26 pages • 52 minutes read
Freckle Juice
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Freckles and Freckle Juice
Freckles are the most prominent symbol in Freckle Juice. For Andrew, freckles represent the solution to all of his problems. Andrew is obsessed with having freckles, but more specifically, he wants freckles like Nicky Lane’s. Andrew thinks that “if he had freckles like Nicky, his mother would never know if his neck was dirty. So he wouldn’t have to wash” (7). If Andrew had freckles, “he’d hear Miss Kelly when she called reading groups” (7-8). If Andrew had freckles, he thinks that he would be able to concentrate in school, no one would laugh at him, and he wouldn’t get in trouble. When Andrew asks Nicky how he got his freckles, he is disappointed to learn that a person has to be born with them. The freckles become an unattainable dream until Sharon enters the picture.
For Sharon, freckles are an opportunity to cash in on other people’s insecurities. She is quick to promise that with freckle juice, Andrew “can get as many as [he] want[s]” (11). She plays on his fascination with Nicky’s freckles by saying that if Andrew drinks two glasses of freckle juice, he’ll look just like Nicky. The freckle juice recipe becomes a golden, precious opportunity, and Andrew treats it as such. However, the recipe also becomes symbolic of a big secret: Andrew hides the recipe from his mother, and he tries to hide it from Miss Kelly. If freckles represent the ultimate goal that Andrew is striving for, then the freckle juice represents the drastic measures he will take to change his looks. Both work together to represent insecurity and desperation for a child who wants so badly to look different.
When Andrew learns that Nicky doesn’t want his freckles at all, he is surprised. After spending so much time fixating on freckles and how they would solve all of his problems, he doesn’t understand: “How could Nicky hate his freckles? They were so neat!” (38). He realizes that just because he loves freckles doesn’t mean that everyone else does. Freckles can also represent the small things about a person they love or hate: their curly hair, the gap in their front teeth, or the dimple in their cheek. What one person might love, another person might hate. In this story, freckles show how subjective beauty standards can be and how an obsession with physical appearances can lead to feeling deeply unsatisfied.
Andrew’s Dream
When Andrew is home sick after drinking the freckle juice, he has a terrible dream in which “a big green monster [makes] him drink two quarts of freckle juice, three times a day” (30). Andrew is haunted by the terrible taste of the freckle juice and how sick it made him feel, so it is understandable that the freckle juice would show up in his dreams. The worst part of his dream, however, is that “every time [Andrew] drank it, the monster got freckles but Andrew didn’t” (30). In some versions of the book, illustrations show that the monster looks an awful lot like Sharon with pigtails and a dress. The dream symbolizes how Andrew kept doing the hard work of drinking the freckle juice, but ultimately, Sharon was the one who profits from him. At the end of the story, Sharon has 50 cents in her pocket, she doesn’t have to miss any school, and she is able to keep selling her fake recipe to others. Andrew suffers the most but gets nothing in return, just like in the dream.
The dream also represents how helpless Andrew feels about this whole situation. All he wants is freckles, and now he can’t even have them in his dreams. In the dream, Andrew is not drinking the freckle juice voluntarily, but it is being forced upon him. In the same way, Andrew may have felt forced to buy Sharon’s recipe and drink the freckle juice in real life. Even though it seems like he did it of his own free will, Andrew knows he hasn’t been thinking clearly, and he is motivated by a deep urge that even he might not understand. The monster might also represent Andrew’s insecurity and how that insecurity ultimately pushes him to do something irresponsible and foolish by drinking the freckle juice.
The Blue Marker
One of Andrew’s most unusual decisions in the course of the story is his decision to cover his entire face with a blue magic marker. After Sharon tricks him, Andrew insists that “he couldn’t let Sharon get away with it” (32), and he has to do something to make her think she hasn’t won. He tries to find a brown marker, but when he can only find a blue one, he doesn’t accept defeat. Instead, he uses the blue to create blue “freckles” all over his face. He admits that they don’t look like Nicky’s freckles, “but they sure looked like something!” (33).
Even though the blue freckles confuse Miss Kelly and cause his classmates to laugh at him, Andrew still sits in class all day with them. The blue marker and the “freckles” Andrew creates represent his determination to have freckles, one way or another. Andrew is trying to show Sharon that he will have freckles with or without her help, and the blue ones he creates are one last pitiful attempt to get what he wants.
However, the reader is led to think that Andrew comes to regret this decision. When Miss Kelly gives him the choice to use her “secret freckle remover,” Andrew doesn’t refuse. He runs to the boys’ room with the package containing the remover. It seems like, deep down, Andrew is tired of trying to be something he’s not. He will never have freckles, and although this distresses him at the beginning of the story, he is now tired of fighting the inevitable. By the story’s final pages, Andrew is at peace with his appearance, especially with Miss Kelly’s encouragement. He washes away the blue freckles, and symbolically, he washes his hands of any and all freckles. Andrew has decided that they aren’t worth the struggle and humiliation, and the blue marker eventually leads him to some form of self-acceptance.
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