Literature / Dirty Little Secrets

Dirty Little Secrets is a young adult novel written by C. J. Omololu.

Sixteen-year-old Lucy Tompkins comes home one morning to find her mother dead. She wants to call for help, but there's just one problem: her mother was a hoarder who progressively filled their home with all manner of junk and garbage over more than a decade. The mess was a closely guarded family secret between Lucy, her mother Joanna, her sister Sara, and her brother Phil, and if she dials 911, it will be out in the open.

For the whole day, Lucy tries to clean the house before making the 911 call she knows she has to make. She soon realizes, however, that no amount of cleaning can delay the inevitable long enough, so she takes drastic action to keep what's left of her life—and her mother's memory—safe.

Not to be confused with the visual novel of the same name.

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This book contains examples of:

• Abhorrent Admirer: Downplayed with Justine Hildebrand for Josh. He doesn't seem disgusted by her, just bored.
• A Boy, a Girl, and a Baby Family: The Tompkins family was this at one point, since Lucy has an older sibling of each sex.
• Absurdly Long Wait: Deconstructed. Lucy wants to wait a couple of days for a 911 call. However, when Sara drops by unexpectedly and announces her intention to talk to Joanna the morning, Lucy realizes that she can't.
• Abusive Parents: It's clear that Joanna valued her hoard of junk more than her she did her children. What's more, she blamed her children for the mess in the house, and didn't let Lucy have any privacy as a teenager.
• Accuser of the Brethren: After the one time that Phil and Lucy cleaned the house along with their aunt, Joanna played this role to the two children, saying that they betrayed her.
• The Ace: Josh.
• Acting Unnatural: Lucy does this whenever someone drops by her house while she's cleaning up for the paramedics.
• Actually a Good Idea: After her best friend Kayleigh begs Lucy nonstop to attend a party with her all day, Lucy relents after realizing she can't clean her house fast enough to prevent others from finding out her secret. She decides to spend her "last normal night" out having fun with her friends and her crush instead of surrounded by her mother's hoard of junk.
• Affectionate Nickname: Josh starts calling Lucy "Lucy Lu."
• A Friend in Need: Invoked by Kayleigh. She can tell something's bothering Lucy when they're together, and says that Lucy can tell her anything. However, Lucy doesn't tell her, having learned over the years not to talk about her family secret.
• Against My Religion: Invoked by Lucy - for her mother's religion, anyway. She is accustomed to using her mother's religiosity to avoid going out with people.
• Age-Gap Romance: Discussed. Lucy's father has a new wife who's only three years older than his eldest daughter.
• Alcoholic Parent: Discussed. When Lucy finally gets some alone time with her crush, Josh, he mentions that his mother's alcohol addiction was his family secret - that is, until his mother killed someone while driving drunk.
• A Lesson Learned Too Well: Lucy is so obsessed with keeping Joanna's hoarding a secret that she tries to clean the house before calling for help.
• All for Nothing: After Jean, Phil, and Lucy clean the house, which has to represent four or five years of accumulation by Joanna. It took only six months for Joanna to return the house to a similar state, and by the time of the main story, the house is full to the brim.
• Alone in a Crowd: Lucy strives to be this at all times in an effort to keep her family secret safe.
• Aloof Big Brother: Zigzagged with Phil (to Lucy). Phil would occasionally throw Lucy a lifeline when she was the target of bullying from Joanna and/or Sara, but mostly, he's lived in his own world since he moved out of the house, neither returning nor discussing Johanna's hoarding unless forced to.
• Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: Josh sees Lucy as this.
• Always a Child to Parent: Seemingly averted with Phil. When kids at school started calling Lucy "Garbage Girl," Phil, who was not quite eighteen, prevailed upon Joanna to let Lucy change schools. Lucy suspects that because Phil's age, Joanna was starting to treat him more like an adult.
• Always Check Behind the Chair: Or inside the chair, as it were. After Joanna accused Lucy of losing (or stealing) her favorite pair of scissors, Lucy finds them wedged inside her mom's recliner in the living room while cleaning the house.
• Ambiguous Ending: Does anyone ever find out about the condition of the house after Lucy burns it down?
• Ambiguous Situation: The last repairman in Lucy's house threatened to call child protective services on account of the conditions inside. Since no one from child protective services ever came, Lucy figures that the repairman never made good on his threat. However, there remains the possibility that the repairman did call, child protective services, but child protective services failed to follow up.
• Anachronic Order: The story keeps jumping into flashbacks of Lucy's home life, and even the flashbacks are not in chronological order.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: Lucy feels a lot of things after Joanna dies, but sadness isn't one of them. One thing she does feel is relief on account of how she lived and was treated while her mother was alive.
• An Odd Place to Sleep: Joanna would usually sleep in her recliner in the living room, her bed being covered with assorted junk that she'd "collected."
• Appeal to Familial Wisdom: An ironic example. In her effort to clear her house of junk, Lucy remembers the advice that Joanna (the hoarder of all the junk) once gave her to tackle large problems piece by piece.
• Appeal to Worse Problems: Joanna would often invoke the plight of third world children to justify keeping something that Lucy wanted to throw away.
• Artistic License – Law: Subverted. When she sees that Joanna has a pile of unpaid credit card balances, Lucy wonders whether she, Phil, and Sara will have to work their whole lives to pay it off. Credit card debt cannot be inherited in the United States; however, Lucy is thinking of this possibility out of fearful speculation, not knowledge of the law.
• Artists Are Attractive: Part of Josh's appeal to Lucy is that he plays bass in a band.
• A Side Order of Romance: Before Lucy finally gives in to telling others about what happened with Joanna, she spends some time with her crush, Josh.
• A Simple Plan: Lucy's plan to hide the evidence of Joanna's hoarding is straightforward: open the windows to let the winter cold preserve her mother's dead body, clean any room in the house the paramedics could see or smell, call 911, and clean the rest of the house after the paramedics had departed. However, between nosy neighbors and the interference of her sister, this proves impossible.
• Asshole Victim: The entire book revolves around the death of Joanna, Lucy's often abusive hoarder mother.
• Awful Truth: Joanna's hoarding, and the conditions in which her family lives as a result. It's hard on Phil and especially Lucy.
• Babysitter Friendship: Lucy babysits TJ, a young boy who lives across the street. She eventually lets him into the house to keep her company while she cleans, and lets him keep some of the things she plans to throw away.
• Bad Bedroom, Bad Life: Oh, boy. Lucy cleans and straightens up her room, but even she can't escape the tide of junk filling it up. Joanna, meanwhile, can't even sleep in her bed because of the excessive clutter.
• Bad Liar: Lucy considers herself to be this, despite having to lie constantly to keep Joanna's hoarding a secret.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: Lucy loses some of the little respect she has left for her mother after she discovered that her pet hamster had not, as Joanna maintained for years, escaped his cage while Lucy had been away at camp. In reality, he'd starved to death because Joanna had never bothered to feed him.
• Before the Dark Times: According to Phil, Joanna had once kept the house neat as a pin. And even after her hoarding behavior had set in, Lucy made some fond memories with her mom as a little girl.
• "Begone" Bribe: Lucy sees the Christmas check from her father as this.
• Beg the Dog: After Lucy had once expressed a desire to run away, Joanna was just finishing up a speech about how nobody would take her in when she had as asthma attack. She managed to ask Lucy for her inhaler.
