53 pages • 1 hour read
Kiley ReidCome and Get It
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Complexities of New Adulthood
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses a relationship with an imbalanced power dynamic and accidental animal death.
Varsity novels are often about the transition from adolescence into adulthood, and that is certainly part of Come and Get It’s thematic focus. Two characters in particular, Millie Cousins and Kennedy Washburn, centralize this thematic concern in their character arcs. Both lend insight into the ways that adulthood is marked by the recognition that complex problems cannot be resolved by straightforward solutions.
For Kennedy, coming to the University of Arkansas presents itself as a solution that allows her to escape her past without truly confronting it. However, her inability to gain the community and mentorship she desires suggests that physically leaving the site of her pain is not the straightforward solution it seems. It isn’t until Chapter 15 that the reader understands why she has transferred there from Iowa, other than the fact that she is eager to be in the orbit of Agatha Paul, one of her favorite writers. Her escape from the academic community that shuns her after her role and reaction to Sadie’s accidental death is the only corridor she sees toward a return to the stable life she had enjoyed in college. However, her experiences at Arkansas, particularly at Belgrade, do not go at all as she expected. What brings her character arc to a head is the failure of her attempt to enroll in Agatha Paul’s undergraduate workshop. Paul being a visiting professor, Kennedy has missed her one window of opportunity to regain that attention and affirmation. Her interpretation of Agatha’s appearance in her room is that of an epiphanic vision, which she communicates to Millie at the hospital. She admits her continued desire for an easy solution to her pain, saying, “[E]verything has sucked for me for an entire year, and I just want a teeny break, you know?” (337). When she is discharged, she is surprised by the flood of warm messages she receives from people throughout her life. Suddenly, her reasons for coming to Fayetteville seem to have vanished. Her decision not to seek reconstructive surgery for her scar indicates that Kennedy understands that her path forward must embrace the scars of her past, both visible and emotional. Her character arc illustrates her growing recognition that seemingly straightforward solutions to complex, adult problems are temporary measures; instead, she learns that resolution, like adulthood itself, is a complex, ongoing process.
Kennedy’s revelations also feed into Millie’s character arc, whose entry into adulthood is similarly marked by the belief that achieving her singular goal of homeownership will define her life going forward. She believes that becoming a homeowner can mark a clean break away from her collegiate life, where she has always been living with and caring for others. Living on her own terms for the first time will set the tone for the rest of her adult life. Her plans are complicated by her entanglement with Agatha Paul, for whom her crush is sensual and sophisticated in contrast to the somewhat schoolgirl crush she holds for Josh, her resident director. Millie and Agatha’s relationship gets in the way of her residential duties, her lapses in judgment send Peyton and Kennedy to the hospital, and she ultimately loses the resident director opportunity that would have set her on an easy path to her goal. When Millie speaks to Kennedy at the hospital, she is startled by the revelation that Kennedy wants to be close to Agatha too, albeit in a different way. This compounds her earlier discovery that Agatha had been taking advantage of her to boost her writing career. She knows she still likes Agatha, but cannot reconcile that with the ways Agatha has failed to align with her expectations of an adult relationship. Unlike Kennedy, whose aspirations for her time at Arkansas go unfulfilled, Millie does reach her goal of homeownership by the end of the novel. However, it is not the uncomplicated marker of adulthood she once thought it would be. Instead, at her new home, she ponders the ways she could have lived the past semester differently. She no longer feels like the person she used to be, much less the person she wanted to be. If Kennedy’s character arc explores the inability of temporary measures to address complex problems, Millie’s suggests that the achievement of finite goals alone is not a straightforward success. Instead, Millie continues to grapple with the consequences of her mistakes, despite acquiring the external marker of material success.
These character arcs speak to the way the university environment often forces people to make and confront mistakes on their own for the very first time. The messy and complicated resolutions are symptomatic of the continuing development they must engage in when they enter adulthood. At the end of college, people are rarely ever fully who they are supposed to be.
Navigating the Social Dynamics of Communal Living
One of the things that sets Come and Get It apart as a varsity novel is that it is set almost exclusively at a university dormitory. Classes, when depicted, are extraneous to the plot of the novel, and Agatha Paul is the only faculty character who appears throughout the entire novel. This establishes a thematic lens on communal living, allowing the novel to explore the ways dormitory life uniquely forces residents to confront themselves and each other in interesting ways.
Reid uses the material conditions of the dormitory to underscore the irony of communal living: Not only do emotional isolation and physical proximity coexist, but the knowledge of this proximity can exacerbate loneliness. Kennedy’s room sits in between Tyler Hanna and Peyton Shephard’s double room and the room occupied by the resident assistants. This gives her access to overhear private conversations on both sides, yet she herself becomes conscious of the fact that she isn’t a willing participant in any of them. Kennedy’s placement in the single room only emphasizes her isolation while bolstering her wish to find connection among her neighbors. When Kennedy hears information about a health and safety inspection, she immediately leverages this information for Tyler’s approval and fails to receive it. Tyler practically ignores Kennedy, involving Peyton in her prank instead. Though Kennedy is surrounded by other residents, even hearing their voices when she is in her room, she is emotionally isolated.
