The book’s narrator and protagonist. At the book’s start, Avery is a junior in a public high school in New Castle, Connecticut, working an after-school job at a diner and hoping to get a scholarship to the University of Connecticut to study actuarial sciences. By the book’s end, Avery is the heiress to the Hawthorne estate, attending a posh private school and living in a mansion in Texas. The daughter of a single (deceased) mother and absentee father, Avery was raised in poverty and embodies the book’s thematic treatment of the problematic nature of class differences.

Although her circumstances change significantly throughout the narrative, Avery herself maintains a consistent characterization. She is smart, independent, self-sufficient, and ambitious, “a girl with a razor-sharp tongue” (12). She also has a knack for solving puzzles and playing games like chess, allowing her character to support another one of the book’s thematic red threads, the risks of playing games. Avery’s role is often that of detective as she seeks to unravel mysteries, like Emily’s death and Tobias’s will. Nonetheless, Avery is still a teenager and, despite the large issues she faces, she also deals with teenage dramas, like her budding romances with Jameson and Grayson.