Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of suicide, death, gender discrimination, and racism.

The novel opens with a vignette describing someone drowning. As the water fills her lungs, she whispers, “I’m sorry,” echoing the note she left behind.

Sade is climbing down a balcony to leave a party thrown by the boys of Hawking House at Alfred Nobel Academy. She hurries to the car where her friend is waiting, surprised to see tears on Sade’s cheeks. When she asks what happened, Sade stammers, “he’s dead.”

On a Monday five weeks before the party, Sade Hussein arrives at Alfred Nobel Academy to start her third year of high school. Miss Blackburn, the school’s matron, is waiting for Sade. She mispronounces Sade’s name, and the girl corrects her before remembering that teachers on television “rarely seemed to like being told they were wrong” (4); she is used to the tutors who taught her at home. Miss Blackburn scolds Sade for being four weeks late for the start of term. She wonders aloud how Sade’s parents let her arrive in such a condition, and Sade interrupts her to say that her parents are both dead; her mother died by suicide when Sade was 10, and her father died of a heart attack just a few days before Sade’s new school year was meant to start.