• Benevolent Boss: Nadine, Joanna's boss at work, adores her. She even drops by her house when she doesn't show up for a shift (due to her death).
• Berserk Button: Unsurprisingly, Joanna had two main ones, though there were others as well:
  • Do not throw out any of her stuff.
  • And don't let anyone aside from family in her house.
• Best Friend: Kayleigh, to Lucy. She doesn't ask too many questions about Lucy's home life, which makes the friendship work.
• Betrayal by Offspring: Invoked regularly by Joanna ever since Phil and Lucy had helped their aunt clean the house. By the time just before the events of the book, she was accusing Lucy of stealing anything she couldn't find.
• Betty and Veronica: Lucy sees herself as the Betty and Justine Hildebrand as the Veronica to Josh's Archie.
• Big Secret: A major theme of the book.
  "Secrets. Everyone has them. Some are bigger and dirtier than others."
• Blatant Lies: When Lucy accidentally let then-best-friend, Elena, come in to use the bathroom once, both Lucy and Joanna tried to say that their bathroom was "broken" because their house was being renovated. Elena didn't buy it, even though she didn't press the issue.
• Bonding over Missing Parents: Downplayed, as Lucy doesn't want to talk to Josh about herself, but Josh opens up to her about his own Disappeared Dad.
• Boyfriend Bluff: A gender inverted example right at the beginning of the book. When Justine starts hitting on Josh, he puts his arm around Lucy instead.
• Brainy Brunette: Lucy gets good grades and used to read encyclopedias when she was little.
• Brick Joke: Early in the book, Lucy has a flashback to her mom chewing her out over allegedly losing her favorite pair of scissors. While Lucy is cleaning the house, guess what she eventually finds wedged between the cushions of her mom's recliner?
• Broken Bird: Lucy.
• Broken Pedestal: Lucy defies this for her mother with all her might with her attempt to clean the house. She'd rather her mother be remembered as how the outside world was used to seeing her not as a hoarder surrounded by her own mess (though her reasons aren't completely altruistic either). Upon discovering that Josh is genuinely interested in her, she does it again for herself, preserving the air of mystery that attracted him to her in the first place.
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: Gender inverted with Lucy and Josh.
• Bros Before Hoes: Defied by Josh. When Lucy meets Josh at the party, she suggests that she hang out with his guy friends, but Josh replies that he can talk to "those idiots" whenever he wants, but that he gets far fewer opportunities to be with her.
• Bullied into Depression: Lucy, first by her mother and sister, and then by kids at school who call her "Garbage Girl." By the events of the book, she has trouble believing that she could be well-liked by by anybody.
• Bully Magnet: Lucy, once Elena saw inside her house.
• But I Read a Book About It: Lucy realizes that she's never done, even intending to turn to Food Network for ideas for meals to cook.
• Canis Major: The dog owned by the nosy neighbor, Mrs. Raj.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': In describing her life with her mother, Lucy sums up what it was like to be accused of losing (or stealing) some random object around the house. There were no good options to respond, and Lucy had to choose the least bad one.
• Can't Stay Normal: Although Sara moved into her own apartment as soon as she was legally able, she started hoarding things herself, just like Joanna.
  • Also implied with Joanna herself. Phil characterized Joanna as a onetime "neat freak," and Joanna's sister, Jean, revealed that their mother was also a hoarder.
• Can't Take Criticism: Joanna, at least when confronted with the reality of her living conditions.
• Captain Oblivious: TJ isn't aware of anything wrong when he's in a cold house, in a living room filled with junk, and Lucy tells him that he must not, not, 'not' go anywhere else in the house. Justified, as he's an eight-year-old boy surrounded by "cool stuff."
• Cassandra Gambit: Lucy lets TJ into her house while she's cleaning, knowing full well that he'll tell his mother what's inside, because a) she wants someone to talk to, b) because she's not cleaning the worst of the house, and c) because his mother won't believe him anyway.
• Cathartic Crying: Lucy does this at the end of the book as her house goes up in flames.
• Cell Phones Are Useless: Downplayed. Phil calls Lucy on the way to Tahoe. The call drops in the middle of her conversation, but Lucy hears enough to realize that she is well and truly alone to deal with Joanna's death.
• Chekhov's Gun: Several:
  • Lucy finds her mother's piano buried under boxes and bags in the garage, and remembers that Joanna liked to play. Lucy later discovers later exactly how good at playing piano Joanna had once been.
  • Joanna's recliner in the living room contain notices of five-figure bills and a bank statement that Joanna had about nine grand in her account. This is when the harsh reality of what Lucy is up against starts to set in.
  • The space heater that Lucy would always use to heat her room (due to the broken furnace) becomes her tool to burn down the house.
  • Lucy finds the new slippers she gave Joanna for Christmas among the hoard. She puts them on her mother's feet just before she sets the house on fire so that what would be left of Joanna's body would be found wearing them.
• Chekhov's Party: Josh invites Lucy - and Kayleigh nags her to go - to a party. When she does finally decide to go, she gets the some time with Josh that she wanted so much.
• Child of Two Worlds: Lucy after her parents' divorce. She is a child of her father's world of normalcy that she feels is trying to push her out, and of her mother's world of isolation and hoarding that she feels is trying to draw her in.
• Child Prodigy: While going through her mother's things during her cleanup, Lucy discovers that as a child, Joanna was a pianist who won national competitions. However, while Joanna continued to play the piano well into adulthood, her procession of awards stopped suddenly when she was around 17.
• Children as Pawns: This is what Joanna thought Jean was doing when she enlisted Phil and Lucy to help her clean the house. She thought Jean was out to steal her things, and had convinced her two youngest children to help her. Not that she doesn't also hold Phil and Lucy responsible for "betraying" her.
• Children Do the Housework: Jean enlisted Phil and Lucy to clean up after Joanna while her sister was in the hospital (though Jean did work harder than she expected of either of the children). As Lucy got older, she became the only one who did any sort of cleaning around the house - though that never stopped Joanna from blaming the mess on her. And after Joanna dies, it falls on Lucy - Joanna's only offspring who did not yet reach adulthood - to clean the house alone to spare her family shame.
• Chore Character Exploration: Lucy would rather spend a couple of days cleaning up than call 911 immediately and let the full impact of Joanna's hoard hit the paramedics - and any newsmen who happen to come along. Her strength to keep going comes from a hopeful vision of her future. And on the way, her toxic relationship with her mother and her strained social life are unpacked.
  • Jean is a minor example. Her mother was a hoarder as well, and she apparently cannot bear to see Joanna fall into the same situation.
• Christianity is Catholic: Joanna is the only character who is specifically mentioned to go to church - a Catholic church.
• Christmas Episode: Almost. The book takes place between Christmas and New Year's Day.
• Chronic Pet Killer: Defied by Lucy after Joanna let her pet hamster escape (or so she thought). After she comes back home to find the hamster gone, she can't bring herself to bring another pet into the house.
• Church Lady: Downplayed with Joanna. Although she was active and well-liked in her church community, her professional life was just as important to her.
• Cinderella Plot: Played with. Lucy can definitely be considered a Cinderella, with her immediate biological family (Joanna, Sara, and Phil) stepping into the role of the wicked stepfamily, Kayleigh as the fairy godmother, and Josh and the handsome prince. However, for most of the book, Lucy is alone, out of sight of everyone else. And Lucy solves the problems she faces with no direct help.
