“I inspected the knife in my hand.”

This is the novel’s opening sentence. Although it could refer to Ani about to kill Arthur Finnerman at Bradley, Ani is with her fiancé picking out wedding utensils, but she quickly imagines thrusting the knife into the stomach of the man she is going to marry, foreshadowing her showdown during the school shooting and revealing her uncertainties over her commitment to marry.

“I had to write a description of an object without ever explicitly identifying the object. I went with my cat, and ended the passage with her diving off our back porch to her bloodied, mangled death.” 

In choosing the bloody death of her cat as the subject of her entrance exam essay for Bradley, Ani decides her best bet for gaining admission to a school whose principal claim to fame is that J. D. Salinger’s first wife attended there is to play the dark misfit. This will be the first of many of Ani’s personas she will select. Thus, she begins her education being the very thing Holden Caulfield despises: a phony.

“College was my first go at reinvention, and I couldn’t compromise it by getting a reputation again.” 

Even before she shares with the reader her experiences at Bradley, she confesses that when she went away to college she began what would become her strategy for survival: pretending to be someone else. She never admits to her college friends the dark history she carries.