60 pages • 2 hours read
David LubarSleeping Freshmen Never Lie
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2005A 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 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie opens with Scott Hudson, the novel’s protagonist, heading home with his three best friends, Patrick, Kyle, and Mitch, after spending the last day of summer playing basketball. The four boys, who will be starting high school the next day, discuss what high school may be like: Patrick sees it as an adventure, Kyle believes it will be boring just like middle school, Mitch is looking forward to meeting girls, while Scott is worried that the classes will be difficult. Scott alludes to The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas in his farewell, “All for one and one for all” (4), but the allusion falls flat because he is the only one who has read the book.
When Scott reaches home, Mom and Dad are acting strangely, but he believes that they are stressed because his brother Bobby flunked out of high school. He reassures them that he will be fine because he is nothing like Bobby, who is tall, strong, handsome, and good with tools. By contrast, Scott is smaller, not at all good with tools, and loves to read. Before going to sleep, Scott reads a book he’s picked up from the flea market, Field Guide to North American Game Fish, and though he tries to call Bobby to get advice about high school, there is no answer.
The next day at the bus stop, Scott is accosted by Louden (Mouth) Kandeski, a fellow freshman who never stops talking. Amid Mouth’s endless babble, Scott notices Julia Baskins, who has grown up significantly during the summer. Scott tries to work his way closer to talk to her but never gets the chance.
Chapter 2 Summary
As Scott tries to worm his way closer to Julia, a mob of bigger kids reaches the group of first-year students. They offhandedly bully the younger kids, kicking one in the rear and dumping the contents of Mouth’s backpack on the ground. Scott considers helping Mouth, but the bus arrives, and he hurries on, hoping to find a seat near Julia. When he finds himself out of luck, he sits in front, which allows every big kid who boards to smack his head. To distract himself, he writes a field guide to bus drivers.
Arriving at J. P. Zenger High, Scott gets lost on the way to homeroom, in part because an older kid gave him directions to the furnace room. He receives his schedule, which consists of Honors and College Prep classes, and is happy to discover that Julia is in his Honors English class. His English teacher, Mr. Franka, hands out three books and homework before they leave for lunch.
Chapter 3 Summary
Scott sits with Kyle, Patrick, and Mitch at lunch and discovers they are all taking Tech Prep classes instead of College Prep. On the way out of the cafeteria, a senior knocks Scott’s books out of his hands, prompting Kyle to chase after the senior and knock his books out of his hands. When Scott leaves his friends for his next class, a different senior relieves him of his spare change.
In Spanish class, Scott and his classmates cannot understand the teacher, Ms. de Gaulle. By the time Scott leaves school, he has filled an entire page in his assignment book with homework assignments. When he sees Mouth on the bus, Mouth tells him that high school is awesome even though his backpack has footprints on it and his shoelaces are missing.
Chapter 4 Summary
At home, Scott’s Mom tells him she is remodeling the guest room when Scott notices her looking at wallpaper samples. He begins his homework but is only able to complete the English assignment before dinner. At dinner, Scott discovers pregnancy and baby magazines on the kitchen counter. Thinking Bobby has gotten a girl pregnant, he confronts his parents, and they tell him that Mom is pregnant. Scott is shocked, but Mom reassures him that he will always be her little boy.
After dinner, Scott goes to his bedroom to finish his homework. Dad taps on his door and asks if he is alright. Scott lies, telling his dad that he is fine. Realizing that he doesn’t remember anything about elementary school and that even his middle school memories are fading, Scott starts a journal to share advice with his unborn sibling.
Chapter 5 Summary
The next morning, Scott wakes up exhausted. Someone hides his backpack in the back row when he falls asleep on the bus. They also steal one of his shoes and fill it with chewed gum and half a Twinkie.
Scott is too tired to meet up with his friends before school and falls asleep during homeroom. In English, he learns about Tom Swifties, a type of pun based on the speech pattern of the main character in the book series The Adventures of Tom Swift by Victor Appleton. He and Kyle endure relentless exercises in gym class and share the group showers with other first-year students. When class is over, Scott writes a sarcastic guide to things that are worse than gym class.
At lunch, Patrick, Kyle, and Mitch all agree that they would rather get out of English than gym, which surprises Scott because his favorite class is English. Mitch strikes up a conversation with a pretty girl and moves over to her table, while Patrick and Scott make up Tom Swifties. Afterward, a “scary-looking senior” (40) named Wesley Cobble asks for Scott’s change from lunch, which Scott immediately hands over.
Throughout the rest of the day, Scott jots down more Tom Swifties for fun. Confronted with a pile of homework, he turns Kyle down when his friend calls to see if Scott wants to go bowling. Instead, Scott writes another journal entry to the baby, telling it that it is driving his mom “crazy.”
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
In Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie, David Lubar employs a first-person limited perspective for the protagonist and narrator, Scott. This perspective allows the reader to experience Scott’s bumbling and naive introduction to high school, but it also allows for ample examples of dramatic irony as Scott navigates unfamiliar hallways and rigorous academic expectations. In this first section, Lubar presents the setting, conflict, and characterization of the initial major characters in an exposition that relies heavily on humor to engage the reader.