• Class Trip: Discussed. In her sophomore year, Lucy had to miss a trip to Disneyland with her class. She only learns the real reason why after stumbling upon Joanna's unpaid bills.
• Closest Thing We Got: Since Joanna and Lucy couldn't get a professional repairman into the house due to the mess, they had to call either Phil or Sara's boyfriend, Mark, whenever something needed fixing.
• Cloudcuckooland: The house where Lucy lives is filled with junk. Nobody is allowed to throw anything away. Everybody makes excuses not to have guests over, Lucy becomes a complete social outcast when her one friend ends inside, the last professional repairman in the house threatened to call Child Protective Services, Sara and Phil moved away as soon as they turned eighteen, and Lucy was planning on doing the same before Joanna's death.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Joanna obsessively buys and keeps whatever she can get her hands on, even well past the point of having an unhealthy environment in her house.
• Cloudcuckoolanguage: Downplayed. To Joanna, there was no "trash" or "junk," only her "treasures." Or more sinisterly, getting rid of her "treasures" is "betraying" her.
• Commonality Connection: Much if the bonding between Lucy and Kayleigh is over their shared crush on Johnny Depp.
• Control Freak: Joanna maintained total control over the house, mainly to ensure that nothing would be thrown out.
• Cool House: Inverted with Lucy's house. To everyone who's ever lived in the mess there - even Joanna, who made it (not that she ever admitted it) - the conditions are an embarrassment.
• Cool Kid-and-Loser Friendship: Kayleigh has many more friends and gets much more attention from boys than Lucy.
• Cool People Rebel Against Authority: When Lucy gets egg on her face after reciting a Shel Silverstein poem in English class, Josh recites another one, enraging the teacher. Lucy can tell that their classmates all think it's funny.
• *Cough* Snark *Cough*: In one of Lucy's flashbacks, a boy in her class does this to call Lucy "Garbage Girl."
• Crappy Holidays: Downplayed with Christmas with Lucy in her teens. Joanna would usually not get her any good gifts due to mysterious financial problems she always get around this time of year, but at least she would go over to the large, spacious house owned by her family friends, and out of the cluttered one where she lives.
• Crazy Enough to Work: Both of Lucy's ideas to hid Joanna's hoarding:
  • Zigzagged with the cleanup. Whenever reality sets in and the job sounds as impossible as it is, Lucy keeps coming up with ways to make it easier. Finally, though, she's forced to abandon her cleanup attempt when Sara announces her intention to speak with Joanna the next day - no ifs, ands, or buts.
  • Then played straight when Lucy burns the house down. By the time the fire department arrives, the flames are so intense that no firefighter would dare go inside.
• Crush Blush: Lucy gets this multiple times around Josh.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Sara, Phil, and Lucy, growing up with Joanna's hoarding.
  • Also, Joanna and Jean, whose mother was also a hoarder.
• Darkest Hour: The time after Sara says she'll come back the next day to talk to Joanna. Lucy realizes that she has no choice but to let the paramedics - and whoever else will come along with them - see what had happened to the house. Or so she thinks.
• Dark Secret: Joanna's hoarding, so much that Lucy would rather spend a couple of days cleaning up than make a 911 call right away upon finding her mother's dead body.
• Dawn of an Era: After Joanna's death, Lucy imagines what her life will be like after she gets the house cleaned up. And at the end, she narrates that her "after" would be different than what she imagined, but she's fine with that.
• Death by Materialism: Joanna is a possible variation. Her hoarding has both put her in heavy debt and filled her house with clutter, bringing dust, mold spores, and God knows what else into the air. And Joanna was asthmatic.
• Deceptive Legacy: Lucy always believed that her had left her mother to be with Tiffany. Sara, however, says that he didn't meet Tiffany until later, and that Joanna had thrown him out due to his nagging. And because of Tiffany's age (she would have been around 17 or 18 at the time of Joanna's divorce), Sara's version of events is more believable.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Although she's usually guarded around other people, Lucy drops her guard just a little when she's alone with Josh.
• Department of Child Disservices: Possibly. The last professional repairman in Lucy's house threatened to call Child Protective Services due to the state of the house. Lucy figures he never actually made the call, but another possibility is that Child Protective Services never investigated the call they'd gotten.
• Despair Event Horizon: Lucy crosses it after Sara announces that she'll be back to talk to Joanna the next day (meaning that she won't have enough time to clean up before calling the paramedics) and Phil makes it clear that he's not coming back to help her.
• Destroy the Abusive Home: What Lucy does in a last-ditch attempt to keep her family secret safe.
• Destructive Romance: Discussed. According to Josh, his mother is chronically bad at choosing men because of her desperation to have a man in her life.
• Determinator: Subverted with Lucy. Although she's fully committed to cleaning her house at first, she finally gives up after realizing that she doesn't have enough time, and that even if she did, Sara would still stand in the way of her Happy Ending.
• Diabolus ex Machina:
  • Joanna, whose room was in the very back of the house and barely even went into her bedroom (she would sleep on her recliner in the living room), died... while walking into her bedroom. Lucy lampshades this several times during the narration, touching on both her puzzlement on what her mother wanted from her bedroom and her annoyance that she died in the one part of the house that made her cleaning job the hardest.
  • A subversion and inversion comes later on. Lucy considers Sara's timing or show up at the house as the worst, but in reality, she can come up with a plausible - and half-true - explanation for why she was out of the house when Sara arrived. If Sara had come at any other time that day, Lucy would have been Caught Red Handed throwing out Joanna's "treasures," and if Sara had arrived just a couple of minutes earlier, she would have seen TJ in the house.
• Did I Mention It's Christmas?: The main story is set just a few days after Christmas, before the new year had even been rung in. However, nothing particular to Christmas (decorations, etc.) are ever mentioned as being anywhere.
• Dies Wide Open: Lucy finds Joanna's dead body this way.
• Dirty Business: Lucy does this twice for the sake of making the house somewhat presentable for the paramedics:
  • Leaving Joanna's dead body lying on the floor while relying on the winter cold to preserve it. She originally plans to clean the house for a couple of days before calling 911. She reasons that there's nothing she can really do for her mother except protect her memory.
  • Moving Joanna's dead body to the front part of the hallway, giving herself less of the house she has to clean to accomplish her task. To do this, Lucy has to think of Joanna's body as having no connection to her late mother.
• Disappeared Dad: Josh never knew his father, and has no idea who he is/was or what happened to him.
• Discreet Drink Disposal: When she finally goes to the party, Lucy dumps a cup of beer into a potted plant, both because she doesn't like the taste and because she fears was would happen if she were to get drunk. Josh sees her, but doesn't see anything wrong with her not wanting to drink, partly because he's not drinking at the party himself. Josh then gives Lucy an imported root beer that she can drink without anyone knowing the difference.
• Dog Got Sent to a Farm: When Lucy finds the empty cage of her pet hamster, she remembers how she asked Joanna to take care of him while she was at camp. However, when Lucy got home, Joanna told her that the hamster had escaped when she'd opened the door to his cage for a few seconds. Lucy discovers that Joanna was lying when she finds the hamster's desiccated body under the wood chips in the cage, and realizes that Joanna must not have bothered to feed him.
• Don't Do Anything I Wouldn't Do: Kayleigh tells Lucy this when she leaves her best friend alone with Josh. And it's clear from the context that Kayleigh would be okay with anything Lucy would do with Josh.
