Big Mouth & Ugly Girl

Matt writes an email to Ursula. He wonders why she is not being friendly at school. Maybe the past three emails he sent haven’t gone through? His email reveals that though he is back to his old life, things now feel different, and his friends are not really his friends anymore. Matt deletes the email before sending it.

Ursula is called to Mr. Parrish’s office. He commends Ursula’s handling of the bomb threat situation and notes that school administrators have written exemplary college admissions letters for her. He asks if she and Matt spend time together and is surprised to hear they do not. In the cafeteria Ursula sits with Eveann and Bonnie LeMoyne. When Matt passes, Ursula freezes. Bonnie admits the team is doing terribly without Ursula.

It is a Friday afternoon in February, two weeks since Matt’s “arrest.” To Matt’s mind, this is “another Nothing-Day. Smelling of dirty socks, and worse” (95).

In a meeting with Mr. Bernhardt, the teacher who oversees the student council, Matt decides to resign from his post as vice president of the junior class. Mr. Bernhandt tells him this is not necessary but seems relieved all the same. Matt has also dropped from a B+ to C average in Mr. Bernhardt’s German class. When Matt asks if he is officially resigned, Mr. Bernhardt encourages him to put it in writing, “just for the record” (96).

It is Monday, two weeks and four days after Matt’s “arrest,” and yet another “Nothing-Day. Smelling of dirty socks, and worse” (97).

Matt is submitting a comedic column called “Just for the Record” to the school paper. It concerns a convicted murder who “resigns” from life as he is executed by lethal injection. Mr. Steiner, the teacher in charge of the paper, rejects it. First he tells Matt it is not funny; when pushed by an indignant Matt, he also says the column is in bad taste “under the circumstances” (99). Matt feels censored, and in his argument with Mr. Steiner, he realizes he “liked the truth [of his anger] being exposed at last instead of disguised behind vague mumbles, averted eyes” (99). Mr. Steiner suggests Matt make an appointment with Mr. Rainey, the school psychologist. Matt scoffs at this idea.

Matt “looked taller, leaner, like a knife blade” (100) after the accusations. He is beginning to change, and those at school have changed around him, becoming suspicious and evasive, as if “Matt had been wounded somewhere on his body he couldn’t see, and the wound was visible to others, raw and ugly” (101). Even Ursula Riggs, he feels, is avoiding him.

When “Just for the Record” was rejected, Matt took it from Mr. Steiner and tore it onto long strips in front of him. At home, he sends an email resigning from the Rocky River Run paper staff. When Matt later sees the announcement that he has resigned from student council buried on page four of the school paper, he laughs, thinking, “What had he been expecting, a front-page photo spread?” (103).

Exiting school one Friday, he passes his friends and rejects their invitation to a party that weekend. Though his parents try to dissuade him from moping, Matt hears them quietly discussing his behavior, repeatedly stating that he seems depressed.

On an email sent to Ursula on Friday at 2:00 a.m., Matt, referring to himself as Big Mouth, laments that Ursula, “one of Rocky River’s coolest individuals” (107), pays no attention to him. He asks if Ursula knows the witnesses who reported him in the first place. He also mentions his mother’s use of Prozac and his father’s extensive time away from home. He denies being depressed and wishes that Ursula, who is unlike other girls, would be his friend. He admits he has a crush on Ursula. After imagining his school friends finding out about it, he deletes the email.