Content Warning: This section refers to substance addiction, death due to overdose, and physical violence that feature in the source text.

“I think when you’re the worst of people, finding the worst in others becomes a survival tactic of sorts. You focus heavily on the darkness and the people in the hopes of masking the true shade of your own darkness. That’s how my mother has spent her entire life. Always seeking the worst in people. Even her own daughter.”

The irony of these words is that “seeking the worst” in others is precisely what Beyah does for the first third of the narrative. She discounts her father’s love, believes that Sara is a “locker room” mean girl, assumes that Alana is a typical out-of-touch upper-middle-class woman, and believes that Samson’s attempt to give her money for food is actually a transaction for sexual favors. Gradually, as her character develops, Beyah begins to realize she has misjudged these people.

“It’s as if I adopted myself when I was a kid and have been on my own since then. This visit with my father feels like just that: a visit. I don’t feel like I’m coming home. I don’t even feel like I just left home.

Home still feels like a mythical place I’ve been searching for all my life.”

This passage captures the pervasive attitude Beyah holds in the first part of the book. She believes she’s essentially raised herself, and that—even though they were both a part of her life to a degree—she has been abandoned by both of her parents from an early age. She attributes all her successes to herself and views both of her parents as having strictly negative impacts upon her life.

“I grew up in a trailer house with a drug addict for a mother, and now I’m about to spend the summer in a beach house with a stepmother who holds a doctorate, which means her offspring is more than likely a spoiled rich girl I have nothing in common with.

I should have stayed in Kentucky.

I don’t people well as it is, but I’m even worse at peopling with people who have money.”

Hoover examines multiple forms of prejudice in the narrative. Here she gives a clear example of Beyah’s prejudice against people she has not met because she knows that they are financially well-off. She assumes without having met either that her stepmother will have nothing in common with her and that she will be unable to connect with