing page. In consequence, Jessica becomes salutatorian. Jessica decides it’s okay to let bad things happen to people even if she can stop it because this is a way to remove obstacles to her ambitions.

“I slid out of my chair to my knees and clasped my hands together. The diners around us hushed, their attention turned to the spectacle of the begging girl.

‘Please,’ I cried, my voice thick with tears. ‘Please take me back. Please don’t leave me. Please love me. I’ll do anything.’

Down, down, down, I went.”

Jessica exposes her need to be loved by Mint, willing to humiliate herself to keep him, which disgusts him. This moment is a low point in her life, but it is also an honest act. Jessica usually hides behind a mask of independence. In the restaurant, pleading for Mint to stay, she understands her need to be loved by him. The motif of “down” also foreshadows the Jessica’s elevator trip down to the first floor of her dorm revealed at the conclusion of the novel.

“Coop didn’t understand what it felt like to walk across campus with Mint, arrive at parties holding his hand. The way people looked at me: appraising, envious, wistful. The rush of being valuable. What it meant to me. I did love it.”

Jessica’s love for Mint is rooted in her need for adoration. Because she has spent her life feeling overlooked, her need to be seen as successful by others usurps all other ambitions, even when presented with the chance for true love and happiness with Coop. She gives it up for Mint but never forgets that Coop—rather than the others—“sees” the real Jessica.

“Heather? How had Heather been named Sweetheart? Put the two of them side by side and there was no comparison.”

In a passage narrated from Courtney’s point of view, it becomes clear that Jessica is not the only Duquette friend who envied Heather. Each of the East House Seven, and even Courtney, resents her friend who gets everything she wants.

“Coop had grown into a good man, or maybe he’d always been one. Either way, he didn’t understand that there were some truths too ugly to see the light of day. Some that would ruin love, if they were uncovered.”

Jessica—who has yet to accept her imperfections—feels unworthy compared to Coop. Knowing her inner desires and ambitions, she feels he would never understand or love her if he knew the depths of her obsessive desire to be the best. This passage expresses a major theme of the novel: that a person cannot accept love from others until they learn to accept themselves.

“He’d done it. Frankie, always so careful, so anxious, had reimagined what his life could look like. I tried to picture what Jack would say if he could see Frankie now.”

Frankie’s courageous act to come out as gay helps Jessica see that it is possible to change course and be honest with others and oneself. This realization paves the way for her willingness to let go of her ambitions and live a life for herself rather than the admiration of others.

“It was so close to my Homecoming fantasy—every eye on me, rapt, waiting to see what I’d do next, just like it used to be with Heather—that for a moment, I felt an absurd flash of joy. Of gratefulness. Jessica Miller, star of the show.”

This subversion of expectations shows irony in that Jessica finally gets the attention she craves. Rather than being celebrated for her job, looks, or wealth, the attention comes in the form of horror as her friends see the true Jessica: a needy hanger-on willing to lie and cheat to get what she wants.

“I made it back to my room and took the ruined photographs to Heather’s desk. I slid the scissors in and cut, again and again, carving Heather into pieces.

I hated her.

I wanted her gone.

I wanted her to die.”

Throughout the novel, numerous references and metaphors relate to sharp objects (See: Symbols & Motifs) in association with Jessica’s feelings about Heather. Close to the narrative climax, Jessica cuts up a photograph of Heather with the scissors later used to stab her, inferring Jessica might be responsible for the murder.

“Maybe this is what the real Jessica—the one who came out when I was too drunk, the one who existed in the moments I shoved away—wanted all along. To get caught. To be punished. And now, finally, we were reconciled, all her crimes my own.”

Jessica reveals the “real” Jessica to her friends, rather than the false one she’s paraded around Duquette’s Homecoming. Once she finds out Mint killed Heather, she’s released from the guilt of her involvement and begins to see how her empty ambitions caused her to act with similar cruelty.

“Under the surface, in the cold, in the salt, swallowed by waves, I pressed my eyes shut, letting myself sink. And in that moment a wild wishing came over me. I wanted to stay here, submerged forever. Above the surface, all the days of my life were waiting like a promise. There was nothing but a blank slate, and anything goes, and what if. My life could mean anything.”

Before she loses the fellowship to Heather and Mint leaves her, all her hopes are still possible. Obsessed with ambition, Jessica feels the sense of promise waiting for her after college when she can finally fulfill her father’s dreams for her—and maybe make him happy for once.

“Then I reached out, took the diploma, and threw it, as hard as I could, against the wall. It shattered into splintered pieces of wood and glass, raining across the floor. In the end, such a fragile thing.”

Much of Jessica’s self-worth remains tied up in her father’s ambitions and her failure to get into Harvard as he wished. Breaking Dr. Garvey’s diploma loosens the hold this dream has on her, helping her realize that a Harvard diploma means little in relation to the kind of person you are.

“I choked again, and all the while Mint was leaning over me, sinking closer. Why wasn’t I fighting? What power did he have over me, what spell had he cast that kept me, even now, in his thrall?”

From the moment Jessica first sees Mint, she—like everyone else—falls prey to his charm and his pedigree, so much so that even as he’s trying to kill her, she falters in fighting back. Despite knowing his guilt, a part of her still craves his love because his love means the adoration of everyone else.

“I’d had the pieces inside all along, a quilt of light and dark, but for years I’d refused to look. When had my body first tried to tell me the truth? Was it the moment in Blackwell when Mint confessed what he’d done, and I felt the heart quickening pang of sameness?”

Once Jessica acknowledges the part she played in Heather’s death and the destructive nature of her ambition, she begins the journey toward self-acceptance and happiness. She knows she will never be perfect but will always be a mixture of dark and light, good and bad. Comparing her actions and emotions to Mint’s, she sees they share a need to be adored. Though she did not kill Heather, she recognizes in herself someone who could have.