Summary
X-Ray gives Armpit a ride to The Four Seasons hotel to see Kaira for breakfast before she leaves to perform in Dallas. X-Ray thinks that Armpit is lying about meeting Kaira at the hotel so he enters with Armpit and asks the doorman if Kaira DeLeon is there. The doorman says that he wouldn't know, so X-Ray leaves. Armpit realizes that he doesn't remember the pseudonym Kaira asks him to use, only that it is the name of a character from the movie Bewitched. Armpit asks a family exiting the elevator for help in remembering the name of the woman from Bewitched. At first, the father steps in front of his daughters, shielding them against a perceived threat, but their mother answers the question and then everyone tries to remember the name. They remember—the character's name is Samantha Stevens. When Kaira comes to pick up Armpit from the lobby, Armpit notices how well-dressed Fred, Kaira’s bodyguard, is. He notes how each time he sees him he's dressed even more expensively than Kaira.
When Kaira and Armpit sit down and order breakfast it’s awkward, and Kaira is speaking unusually loud. Armpit realizes she's speaking loudly for Fred’s benefit, and Kaira leads Armpit to the patio for some privacy. As soon as they get outside, Kaira takes off running with the aim of getting Fred off her trail, aka "ditching the doofus". Once they get down to the river, Kaira holds Armpit's hand and they stroll down the river talking. Armpit tells Kaira that he doesn’t have big dreams, and that he only takes small steps, and she tells him that she’s advised to do the opposite. She’s told she has to take big steps before she’s all washed up in a couple of years.
Armpit agrees to tell Kaira his nickname on the condition that she has to touch him on the body part that is named after. She reluctantly agrees and proceeds to touch his Armpit, during which she learns that he is very ticklish. Kaira wasn’t interested in knowing the story behind his nickname; her focus is on kissing Armpit. Just as they’re about to kiss, Fred comes and interrupts them.
A detective, Debbie Newberg, comes to Armpit's home and questions him about the fake tickets. Armpit tries to think on his feet, but struggles to lie on the spot. He tells her that he met a hairy Iranian man named Habib in the H-E-B parking lot. Afterward, he recounts his conversation with Detective Newberg to X-Ray, and X-Ray tells him to start keeping all of his answers short and simple.
When Armpit returns to school, Tatiana asks him how the concert went. She interrupts his response out of frustration when she thinks that Armpit is talking to her about his girlfriend. Armpit pays Matt, the boy who thought he was robbing him, and he’s bashful and surprised.
Armpit can’t stop thinking about Kaira: he can’t concentrate at work, he can't summon enough focus to study for his economics final, and he can't hear one of her songs without getting completely distracted. Armpit's mother is impressed when Mayor Cherry Lane calls the house to check on him and she looks at him as more than just a criminal for the first time in a long time.
Days before his final exams and 11 days after meeting Kaira, Armpit is reeling and completely distracted, waiting for her to reach out. Detective Newberg calls Arpmit and asks him if he recognizes some names as being possible suspects. She lists the names Felix, Rex, X-Ray, and Armpit. It sends a shock through Armpit and disrupts the rest of his night. After getting off the phone with Detective Newberg, Armpit receives a love letter from Kaira. In the letter, Kaira explains how she’s written him so many letters and never sent them and will never send this one either (she does). She writes about how she imagines him whenever she sings her love songs, and about how much she misses him.
Detective Newberg calls Armpit to come down to the station because she has a suspect she wants him to see her question. A patrol car comes and lets him sit in the front at his request so his neighbors don’t think that he’s being arrested again. When Armpit arrives at the police station, he sees X-Ray in the interrogation room. Detective Newberg successfully corners X-Ray in his lies. She already knows that he couldn’t have possibly operated alone because the maximum amount of tickets one person can purchase at Lonestar arena is six, but he sold 12 tickets. She also knows that he went to Smokestack Lightnin’ with someone named Armpit. She becomes impatient with him, and lets him know that lying to a police officer is a criminal offense, and that he already has priors. X-Ray then spins a story about being threatened by Armpit and forced into being partners. X-Ray corroborates Armpit's story and says that Armpit's real name is Habib. Detective Newberg lets X-Ray go once she gets information out of him and then debriefs with Armpit. She doesn't believe anything X-Ray told her, but Armpit corroborates X-Ray's description of Habib wearing a turban.
