Is Maddie Reyes a bully or a victim in Kiss Me, Captain?

The book doesn't soften her record, so start there. The day Emily shows up, Maddie acts in front of the whole team like they were never close, writes off their old friendship as something to be ashamed of, and tells her to quit trailing after her. After Emily beats her on the ice, Maddie catches her outside the locker room and hints that Coach Marquette loses interest in new arrivals fast. At a party she puts Emily down in front of everyone as a skater who has never gotten past regionals.

Chapter 3 is the low point. Emily casually asks whether Maddie's dad changed jobs, and that one question threatens the wealthy backstory Maddie has built. Maddie shoves Emily against the lockers with a skate blade and promises to ruin her if she talks. You can't file that under rivalry. She uses a blade and a threat to keep someone quiet.

The longer-running harm is quieter. Emily lays it out: for weeks, Maddie's teammates have moved her things, made cracks about scholarship kids, and messed with her blade guards, and Maddie just watched. When Jenna, Carol, and Sophie gang up on Emily during practice, Maddie claims a captain has to stay neutral. When Emily's bag is cut open, along with a jacket her mother saved up to buy, we learn Maddie saw Jenna hanging around it and still kept quiet. Her friends do most of the dirty work, and they get away with it because she lets them.

Chapter 24 makes you reread everything before it. After Jenna tells the team that Maddie's father fixes cars for a living, Maddie falls apart alone at the rink at midnight and finally tells Emily about her new school after the move. Kids there picked apart her clothes, her used skates, her accent, and her mom's Walmart job, and they called her trailer trash. The letters belong to this same stretch of her life. At thirteen, while all of this was happening, she kept writing to Emily, and her last letter told Emily she loved her. She never got an answer, because every letter went to a house Emily's family had already moved out of.

So the girl who brushes Emily off on that first day at the rink started out as a lonely, picked-on teenager who thought her best friend had walked away right when she needed her most. That doesn't make the blade okay. It does explain why getting found out terrifies her: everything she's become depends on nobody learning where she came from.

And the pressure is still on. Her family is short on money. Her mom picks up extra shifts and Maddie skips meals to save, all while she tells Jenna about Maldives investments. When her parents come to campus, her father says things against gay people and Maddie just goes along with it, then assures them that she and Derek are doing great. She's still hiding from the two people who ought to know her best.

This is what keeps her from being a simple victim. Maddie says herself that the meanness was on purpose. She studied the popular girls, saved her babysitting money for one designer piece, and admits she started hurting people before they could hurt her. She doesn't describe it as cracking under strain. She describes a plan.

That's what makes her silence about Emily sting so much. What Jenna's group mocks in Emily is the scholarship, the sense that she doesn't fit in, a mother pinching pennies for a jacket. That's the same list Maddie got mocked for at her new school. By saying nothing, she lets the old scene play out again with Emily in the spot she used to stand in. Her worst failure isn't the blade. It's being the girl who remembers exactly how that feels and still looks away.

And the cruelty doesn't even protect her. Jenna's digs about taking in a needy roommate rattle Maddie so badly she almost goes down at practice, and she ends up gasping for breath in the bathroom, telling Emily she's scared the self she built is about to crumble. Later she cries under the shower, no longer sure who Madison actually is. Once word spreads that her family has little money, the team she used to run freezes her out, and Lisa calls her a traitor. The pecking order she climbed for safety turns on her the moment it gets a reason.

The whole arc builds toward one test: will Maddie stand up for Emily in public when it costs her something? In chapter 25 she fails, badly, and even agrees with Emily that what they had meant nothing. In chapter 26 she confesses she doesn't know how to be brave, and Emily answers that you learn it by starting. In chapter 27 Maddie insists that people always end up using your weak spots against you, and Emily tells her flatly that she isn't that kind of person.

Two weeks out from Nationals, Jenna, Carol, and Sophie trap Emily in the showers, crank the water to scalding, and slam her into the tile. This time Maddie doesn't stay quiet. She orders them out and says she'll go to Coach, the Dean, the police, and their parents. Then she shuts off the water, wraps Emily in a towel, says she's sorry she didn't come sooner, and admits she's done enabling the abuse and done being a coward.

Pay attention to the wording. She doesn't claim she was innocent all along. Saying she was enabling it means she owns her part as a bystander and doesn't hide behind her history. She also doesn't treat one rescue as a reset, and tells Emily it doesn't fix everything. Emily thanks her for picking the risk over her own safety, and that's the real change: for once, Maddie puts someone else's pain ahead of her own cover story.

You could argue Jenna Caldwell is the real bully and Maddie was mostly a prisoner of the hierarchy. The book gives you some support for that. Chris warns Emily that Jenna is behind the escalating sabotage, and Jenna is the one Coach Marquette cuts from the Nationals roster along with Carol and Sophie. But the blade in chapter 3 was in Maddie's own hand. It's hard to call her purely a victim when she's the one doing the threatening.

By chapter 30, Maddie is a target too. Skaters from a rival team whisper that someone tampered with her skates, and at Nationals she crashes on her triple axel and doesn't get back up. Nobody knows yet who did it, but the trick looks a lot like the equipment sabotage once aimed at Emily, which shows how easily bully and victim can switch places on this rink.