Literature / Small Steps

Following

Small Steps is a young adult novel by Louis Sachar. It is a sequel to Holes which follows Theodore ("Armpit") and X-Ray after their release from Camp Green Lake.

Two years later, Armpit is trying to finish passing high school, earn some money, and get his life back on track. X-Ray, however, plans a get-rich-quick scheme with him by scalping tickets. Those tickets, however, are for the concert of Kaira De Leon, a troubled teen pop singer. Their lives intersect in unexpected ways.

Tropes:

• Adults Are Useless: Armpit's parents seem unable to believe that their son has become a better person, and sometimes lie to his face while lecturing him. Kaira's mom throws everything to her husband. The husband tries to kill her.
• Aesop Amnesia: X-Ray was arrested and sent to Camp Green Lake for running a scam selling fake marijuana. He's back to it as soon as he and Armpit are out, roping him into a ticket-scalping scheme. What makes it worse is he gives Armpit a photocopied ticket to use at the concert, which gets the latter beaten up and nearly sent to jail again.
• Affably Evil: Billy Boy, an anonymous person who regularly sends Kaira letters telling he loves her, she's beautiful, and one day he'll kill her. He turns out to be El Genius.
• Batman Gambit:
  • Kaira hates her bodyguard Fred and regularly tries to ditch him. El Genius had hoped for this, so that he could murder her in secret and not get the blame for it since he was the one who hired Fred.
  • This was also done earlier in the book, as it's revealed the story about how Kaira's tickets sold for $750 in Philadelphia was planted by El Genius to increase demand for them.
• Bittersweet Ending: Kaira is saved, but she not only has memory loss but her voice is damaged and she is financially ruined, thanks to her mother's friend stealing all of her money. It is said that she starts singing again, with some difficulty, so there is hope for her to recover her old life. Armpit's relationship with Kaira doesn't work out, but he's finally mostly regained his parents' trust and is making plans for the future, and the fact that Kaira uses a conversation between them as the basis for her new song shows that she still has positive memories of him, leaving open the possibility that they might reconnect one day.
• Bruiser with a Soft Center: Armpit is a big guy who, after being provoked into a fight, once beat up two boys so badly that it got him sent to juvenile detention, and in the present day is still able to overpower and take down El Genius even with only one functioning arm. However, he's mostly shown to be a kind and polite person with an especially soft spot for his neighbor Ginny, a girl with cerebral palsy who he treats like a little sister. He's also gotten a better handle on his anger such that even when he's provoked, he's no longer prone to lashing out; while he gets irritated and raises his voice a few times (mostly at X-Ray's shenanigans), the only time he gets into a physical fight is when he's forced to do so in order to protect innocent lives.
• Career-Ending Injury: El Genius used to be a baseball player in the Minor Leagues, until a baseball struck him in the face. This caused him to reflexively shut his eyes when swinging a bat, and he couldn't hit another pitch.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • The mayor Armpit meets in the opening scene shows up to stick up for him during the concert when he's accused of forging his ticket and drugging Ginny. (The ticket was forged, but Armpit was unaware of it.)
  • Kaira's bodyguard whom she calls a doofus. It turns out he is good at his job and refuses to let El Genius murder her even as she tries to ditch him.
• Chekhov's Skill: In-universe, Armpit and X-Ray's time at Camp Green Lake helps them get landscaping jobs back home.
• Covert Emergency Call: Despite being unable to speak, Kaira manages to get Armpit's attention by pulling a lamp off the nightstand by the cord, causing it to crash loudly to the floor. This brings Armpit into the bedroom to check if everything is okay, at which point he sees what's happening and is able to intervene to save Kaira and Fred.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: To Armpit, Kaira opens up almost instantly, but it takes an entire murder attempt for her to open up to her bodyguard.
• Demoted to Extra: All of the Camp Green Lake kids except Armpit and X-Ray. Stanley is mentioned once, and not even by name (apparently he gave Armpit lots of free boxes of Sploosh), and the others don't even get that much.
• Disability Superpower: Ginny has cerebral palsy, and is implied to be good at math. Each of her stuffed animals are also disabled, with some kind of hidden talent.
• Disappeared Dad: Kaira's father was a soldier who was killed in the line of duty. Unfortunately, this left an opening for El Genius to seduce her mother in order to get to Kaira's wealth.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Armpit got into Camp Green Lake because he beat up a group of boys who tripped him and made him spill his popcorn.
• Dude, Not Funny!: In-Universe. El Genius jokes about how Ginny went into a seizure, causing the cops to think Armpit had given her drugs. Kaira hates this, and personally requests to see them.
• Everybody Knew Already: Debbie finds out Armpit was one of the ticket scalpers, but doesn't arrest for it because "As I said, case closed."
• Flipping the Bird: A jogger does this to X-Ray after he flirts with her from his van.
• Genre Shift: Small Steps is much more rooted in reality than Holes, being about ticket scalping and abusive music managers rather than curses and lost cowboy treasure.
• Hates the Job, Loves the Limelight: Kaira does enjoy performing, but resents not having much time to herself and no real friends. Not helping is her step-father controlling her life and career, and keeping her isolated.
• Heroic Resolve: In the climax, Fred gets a knife to his side, and Armpit's arm is broken after El Genius ambushes him with a baseball bat. Fred, while playing possum, manages to trip El Genius, allowing Armpit to get the upper hand and beat him unconscious with his one good arm.
