Eden McCrorey

Quick Facts

• Role: Protagonist and first-person narrator of The Way I Used to Be
• First appearance: Freshman year, in the immediate aftermath of a sexual assault at home
• Age range: 14–18 (spanning all four years of high school)
• Key relationships: Older brother Caelin; best friend Mara; first love Josh; assailant Kevin; parents Vanessa and Conner
• Core themes: Trauma, secrecy, identity, voice, control, and healing

Who They Are

Quiet, observant, and bookish at fourteen, Eden McCrorey begins the novel certain of who she is—and then loses that certainty overnight. After she’s raped by her brother’s friend, her world contracts around secrecy and survival. Eden’s story is less about a single event than about the ways silence reshapes a life: she builds a harder persona to protect what’s left of herself, drifts into risk and isolation, and eventually chooses to speak. Her arc bridges the novel’s ideas about Trauma, Silence, and Secrecy, Identity and the Loss of Self, and, ultimately, Healing and Finding One's Voice.

Personality & Traits

Eden’s personality fractures into a “before” and “after.” The before is diligent and gentle; the after is armored. What looks like rebellion—aggression, hookup culture, detachment—isn’t liberation so much as a survival strategy: if she can control how others see her, she can avoid being seen at all.

• Loyal and rule-following (before): A “band-geek” who loves routines and the comfort of home. Her closeness with her best friend Mara and her idolization of her brother show a girl wired for trust and belonging.
• Self-reinvention as shield: She swaps glasses for contacts, changes her clothes and hair, and starts makeup—an exterior overhaul so dramatic even Josh doesn’t recognize her. This curated “new Eden” is a daily performance that attempts to erase the “old” one who was harmed.
• Silence as self-blame: After her mother’s oblivious “I’ll take care of this…mess,” Eden internalizes shame and decides her pain is unspeakable. The “Lunch-Break Book Club” becomes a literal and symbolic refuge.
• Anger that masks fear: Her “pure rage” surfaces when she’s cornered or exposed, a visceral response to powerlessness that she misreads as strength.
• Control through detachment: With Josh, she invents strict rules to prevent intimacy, embodying the novel’s tension between Control and Powerlessness.
• Risk as numbness: Later hookups are chosen for their emptiness; feeling nothing feels safer than feeling.

Character Journey

Eden’s four-year arc is the slow unlearning of silence. Freshman year, she absorbs the assault and its immediate erasure: Kevin’s threats, her mother’s misreading, and Caelin’s loyalty to Kevin convince her that staying quiet is the only way to stay intact. Sophomore year, she commits to a tougher identity and to “rules” that keep real closeness out, especially with Josh—she wants normalcy but can’t risk vulnerability. Junior year, the façade hardens; she mistakes sexual detachment for power, fights with Mara, and drifts further from the girl she was. Senior year breaks the stalemate when Kevin is arrested for other assaults; the external validation cracks her private narrative of blame. She tells Caelin, then Josh, and finally the police—actions that don’t undo the past but relocate the shame and redistribute the burden. Speaking doesn’t magically heal her, but it marks the first moment she chooses herself over silence.

Key Relationships

• Caelin McCrorey: Eden’s hero-brother becomes the novel’s most painful absence when he can’t see—or won’t see—her distress. His loyalty to Kevin eclipses his loyalty to her, a betrayal that deepens her isolation. When Eden finally tells him, his horrified, protective reaction belatedly realigns their bond and validates her reality.
• Josh Miller: Josh is both a possibility and a problem. Early on, Eden enforces emotional distance to keep herself safe, sabotaging what could have been a healthy first love. Years later, he becomes a listening witness; believing her without hesitation, he models the compassionate response that helps her move toward help.
• Mara: As the keeper of Eden’s “before,” Mara represents ordinary teenage life—inside jokes, band, stability. Their friendship frays as Eden’s coping becomes secrecy and Mara grows frustrated by what she can’t name, highlighting how trauma isolates the survivor even from those who love her.
• Kevin Armstrong: Eden’s rapist and her brother’s best friend, Kevin turns Eden’s home into a place of danger. His proximity keeps the trauma present; she can’t simply avoid him without exposing herself. His later arrest for other assaults reveals a pattern that disproves Eden’s self-blame and catalyzes her decision to speak.
• Vanessa McCrorey (and Conner): Her mother’s early misreading—calling the blood “a mess”—builds the novel’s architecture of silence. Well-meaning but inattentive, her parents’ failure to notice the drastic shifts in Eden’s behavior underscores how easily trauma can hide in plain sight. Vanessa

Defining Moments

The novel’s pivotal scenes track Eden’s movement from secrecy to speech—and why each step matters.

• The assault: Kevin attacks Eden in her own bed at the start of freshman year.
  • Why it matters: It relocates danger into the safest space and makes silence seem like survival.
• The morning after: Her mother sees blood and says, “I’ll take care of this…this mess.”
  • Why it matters: Authority fails her; Eden concludes that speaking will only deepen shame.
• Backyard plea to Caelin: Eden begs her brother not to leave her alone with Kevin; he dismisses her fear.
  • Why it matters: Family loyalty to the wrong person isolates Eden further and hardens her new persona.
• Making rules with Josh: Eden constructs boundaries that prevent intimacy.
  • Why it matters: She equates control with safety, sacrificing love to avoid vulnerability.
• Kevin’s arrest (including his sister, Amanda Armstrong): News breaks that he’s assaulted other girls.
  • Why it matters: External confirmation reframes Eden’s story from isolated incident to pattern; her self-blame begins to loosen.
• Telling Caelin and then Josh: She confides first in her brother, then in Josh, who believes her immediately.
  • Why it matters: Trusted witnesses redistribute the burden of truth and open a path toward support.
• Reporting to the police: Eden gives her statement to Detective Dodgson.
  • Why it matters: Speaking to institutions that once failed her marks the start of reclaiming power and identity.

Essential Quotes

I DON’T KNOW A LOT of things. I don’t know why I didn’t hear the door click shut. Why I didn’t lock the damn door to begin with. Or why it didn’t register that something was wrong—so mercilessly wrong—when I felt the mattress shift under his weight.

This interior monologue shows Eden’s early self-blame—the compulsive “why didn’t I” questions that survivors often internalize. The sensory detail (“mattress shift”) anchors trauma in the body, and the capitalized opening mimics shock’s volume even in silence.

But I’m not her anymore. I don’t even want to be her anymore. That girl who was so naive and stupid—the kind of girl who could let something like this happen to her.

Eden rejects her former self as a way to reject her vulnerability. Calling herself “naive and stupid” misassigns guilt to the victim, but it also explains her transformation: reinvention becomes punishment and protection at once.

Rage. In this moment, I am nothing but pure rage.

The bluntness of this line captures how anger substitutes for words Eden can’t say. Rage feels clean and clarifying compared to shame; it’s the one emotion that makes her feel active rather than acted upon.

I’m reinventing myself. Everyone else gets to change.

Eden frames reinvention as fairness, not desperation. The line looks like empowerment but is edged with bitterness—her “change” is reactive, a mask designed to keep others from seeing the harm she can’t bear to name.

Only now I can’t remember, damn it, where the lies ended and I began. It’s all blurred. Everything suddenly seems to have become so messy, so gray, so undefined and terrifying.

Here, Eden recognizes the cost of her persona: in saving herself through performance, she’s lost track of the authentic self it was meant to protect. The “messy/gray/undefined” diction signals a turning point—clarity will have to come from truth, not control.