Adjusting to a new high school is daunting in and of itself, but Jessie has to adapt to the completely foreign “jungle” of Wood Valley while also processing “all the stagnant, soul-crushing grief” (278) of losing her mother and making space for her new stepfamily. The language Jessie uses to describe her grief characterizes it as something all-consuming, overshadowing everything and leaving little space for other emotions. Even two years after her death, Jessie is unable to think about her mother “in a way that doesn't make [her] keel over” (37), and she is convinced that “time does not heal all wounds, no matter how many drugstore sympathy cards hastily scrawled by distant relatives promise this to be true” (9).

The trauma of her mother's death makes her especially anxious, and she cannot help but feel like everything in her life is tenuous. After Bill's fight with Rachel, Jessie momentarily convinces herself that he returned to Chicago without her because “when the worst thing you could possibly imagine happens to you, you think maybe other previously inconceivably bad things can happen too” (135). She logically knows, of course, that her father would never do such a thing, but the immense grief isolates her and traps her in a sphere of fear and uncertainty.