We didn't keep score.
Discussion Guide
1. Consider the adjectives "absolutely true" and "part-time." What concepts appear to be emphasized by the images and the title? Does the cover make a reference to Junior's internal struggle, or a struggle between Junior and the white power structure, or both, or neither?
2. By drawing cartoons, Junior feels safe. He draws "because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me." How do Junior's cartoons (for example, "Who my parents would have been if somebody had paid attention to their dreams" and "white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white" and "white/Indian") show his understanding of the ways that racism has deeply impacted his and his family's lives?
3. When Junior is in Reardan (the little white town) he is "half Indian," and when he is in Wellpinit (his home reservation) he is "half white." "It was like being Indian was my job," he says, "but it was only a part-time job. And it didn't pay well at all." At Reardan High, why does Junior pretend to have more money than he does, even though he knows that "lies have short shelf lives"?
4. Junior describes his home reservation as "located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy." Yet when he and Rowdy look down from almost the top of an immense pine, he says, "We could see our entire world. And our entire world, at that moment, was green and golden and perfect." What forces drive the dichotomy of Junior's perceptions of his world and allow him to see the land in apparently disparate ways?
5. Cultural outsiders who write young adult fiction tend to romanticize the impoverishment of Indians. Junior is having none of this: "It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you're poor because you're stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you're stupid and ugly because you're Indian. And because you're Indian you start believing that you're destined to be poor. It's an ugly circle and there's nothing you can do about it. Poverty doesn't give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor." How does Junior's direct language address this stereotypical portrayal of Indians? What about his language draws the teen reader into the realities of his life?
6. Junior's parents, Rowdy's father, and others in their community are addicted to alcohol, and Junior's white "friend with potential," Penelope, has bulimia. "There are all kinds of addicts, I guess," he says. "We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away."
Compared to the characters in Jon Hassler's young adult novel, Jemmy (Atheneum, 1980), how does Junior's understanding of addiction transcend ethnicity and class?
7. Junior refers to his home reservation as "the rez," a familiar name for the place in which he was born, the place in which his friends and relatives for many generations back were born and are buried, and the land to which he is tied that, no matter how bad things get, will now and forever be called "home." What would Junior think of a cultural outsider, such as Ian Frazier, who visits a reservation to gather material for a book and then calls his book On the Rez?
8. At Junior's grandmother's funeral, held on the football field to accommodate all the people who loved her, Junior's mother publicly gives a white billionaire his comeuppance to the delight of the whole community. "And then my mother started laughing," Junior says. "And that set us all off. It was the most glorious noise I'd ever heard. And I realized that, sure, Indians were drunk and sad and displaced and crazy and mean but, dang, we knew how to laugh. When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing. And so, laughing and crying, we said goodbye to one grandmother, we said goodbye to all of them. Each funeral was a funeral for all of us. We lived and died together." How does this story reflect a cultural insider's perspective and how does it disrupt stereotypes about stoic Indians?
9. "I'm fourteen years old and I've been to forty-two funerals," Junior says. "That's really the biggest difference between Indians and white people." In the community if Wellpinit, everyone is related, everyone is valued, everyone lives a hardscrabble life, everyone is at risk for early death, and the loss of one person is a loss to the community. Compare Wellpinit to Reardan, whose residents have greater access to social services, health care, and wealth, and people are socially distanced from each other. How does Junior use this blunt, matter-of-fact statement to describe this vast gulf between an impoverished Indian community and a middle-class white town just a few miles away?
10. In many ways, Junior is engulfed by the emotional realities of his life and his community.
Yet his spare, matter-of-fact language and his keen sense of irony help him to confront and negotiate the hurt, the rage, and the senselessness of Wellpinit's everyday realities. How does Junior use language to lead readers, whose lives may be very different from his own, to the kind of understanding that they will not necessarily get from other young adult fiction, whose writers do not have this same kind of lived experience?
11. Cultural markers can be defined as the behaviors, speech patterns, ways of seeing the world, ethics, and principles that identify a person as belonging to a particular culture. When Rowdy and Junior play one-on-one at the end of the book—and they don't keep score—how is their friendship solidified by their deep knowing of who they are and what they come from?
Interview with Ellen Forney
How long have you been drawing comics?
I've drawn pictures from as far back as I can remember, but I didn't start drawing narrative comics until I was in high school. I drew a full-page comic for a friend who had quit her job at the ice cream parlor where we both worked—the piece was called "The Trials and Tribulations of Tina-Beena," and included a bunch of little stories about the way South Philly girls pronounced "Oreos" and the time she argued with a customer—stuff like that. She loved it and hung it up in her kitchen under a piece of plastic wrap
How did you and Sherman work together?
Sherman would give me a few chapters of his manuscript and ideas for what I might draw, and I'd do thumbnail sketches using his list as a bouncing-off point. Later, we'd go over what I'd come up with. About a third of the graphics were Sherman's ideas, a third were real
collaborations, and a third were my ideas that struck me as I read the text.
How was it getting into the head of Arnold Spirit?
Intense. Sherman describes Arnold so well in the text that I felt I had a good grip on who Arnold was. But to draw like him, to think of jokes that he might tell, I had to really immerse myself in being him, and it wasn't an easy place to be.
For instance, while drawing my last round of thumbnail sketches, I was working in a café, with manuscripts and sketches spread out all over the table. I'd worked for hours, hadn't eaten in a long time, and I drank too much coffee. I was deep in Arnold's head and felt like I had to keep going. So much heavy stuff was happening in the story, that's when I came up with some of Arnold's darkest humor, like the comic about the last sip of wine and the Burning Love book cover cartoon when Arnold's sister died.
Then when I got to the end of the manuscript, where Arnold and Rowdy play basketball, and as it was getting dark outside, I felt a tightening in my chest and I realized I was about to bawl. It felt like I was playing a bittersweet basketball game with Rowdy. I had a split second to decide whether or not I would cry in the cafe, and I put my head in my hands, sobbed once, and thought about something else. I had read that section so many times, but until then I hadn't been so deep in Arnolds mind.