Gantos’ temporary home, the King’s Court motel, is run by an eccentric self-proclaimed descendent of Davy Crockett. Gantos attends high school and secures steady work at the Piggly Wiggly (a grocery store). The first third of the chapter details that how Gantos goes about practicing writing is through imitation. He writes passages from other writers that strike him as significant and keeps a list of vocabulary words, mostly minimizing the act of original writing on his part.

Another part of the chapter provides foreshadowing: Gantos describes his attraction to the fact that his high school functioned as a former prison. He also preoccupies himself with lewd words and images of a naked woman and states that “[i]t was sexy to imagine myself in prison” (24). He finds crime television equally interesting and is drawn to the dangerous women and crude behavior of detectives and perpetrators. One event of particular importance is a school assembly where four inmates from the local prison speak to the students about how they ended up in prison. Unaffected, Gantos accepts an invitation to smoke marijuana shortly afterward, barely completes high school, and declines the opportunity to attend college.