• Don't Look At Me: Due to her past experiences, what Lucy fears most is having lots of eyes on her.
• Doomed New Clothes: A variation. Lucy gave Joanna new slippers for Christmas, since her old ones had to be held together with duct tape. While cleaning the house, Lucy finds the new slippers stashed in a box, while Joanna is still wearing her old ones. Later, before burning the house down, Lucy places the new slippers on her mother's feet.
• Double Date: Discussed. Kayleigh wants a date with her crush, Steve, along with Lucy and Josh.
• The Dragon: Ever since Jean, Phil, and Lucy cleaned the house, Sara has used the incident to curry favor with Joanna, encouraging her to turn against her younger children.
• Dramatic Shattering: After remembering Joanna's worst side as a parent, Lucy throws her "World's Greatest Mom" mug into a garbage bag, and is pleased to hear it break.
• Drinking the Kool-Aid: Sara continues to buy into Joanna's philosophy that nothing should ever be thrown away despite moving out at eighteen. Lucy attempts to demonstrate how insane this is by pointing out that with the way the house is, Sara can't sleep over because any unoccupied bedroom is filled to the brim with junk. Sara is still unmoved.
• Drunk Driver: Defied by Josh. Since his mother once killed someone by driving drunk, Josh is always careful not to drink and drive.
• Duct Tape for Everything: Joanna would rather wear her old, worn out, duct-taped slippers than the new ones Lucy had gotten her for Christmas.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: After Jean had spent two weeks cleaning Joanna's house with the help of Phil and Lucy, Joanna screamed at her that she wanted her stuff back. Jean then asked if she wanted mold back in the house too.
• Due to the Dead:
  • Zigzagged with how Lucy treated Joanna's body. She left the body lying in the cold for a day before burning the house down with her mother's body inside. Lucy admits to herself that it's disrespectful, but she's also trying to preserve the memory of her mother that everyone has rather than have everyone find out about her hoarding.
  • Played straight, however, with how Lucy treats the body of her hamster. Lucy feels that she failed her pet in life, so she resolves to at least give him a proper funeral. She takes a break from the urgent work of cleaning the house to dig him a grave and say a prayer.
• Dying Alone: Nobody else was in the house when Joanna died.
• Dying for Symbolism: Joanna's death represents the death of the toxic (health-wise and emotionally) environment for Lucy.
• Dysfunctional Family: Lucy's family. Her parents are divorced, her father lives thousands of miles away with his new family (and Lucy suspects that he doesn't want her there), Joanna was an emotionally abusive hoarder, Sara is another hoarder who always tries to curry favor with her mother by denigrating her younger siblings, Phil is closed off and distant and isn't always there for Lucy when she needs him, and Jean - the only functional member of the family - has been "banished from the house."
  • And as Lucy finds out, Josh's family is like this as well. Josh lives with his mother, an ex-alcoholic who would always get involved with the wrong kind of men. For where Josh is standing, his current stepfather, whom his mother met at an AA meeting, is an improvement. He might be an asshole, but at least he's not a drunk asshole.
• Embarrassed by a Child: Joanna blamed Lucy for Elena getting into her house by mistake. Nothing could 6convince her that Lucy didn't let Elena in on purpose.
• Embarrassing Hobby: Joanna's habit of "collecting" things could be considered this.
• Embarrassment Plot: Lucy is so determined not to let the paramedics see the mess in her house that she waits until she has a chance to clean before she calls them. Why? She could never have people over as long as she could remember, she got called "Garbage Girl" when her classmates found out how she lived, and she knew that dead hoarders tended to have their houses end up on the news.
• Entertainment Below Their Age: Lucy and Josh, who are both teenagers, like Shel Silverstein poems, which were written for very young children.
• Environmental Symbolism: The house in which Lucy lives symbolizes many things in her life: overwhelming, toxicity, oppression, etc.
• Establishing Character Moment: Lucy's time with Josh at the movies. Lucy is constantly struggling with herself between what she wants and what she think is necessary and/or possible.
• "Eureka!" Moment: As Lucy is about to go home after spending some alone time with Josh, she decides that the way to solve her problems is to burn down her house.
• Exact Words: Josh pulls one on Lucy when she calls him out for speaking inconsistently about his curfew:
  Josh: I said my mom wants me home. I didn't say I always do what she tells me.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The main part of the book (excluding the first chapter and flashbacks) takes place in less than twenty-four hours.
• Face–Heel Turn: Over time, Joanna turned from a loving mother who kept a clean house to an emotionally abusive hoarder who blamed Lucy for everything that went wrong in her house.
• Fair-Weather Friend: Elena was this for Lucy. Formerly Lucy's best (and only) friend, she abandoned Lucy immediately after seeing the conditions of her house. The memory of this incident makes Lucy unable to confide in Kayleigh about her home life.
• Faked Gift Acceptance: Lucy remembers that Joanna looked happy upon receiving her Christmas gift: a new pair of slippers to replace her old ones, which had to be held together with duct tape. However, Joanna stashed the new ones away while continuing to wear the old ones.
• False Friend: After becoming a complete social outcast due to her classmates finding out about the condition of her house, Lucy suspects everyone she knows of being this.
• False Start: As her house burns, Lucy says she might confess to Josh what really happened and why but wants to put it off for the time being.
• Family Drama: Constanly within Lucy's family.
• Family Honor: Lucy feels the pressure of this at all times. It is this, as much as anything else, that drives her actions throughout the main part of the book.
• Female Gaze: How Josh is described.
• Fiery Cover Up: Downplayed. Lucy burns down the house to spare herself (and her family) the shame of her mother's hoarding being made public knowledge.
• Fiery Redhead: Joanna, eventually. By the time Lucy was in her teens, saying one wrong thing would send her flying off the handle.
• First-Person Perspective: The story is told from Lucy's point of view.
• Flashback Within a Flashback: It's within a flashback that Phil recalls the kind of neat freak Joanna had been before her divorce.
• Food as Bribe: Lucy made a meal in the kitchen once (back when the refrigerator worked) to butter her mother up enough to let her clean up the house so she could have a sleepover there. All the girls at school were curious about her house, since none of them had ever been there. It was a spectacular failure, ending in a huge argument between Lucy and Joanna.
• Foreshadowing: Lucy bonds with Kayleigh over their shared crush on Johnny Depp. Near the end of the book, Lucy gets the idea to burn down her house from his movie What's Eating Gilbert Grape.
• Forgets to Eat: Lucy does this while cleaning her house, only eating a couple of egg rolls and a scone.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Lucy and her family. Joanna was choleric, Sara is sanguine, Lucy is melancholic, and Phil is phlegmatic.
• Fourth Wall Myopia: Some reviewers on Amazon ask why Lucy didn't just call the police or Child Protective Services. In Lucy's experience, her family members are the only ones who accept her as she is, however poorly.
• Freudian Trio: Lucy and her siblings: Sara (Id), Phil (Ego), and Lucy (Superego).
• Fridge Horror:
  • Joanna, who lived in unsanitary conditions, worked as an oncology nurse. As related in Lucy's narration, Joanna's boss won't let employees work sick - a reasonable requirement, as cancer treatments often leave patients with compromised immune systems. And Joanna would often do extra physical things for her patients, like stroking their feet. Who's to say Joanna never brought any germs from home that infected her patients?
