The Beginning of Everything

Ezra’s hypothesis—that until a life-changing event happens, a person cannot truly know who they are—is powerfully addressed in the early chapters. Toby’s event is catching a severed head on a roller coaster, but since the narrative is written from Ezra’s perspective, it is not until later that the reader finds out how this event impacts Toby’s life. The focus instead is on Ezra’s reaction to Toby’s event, which is to distance himself from Toby to avoid being in potentially embarrassing situations by association. Ezra pities Toby. As Ezra says, “their friendship had been decapitated that summer,” joking that “there was no weight on my shoulders” (4). Schneider’s protagonist often deals with uncomfortable situations with puns and humor, often crude. For example, when Ezra walks in on Charlotte cheating on him, Charlotte stammers, “I didn’t think you were coming,” to which Ezra replies, “I think he was about to” (9). This cynical, sometimes abstract humor runs throughout the book. After the car crash, Ezra initially says that he just “sat there laughing and unscathed because I’m an immortal, hundred-year-old vampire,” before explaining what really happened (11).

It's ironic that Ezra is too embarrassed to be seen with Toby amid the shifting alliances to the “popular” crowd only to be disfigured by events caused by that same “popular” crowd. The shallowness of Ezra’s response to Toby’s tragedy is highlighted by the contrasting willingness of Toby to sit next to Ezra and chat about something other than the accident on Ezra’s first day back at school. Toby shows compassion, not pity, toward Ezra. When Toby gives Ezra “crap about the cane” (21), Ezra doesn’t mind, alluding to the depth of their prior friendship, which Ezra had so easily written off. Even though he no longer feels “cool enough” to be part of the popular group, Ezra has a hard time revising his self-image, inwardly mocking the debate team and making it clear that for him it’s a requirement, not a choice. Ezra is stuck not knowing where he fits in and struggles to choose proper responses to situations. For example, he refuses to pick up his elevator key because it highlights his disability, but struggling with the stairs highlights his disability just as effectively.

The importance of Knowing Your Authentic Self and Where You Belong is a theme running throughout the book. During his recovery, Ezra loses all sense of who he is, and Schneider sums this up neatly with Ezra’s musings about the term invalid. “In the context of a mathematical proof, if something is considered ‘invalid,’ it has been demonstrated through irrefutable logic not to exist. […] I had been Ezra Faulkner, golden boy, but that person no longer existed” (13). In a physical sense, Ezra is an invalid because of his injuries. Emotionally, he feels invalid—no longer existing as the person he knew and not knowing yet who he has become. Looking back at himself from college while writing this “memoire,” Ezra is aware that the image he had of himself before the accident was styled by other people’s perception of who he should be. He admits that the pleasure of winning at tennis had long gone, but “I’d kept on playing because people expected me to, and I was good at doing what people expected” (16). After the accident, Ezra expects to be excluded from his old group, which is why he doesn’t join them in the quad for lunch. His reasoning is that “I wasn’t class president, or tennis team captain. I wasn’t dating Charlotte, and I didn’t drive a shiny Beemer. I wasn’t king any longer, so it was only fitting to take my exile” (30). He expects to be rejected, to be on the receiving end of pity, and is surprised when Evan treats him “the same as they always had” in Spanish class. Not only does Ezra expect to be shunned now because he is different, but he can empathize with others who are stigmatized for looking or acting differently. Before the accident, Ezra might have joined in with Charlotte and Jill’s mockery of Cassidy for her clothing, or at least not done anything to stop it. Now Ezra not only partners with Cassidy but, knowing Charlotte, tries to protect Cassidy from becoming their “new object of torture” (37). Unfortunately, this backfires, and Cassidy’s retaliation ends up humiliating Ezra by announcing the characteristics that he previously believed defined him but are now lost: “He was the prom king and he’s the best tennis player in the whole school” (37).

The relatively privileged life that Ezra and the other high school characters lead is touched on in these chapters with descriptions of the immaculate gated community where Ezra lives. Ezra mentions that half a mile away from his huge “Spanish-style” mansion are strawberry fields where migrant workers “break their back” every day (14). However, this acknowledgment of poverty and exploitation on his doorstep is not taken further, other than the occasional observation by Ezra as he passes them, possibly reflecting the normal self-centeredness of the teenage mind.