Get a Life, Chloe Brown

“Her moment of communion with the universe rudely interrupted, Chloe hauled herself into a sitting position. Strangely, she was now feeling much better. Perhaps because she had recognized and accepted the universe’s message. It was time, clearly, to get a life.”

After nearly being hit by a drunk driver while standing outside of a cafe, Chloe realizes that had she died, her eulogy would be rather short. Chloe decides to use the near-death experience to radically change her life and embrace opportunities that she has previously avoided because of her chronic illness. This decision is the catalyst for the entire narrative, for without creating her Get a Life list in the first place, she and Red would have most likely remained aloof enemies at best. Through her list, Chloe not only falls in love, but realizes that she has always been brave.

“Her voice was sharp and expensive, like someone had taught a diamond how to speak. The sound scrambled his mind, her crisp accent reminding him of people and places he would rather forget. Of a different time and a different woman, one who’d clutched her silver spoon in one manicured hand and squeezed his heart tight in the other.”

Red hears Chloe speak and remembers his failed relationship with Pippa, in which she abused him and left him with heavy emotional baggage. This quote sets up Red’s class anxieties, and how Red projects these anxieties onto Chloe when they first meet because he associates her wealth with the way Pippa, also wealthy, treated him.

“Chloe didn’t do well around people like him; confident people, beautiful people, those who smiled easily and were liked by everyone and felt comfortable in their own sin. They reminded her of all the things she wasn’t and all the loved ones who’d left her behind.”

As much as Chloe’s personality triggers insecurity in Red, his perceived confidence and ease in moving through the world triggers Chloe’s own anxieties. At the beginning of the text, she views Red as someone who is effortlessly comfortable in his own skin.