The Favorite Girl

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of self-harm, mental illness, sexual violence, gender discrimination, and substance use.

The narrator, Demi Rao (who isn’t named yet), explains that children are afraid of the dark because they don’t know what is in it. Adult women are conditioned to be afraid of men in the dark; they know what kind of attacks are waiting there. At the same time, because women are too trusting, many become puppets for men who control and harm them.

Demi considers how the effects of a car crash ripple out from the vehicles involved. She feels that her life is out of her control, comparing it to an accident, and that she is unlucky. She is 19 years old and lives in North Carolina; she is currently staying in a cheap motel as a temporary respite from living on the streets. Demi looks through the newspaper’s classifieds for a job that doesn’t require a home address, and she finds a housekeeper position with Dr. Ian Ivory. She thinks back on not having an education but loving library books. Overwhelmed by the idea that she might escape her life, she self-harms with scissors on her thigh.