54 pages • 1 hour read
Gordon KormanBorn to Rock
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 19-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary
Max grows more protective of his drum kit as the stress of his divorce mounts. Tensions are worsening between Leo and Cam, and also within the band: Purge is replacing Neb Nezzer with Pete, despite Neb being healed from his injury.
Through Melinda’s blog posts and through contact with Owen, Leo keeps up with Melinda, who is still upset with him. Owen explains that Melinda feels like Leo took King from her because being a fan cannot compete with being a blood relation. He helps Leo understand what music means to Melinda. Leo gets them backstage passes as a plea for forgiveness.
When Leo finally sees Melinda, he’s shocked by her appearance. Time on the road has made her jettison her goth makeup and hair, and her skin has gotten tan from the sun. Leo loves the way she looks now. While Purge plays their set, Leo realizes he no longer fits in with people like Fleming and Gates, but he still doesn’t fit with the people of Concussed. Melinda and Owen are the people closest to him on the Concussed tour.
When King talks to Melinda after the set, Melinda gushes about how important Purge’s music is to her. King keeps the conversation going, and Leo realizes King is asking Melinda questions that a father might ask his son’s girlfriend. Leo is amazed at both King’s behavior and his mistaking Leo and Melinda for a couple. Everyone else is also kind to Owen and Melinda. Bernie invites them to an after party, where Cam gets belligerent with Leo, and where Leo spots Bernie alone with Melinda. He realizes Bernie is pursuing her.
Chapter 20 Summary
Leo has done his best not to judge Bernie’s behavior with women, but now he is enraged. He knows Melinda is not street-smart enough to handle Bernie’s advances. Leo tries to get away from Cam, but Cam is too drunk and angry to let Leo go. Bernie and Melinda disappear up the elevator.
Leo finds Owen and explains what happened. Owen suggests Leo is jealous. Owen is right, but this makes Leo furious. He unloads on Owen, yelling that he lost his scholarship to Harvard because of Owen, who now wishes Leo would’ve let Borman take Owen down instead. Cam is still determined to fight Leo, but when he screams in Leo’s face, Owen slaps Cam across the face and demands he relax. Cam freezes in his tracks, so Leo slips away up the elevator.
Leo hears Melinda’s voice through Bernie’s door, telling him to let go, reiterating that she said no. Leo bursts through the door and sees them on the couch together, Bernie’s hands on Melinda’s arms. Leo demands Bernie let Melinda go and punches him in the face. Melinda runs out, upset. Leo fears he’s ruined everything with her. Bernie tells Leo to get out. As Leo leaves, he notices the DNA test results sitting on the table with the rest of Bernie’s mail.
Chapter 21 Summary
Leo hardly sleeps that night, certain that hitting Bernie means the end of his time on Concussed. He decides to get the DNA results, ask King for a Harvard loan, and leave the tour as soon as possible. Leo asks a still-groggy Cam if he beat up Owen for slapping him, but Cam doesn’t think so.
Leo snags the DNA envelope from Bernie’s room while it’s being cleaned. The test reveals that Leo’s relationship with King Maggot is familial, but not father and son. It’s more likely that they’re cousins once removed. Leo realizes Bernie McMurphy is his father. Sickened at how Bernie uses his position in the music industry to prey on women, Leo realizes that it was the exact same way in the 80s, with Leo’s mom.
Leo seeks comfort with Owen and Melinda at the campgrounds. Melinda can tell something is wrong and asks Leo about it. Leo pulls her into a hug. Melinda asks again what happened, and Leo kisses her. Melinda kisses back until Owen interrupts. He’s happy because he’s waited forever for them to get together.
Leo explains that he quit the tour and that Bernie is his biological father. While Owen goes to retrieve Leo’s stuff from the hotel room, Melinda learns about Leo losing his scholarship and breaks down crying with guilt for having asked Leo to tutor Owen. Leo and Melinda go into the tent to calm down. They stay there all day, hooking up and enjoying each other’s company. Leo feels this moment couldn’t have happened if he and Melinda hadn’t been stripped of their Republican and goth personas. Owen doesn’t come back until almost dinnertime. Melinda tells him he didn’t have to stay away, but Owen hints that he met someone too.
Purge is already in the next city, but Melinda, Owen, and Leo camp out one more night, missing their first show since the tour began. Leo doesn’t think anyone will care that he’s gone. He wonders when Bernie was going to tell him about their relationship.
Leo travels with Melinda and Owen to the next city on the tour. Neb Nezzer is suing Purge for replacing him, so that’s all Melinda and Owen talk about the entire way. Leo feels guilty for missing a show. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s in the city where he’ll be cavity searched.
Chapter 22 Summary
Leo is surprised by the kindness and communal hospitality of the punks at the campgrounds. He enjoys his time with them.
