- Catharsis Factor:
- Coach Benson constantly looks down on the main characters while turning a blind eye to the flaws of racist domestic abusers and bends the rules to go back on his word to give all of the swim team letterman jackets out of spite and pride. Simet gives him and his cronies a brutal chewing out while spelling out that they did not have the authority to do that and that their decision is automatically invalidated, before using Reverse Psychology to lead to racist Barbaric Bully and Domestic Abuser Barbour challenging his longtime bullying victim Chris to a swim race and being humiliatingly defeated.
- After Rich Marshall spends the entire book being a sadistic racist and Complete Monster, the reveal that he's sentenced to life for killing TJ's dad is pretty satisfying.
- Complete Monster: Rich Marshall is a thuggish hillbilly whose abuse has left his wife Alicia a Broken Bird and rendered his five-year-old biracial stepdaughter Heidi a psychological wreck. Already a racist, sexist, ableist pig who perpetuates prejudiced attitudes in high school students through his alumni group and shoots animals just for the pleasure of killing them, Rich convinces Heidi that in order to win his love, she needs to scrape off her colored skin. This results in Heidi taking a steel-tipped Brillo pad to her body and attempting to skin herself simply to win Rich's approval. When Alicia finally presses a restraining order against him, Rich decides the appropriate course is to try and shoot Heidi in a crowded baseball game, forcing the father of protagonist T.J. Jones to take the bullet.
- Moral Event Horizon: Rich was never a good person to begin with. But he crosses it when he convince his biracial daughter, Heidi, to begin scraping her skin off with a Brillo pad.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Several readers lament how TJ's girlfriend and Distaff Counterpart Carly doesn't get to be much more than a Satellite Love Interest after her promising introductory scene.
- Unintentional Period Piece: Published in 2001, the book mentions the use of Gameboys and Walkmans.
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