Summary

Part 1, Chapter 1

The narrator says that she is profoundly angry about having been a ‘good girl’ all her life, making sacrifices to take care of her dying mother and caring for her father. She has always done what she was meant to do, but she says that this made the world a fun house she could not escape. She says that she meant to be a great artist and that she had given that up for so long that she is deeply embittered. At the end of the chapter, she says that she is going “to make my nothingness count.”

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Part 1, Chapter 2

When Reza Shahid shows up in Nora Eldridge’s third-grade classroom, Nora falls in love with him. She is touched by his foreignness, and then she recognizes him as the boy she had seen at the supermarket a...