Jared's house

Jared's house is the setting for much of the novel. Jared has a basement apartment of his own, and his mother and Richie live in the main portion of the house with a couple of tenants that they rent rooms to in order to make more money. Jared's basement is periodically described as depressing by his mother or other people, but Jared seems pretty happy to have a space to call his own away from the general chaos of the main part of the house. He is constantly affronted with violations of his privacy, like when he finds a hole drilled into his wall that he theorizes is being used by one of the tenants to spy on him.

The Jakses' house

Jared is often at his next-door neighbors' house, the Jakses. For most of the first half of the novel, he is over there a good...