• Hidden Depths: Of all the characters of Holes, did you really think Armpit would be the kind, thoughtful one? The movie actually implies it, by giving Squid/Alan's lines at the end to him (in which he gives Stanley a phone number and tells him to call his mother and tell her he's sorry for something).
• Idiot Ball: Kaira, instead of keeping her mouth shut, tells El Genius that the minute she is eighteen, he is fired as her manager. El Genius may have tried to kill her anyway, but he has a greater incentive.
• I Have This Friend: Played with. Kaira thinks Armpit is doing this when he attempts to explain the situation. Armpit tells her that "his friend" (meaning X-Ray) was the ticket scalper, and she angrily asks him something like "was it you who kissed me earlier, or your friend?"
• I Lied: Armpit only agreed to X-Ray's scheme to get him off his back and asks to keep some of the tickets so he can take Ginny to Kaira's concert. The tickets that X-Ray gave him were photocopied rather than the real deal. Armpit is not amused when he nearly gets arrested and Ginny has a seizure. X-Ray is unrepentant.
• I Never Told You My Name: Armpit is confused to hear Kaira sing "Oh, you'd never guess, Armpit, [I'm a] damsel in distress." It's actually a mondegreen saying "I'm but". Kaira actually sings his version later.
• Innocent Innuendo:
  Armpit: Did you tell her my nickname?
  Ginny: I just told her it was a part of the body.
• Insistent Terminology: X-Ray insists that "X-Ray" isn't his nickname, it's actually his name in another language.
• Irony: Armpit's new job after leaving Camp Green Lake? Digging holes. (Well, technically trenches, but...) Doubling down on that, Armpit muses that Camp Green Lake's working conditions did not have mosquitoes as the area was too dry for them to survive in.
• Jerkass: X-Ray has clearly learned nothing from his experiences at Green Lake.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: El Genius. Kaira points out to him the parallel with her name and Juan Ponce de León, but he's never heard of him. He turns out to be smarter about committing murder.
• Like Brother and Sister: Armpit acts like a protective big brother towards Ginny, and she clearly looks up to him.
• Mistaken for Junkie: When Ginny starts having a seizure, the police initially assume Armpit gave her drugs. She actually has a known seizure disorder, but it takes the cops a while (and the intervention of an authority figure) before they let them explain that.
• Morality Pet: Ginny to Armpit. Also counts as a sort of Littlest Cancer Patient.
• Named After the Injury: The book reveals that Armpit got his nickname after getting stung by a scorpion, and the pain eventually settled in his armpit.
• Near-Villain Victory: El Genius almost murders Kaira, but gets foiled by Armpit's last-minute interruption. His partner-in-crime and fellow tour manager, Aileen, embezzles all of Kaira's savings and runs off to Belize with a fake identity, only to end up arrested anyway. However, the money is never recovered.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Armpit's parents are unable to move past the fight that got him sent to Camp Green Lake. While it's understandable that it was a big deal, they continue to treat him with a high level of suspicion as if they're always waiting for him to screw up, seemingly unable to accept the possibility that he's truly been rehabilitated. Meanwhile, their neighbors, despite also knowing about Armpit's past, are able to see him for who he is now to the point where they trust him with their disabled child.
• One-Steve Limit: Enforced. Kaira's real name is Kathy Spears, but she performs under a stage name because Britney already took that surname.
• Orgy of Evidence: El Genius tries to frame Armpit for his attempted murder of Kaira by leaving some of Armpit's possessions at the crime scene, traces of his hair and blood in the final "Billy Boy" letter, and uses a baseball bat with Armpit's fingerprints on it. X-Ray lampshades how even if Armpit hadn't interrupted the attack, he probably would have been able to prove his innocence due to how the Frame-Up was too obvious, since Armpit couldn't possibly bring a baseball bat to the hotel without anyone noticing it.
• Police Brutality: Security officers at the concert beat up and handcuff Armpit for having photocopied tickets instead of questioning him first. Then accuse him of drugging Ginny when she has a seizure.
• Properly Paranoid: Kaira believes her stepdad was sending the death threat letters. He was. And tries to kill her.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Debbie; she knows that Armpit and X-Ray were the ticket scalpers. She refuses to prosecute them because Armpit suffered punishment enough by inadvertently arriving at the concert with phony tickets and then nearly getting framed for murder. Plus, El Genius was the one who was encouraging scalpers by making up stories about how popular Kaira is and he's already in jail now.
• Romantic False Lead: Armpit initially invites a girl in his summer school class to Kaira's concert, but she has to back out when her family won't let her go and Armpit decides to take Ginny instead, and the girl in question is only mentioned in passing after that, while Armpit starts dating none other than Kaira herself.
• Shady Scalper: Armpit once gets roped into his friend X-Ray's scheme to scalp concert tickets. While waiting on line to purchase the tickets for the scheme, they encounter a well-organized scalper gang doing the same thing on a larger scale; when Armpit's tickets are revealed to be fake, the police initially believe that the gang is responsible.
• There Are No Therapists: Averted. Kaira does have a therapist, but doesn't trust her because El Genius was the one who hired her.
• Title Drop: "Small steps" is Armpit's motto to rebuilding his life, as well as Ginny's approach to working through the challenges associated with her disability. It ends up being the title of Kaira's new song.
• Unfortunate Names:
  • "El Genius", Kaira's stepfather, real name being Jerome Paisley. Kaira also nicknames her bodyguard "Doofus".
  • One of Armpit's goals is to try to lose his nickname.
• Wham Line: "Should I sign [your cast] 'Theodore' or 'Armpit'?" Subverted with the next line. "As I said, case closed."