  • Lucy's house burns down the day after Sara caught her throwing out Joanna's things but did not speak to their mother, in the early hours of the morning, and only hours before Sara planned to return to speak with Joanna. Sara, like Joanna, does not trust Lucy by default. And Joanna would not be found wearing the only slippers Sara ever knew her to wear. The circumstances look suspicious for Lucy, and given the enmity between Sara and Lucy, it wouldn't be unlike Sara to suspect Lucy - or to relay her suspicions to the police.
• Friendless Background: After Elena had deserted her, Lucy had no friends until she changed schools and met Kayleigh.
• Friends Are Chosen, Family Aren't: Zigzagged with Lucy. While Lucy spends as many nights as she dares at Kayleigh's, her best friend knows next to nothing about her home life.
• "Friends" Rent Control: Sara and Phil both moved into their own apartments as soon as they turned eighteen, though not far away from the house. The family lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the United States. This is especially pronounced with Sara, who lives in San Francisco itself and is not mentioned to have gone to college (ever).
• From Bad to Worse: It's hard enough for a sixteen-year-old girl with a history of being bullied for her living conditions to to find her mother's dead body amid her piles of junk. What could make it harder? Finding out how much her mother spent to build those piles of junk. Or having her sister, a hoarder just like her mother was, catch her trying to get rid of the piles of junk, and short-circuit her plan to keep the news cameras out of her home.
• Full-Name Ultimatum: Joanna would do this whenever she would chew Lucy out over something she couldn't find.
• Fun with Homophones: Josh plays bass in a band called "The Missing Peace."
• Get Out!: Joanna did this to Jean, topping it off with an assault, when she threw out a large number of her "treasures."
• Girls Like Musicians: Josh, who plays in a band, is quite the Chick Magnet.
• Girly Girl: Kayleigh.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: The socially isolated Lucy does not appear to be in good mental health.
• Gonna Need More X: Lucy quickly realizes that she doesn't have enough time to clean her house before the paramedics arrive, no matter how cold her mother's body is. With the house not nearly as bad, it still took her two weeks to clean it along with Phil and Jean.
• Good Parents: Kayleigh's mom is supportive of her daughter, and lets her go out (as long as she behaves).
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Words more profane than "hell" or "crap" are rarely used. The most vulgar word in the story, used only a couple of times, is "ass." No character in the book says "fuck," while "bullshit" is shortened to "bull."
• Grew a Spine: Lucy defends herself regarding the mess in her house for the first time when Sara comes over:
  Lucy: This is not my fault! The house is a mess because Mom lives like a pig!
• The Grovel: After Sara threatens to go straight to Joanna upon finding Lucy throwing out her stuff, Lucy does this in a last-ditch effort to keep Sara from seeing Joanna's body.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Joanna had this, especially after Jean had cleaned her house. Lucy was constantly on edge about saying or doing something that would set her mother off.
• Holiday-Appropriate Weather: The story takes place a few days after Christmas, and Lucy thinks the weather's cold enough to preserve Joanna's dead body so Lucy can clean up.
• Hollywood Nuns: One briefly appears in one of Lucy's flashbacks, snapping at her for looking at the caricature of herself that had been thrown at her in class.
• Honorary Uncle: Bernie and Jack, Joanna's longtime friends, have her whole family over every Christmas. Lucy loves it, since their big house would give her plenty of space to play with her new toys. Plus, she gets to get out of her own house.
• Hope Spot: Many times while Lucy cleans her house. Whenever getting the house clean enough seems impossible, she always gets an idea to make it less so. At least, until Sara shows up.
• Hurricane of Excuses: Lucy gives different ones to different people during the book:
  • To Kayleigh, all of her excuses not to go to the party boil down to "I have to do something with my mom."
  • She also keeps giving excuse after excuse why Sara can't go see Joanna. Lucy finally puts her off (at least for the night) by telling her sister that their mom was throwing up.
• Hypocrite: Joanna, who lived in disgusting and unsanitary conditions of her own making, would never share a fork with another person in order to avoid spreading germs.
• I Am Not My Father: Lucy and Jean both take care not to live like their mothers, who hoarded junk and garbage until it filled up their houses.
• I Am Not Pretty: Lucy doesn't think of herself as pretty, and it takes her a long time to realize that Josh likes her, since he can have any girl he wants.
• I Can't Believe a Guy Like You Would Notice Me: Lucy's reaction when she realizes that Josh reciprocates her feelings for him.
• If We Get Through This…: While she cleans the house, Lucy keeps imagining what her life will be once all the junk is gone.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Lucy, who was called "Garbage Girl" before because of the mess in her house, never again wants to be seen as a freak who lives in a hoarder house.
• Inappropriate Role Model: Sara lives just like Joanna, a hoarder who hated throwing anything away, did.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: Whenever someone asks Lucy to go out or come into the house, she makes some excuse, and not always a good one. She has no choice but to hold firm, even when called out. This is a habit carried over from her childhood, when the girls in her class would notice that they would never hang out at her house.
  • An exaggerated example of this was when Elena accidentally ended up inside her house because she wanted to use the bathroom, and Lucy told her that it was "broken." And Elena lampshaded it:
    Elena: How does a bathroom break?
• Innocence Lost: When Lucy was nine, Joanna had to stay in the hospital after a car crash, and Jean came to watch them. This actually triggered two back-to-back examples:
  • When Jean arrived and showed her shock at the condition of the house, Lucy realized that the way they lived was not normal.
  • After Jean, Lucy, and Phil cleaned the house and Joanna got angry at them all, Lucy realized that her own mother cared more about random junk in her house than she did about her.
• Insecure Protagonist, Arrogant Antagonist: Lucy constantly doubts herself, while Sara and Justine act confident at all times.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: Lucy, who gets good grades and read encyclopedias for fun when she was little, is never shown (in the present or in flashbacks) to have more than one close friend at a time.
• In the End, You Are on Your Own: While talking on the phone with Phil, Lucy implores him to turn around from his trip to Tahoe and come home, because she needs his help right then. Phil makes it clear that he won't even before the call drops, leaving Lucy to deal with the aftermath of Joanna's death by herself.
• I Reject Your Reality: Sara refuses to see Lucy's point about the house being too cluttered even when Lucy points out that the hoard of junk makes it impossible for her to sleep over.
• Irrevocable Message: When Joanna refused to de-junk the house so Lucy could have a birthday sleepover, their conversation descended into an argument, in which Lucy expressed a wish to leave, and to live with either her father or her Aunt Jean. Even after she'd fetched her mother's inhaler to stave off an asthma attack, the weight of what she'd said before still was on her shoulders.
• It's All Junk: Everything Joanna crammed into her house and garage. Lucy finds old newspapers and magazines, food that has long since rotted, things her mother could never find in the mess, things they could actually use if the house wasn't so cluttered, and much, much more. In the end, she burns down the house with even all her favorite things still in it. The only thing she saves is a teddy bear she made herself as a small child.
• Ivy League for Everyone: Invoked. After finding Joanna's unpaid bills, Lucy imagines Kayleigh and Josh going to prestigious schools while she has to work to pay off her mother's debt.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Lucy finds pictures of Joanna as a teenager, pretty, well-dressed, and confident.
• Keeping Secrets Sucks: Hiding the evidence of Joanna's hoarding has been nothing short of exhausting, and it naturally becomes even more so when Joanna dies surrounded by all her junk.
