Content Warning: This novel and guide discuss rape, child abuse (physical, sexual, and emotional), domestic violence, murder, kidnapping, torture, and death by suicide.

Heather Cash is the novel’s protagonist. She works at the deli counter in Zayre Shopper City and plays drums whenever she can. Although she is only a teenager, Heather takes care of her family by tending to her younger sister, Junie, and cooking meals every night. Heather hides a burned ear from everyone in Pantown, the result of abuse at her mother’s hands. She keeps her hair long and wears baggy clothes throughout most of the novel, resisting the early sexualization of young women in Pantown that she notices in Brenda, Maureen, and Junie.

Heather envies her friends as they grow into women and feels as though she’s falling behind. However, as Heather tries to catch up, she begins experiencing the same kind of sexualized violence her friends do. She loses her sense of naivety, not because she learns to flaunt her sexual power, but because she learns to tell the truth rather than maintain her town’s code of silence.

As such, Heather becomes a “final girl,” a trope in thrillers where one female character successfully evades a killer who has murdered her friends.