Chapter Fifteen

Matt Donaghy writes a letter for Ursula Riggs again and again he doesn’t send it but he deletes it.

He isn’t the self-confident boy as before with many friends and who’s absolutely happy. His whole life has changed in the last three weeks. Now he is a shy little boy with serious emotional problems. His emotions overwhelm him. He is a broken human being. The witnesses of his joke in the cafeteria have destroyed him: “My heart is a stone – it won’t be broken again. (p. 105, l. 10)”, “I’m so lonely. (p. 107, l. 25)”

Before these incidents he wouldn’t be frightened of sending a letter to someone. He had problems with talking about his feelings, but now he’s also afraid because he’s only a poor boy without friends or any perspective.

I think he’s lost his personality. In the past the most important things for his personality were his comic character, his popularity and his talent for writing. Now he has lost everything. He also knows that: “Maybe I’m a ghost? (p. 107, l. 18)”

If I should describe his new personality, I could only say that he doesn’t have a real one. He only regrets his old life. Before the school also was very important for him, but now everything is of no importance: “His grades had plummeted to C/C- in recent weeks.”