Opening
Sixteen-year-old Tiger Tolliver clings to her fierce, too-small life with her mother, June Tolliver, until a single afternoon shatters everything. What begins as a normal teen week—secret crushes, fights over freedom, humiliations at school—collides with sudden death and the brutal first wave of Grief and Loss, leaving Tiger wrecked by guilt and alone in a world that no longer makes sense.
What Happens
Chapter 1: Find the Bills
Tiger digs out a stack of overdue bills from the dresser she shares with June and feels fear harden into certainty: they’re broke, the water’s off, and June has been crashed on the couch for more than a day with a blinding “headache.” Tiger moves through the quiet house as if it’s a glass jar—watching, waiting, pretending everything is fine because the two of them always make it work.
When Tiger shakes June awake, June lurches upright and returns to mom-mode at once: coffee, promises, solutions. That dependable switch flips Tiger’s panic into relief. As she dresses in her mother’s scavenged, often mortifying clothing, she stares at her dark hair and freckles and wonders again about the father June refuses to discuss. The chapter frames Tiger’s simmering need for independence and her tangled reliance on June, laying the ground for Identity and Coming of Age.
Chapter 2: The Horror of Lupe Hidalgo
On the way to school, Tiger is hungry and prickly. Texts from her best friend, Cake Rishworth, push her to tell June she’s going to the dance with their friend, Kai Henderson. Tiger blurts it out after June won’t let her touch the radio, and the car fills with familiar alarms: Is Kai a boyfriend? What about drinking? After-parties? “It’s a big thing we need to discuss,” June says.
Tiger snaps. She describes life as a “bug in a jar,” lists every missed chance she caved on to keep June calm, and—shaking—claims herself: “I’m going to the dance with Kai Henderson… And you can’t really stop me.” She slams the car door on tears, scorched with defiance and guilt. The fight cracks their tight two-person unit and spotlights the fault line between control and freedom within their Family and Found Family.
Chapter 3: Kai Henderson Is Reading
In zero period, Tiger’s phone buzzes with June’s calls, catching the eye of her long-time tormentor, Lupe Hidalgo, a fierce, popular athlete who ridicules Tiger’s thrifted unicorn shirt and sneers “Stevie fucking Nicks.” Tiger burns with shame; her mother’s eccentric, secondhand finds become a bullseye on her back.
She spots Mae-Lynn Carpenter, another outsider, and feels a guilty relief at not being the absolute bottom. Ms. Perez shuts down the spectacle, but the damage stays. Tiger aches for Cake’s presence, underscoring how Friendship functions as her lifeline beyond June. She counts down to Biology, to Kai, to a version of herself that doesn’t feel like a punchline.
Chapter 4: Cake is waiting for me
Sitting beside Kai in Biology, Tiger relives the moment she first caught feelings during a casual conversation about the heart that suddenly pulsed with possibility. Their mutual crush is comically obvious—Taran Parker tells them to “get a room already”—but it feels fragile and perfect anyway.
Kai checks in about the dance: is everything cool with her mom? Tiger lies and says yes. She refuses to let the morning fight steal this small, normal joy. They plan to meet at The Pit after school. Even a pop quiz failure can’t drag her down; Kai glows as the promise of something new, something chosen.
Chapter 5: The late afternoon is my favorite time
At lunch, Cake feeds and soothes Tiger until a text from June detonates the calm: a photo of an old-fashioned, hideous “apology” dress for the dance. Humiliated and furious, Tiger takes June’s call and unleashes everything.
“You can’t let me do one thing by myself. I can’t do anything without…without you getting your fingers in it. Not even picking out my own stupid dress for a stupid dance.”
“Why can’t you ever just fucking leave me alone?”
Shaking, Tiger hangs up, sobs in a bathroom stall, then texts Cake during her library shift about her plan: kiss Kai tonight. She meets him, and they wander to the elementary school playground. Under the stars, she leans in—soft, “plush,” exactly like Cake promised—and the kiss lights up her entire chest.
A sudden chill needles her spine. Kai answers a call, his face draining. “Your mom. Died.”
At the hospital, a young doctor explains an aneurysm. Tiger vomits, stares at the body on the bed, and cannot reconcile stillness with June. Her final, cruel words slam back, seeding a crushing burden of Guilt and Forgiveness. In the waiting room, she learns Kai has gone. Silence spreads. The world before is gone.
Character Development
Tiger begins as a daughter fused to her mother, yearning for space yet terrified to step alone. Across these chapters, she tests her voice, chooses a first kiss, and grasps at a version of teenage normalcy—only to be pitched into catastrophe that will redefine her entirely.
- Tiger: Claims a boundary with June and pursues the dance and kiss; shame and longing give way to a brief, blazing confidence that collapses into shock and self-blame. The path ahead points toward Resilience and Survival.
- June: Loving, eccentric, and overwhelmed, she hides bills, fixates on safety, and tries to mend a rupture with a misguided dress. Her sudden death freezes her at the peak of conflict—her intentions tender, her impact complicated.
- Cake: Steady, practical, and protective, she feeds Tiger, pushes her toward honesty, and anchors her emotionally when everything else wobbles.
- Kai: Gentle and attentive, he offers Tiger a glimpse of mutual affection and independence; after delivering the news, his withdrawal leaves a raw vacuum.
- Lupe: Publicly cruel and incisive, she personifies the social pressure that magnifies Tiger’s embarrassment and isolation.
Themes & Symbols
These chapters fuse coming-of-age with catastrophe. Independence collides with loss: Tiger’s push for autonomy—clothes, radio, dance, kiss—meets the irreversible end of the relationship that defines her. Grief floods in, not as quiet mourning but as whiplash: one minute a “plush” kiss, the next an emergency room. That shock stitches together Grief and Loss with Guilt and Forgiveness: Tiger’s last words become a wound she must learn to look at without flinching.
Identity and Coming of Age and Family and Found Family loom beneath every scene. The two-person household works like a “well-oiled, good-smelling machine” until it doesn’t; after, the question becomes who Tiger is without “June’s daughter” as her primary name, and who will hold her up instead. Symbols sharpen this arc: the “monstrosity” dress manifests love that misses the mark; the first kiss embodies fragile, ordinary joy; the sudden chill serves as eerie foreshadowing, a hinge moment where the air changes before Tiger’s life does.
Key Quotes
“We’re a well-oiled, good-smelling machine.” Tiger defines her family as perfectly tuned and self-sufficient—romanticizing a precarious setup. The metaphor foreshadows how one broken part (June’s collapse) halts the entire mechanism.
“I’m going to the dance with Kai Henderson… And you can’t really stop me.” This declaration is Tiger’s first clean line in the sand. It marks a pivot from appeasement to agency, even as it ignites the guilt that will haunt her later.
“Why can’t you ever just fucking leave me alone?” As final words before June’s death, this outburst transforms a normal teen fight into a moral crater. It binds Tiger’s grief to shame, shaping her journey toward self-forgiveness.
“Your mom. Died.” The blunt syntax mirrors the experience of trauma—no cushioning, no context, just impact. It splits the narrative into Before and After.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
Chapters 1–5 build a living portrait of a mother-daughter dyad, then tear it open to expose the raw core of Tiger’s story. By layering everyday stakes—money troubles, school cruelty, a secret crush—against the suddenness of loss, the book establishes its central engine: a teenager forced to grow up overnight. The sequence primes the novel’s long arc toward reckoning—with guilt, with identity, and with the impersonal machinery of The Foster Care System and Child Welfare—while preserving the fragile glow of the ordinary joys Tiger still wants to claim.