• Kids Are Cruel: What did Elena do when she saw what Lucy's house looked like inside? Stopped talking to her. And what did her classmates do? Called her "Garbage Girl." It got so bad, Lucy had to change schools.
• Klatchian Coffee: After Lucy and Josh leave the party, they go the the (closed) cafe where the latter works. He lets her take a whiff of the beans in the garbage can. He swears that one gets a jolt of energy just by doing that.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: After Sara drops by the house and announces that she'll be back the next day, Lucy knows that she can't possibly clean the house enough in one night to make it at all presentable. She goes out for "one last normal night," not wanting to waste it surrounded by garbage, before her mother's death is all over the news and she becomes a social outcast again.
• Lead Bassist: Josh is this for his band.
• Let the Past Burn: Lucy burns down her house rather than let the paramedics see inside. She isn't the child of a hoarder anymore; just a teenager like any other with a burning house.
• Light Girl, Dark Boy: Lucy is pale from all her time spent indoors, while Josh has a tan (in winter). Lucy is sure Josh has some Asian ancestry.
• Like Father, Unlike Son: Jean grew up with a hoarder mother, and seems to have resolved not to be like her.
• Limited Social Circle: Justified with Lucy, Kayleigh, and Josh. Friendships are exhausting for Lucy, since she is always not to talk about her home life.
• Liquid Courage: Invoked by Kayleigh. As she tells Lucy, if it lowers your inhibitions, who cares if it tastes like crap?
• Littering Is No Big Deal: Averted. When Lucy starts tossing garbage bags of junk out the dining room window, the nosy neighbor, Mrs. Raj, is sure to remind her to make sure they're gone on garbage day.
• Living a Double Life: To the world, Joanna was a knowledgeable and respected oncology nurse, a well-liked Church Lady, and a devoted mom. To her children, she was a hoarder who only cared about her junk.
• Loners Are Freaks: Lucy certainly thinks of herself as a freak.
• Loners Will Stay Alone: Finally defied by Lucy. She realizes a course of drastic action that (supposedly) allows her to keep Kayleigh and Josh.
• Long Last Look: Lucy takes one last look around her house before setting it on fire.
• Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Discussed. According to Josh, this describes his mom to a tee.
• Loose Lips: Subverted with Lucy. While she's with Josh, alone in the coffee shop, she has trouble guarding her speech. In particular, she refers to her mom in the past tense when no one's supposed to know that Joanna is dead. However, Josh doesn't notice any of it.
• Loser Gets the Girl: Gender inverted with Lucy, who wins Josh's heart despite having only one friend.
• Loser Protagonist: Lucy again.
• Loss of Inhibitions: Lucy invokes this at the party. Not wanting to end the night "cold and alone" like always, she resolves to takes risks to spend some alone time with Josh for what she thinks could be her only chance.
• Lost Pet Grievance: Lucy was sad at the disappearance of her pet hamster. Joanna told her that he'd escaped from his cage while she'd been at camp after Lucy had begged her mother to take care of him. Then, Lucy experiences this again while cleaning the house when she discovers his dried-out body in the cage, proving that Joanna was lying.
• Lost the TV Remote: At one point, Lucy wants to put the TV on for a little distraction while she works, but the remote is missing. She looks under and inside her mom's recliner, where she finds, not the remote, but multiple pairs of scissors (including the pair Joanna accused her of losing), enormous unpaid bills, and a bank statement for only a fraction of her mother's debt.
• Ludicrous Gift Request: Inverted. On one of their rare mother-daughter shopping trips, Joanna found Lucy looking at several expensive wallets of different colors on the bargain rack, and offered to buy her one for Christmas. That Christmas, Lucy opens a present to reveal eight of the wallet in all colors from the store (except pink, which Lucy had said she hadn't wanted). When Lucy finds the rest of the wallets while cleaning out the garage, she looks at the price tag and realizes that Joanna must have spent $200 on them.
• Manipulative Bastard: Pretty much as long as Lucy can remember, Sara has been good at playing on the emotions of those around her.
• Meaningful Name: Possibly. The name of Josh's band - "The Missing Peace" - could be a reference to the lack of peace in his home life.
• The Medic: Joanna was an oncology nurse who was very good at her job. She would do a lot of extra things for her patients, and she would spot things that the doctors wouldn't.
• Mellow Fellow: Josh is even-tempered, and rarely seems bothered by anything (anymore).
• Messy Maggots: One of Lucy's more disgusting discoveries while cleaning is a bunch of live maggots, one of which gets down her shirt.
• Minor Living Alone: Lucy... but only for a day.
• Motivated by Fear: Lucy, afraid of public scrutiny of her living conditions that might follow Joanna's death, begins the herculean task of cleaning her house, hoping to make it presentable to the first responders, upon finding her mother's dead body.
• Motor Mouth: Kayleigh often talks nonstop - though, importantly to Lucy, without asking too many questions.
• Mouthy Kid: TJ.
• Move Along, Nothing to See Here: Lucy sometimes does this to avoid letting people into her house.

Mr. Fanservice: Josh.

• Ms. Red Ink: Joanna. Lucy always wondered why her mother would be loath to spend money on her (even around Christmas), and while cleaning the house, she finds the reason: her mother has multiple credit cards with balances of ten of thousands of dollars apiece, while she only has about nine thousand in the bank. To Joanna, buying random things she didn't really need was apparently more important than spending money on her children - or saving it, for that matter.
• Mundane Solution: Downplayed. Burning down her house while making it look like an accident is tougher than Lucy anticipated, but it's still easier than trying to clear away seven years' worth of junk in one night.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Upon finding Joanna's corpse surrounded by a pile of magazines, one of the many things Lucy feels is guilt. Why? When she left the house the previous night, she slammed the door in the hope that some stack of something somewhere in the house (like the magazines) would fall over.
• My God, You Are Serious!: When Josh first takes her on a date, Lucy thinks he's just trying to make his cheating ex jealous. It soon becomes clear, however, that he's genuinely interested in her.
• My Greatest Failure: Lucy sees the death of her pet hamster as this, especially after she finds out what really happened to him when she was away at camp. To her, the hamster was depending on her, and she let him down.
• My Nayme Is: Kayleigh.
• Mysterious Parent: Lucy only realizes how little she knows about Joanna's past when she comes upon her mother's old awards for winning piano competitions.
• Mysterious Past: Although Lucy occasionally gets glimpses into Joanna's past, she never gets the full picture.
• Neat Freak: Discussed. Phil once told Lucy that Joanna had been one many years before.
• Needlework Is for Old People: Averted. Joanna once helped Lucy sew a teddy bear for a class project. It eventually becomes the only keepsake Lucy takes from her house.
• Never Be Hurt Again: Lucy never intended to make another best friend after Elena had deserted her. Her friendship with Kayleigh started as a sort of accident.
• Never Got to Say Goodbye: The last interaction between Lucy and Joanna was an altercation over a lost pair of scissors. Lucy left for the night, and she comes back the next morning to find her mother dead.
• Never My Fault: Although Joanna made a mess in her house due to her hoarding, she would always blame Lucy for not tidying the place up, or for losing something or other that she wanted.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Subverted. Sara takes several bags of garbage with her when she leaves the house just to make sure Lucy won't throw them away. However, while this appears to make Lucy's job easier at first, Sara then announces that she'll be back the next day (declining to specify a time) to talk to Joanna. Lucy, who was planning to spend a couple of days cleaning, realizes that Sara is making her task impossible.
