Summary

In Chapter 5, Romy, still on the bus to Stanville, recalled the details of the trial that led to her imprisonment. She remembered how her mother was present in the courtroom. She also remembered witnessing another trial before hers began. The defendant, named Johnson, was charged with a home invasion, and, Romy realized, had been administered an involuntary dose of thorazine, to sedate him in transit, before his trial began. The drug led him to be nearly incoherent on the witness stand. Romy also recalled how she, perhaps foolishly, had refused to plead guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence. Before her trial began, she was certain that the perceived severity of her crime—which, we learn, was killing Kurt Kennedy, her stalker, with a tire-iron—would be mitigated by circumstance, by Kennedy’s thorough obsession with Romy and his history of harassing her. Kennedy...