A few days later, King Maggot finds Leo and yells at him for disappearing without telling anyone. Leo is surprised that King was worried about him and even more surprised that Bernie didn’t tell King about the DNA results. Leo realizes this means Harvard is still possible. He agrees to return to Concussed.
Backstage, Cam is begrudgingly nicer to Leo. There’s also a lawyer attempting to serve papers, but everyone has been briefed to not accept the papers, so they all ignore him. The papers are an injunction for Purge to stop performing without Neb until the lawsuit is worked out; accepting them would mean Purge has to stop playing.
Leo tells Bernie he saw the DNA results and knows the truth. Bernie doesn’t remember Leo’s mom. He’s been using his position to land women for years—it’s his entire reason for being in the music industry. He’s not sorry, nor does he want anything to do with Leo.
Leo notices there are more police than usual at this show. The lawyer argues with them. When Purge performs, Leo feels like he’s hearing their music for the first time. He genuinely likes it and now appreciates the entire punk festival experience. He’s become a “punk Republican” (202).
Owen appears backstage and, not having been briefed, accepts the papers from the lawyer. Cops instantly swarm the stage and restrain Purge. Bernie tries to say they haven’t been served, but his efforts are lost to the chaos. The crowd tries to fight the police fruitlessly. Zach’s nutritionist rushes the stage and cuts open Max’s drums, revealing a large stash of expensive jewelry. The cops realize there’s more going on than just an injunction. They arrest Purge and all their employees.
As is standard with cases of jewelry theft, everyone is subjected to a cavity search. Leo feels like this experience has changed him forever. It turns out that Max was attempting to hide money from divorce lawyers by converting it into jewelry and hiding it in his drums. Zach’s dietician is really a private investigator hired to find the jewels.
Purge breaks up in the police station that night. King Maggot decides he’s done for good. Bernie tries to get him to reconsider, but King is firm. None of the other Purge members put up a fight. The band is over without King.
On the way to the airport, King apologizes to Leo for how the tour ended. King was happy to get to know Leo and will always be a father to him. When he tells Leo to call if he needs anything, Leo realizes this is his moment to ask for Harvard tuition, but he can’t bring himself to do so. He feels guilty for even considering taking King’s money. He tells King Maggot that he doesn’t deserve a father like him before leaving for his gate.
Chapter 23 Summary
The Purge breakup is huge news. Concussed replaces them with the Sex Pistols, and Melinda and Owen follow the tour for a few more dates before summer ends. Melinda and Leo are in a relationship, which they’ve agreed to continue long-distance once school starts. Melinda encourages Leo to talk to Borman to get the mark on his record removed, explaining that it will affect Leo’s future. Leo jokes that she sounds Republican. He’s been checking her blog posts and noticed she’s happier now that they’re in a relationship. Melinda warns Leo that she’ll go back to her goth attire soon, but Leo doesn’t mind.
Leo decides not to tell his mom about Bernie McMurphy. She’s put most of the puzzles away and reached a cautious peace about her past that Leo doesn’t dare disturb with new information about his real father being a sexual predator and not a rock star.
Leo meets with Vice Principal Borman to ask him to reconsider, but Borman insists that Leo broke the rules and needs to face the consequences. Leo feels the angry McMurphy rise inside him. He acknowledges that he is McMurphy and stands up for himself.
At that moment, King Maggot crashes through Borman’s office window on a motorcycle. He chews out Borman for holding a promising student back. King knows about Leo’s meeting from Owen, who is still traveling with Concussed because he and Cam are a couple. Leo is shocked that Cam is gay, but he’s happy for the two of them. King asks why Leo didn’t tell him about the scholarship. Leo says it wasn’t King’s problem, but King insists that Leo’s problems are his problems. He went through a lot of trouble to crash the meeting just to be there for Leo, and he wants to pay for Leo’s Harvard tuition.
Leo confesses that King Maggot isn’t his biological father; Bernie is. King suspected as much, but he doesn’t care. They are still family and he wants to support Leo. Leo realizes that King really cares about him. As Police sirens in the distance grow closer, King instructs Leo to call Bernie about King’s arrest, then go home and pack for Harvard. Leo escapes the school just before the police pull up. He acknowledges his McMurphy as he leaves.
Chapters 19-23 Analysis
The final five chapters of the novel conclude Leo’s main conflicts with both his biological origin and his need for Harvard tuition, furthering themes of The Ethics of Lying by Omission and Genetics and Identity as Leo discovers the truth about his biological father, carefully selects who to reveal this information to, and begins a relationship with Melinda.
