Bee, the teenaged daughter of Bernadette Fox and Elgin Branch, is the collator of the documents comprising the novel and its occasional narrator. Her rarely used full name, Balakrishna, refers to the blue color of the infant Krishna. It was given to her by her mother after Bee was born with a heart defect that she was initially not expected to survive and which required years of surgery and hospitalization, an ordeal of which Bee retains little memory. Bee is warm, generous, and academically gifted. At the opening of the novel, she is completing the eighth grade at Galer Street School and hoping to attend Choate Rosemary Hall, the prestigious boarding school in Connecticut which her mother once attended. 

Bee, unlike the other characters, sees her family’s life in Seattle as stable and happy. She cheerfully accepts her mother’s eccentricities and loves their decaying house, a former school for wayward girls known as Straight Gate, even though there are blackberry brambles growing up through its rotten floorboards. Bee chooses to mark her graduation from Galer Street with a family trip to Antarctica, a choice with unexpected consequences. She experiences her mother’s disappearance and apparent death as well as her father’s involvement with another woman.