Kaira calls Armpit as soon as he gets off of the phone with X-Ray, who doesn't know that Armpit heard his interrogation. Kaira tells him not to read a letter that will come in the mail from her and he tells her that he’s already read it and liked it. Kaira is very embarrassed and asks him if he’s told everyone that he has a rockstar girlfriend, informing him that she considers herself his girlfriend. She demands he tells her something embarrassing so that they’re even, so he shares how he hears his name when she’s singing the song “Damsel in Distress”. Kaira thinks this is hilarious and tells him the words are, “I’m but a damsel in distress. Save me. I’m but a damsel in distress” not “Save me, Armpit, a damsel in distress.” Armpit calls out Kaira's lie that she didn't want him to open her letter, because if that were true she would have called him days ago. Kaira and Armpit admit that they miss each other, and Kaira offers to fly him out to San Francisco so that they can spend three days together while she’s on tour.
Analysis
Sachar uses repetition to foreshadow future events. When Armpit meets Fred, he recognizes that he's expensively dressed, and he does again the second time he see's him at the Four Seasons. Armpit comments that if he didn't know better, he would've thought that Fred was the rich and famous one of the two of them (p. 144). This foreshadows the later revelation of the truth about the situation between Kaira and her manager, why Kaira doesn't have access to her own money, and why El Genius evades and shames Kaira for asking for her money.
In Small Steps, we often see parallelism between what someone says in their inner dialogue and what they tell others. For example, upon first meeting Kaira, we learn that she thinks El Genius is a control freak who may have sent her the Billy Boy death threat letters so he could hire Fred as an informant. Then, when Kaira and Armpit are talking at the Four Seasons Hotel, she tells Armpit the same thought—that she thinks El Genius is sending her the death threat letters to increase his control over her. This repetition, coupled with Armpit noticing how expensively dressed Fred always is, foreshadowings the insidious plan that Fred and El Genius are in on.
Similarly, Armpit tells Kaira that he doesn't have big dreams, and that he only focuses on taking small steps. He then quotes what the counselor at the halfway house told him verbatim. The motif of small steps as well as the repetition of Armpit reciting the quote informs the reader of how important this quote is to Armpit.
In this section of Small Steps, Sachar uses the irony of Armpit's regard for Kaira, as well as foreshadowing, to support the theme of the contrast between social status and identity. When Armpit speaks about Kaira, she refers to her as Kaira DeLeon, which is her full stage name. At this point Armpit doesn't know her real name, a fact that underlines how Armpit sees her as a celebrity before seeing her as a person at this point in the book. This is an example of situational irony, because we would think that because he himself is referred to by a nickname given to him by someone else, Armpit would be more apt to see past the effects of public image. Contrastingly, when Kaira writes Armpit a love letter, she refers to him as Theodore "A," playfully alluding to his nickname that she learned in their last meeting. This juxtaposition of Kaira using Armpit's real name and Armpit using Kaira's full stage name suggests that Armpit has not moved past seeing Kaira as a celebrity first and foremost.
Similarly, Armpit's repetition of the phrase "it's a whole other world" (p. 150, p. 155) illustrates Armpit not being able to wrap his head around the difference between the world Kaira lives in versus regular civilian life. Sachar foreshadows Armpit's agreeing to go to San Francisco with Kaira:
It was incomprehensible to him. She might as well have asked him if he wanted to fly to the moon. Which is probably why he said what he said: "Sure, why not?" (p. 191)
This creates an ominous mood and a subtle dramatic irony, as the author addresses us directly and refers to future events in the past tense, suggesting that the outcome of the events will be different than the characters imagine.