From the first, Lubar characterizes Scott as different from his best friends. When Scott asks Kyle, Patrick, and Mitch what they expect from high school, their answers clearly illuminate their characters: Kyle, portrayed as a stereotypical jock, believes high school will be boring, foreshadowing that his experience will revolve around athletics and not academics. Mitch optimistically envisions all the girls he will meet, while Patrick believes high school will be an adventure. Scott, however, is concerned about academic expectations, revealing him to be more serious than his friends and more studious. Lubar develops this trait further when Scott quotes from The Three Musketeers, “All for one and one for all” (4), a literary allusion that confuses his friends because they don’t share his passion for reading.
This initial interaction between the four friends demonstrates a lack of common interests and sets up the theme of The Changing Nature of Family and Friendships. The differences between Scott and his friends are even more apparent once school starts; Scott is enrolled in Honors and College Prep classes, while Kyle, Patrick, and Mitch are in Tech Prep, a pathway that leads to employment right out of high school. Scott is separated from his friends by his course pathway, which makes him especially vulnerable to bullying, a motif that Lubar employs to drive the narrative and support Scott’s growth as an individual. However, Scott’s observations regarding the bullying are humorous, revealing that he uses humor as a coping mechanism for stress. For instance, bullies steal one of his sneakers when he falls asleep on the bus. He states, “Luckily, my sneaker was on the seat. Unluckily, it was stuffed with chewing gum and half a Twinkie” (33). Later in the day, as he dodges a large group of big kids, he shudders “to think where the next Twinkie could get jammed” (37) if he is swept up in their mob.
Scott’s small group of friends shows signs of fracturing within the first week when Mitch drops his friends to sit with a pretty girl at lunch, foreshadowing his future withdrawal from the group as he grows more interested in girls than his friends. Scott’s heavy academic load causes his exhaustion, and he is already foregoing his friend’s company so he can keep up with homework. While Kyle reacts by calling Scott a nerd, Patrick supports Scott by joining him in creating Tom Swifties and telling Scott that he was lucky to get a good English class. This inauspicious beginning and physical separation between the group of friends signals a conflict that will center around their growing apart as they develop separate interests.
Lubar characterizes Scott as a stereotypical self-conscious and awkward teen throughout this first section, emphasizing his inclination to worry and overthink everyday situations. When his parents seem stressed the evening before school starts, he attributes it to their worry that he will flunk out of high school like Bobby. Even as he reassures them that he will be fine, he worries about how he will look carrying a sack lunch and turns down his mother’s offer to make his favorite sandwiches. He compares himself to his brother Bobby, who is tall, handsome, strong, and good with tools but have flunked out. Scott sees himself as a “runt” (6) who’d rather look for second-hand books than work on cars. Scott’s insecurity extends to the bus stop, where he wants to help Mouth pick up his books but decides to board the bus instead. He believes that he will be perceived as a geek, especially given his interest in books, and doesn’t want to be associated with Mouth, who is an outsider shunned by most of the other first-year students as well as a target for bullies. Scott is preoccupied with how he is perceived by others, especially Julia, which sets up the theme of Coming of Age: Shaping One’s Identity as an Individual.
Lubar introduces the two main conflicts in this section to support the themes of change and identity: Scott’s changing status in his family due to the baby’s arrival and his crush on Julia Baxter. Scott’s initial reaction to the baby is yearning for his family to remain unchanged: When he first learns about the baby’s existence at dinner, he watches his parents “as if I could lock away this scene somehow. Keep things the way they were” (27). When he discovers that the slot-car room he and his dad have been planning will become a nursery instead, he “had a feeling that wasn’t the only unhappy change headed my way” (28). Lubar introduces the motif of lying to oneself early in the book when Scott ruminates about his feelings about the baby. His father looks in on him the first night to ask if he will be okay, and Scott replies, “I’m fine” (28). Scott knows that he isn’t fine and that his father isn’t either, but he believes “he [Dad] would probably have lied too. That’s what guys do. [...] It’s just as easy to lie to yourself as it is to lie to other people. Maybe easier” (28). Tying into the title—Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie—Lubar argues that since Scott never sleeps, he is always lying to himself, especially when he tells himself in Chapter 4, “I’m fine. School will be easy. I’m not worried about anything. I’m happy for Mom. It sure will be wonderful to have a baby around the house” (29).
These conflicts drive Scott to work out both his resentment toward the baby and feelings of inadequacy at school in a journal, and the epistolary style highlights Scott’s use of humor to work through the changes he is confronting. In the journal, he uses his scientific vocabulary terms to insult the baby, calling it a “quivering sack of viscous fluids” (44). He also writes his own Tom Swifties in the journal, humorous puns created when the adverbial dialogue tag plays off the sentence’s subject. Finally, Scott uses the humor devices of incongruity and hyperbole when he ponders, for instance, what would happen if someone clamped a hand over Mouth’s mouth while he was talking: “Maybe the word would shoot out of his butt with so much force his pants would rip” (9). Lubar’s humorous tone establishes Scott’s narrative voice, which is self-deprecatory and comedic, and Scott’s use of humor enables him to minimize the bullying culture of the school and the displacement he feels at home.
