“Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.”
Julie points out to Jack how the double standard of gender identity works in our society. She correctly recognizes the disparity. For girls to dress as boys is acceptable because they are progressing upward in society, but it doesn't work the same for boys. Boys are not allowed to dress up like girls because its considered embarrassing and somehow shameful. This double standard is the obvious result of the belief that women are inferior and thus it would be an insult for a man to be lowered to the status of a woman.
“At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.”
Jack has not simply seen both of his parents die; he's handled his mother's corpse. This boy has witnessed more than his fair share of trauma, so it's no doubt that he feels on edge all the time. His cortisol levels must be high due to his childhood trauma, causing him to constantly feel anxious and to suffer panic from even the tiniest of triggers.
“Most houses were crammed with immovable objects in their proper places, and each object told you what to do - here you ate, here you slept, here you sat. I tried to imagine carpets, wardrobes, pictures, chairs, a sewing machine, in these gaping, smashed-up rooms. I was pleased by how irrelevant, how puny such objects now appeared.”
After their mom's death, Jack and his siblings continue living in their childhood house. The building and its contents become increasingly run-down because the children don't have the necessary skills or discipline to take care of them well. Jack understands that his living situation is unusual, remembering what real homes look like on the inside. He doesn't miss the order and care of a home, however, because the state of his house reflects his inner state of chaos. It seems appropriate now.
“I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself.”
Jack starts to feel trapped in the house with his siblings after his mom's death. Lacking any real direction or motivation in life, he really just lives according to impulse. They all stay in the house most of the time in order to avoid suspicion from any legal authorities. After his mom's death, however, Jack starts to hate the old house because everything around him looks the same as when she was alive. He allows the house and its possessions to deteriorate in order to feel more comfortable in the transformed space, however disgusting.
