Hollis, the protagonist and first-person narrator, is an 11-year-old foster child. She has disorderly hair “the color of sand” (53) and freckles. Hollis has never known who her birth parents are; when she was one hour old, she was found on a corner of the Holliswood neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. She had no blanket, but there was a note naming her Hollis Woods after the location. Since then, Hollis has bounced around in the foster system all her life and has lived with at least five different families, often in dilapidated homes with uncaring adults.

Hollis is highly sensitive and perceptive, but she has so consistently faced rejection from adults that she has developed a tough exterior to protect herself from being hurt. In this, Hollis shows many behaviors common to children traumatized by the foster care system. When she feels misunderstood, she will either act out or stop speaking, and sometimes, she simply leaves—by skipping school or by running away from her foster families. The major transformation Hollis’s character undergoes is the realization that she is worthy of love: both Josie and the Regans see the good in her and know her to be much more than the sum of her difficult past.