Opening
After her mother’s sudden death, Tiger Tolliver is swept from the ER into the machinery of The Foster Care System and Child Welfare, where grief and rules collide. Across Chapters 6–10, she clings to a name, a dress, and fragments of memory as Grief and Loss, Identity and Coming of Age, and Guilt and Forgiveness shape every choice she makes.
What Happens
Chapter 6: The Social Worker
In the hospital, a frizzy-haired social worker named Karen tells Tiger that, as a minor with no known relatives, she must enter emergency foster care. When Karen calls her by her legal name, Tiger pushes back—“Call me Tiger”—staking a claim to the identity she earned protecting her mother, June Tolliver, and refusing to become just a case number.
Cake Rishworth and her parents protest, offering to take Tiger home, but policy wins. Numbness floods Tiger as the memory of her last words to June—“Why can’t you ever just fucking leave me alone?”—crushes her. She hides between supply carts and fractures inward, feeling split into “the girl before and the girl after,” before Karen finds her and moves her toward state custody.
Chapter 7: The Ivory Dress
The narrative shifts into “you,” mirroring Tiger’s dissociation. She wakes in the backseat of her mother’s car in their driveway; Karen has allowed one night at home with Cake to pack a single suitcase before being “remanded to the custody of the State of Arizona.” The house brims with her mother’s presence and absence, so Tiger retreats to the car, a liminal space that feels safer than any room inside.
Inside, she strips off the vomit-stained hospital clothes and pulls on the ivory lace dress her mother bought for the dance—the dress at the center of their last fight. She vows never to take it off, as if wearing it can atone for the cruelty of her final words. Looking at Cake, Tiger feels a widening chasm: no one with a living mother, she thinks, can possibly understand. The strain on their Friendship starts here.
Chapter 8: A Ward of the State
At CPS, Cake and her mother say a devastated goodbye, and Tiger sits in Karen’s office under fluorescent lights, asked to name a father who doesn’t exist on the birth certificate—“The Person Who Shall Not Be Named.” The process turns her into a file folder, a checkmark, a box on a form.
Karen searches Tiger’s suitcase for contraband and makes her ride in the back seat of the state car, a rule that makes Tiger feel criminal. A ranch on the drive sparks a flash of a happy day with June, then the humiliation of a fast-food line: classmates Taran Parker and Kelsey Cameron spot her behind the State of Arizona seal, assume she’s been arrested, and snap a photo. Her private loss becomes public fodder.
Chapter 9: One Night Only
Dusk bleeds into desert dark as Karen drives to a remote foster home. It’s temporary—“one night only”—because the next placement is handling a “removal.” The phrases sound mechanical, chilling. Terrified, Tiger grabs Karen’s arm and begs her to return; Karen promises she will.
Georgia, the foster mother, appears in the doorway: tall, tired, unsmiling. Karen drives off. Tiger hefts her suitcase and steps toward the shadowed house, tasting blood where she has chewed her lip raw.
Chapter 10: The House with Locked Cabinets
Inside, the house is hot and dim. Two foster girls—Lisa, blonde, and Kendra, brown-haired—lay out the rules. Paper plates until you’re trusted. Padlocks on every cabinet and the refrigerator to prevent hoarding. They matter-of-factly explain what scarcity does to kids and share horror stories from the system, including a boy once kept in a dog cage.
Georgia notices Tiger hasn’t eaten and forces a glass of warm milk. In the bedroom—its window sealed with black bars—the girls talk about parents lost to drugs. The heat, the stories, the milk—all of it makes Tiger sick. “My mom died,” she manages, then staggers to the bathroom to vomit. Kendra helps her clean up. Back in bed, Tiger stares through the bars at the night sky, feeling watched, confined, and achingly alone—raw proof of Resilience and Survival demanded too soon.
Character Development
These chapters pin Tiger to the moment her life divides and force her to improvise a self in the vacuum grief leaves behind. Adults and peers orbit her with varying degrees of care, rules, and damage, introducing the harsh logic of the system and the fragile solidarities within it.
- Tiger Tolliver: Clings to her nickname and the ivory dress to anchor identity; splits her sense of self into “before” and “after”; recoils from public scrutiny and even from Cake; starts to see institutions as hostile and herself as reduced to a case.
- Karen: Professional, policy-bound, yet not heartless—promises to return, reads Tiger’s humiliation at the drive-through, and tries to cushion protocol with small mercies.
- Cake Rishworth: Loyal but limited; her presence exposes the painful gap between empathy and understanding, and the first crack in the friendship forms.
- Georgia, Lisa, Kendra: Georgia enforces order with weary severity; Lisa and Kendra are seasoned navigators—jaded, candid, but capable of quiet kindness (Kendra’s help in the bathroom), offering Tiger a map through fear.
Themes & Symbols
These chapters compress the chaos of early grief into sensory shock and procedural coldness. Grief lives in Tiger’s body—numbness, dissociation, nausea—and in her mind’s relentless replay of her last words. The system answers with forms, searches, back-seat rules, and “removals,” replacing family with policy. Together they assault identity: Tiger must decide who she is without June and who she will be under state control.
The ivory dress becomes moving armor—penance and love stitched into lace—while the barred window and locked cabinets render deprivation visible. The car scenes bookend Tiger’s threshold crossing: her mother’s car as a sanctuary and the state car as a moving cell. Friendship strains under loss, and quiet solidarity (Kendra’s care) hints at the survival skills kids teach one another when adults fail.
- Symbol: The Ivory Dress — guilt, love, and a vow to obey too late.
- Symbol: Bars on the Window — confinement by grief and by the system’s physical controls.
- Motif: Bureaucratic Language — “ward,” “removal,” “custody” flatten lived pain into categories.
- Setting as Pressure: Heat, darkness, and distance transform the foster house into a lived metaphor for isolation.
Key Quotes
“Why can’t you ever just fucking leave me alone?” This last sentence to June burns through every scene. It fuses grief with guilt, making mourning punitive. Tiger’s later choices—wearing the dress, insisting on her name—read as attempts at retroactive repair she can never complete.
“The girl before and the girl after.” Tiger names trauma’s split. The phrase turns a private rupture into a framework for the chapters, explaining her dissociation and the second-person shift that distances her from herself.
“Remanded to the custody of the State of Arizona.” Legal phrasing drains the human from catastrophe. The passive voice—“remanded”—erases agency and underlines how institutions take possession of both a body and a story.
“One night only.” The promise of temporariness offers no comfort; it exposes how precarious care is. It warns Tiger—and the reader—that transience is the system’s default.
“My mom died.” Plain, unadorned truth cuts through euphemism. The bluntness triggers Tiger’s physical collapse and opens a small space for care when Kendra helps her.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters serve as the inciting rupture: the moment Tiger’s ordinary life ends and institutional life begins. They establish the central conflict—how to grieve and still survive inside a system designed for management, not healing—and seed the book’s core images and tensions: dress as penance, bars as reality, rules as control, and friendship tested by death. The foundation is set for Tiger’s longer journey—through loss, toward self-definition, and in search of a new configuration of family.