What happens in Chapter 4 of One of Us Is Lying?
Chapter 4 shifts focus to Nate Macaulay, the school’s notorious bad boy, whose story begins on Monday — the day after Simon died in detention. Nate shares his run-ins with the justice system: he's on probation for drug dealing and wears an ankle monitor, which immediately makes him a suspect in Simon's murder. At school, the mood is thick with grief and suspicion, as students mourn for a boy they mostly feared or resented. Nate navigates the day, hyper-aware of how he’s perceived by everyone around him — the teachers, the cops, his probation officer. He reflects on his side job delivering drugs to Bayview’s wealthier students, a fact that complicates any sympathy directed toward him. He also notices the other three detention survivors — Bronwyn, Addy, and Cooper — each showing their own signs of anxiety. By the end of the chapter, Nate finds himself pulled aside for more questioning, with investigators clearly viewing him as the easiest target in a tangled situation.
Analysis
Karen McManus uses Nate's chapter to cleverly subvert the unreliable-narrator trope. He's the character readers are primed to doubt, and McManus fully embraces that expectation before subtly unraveling it. Nate's voice is sharp and self-aware, lacking the social performance seen in Bronwyn's or Addy's chapters — he doesn’t curate his persona for the reader, which surprisingly makes him seem more genuine. The ankle monitor serves as a recurring motif, a clear symbol of surveillance that reflects the novel's larger theme: at Bayview High, everyone is being watched and everyone is acting innocent. McManus also employs free indirect discourse to allow Nate's class consciousness to come through without commentary — his insights into which students buy from him and how they treat him in public versus private create a vivid social landscape. The chapter's tone is flat and somewhat fatalistic, standing in sharp contrast to Bronwyn's anxious precision and Addy's social dread. This flatness is a deliberate choice: Nate has already faced judgment, so he has stopped trying to defend himself. The interrogation scene at the end tightens the chapter's structure, concluding not with a revelation but with the stark reality of being the prime suspect — a cliffhanger that resonates because McManus has left us questioning whether being obvious also means being guilty.
Key quotes from Chapter 4
“I'm the kind of guy who makes people nervous just by existing.”
Nate reflects on his reputation at Bayview early in the chapter, establishing his self-aware fatalism about how the school — and now the police — will read him as a suspect.
“Everyone's acting like they lost their best friend. Half of them were on Simon's list.”
Nate surveys the performative grief in the school hallways, cutting through the collective mourning with the blunt observation that Simon's gossip app made him feared rather than loved.
“The monitor on my ankle feels heavier than usual.”
As Nate is pulled aside for questioning, this line crystallises the ankle monitor as a symbol of predetermined guilt — the weight of being already-convicted in everyone else's eyes.
Check your understanding
Ask about this work
The reader has this chapter in front of it — the summary, the analysis, the key quotes and the vocabulary — along with the rest of the book’s chapters. Ask what happens and why it matters, or push back on a reading.
It cites the chapter or the line it is working from, and it says so plainly when the guide doesn’t cover something. It’s instructed never to write an essay, a paragraph or an answer for you to hand in, and never to grade anything — it will show you how to approach the question instead. The reader is an AI, not a person, and its replies are written by Claude, from Anthropic. The people behind Storgy are at hello@storgy.com.
Sign in to ask the reader about this work — 1 credit covers three messages.
Create an accountSign in