• Nightmare Fuel: The kitchen in Lucy's house. The refrigerator and dishwasher are both broken, the room is filled with unwashed dishes and takeout containers as well as rotting food, and the white cabinets are covered in brown mold. Lucy has to go inside to clean it for the first time in years, since the smell is noticeable from anywhere in the house.
• No Full Name Given: Lucy's father is not given a first name, but his last name can be inferred (Tompkins).
• No Help Is Coming: When Lucy begs her brother to come home and help her, Phil, who is on a trip to Tahoe, tacitly refuses.
• No Sex Allowed: Lucy and Josh finally get their alone time in a closed cafe in the wee hours of the morning. It's the perfect place for them to have sex, Kayleigh previously encouraged Lucy to have sex with Josh if she got the chance, and Lucy wraps her legs around Josh when they kiss... but the teen couple goes no farther.
• Nostalgic Narrator: Zigzagged with Lucy. One part of her wishes she had certain parts of her past back, but the other part wants to focus on the future.
• Nosy Neighbor: Mrs. Raj, who lives next door to Lucy, makes a habit of butting into everybody's business.
• Not a Date: Lucy is sure that her movie date with Josh isn't really a date.
• Now or Never Kiss: Lucy's kiss with Josh. Lucy is sure that once her living conditions are public knowledge, Josh will want nothing more to do with her.
• Oblivious Younger Sibling: Lucy was this as a small child. She didn't realize how abnormal her living conditions were, nor how Joanna would react to having her house cleaned.
• Oh, Crap!: Lucy has one of these moments whenever someone rings the doorbell or asks her what she's doing, and an especially big one when she sees Sara's car in the driveway.
• Ominous Knocking: Happens when Lucy is first starting to clean. Because of the mess in the house, she never opens the door, and neither did Joanna. Later, it's revealed to be Joanna's boss, since Joanna was no-call-no-show for her shift.
• One Normal Night: Defied. Lucy once asked Joanna if they could clean up the house a little so she could have a birthday sleepover. Joanna made the request about Lucy being ashamed of her. The sleepover never happened.
• On the Rebound: Josh is trying to get into a relationship with Lucy, having just broken up with his previous girlfriend.
• Operation: Jealousy: Subverted. Lucy thinks Josh is just trying to make his ex jealous my paying her any attention. It soon becomes clear, however, that Josh is genuinely interested in her.
• Opposites Attract: Josh is warm, personable, and can roll with the punches, while Lucy is fearful and closed off.
• Order Versus Chaos: In contrast to the rest of her house, Lucy was able to make her room reasonably straight.
• Out of the Inferno: Lucy waits until the fire has started to break a dining room window and exit her house.
• Out Sick: Invoked. When her supervisor calls and asks why Joanna hasn't shown up for her shift, Lucy pretends that her mother is merely sick.
• Paralysis by Analysis: Defied by Lucy, both to clean her house and get some alone time with Josh.
• Parental Neglect: Joanna seems completely incapable of taking care of Lucy.
• Parental Substitute: Since Sara and Phil are so much more older than Lucy, they feel more like parents than siblings to her at times.
• Patched Together from the Headlines: The story contains elements of the experiences of multiple children of hoarders, which the author researched.
• Peek-a-Boo Corpse: Lucy finds Joanna's body among a fallen stack of magazines.
• Peerless Love Interest: How Lucy perceives Josh.
• Permissive Parents: Downplayed with Kayleigh's mom. She allows her daughter a high degree of freedom, but not total liberty.
• Personal Horror: Lucy feels a measure of guilt on finding Joanna dead, and also a compulsion to clean the house so no one will know how she lives.
• Persona Non Grata: Joanna throws Jean out of her house for cleaning it, and throwing out her "treasures."
• Pet the Dog: For Christmas, Joanna offered Lucy a fancy wallet in her choice of color. Such moments had become almost nonexistent between the two of them.
• The Piano Player: Joanna was a piano prodigy, and still played for a long time as an adult.
• Picky Eater: Phil. Lucy, when making a meal for the family, bribed him with ice cream sandwiches because she was making salad, which he didn't like.
• The Plan: Lucy's doomed attempt to clean her house.
• Plan B Resolution: Lucy can't clean her house as much as she needs to, so instead, she burns it down.
• Plot-Triggering Death: Joanna's death sets the events of the main part of the book in motion.
• Plot Twist: Sara's appearance at the house throws Lucy's whole plan into disarray.
• Plucky Girl: Throughout her whole ordeal, Lucy always finds some good in her situation.
• Posthumous Character: Joanna dies at the beginning of the story proper, but her presence is felt in Lucy's flashbacks.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • Jean was visibly nervous about Joanna seeing her newly cleaned house for the first time. Phil took it a step further, hanging back on the porch so as not to see his mother's reaction. Joanna confirmed their suspicions, banning Jean from her house and harping for years about Phil and Lucy "betraying" her.
  • Lucy, like the rest of her family, was always fastidious about not letting anyone see the inside of her house. Her worst fears were confirmed when Elena ended up inside by accident. Elena never talked to Lucy again after that day, and Lucy had to change schools to avoid the taunts of her classmates.
• Pun-Based Title: Lucy's secret is certainly dirty.
• Punny Name: Josh's band: "The Missing Peace."
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Kayleigh's mom.
• Reclusive Artist: Lucy's best subject in school is art.
• Recovered Addict: Josh's mom, after going to a few AA meetings.
• The Rival: Justine. Lucy doesn't even believe she's worthy of being Justine's rival.
• Romantic False Lead: Justine vies for Josh's attention throughout the book, much to Lucy's jealousy. Josh is interested in Lucy, however.
• Romantic Wingman: Kayleigh does everything to set Lucy up with Josh, from encouraging her to talk to him to picking out her outfit for the party.
• Rule of Three: Three people attempt to visit the house while Lucy is cleaning. Sara, the last one, completely derails the cleaning project.
• Saw It in a Movie Once: Near the end of the book, she gets the idea to solve everything once and for all by burning her house down from [1].
• Scenery Gorn: Lucy's description of the house, filled as it was with all kinds of junk and garbage.
• Screaming at Squick: Lucy, when she finds a bunch of maggots (one of which gets down her shirt).
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Lucy, when Sara cuts down her timeline to clean the house. She sees herself having only one more night where she's just herself, and she'd rather spend it having fun than in an exercise in futility.
• Sealed with a Kiss: Lucy's and Josh's kiss in the cafe cements the two of them as a couple.
• Security Blanket: Lucy takes her homemade teddy bear to the party, and she keeps him when she burns down her house.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: Lucy is always the first to deny it when Kayleigh brings up her budding relationship with Josh... until they get some alone time after the party.
• Shipper on Deck: Kayleigh constantly tries to get Lucy and Josh together.
• Shockingly Expensive Bill: When Lucy finds Joanna's credit card statements, she finds that her mother owes tens of thousands of dollars - or several times more than all the money in her bank account - on each one.
• Shown Their Work: The author researched what life was really like for children of hoarders, and incorporated her research into the book.
• Signature Item Clue: Two are clues to Joanna's death:
  • Her recliner is empty.
  • A stack of her magazines is in a pile on the floor.
• Single Girl Seeks Most Popular Guy: According to Lucy, Josh could have his pick of any girl in the school.