Millie’s relationship with Agatha echoes the covert access residents have to others’ private lives in a communal setting. Millie enjoys observing and eavesdropping on the residents because it helps her proactively care for them as a resident assistant. After Tyler’s prank, she sees an opportunity to leverage that access with Agatha for revenge and for her personal goals. Agatha’s regular visits to Belgrade allow her to become intimately acquainted with the goings-on in Tyler’s and her friends’ lives. However, she observes them from a distance that is exactly the same as that of her readers, which is precisely why she is able to write her profiles and fictionalize details with ease. Like Kennedy, Agatha and her readers hear the stories of these girls’ lives but aren’t part of them. This amplifies the often-voyeuristic perspective that communal living can afford residents, providing intimate glimpses into lives they otherwise shouldn’t be able to access.
There are clear tiers of authority in place at Belgrade, but this authority is frequently exploited, highlighting the tenuous and transactional nature of communal living. Residents are kept in check by the resident assistants, who answer to the resident director. Ideally, this hierarchy should enable a peaceful co-existence between residents. In the novel, it is exploited in various ways. Tyler leverages Millie’s authority as a resident assistant to switch Peyton’s and Kennedy’s room placements. When Tyler gives Millie money as a sign of gratitude, it turns their collaboration into something transactional. Tyler threatens to use this fact against Millie at the novel’s crisis point, turning the truth on its head as the exchange of money can only be understood in so many ways. Millie also finds herself at odds with Colette, her closest friend among the resident assistants, who often shrugs off her residential duties, leaving Millie to pick up the slack until the end. Millie’s relationship with Agatha also prevents her from seeing the brewing dispute between Peyton and Kennedy over the latter’s dirty dishes. Despite Peyton’s clear request to respect her need for a clean kitchen, Millie brushes off any signs that this line is being crossed, including one moment where Peyton asks her for advice on the matter outright. In this way, Reid affirms how the tenuous residential conditions of the dormitory are often prone to abuse and infiltration, despite its apparent simplicity.
Crossing Personal and Professional Boundaries
In the novel, Millie and Agatha make morally ambiguous decisions, sacrificing their professional integrity to satisfy personal desires. Though their affair is kept secret for the most part, its impact on the lives of others becomes clearer as other characters are made aware of it.
Agatha justifies her relationship with Millie as one between two consenting adults, yet Millie’s behavior reveals the imbalanced power dynamics that underpin their affair. Though Millie is a student, there is no direct power dynamic that Agatha exercises over her as a professor. In this sense, there is little to distinguish their relationship from two co-workers from different departments at the same organization. After all, Millie’s role as a resident assistant—soon to become a resident director—elevates her to the status of an employee at the university. However, the fact that Millie can barely bring herself to tell Colette about it implies that she is anxious about misunderstanding and judgment. There are more complex power dynamics at work precisely because Millie is a working undergraduate student. Robin calls Agatha out on this when she discovers the relationship herself.
Agatha’s embrace of the relationship’s secrecy highlights her understanding of personal boundaries not as moral limits but rather as barriers between discrete life stages. She willfully looks past the problematic aspects of the relationship when she assumes that its secrecy can allow them to move along with their lives with minimal disruption. Reeling from her breakup with Robin, Agatha is surprised by Millie’s attempt to kiss her. She later idealizes a scenario where she is dating someone else, a place where “she’d returned to her proper self, her furtive year in Arkansas retroactively making sense” (247). For her, a relationship with Millie is appealing precisely because it is discreet and transient. She expects that the boundaries between her “proper” life and her Arkansas life can remain intact, an assumption symbolized by her decision to submit the profile she has written on Millie to Teen Vogue anyway, regardless of the possible consequences.
However, Agatha’s choice to write about Millie crosses the boundary between their personal and professional lives, an act exacerbated by Agatha’s secrecy. Without clearly communicating her intent for the interview and allowing Millie to know only half of the truth, Agatha takes ownership of Millie’s life as material for her own personal advancement. Just as she assumes that no harm will come out of her relationship with Millie, she also assumes that no harm will come out of writing about her. She anonymizes her and fictionalizes various missing details, yet the identity of her profile is clear when Millie, Colette, and Ryland come upon it. Millie later communicates that Agatha should have been clear about the nature of her work. In other words, Millie takes offense not just at Agatha’s crossing of the boundary between Millie’s personal life and Agatha’s professional endeavors but at Agatha’s decision to do so in secret. While Agatha uses secrecy as a tool to maintain artificial boundaries, Millie’s reaction demonstrates that Agatha’s secrecy itself is what irreversibly merges their personal and professional lives.
When Millie invites Agatha to have sex in her room at Belgrade, she too crosses the boundary between personal desire and professional aspiration. After the incident that sends Peyton and Kennedy to the hospital, Millie’s boss, Aimee, does not pass any judgment over the ethics of Millie’s relationship, but she reminds her to protect that boundary. Millie does not appear that affected by her advice but later has a similar line of thought as Agatha in the aftermath of their relationship, pondering when she might “find herself again” (377). With this shared revelation, Reid suggests that the collapsed boundary between the personal and professional aspects of life may meddle with one’s sense of self and cause more harm than good.
