Chapters 1 - 3 Summary

Maria is in a hospital and is being asked a list of routine questions about who she is and why she is there. Maria sits in her hospital room, thinking back on the earlier years of her life, musing about how dangerous snakes can be and how Darwinian it is that a coral snake needs neurotoxic poison to survive but that a very similarly marked king snake needs none. This unfairness, she fears, will prevail throughout her life.

Maria grew up in Silver Wells, Nevada, which at the time had a population of twenty-eight, but now has a population of zero because it is in the middle of a missile range. Maria was born in Reno, Nevada but moved to Silver Wells after her father lost their home in Reno gambling. He either won the town of Silver Wells in a...