Summary

The part opens with a love poem directed to an unspecified “you.” In the next chapter, the topic of instruction at school is sexual education. The narrator feels self-conscious because of her small breasts, but the cute boy in class shares a cigarette with her at recess and she then feels attractive. At home, the narrator celebrates the fact that her family dinner is not interrupted by any unexpected visitors. The narrator reflects on the relationship between Christianity and colonialism, as her mother was a child who experienced the Canadian High Arctic Relocation which displaced Inuit communities further north, resulting in significant hardship. She compares her own relationship to the land and her own body to her interpretation of Christian shame about sex.

The narrator recalls a memory of a childhood sleepover. The children told their parents that they were sleeping over at...