Leave It All Behind
By: Helen Zhuang
"Daddy'll kill you."By: Helen Zhuang
Boy, she really gets something on her mind when she gets something on her mind.
"No, he won't. The worst he'll do, he'll give me hell again, and then he'll send me to that goddam military school. That's all he'll do to me. And in the first place, I wont even be around. I'll be away. I'll be – I'll probably be in Colorado on this ranch."
"Don't make me laugh. You can't even ride a horse. Besides how would you get there?"
"Who can't? Sure I can. Certainly I can. They can teach you in about two minutes. And don't you think I could get to Colorado if I came all the way here from Princey Prep? I can go any goddam place I want, I just need some goddam money."
"Stop swearing. You can't go to anywhere you want, you don't even know where in Colorado you want to go. Where are you going to get the money?"
"I told you, a ranch and I'll get a job. There's this guy down in Greenwich Village that still owes me ten bucks; I could borrow his car. You could come with me, get the hell out of here. You would never have to worry about bullies anymore and you could write stories about Hazel Weatherfield all day long. How does that sound?"
The truth was I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Boy, once I get started I can really go off talking about this stuff. Phoebe just gave me this blank stare, for a second I thought she was actually considering it. Then she said, "YOU'VE BEEN READING MY STORIES?!"
Dammit, I forgot she didn’t know. Phoebe can be pretty goddam protective over her things sometimes. I remember one time mom almost opened her notebook and she went all crazy like a goddam lunatic and grabbed the book away from her. Other than being protective, Phoebe was the nicest girl around. You never met anyone quite like her.
"No, no, it was lying open on the desk when I came in."
She put her head right back under her pillow. Why do girls have to be so goddam sensitive about everything?
"Come on Weatherfield… those stories are good. If I saw one of those stories on the rack at a bookstore I'd buy one."
I lied. I wouldn’t buy one for myself but maybe for some other little girl, her stories were pretty good, except it wasn’t for my age and gender.
"Really…?" she asked with the most innocent face.
"Of course. Just forget about it, about everything. Forget about moving to Colorado, I'll be around Phoebe. Don't worry about me, I promise I'll visit."
Analysis Paper
I chose to do a conversation between Holden and Phoebe because I liked the fact that Holden acts like a nice guy around her. I ended my paper the way I did because it shows a caring side of Holden that he normally doesn’t display in the book. I think that my paper could actually be put in The Catcher In The Rye because I used key words that Holden uses like, "Boy," and "goddam". I started my paper off with Phoebe and Holden's conversation on page 166 and just changed the direction of the conversations to where Holden actually thinks about going to Colorado. I got this idea from when Holden was with Sally and he started going off about driving up to Massachusetts and Vermont. I thought this was a reasonable thing to write about because Holden's mind often goes off and starts thinking about things that may never happen.My story is called Leave It All Behind because Holden always wants to leave his problems behind and start over somewhere new. In my short story he talks about leaving for Colorado because it is a quiet place where no one knows who he is. In my story I wrote, "I remember one time mom almost opened her notebook and she went all crazy like a goddam lunatic and grabbed the book away from her." because Holden normally talks about some other incident if it has something to do with the person he's talking to or if it has something to relate to the topic he is talking about.
The line, "Come on Weatherfield…" was from the book when Phoebe was ignoring Holden and I thought I could use that because it shows Holden's affection toward Phoebe because he is calling her by a name she likes. I think this paper would be fun to act out or add in the book.
