Content Warning: This section discusses murder and death, suicide, trauma and PTSD, and racism.

Several of the novel’s protagonists have experienced extreme trauma, and the echoes of their pasts continue to influence their lives in the present. A prime example of this dynamic can be found in Mack herself, for she is the sole survivor of her father’s massacre of her entire family, and she now struggles to overcome her guilt over failing to save her younger sister. The hide-and-seek competition is very triggering for her because her father killed the family during a game of hide-and-seek. When she and Ava initially hear someone searching for them, she weeps, and Ava has to cover her mouth to keep her from screaming. Though Mack tries to reassure herself by saying, “It’s just a game,” she “knows it [i]sn’t the idea of losing that fill[s] her with existential terror. It [i]s the idea of being found. And then dying” (68). In addition to causing her to freeze up in key moments, her trauma also affects her entire life, and she repeatedly thinks that she “wants to be invisible, wants to be underestimated, wants to be unseen” (15). In a sense, she has never left the hiding place in which she survived her father’s massacre, and on a deeper level, her survivor’s guilt also compels her to long for death, seeing it as “that last, final, ultimate hiding place, the darkness in which no one could ever find her.