Rumors Far From Honesty

 

               The book Ask the Passengers by A.S. King is about a girl named Astrid Jones who feels like she can't trust her pot-smoker dad and her controlling mother. Because of that, she sends her love to the passengers of planes in the sky and uses them as a way to express her feelings about different things. One of those different things being the fact that she likes a girl named Dee and her parents don't know about it. She notices things about the neighborhood in which she lives in like how people judge others by their appearance. Astrid shows how the appearance of some (including herself) can be twisted by others to become something that it's not.

              Astrid shows how some lives in her family's neighborhood have been judged in ways that can embarrass and hurt. Firstly, the text states, "[People talk] About black kids: I hear that Kyle kid got himself a scholarship. Had to be black to get it. I can't see how that's fair. Jimmy Kyle got that scholarship to Villanova because he's a straight-A student and wants to go to law school." The neighborhood judged others by the color of their skin, not by their achievements and goals. The thing that Jimmy Kyle couldn't control about his appearance is why he was being assessed. I can also see how Astrid connects to Jimmy Kyle and others who get evaluated. For instance, Astrid was smiling about quitting trigonometry in her mind at the time that her class was watching Holocaust films. She already started thinking about what others would say about her smiling because she knew that that's what others were thinking at the time. She is one of the people who is constantly twisted into a "weird neighbor girl" and that's why she feels so strongly about Jimmy Kyle and others who were being judged. Lastly, I believe that Astrid feels like she can't tell her parents about Dee because she knows that they'll make it into something terrible and she doesn't want that to happen. Dee allows her to feel wanted, not judged. She doesn't want that to slip through her fingertips. 

               In conclusion, the truth seems to become unclear when people are being judged, and that's what Astrid notices in her life. Sometimes I notice others passing rumors around like a game of Telephone. After a while, the truth changes and becomes this statement that's far away from anything honest. I try to think about how the person would feel when hearing that misleading rumor; when hearing that embarrassing piece of news that spread around to many. I try to think about the person who started the rumor; how they would feel if they were on the other side. Then I just forget about the rumor completely because I wouldn't want to have a rumor spread about myself.