The novel explores both positive and negative sexual desire, also delving into the nuances of attraction. Just as Leo feels that he has become an amalgamation of his Young Republican and roadie personas, so too does his attraction toward Melinda first appear when the necessities of tour camping make her give up her intense gothic makeup to become a mixture of alternative and preppy: “She looked fantastic! Even the nose ring kind of fit into the new style, an eclectic mix of Sex Pistols and the Gap” (171). Rather than sticking to their adopted ideologies, both teens have broadened their perspectives; their changing appearance symbolizes this softening. Although Leo and Melinda have been friends for as long as they can remember, it took Leo being “stripped of my Republicanism” and Melinda “stripped of her gothism” (191) for them to acknowledge these feelings. In contrast, Bernie’s sexual predation on Melinda has little to do with understanding her personality; he sets his sights on Melinda for pure conquest. The novel juxtaposes the way these two desire are expressed physically as well. The climax of the novel occurs when Leo busts through Bernie’s hotel room door to stop Bernie from sexually assaulting Melinda, who “might have been struggling before, but now they had frozen, their arms still intertwined” (180). The image of Bernie holding Melinda down while she asks him to let go makes Leo unleash his wild side and punch Bernie, not thinking about the consequences. This is completely unlike the healthy expression of appropriate sexual desire evident in Leo and Melinda’s day they spend hooking up in their tent—both of them want to be there, so the scene reads as a sweet coming of age milestone rather than a nightmare.
Several times in this section, Leo allows his McMurphy side to emerge, typically with good consequences. The McMurphy alter-ego might be unruly, but it is also often honest and straightforward in ways that help Leo. First, when Owen suggests Leo is jealous, Leo becomes enraged, “because he was right” (176), adding that “There were a dozen reasons to be upset about Bernie and Melinda. But I was mad because I wanted her for myself” (177). Because Leo knows Melinda is in danger with Bernie, he’s forced to not only admit his feelings for her, but also protect her from the serial sexual predator. Leo also explodes at Owen about how he lost his scholarship because of the cheating accusations. Owen replies “Why didn’t you just tell Borman what he wanted to hear? I would have been okay” (177). Suppressing the truth only endangered Owen, while this admission leads to the revelation that had Leo told Owen sooner about the problems caused by the ethics violation, Owen would have offered to help Leo’s case.
Leo’s growing understanding of the power of McMurphy wraps up the Genetics and Identity throughline. During the tour, Leo’s admiration of Purge transforms him into “a punk Republican, if not the first, then one of a select few” (202). This moment shows that Leo is capable of having a complex and multifaceted identity that isn’t compartmentalized to just “Republican” or “punk.” Having integrated McMurphy into his psyche, Leo meets with Borman and this time, he wants to stand up for himself: It “was McMurphy, I knew. But this time my hitchhiker wasn’t some stranger. I was McMurphy, and McMurphy was me” (212). After spending the summer getting to know his McMurphy half, Leo no longer feels like there is a stranger making him do reckless things inside his mind; McMurphy is as much a part of his identity as the rest of him. Leo accepting McMurphy symbolizes his acceptance of his whole self, not just the parts the Young Republicans club deems okay.
However, this theme also has a dark side. Leo descends into his most hopeless state after discovering the truth about his paternity: His DNA results show that King Maggot is not his father—his biological father is Bernie, “a predator. Last night the target had been Melinda. Eighteen years ago, it had been my mother” (185). At first, Leo was worried that having King as his biological father would mean allowing his McMurphy alter-ego rule his life; now, he must contemplate whether Bernie’s sexual predation has some genetic component.
As Leo grapples with what to do with the information of his true paternity, he wrestles with The Ethics of Lying by Omission. When King Maggot retrieves Leo from the campgrounds in Chapter 22, Leo realizes that Bernie “let King go on thinking he was” Leo’s father (198). Leo knows it’s wrong for Bernie to keep the truth from King, but he does not reveal the lie out of self-interest: “I was thinking that, as long as King didn’t know the truth, Harvard wasn’t dead yet” (198). However, when Leo is presented the opportunity to ask King for the money, he realizes “I wasn’t going to take his money based on a lie. The thought that I’d even considered it made my face burn in shame” (207); this realization allows Leo to finally tell King the truth after King rescues Leo from a tense meeting with Borman and offers to pay Leo’s college tuition. Leo confesses that Bernie is his real biological father, only for King to say he’d always suspected as much and wants to pay anyway. Leo decision to act ethically and tell the truth to King reveals the true nature of his character.
Leo does, however, choose to continue lying by omission to his mother. Leo’s mother has come to terms with her past with King Maggot, so Leo decides “There was no way I would ever tell her that the watershed trauma in her life had not been King, but his sex-maniac cousin” (211). The truth here would send her back to a place of pain and trauma, so Leo chooses to spare her this regression. Leo’s choice shows that there are ethical reasons to lie by omission when it comes to loved ones and trauma.
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