“There are as many tinges of understanding as there are hues of green in a forest.”

Because Cash narrates the novel after the events, this opening chapter provides the novel with its umbrella theme. This perception of a world more complicated and more nuanced than Cash understands, his mother dead, his expectations limited to living in Sawyer, represents what Cash will learn after his difficult journey to adulthood.

“As we came to know each other, I began to see something in Delaney that I’d never seen in another person. I can’t name the thing. Maybe it has no name, the way fire has no shape.”

Cash’s relationship, defined at his delicate adolescent threshold age, is beyond his understanding at this point. At age 17, he is unsure where the line between friend and girlfriend, between like and love, should be drawn, and he navigates these boundaries awkwardly before finally hitting his stride. As he comes into his own as a master of words, he is ironically often frustrated by the failure of language to adequately articulate life’s more complex moments.

“I’ve spent much of my life feeling unsafe, unsteady, and insecure. Sitting on Papaw’s porch with him was always my fortress against the world.”

Cash’s journey out of Sawyer is as much physical as it is emotional and ultimately psychological. Since the trauma of finding his mother dead in the bathroom of their trailer, Cash has sought in his grandfather’s home a safe and secure place. The prospect of losing that protected space is a key hurdle that he must overcome in order to truly embrace the necessary changes and path to maturity that he will undergo during his time at Middleford.