Things We Do in the Dark

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses child abuse, sexual assault, and murder.

In one of the novel’s most emotional moments, a distraught Drew, who arrives at Joey’s apartment to try to apologize for the quarrel they had the night before, is called on by one of the firefighters to identify her body. Drew can stomach only the briefest glance at the blackened remains of the woman he loved. He identifies Joey by the tattoo on her thigh, a butterfly, four by three inches, blue and purple and pink. Significantly, the image suggests that the “butterfly is in flight” (170), frozen in perpetual motion: ever restless and always dodging. Since a butterfly has a short and colorful life, the tattoo suggests that Joey is elusive and that flight is her strategy of choice: a life forever moving away from itself.

That this corpse is not Joey at all but rather the body of Betty Savage is not revealed until much later, when Drew realizes that the two best friends had identical tattoos. The butterfly, he is told, was Joey’s idea. Hillier hence hints at systemic problems: other characters are in flight, too.

The butterfly symbolizes Joey as a transformational character, constantly reinventing herself.