• Single Parents Are Undesirable: Averted. Of the single parents in the story, all are revealed to be/have been in new relationships, with the exception of Joanna, whose house is unfit for guests.
• Sleep Deprivation: Lucy decides to forgo sleep the night after finding Joanna dead, first to keep cleaning the house, and then to have one last night of fun before her world falls apart.
  • Josh also spends some time with Lucy despite having an opening shift at his job the following morning.
• Sliding Scale of Parent-Shaming in Fiction: Joanna and Josh's mom are both Type III, while Lucy's dad and TJ's mom are Type II.
• Slobs Versus Snobs: Joanna (the slob) and Mrs. Raj (the busybody snob). It may even be symbolic that Lucy runs to Mrs. Raj's house after setting fire to her own.
• Slumber Party: Lucy used to have these with the JV cheerleading squad. It led to a lot of awkward questions, since they never slept over at her house. In an effort to dispel the questions, Lucy tried to convince Joanna to declutter the house so she could have a birthday sleepover there, failing spectacularly.
• Smitten Teenage Girl: Lucy, for Josh.
• Smoking Is Cool: Kayleigh's friend, Vanessa, and her sister, who drive Lucy and Kayleigh to the party, want to smoke cigarettes in the car. Kayleigh objects loudly, not wanting to be grounded for the rest of winter break.
• Speaking Like Totally Teen: Averted. Even Kayleigh, the most stereotypical teenager of the bunch, doesn't use the stereotypical fillers for teen talk.
• Staging an Intervention: Backfired with Jean's house-cleaning, with Phil and Lucy helping. Upon seeing the house clean with her "treasures" gone, Joanna banned Jean from her house.
• Start X to Stop X: Implied with Joanna and her hoarding. Lucy finds a scrapbook of perfect-looking houses and rooms, and realizes that her mother wanted their house to look something like the pictures. However, Joanna filled the house to the brim with stuff, most of which nobody needed.
• Staying with Friends: Downplayed with Lucy, who lives with her mother but stays over at Kayleigh's house as often as she dares.
• Stereotype Flip: Josh, who has some Asian ancestry, is very masculine in a western sense.
• Stern Nun: Features as a teacher in one of Lucy's flashbacks, who reprimanded Lucy for not paying attention in class.
• Stern Teacher:
  • See Stern Nun above.
  • Lucy's present day English teacher also qualifies. He told off both Lucy and Josh when they recited Shel Silverstein poems in his class.
• Struggling Single Mother: Joanna, though many of her struggles are of her own making.
• Stumbled Into the Plot: Lucy is alone at home when she discovers Joanna's dead body.
• Suburban Gothic: Lucy's neighborhood consists of normal-looking houses with ordinary people, none of whom suspect how Lucy lives.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Joanna's personality was like this, tilting more toward ice as she got older and her hoarding got worse.
• Symbolically Broken Object: The "World's Best Mom" mug Lucy gave Joanna when she was little. Now, as a teenager, Lucy no longer thinks of Joanna as a good mother, and she's satisfied when the mug breaks as she throws it in a trash bag.
• "Take Your Child to Work Day" Plot: The narrative of one of Lucy's flashbacks, in which Joanna took her to the hospital for Take Your Daughter to Work Day. Lucy remembered that her mother seemed to become a completely different person at work, becoming a kindly individual who was beloved by all.
• Teen Drama: Lucy is sixteen at the time of the main part of the book.
• Teens Love Shopping: Lucy laments that Joanna didn't often take her on shopping trips, as the two of them had radically different ways to shop.
• The Teetotaler: Subverted with Josh. Lucy initially thinks he doesn't drink at all, but the only reason he's not drinking at the party is that he doesn't want to drink and drive.
• Terrified of Germs: Joanna, ironically. Even with mold growing all over her house, she would never share a fork with another person.
• Textile Work Is Feminine: Joanna helped a young Lucy sew up a homemade teddy bear for a school project.
• Think Happy Thoughts: Her thoughts about what the future might hold give her strength and optimism while Lucy cleans.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Lucy has one of these moments when she realizes that she definitely doesn't have enough time to clean her house before making the 911 call.
• Tragic Keepsake: Lucy's homemade teddy bear.
• Trash of the Titans: Deconstructed. The book talks about the consequences of hoarding on oneself and one's children. In Joanna's case, her children have suffered shame, social isolation, and any number of psychological issues. Joanna herself couldn't always get her appliances fixed nor sleep in her bed, and her debts dwarfed her bank account. Plus, the constant inhalation of mold spores may have exacerbated her asthma enough to cause her untimely death.
• Troubled Abuser: Implied with Joanna. According to Jean, her mother had been a hoarder just like she was, so she'd had to put up with the same crap she put her kids through.
• Troubled Backstory Flashback: Two with Lucy:
  • Cleaning the house with Phil and Jean, culminating in Joanna's fury and blame.
  • Elena seeing the inside of her house, and subsequently getting the nickname "Garbage Girl."
• Troubled Teen: Lucy.
• Turning Into Your Parent: Sara is a hoarder just like Joanna, who in turn was the daughter of a hoarder mother.
• Two Girls and a Guy: Sara, Phil, and Joanna living in the house together.
• Undignified Death: Joanna died in a scattered pile of magazines, surrounded by her hoard of junk.
• Undisclosed Funds: When Lucy finds Joanna's credit card statements, the only number stated is from the first one she opens. However, it's clear that the rest of Joanna's credit cards have comparable balances.
• The Unfavorite: Both Lucy and Phil, especially after they helped Jean clean the house. Lucy had suspected before that Sara was the favorite, but Joanna's tantrum over the cleaning left no doubt in her mind.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Joanna. She assaulted and cut off her sister for cleaning her house.
  • And one of Lucy's flashbacks to a later time contained an even worse example of this behavior. In the middle of an argument with Lucy, Joanna had an asthma attack. Lucy scrambled to get her mother her inhaler, and the first thing Joanna said after she was able to speak again was that Lucy wouldn't be welcome back in the house if she were to run away. And Phil, who witnessed the whole incident, lampshaded it, asking Lucy why she'd even bothered finding the inhaler.
• Unreliable Narrator: Zigzagged with Lucy. While there is no reason to disbelieve her accounting of the facts (at least after her early childhood), she is much less adept at reading the opinions and intentions of those around her.
• The Un-Reveal: As lampshaded by Lucy in her narration, with all we find out about Joanna, we never find out how her hoarding started, or why she stopped playing in piano competitions in her teens.
• Viking Funeral: Lucy burns her house down with Joanna's body inside it.
• Weather Saves the Day: Lucy plans to use the cold winter weather to preserve Joanna's body and buy herself more cleaning time.
• Wham Line: Heralds the beginning of the end for Lucy's cleaning plan:
  "[TJ's] house might be right across the street from ours, but it had never seemed so far away. Especially with Sara's car parked in the driveway."
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: What kept Sara away from Joanna's body when she came over? Sara's fear of vomit.
• Wild Teen Party: Downplayed. At the party, teens are drinking, and at least a couple are smoking. Does it get more wild than that? The question is left open.
• Winning Over the Kids: TJ's mom's new boyfriend tries to do this, much to TJ's resentment.
• The Woobie: Lucy.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Lucy changes her strategy for cleaning the house several times based on one or another insight she gets about what she's trying to accomplish.

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