Summary

Chapter 5. Chapter five opens with the first of many lines from Sydney’s Pulitzer Prize winning poem, "Shawn". In this section of the poem, Shawn is being conceived in his mother’s womb. Shawn tells the reader he loves the beginning of the poem because he is given permission to witness his own birth and he gets to see his dad happy and excited for once. While the poem opens in a positive tone, it quickly changes in nature to describe Sydney’s conflict in loving his son; love means protecting, which might mean ending Shawn’s pain by any means necessary.

Shawn goes on to discuss how he feels about the word “veg.” He states that the first few times he heard it, he literally believed people were turning into vegetables. In his father’s eyes, if Shawn is a “vegetable” he will never...