The novel alternates between sections called “pictures,” which are written in italics and capture moments in the past through descriptions of Hollis’s drawings, and sections called “chapters,” which are not italicized and take place in the present. The novel opens with the first-person limited narrator, the protagonist Hollis, describing a picture she submitted for a class assignment when she was six years old. The picture is from a magazine and shows a family by a house, and “has a dollop of peanut butter on one edge [and] a smear of grape jelly on the other” (1).

Hollis’s teacher draws an X across the picture because the assignment was to find words that start with W, and the teacher says doesn’t see any W words, just a mother, father, sister, brother and house. Hollis thinks to herself, “How about W for wish, or W for want, or W for ‘Wouldn’t it be loverly’ […]?” (1). The girl sitting next to Hollis makes fun of her for failing the assignment, so Hollis draws an X on the girl’s picture, and her teacher sends her out of the classroom for a timeout. Hollis decides to leave school to go to back to her foster home, where she is punished.