[5] maggot, knife grinder, goose fair

Though the 'Maggot' chapter starts with Jason being teased for going to the movies with his mother-- something he’d been panicking about in the last few pages-- it quickly becomes obvious that there’s more than that affecting his standing.  His stuttering has become common knowledge, and there’s the matter of his (presumably) crossing the Spooks at the end of that chapter.  Obviously, bullying is the main focus of this chapter.  Interesting points included, for me: the “allies” he encounters in terms of teachers, Moran, and potentially Holly Deblin; the ambiguous history of bullying in the school, as represented by the hanged student in the old gym; and once again, a repeated line: “Cigarette smoke billowed out like fog in Jack the Ripper’s London,” on 212 and 39.

As things get worse at school, they get weirder at home, we learn in the next chapter. A television is a pretty big gift.  Jason tells us explicitly, “Dad never gives things like this for no reason, not just out of the blue.”  Yet, he doesn’t seem to speculate on why.  Does Jason realize how bad things are between his parents?  Is he naive or in denial?  

Gypsies are a big theme in this chapter; again we get a scene from two sides, as in ‘Souvenirs.’  We’re told that each group (the townfolk and the gypsies) wants the other “to be gross, so the grossness of what they’re not acts as a stencil for what they are.”  (229 and 240)  I’m not surprised that Jason becomes a sort of observer/ambassador for the gypsies.  Throughout the book he’s been on the outskirts of popularity at best, and as the story progresses he seems to identify more and more with marginalized social groups.  
It’s not a huge surprise, either, that the gypsies prove to be allies of a sort in the “Goose Fair” chapter, though the focus shifts to a more personal moral struggle.  I found myself wondering again how much of what happens, happens only in Jason’s imagination: lines like “A mile-long neon Chinese dragon wove through the Goose Fair and bit my jeans pocket.  Luckily, no one else saw it” make me doubt his sanity a little bit.  
Ross Wilcox’s accident at the end of the chapter made me think of a popular saying in my family-- “No good deed goes unpunished.”  Ross Wilcox has been an awful person, throughout the novel; he’s a bully and a brat at the best of times.  Jason finally decides he can’t be responsible for getting him in trouble with his violent, abusive father-- but Wilcox ends up suffering anyway.  How do we feel about this?  How do we expect Jason to react?