Charlie, the protagonist of the novel, is a freshman in high school. He is the youngest of three siblings. While he is aware that many people his age hate their parents, he loves his. In fact, his favorite memory is watching the final episode of M*A*S*H with his family and sitting on his dad’s lap. While his friends give him a sense of identity, without them he is prone to falling into a state of melancholy. He is in love with his friend Sam but never acts on it because she is a senior, and in the beginning of the novel she says that she is too old for him.

His favorite things are music and books. He often uses music to express the way he is feeling to others, and most of the books he reads throughout the novel are reflections of some aspect of his own life. Although he is generally best described as being highly emotional and sensitive to the feelings of others, he also has a violent side. He wasn’t allowed to play sports when he was little because they made him “too aggressive”(52), and on two separate occasions he gets into fights at school and hurts the people involved.