Vanessa, the protagonist and narrator of the novel, is 15 years old when she meets Jacob Strane, her English teacher. The reader gets to know the young Vanessa through a series of flashbacks to her high school and college years, which alternate in between brief chapters that offer a glimpse of Vanessa as a 30-year-old. By the end of the novel, she can face her past and begin healing from the abuse she sustained.

At 15, Vanessa is intelligent, thoughtful, and insecure, and her status as a loner sets her visibly apart from her boarding school classmates at Browick. She is a talented writer who yearns to experience life and to forge deep connections with others, yet her peers find her intensity overwhelming. Alienated and lonely, Vanessa attracts the attention of her English teacher, Jacob Strane, who claims to appreciate the specific qualities in Vanessa that she experiences as social shortcomings. Because Vanessa is a student at a boarding school, she lacks the vigilant care of a parent, which contributes to her vulnerability to Strane’s attentions. Though her dorm parent and academic advisor try to keep an eye on her and help her with her disorganized approach to her studies, their concern is somewhat superficial.