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Rhea’s story draws an explicit connection between how teenage Rhea imagined her outward appearance affected her interactions, and how time changes her perspective on those same meetings and conversations. Her (often skewed) understanding of how she’s seen and interpreted by others ties directly to her personal growth in this novel. As a teenager, Rhea is painfully aware that she’s less conventionally attractive and less appealing to boys than her friends Jocelyn and Alice. Whether or not this is factual is unclear, but she feels it intensely. She's extremely self-conscious about her freckles, bringing them up to the reader over and over again as the reason for things not going the way she plans. She sees the freckles as a massive detriment to her appearance, and she’s so revolted by them that she assumes they stop others from seeing her as the punk and the artist she wants to be.
Rhea is desperate to be taken seriously, and she feels strongly aligned with the punk movement’s dissatisfaction with the status quo of late-1970s San Francisco; she also hates the drug culture and the aging hippies of her hometown. Her misery is compounded by unrequited love, as she’s stuck in a one-sided crush on Bennie Salazar. She stares at him whenever she gets the chance, which usually results in her noticing he’s gazing adoringly at Alice.
Rhea wants very badly to be included and desired, so much so that she pressures Jocelyn into recounting every detail of experiences they don’t share. This extends to blow-by-blow retellings of Jocelyn’s sexual encounters, which Rhea tries to absorb so intensely that she feels she’s been included. She wants to experience everything about being seventeen that Jocelyn does, regardless of whether or not it happens to her personally.
When Jocelyn starts dating Lou—who’s in late middle age during Rhea’s first appearance in A Visit From the Goon Squad—Rhea is both jealous and horrified. She’s not sexually interested in Lou himself, but the glamor and money he brings to Jocelyn’s life appeal strongly to her. She can’t help but become friends with Lou, even as she sees how harmful his behavior is. He both fascinates and alarms Rhea, as he does intensely inappropriate things but plays them off very coolly. This includes incidents that make Rhea freeze in shock, such as when (with one arm still around her shoulders) he compels Jocelyn to give him oral sex during a Flaming Dildos concert. Rhea has no idea how to react, but softens toward him later when he takes an interest in her opinion and tells her she’s special.
When Rhea gets older, she mostly leaves her punk lifestyle behind. She still likes the music, just as Bennie and Scotty do, but at the end of the book she’s married and has three children. In this second appearance in the novel, she’s a side character in Jocelyn’s narrative, instead of the other way around. Her relationship with Lou continues to be both meaningful and deeply troubling to her. She feels bad for him because he’s old and ill, even though she knows Jocelyn’s daughter is the same age she was when she met Lou. She and Jocelyn visit Lou at Bennie’s request as he’s dying of stroke-related complications. During this visit, she’s forced to hold her anger with Lou in one hand and her sympathy in the other. This feels almost impossible when she and Lou have to tell Jocelyn that Rolph, Lou’s son and her childhood friend, had committed suicide several years earlier. By this point Rhea has long given up her green hair and stopped worrying so much about her freckles. Given her new, somewhat more accepting view of herself, it seems fitting that she’s now involved in recounting an important experience to Jocelyn second-hand. She’s no longer confined to the sidelines.
