Aza Holmes

Aza Holmes is a student at White River High School in Indianapolis whose life is shaped by a struggle to distinguish her own choices from the forces, thoughts, and bodily processes she cannot control. Her account begins with a paradox: she sees herself as living inside a story authored by other people and circumstances, even as she must continue making choices within it. The novel’s portrayal of Aza gives this tension physical form through her recurring fear of infection, her compulsive attention to a wound on her finger, and her anxious response to intimacy. These experiences are not separate from her questions about identity; they are where those questions become immediate and bodily.

Identity and Background

At the point when Aza first considers that she might be fictional, her weekdays are governed by a school schedule and forces she cannot identify. Lunch begins at 12:37 p.m. and ends at 1:14 p.m.; she imagines that a different lunch period, or a different conversation with her tablemates on a September day, could have led her to a different end or at least a different middle. The timetable makes her sense of limited agency concrete. A bell rings, she goes to lunch, and the decision she experiences as her own appears to have been made for her in advance.

The school cafeteria intensifies this estrangement. Amid overlapping voices, fluorescent light, and the smell of Lysol and lard, Aza thinks of the students as organisms gathered in a large, windowless room. Her attention repeatedly shifts from the human social scene to the systems beneath it: the body, its microbes, and the question of what makes a person a single self. This tendency gives her narration its distinctive movement, turning a conversation into an opening for recursive reflection rather than leaving thought in the background of the scene.

Intrusive Thoughts and Compulsive Behavior

Aza’s worries about her body gather around a long-standing habit involving her right hand. Since childhood, she has pressed her right thumbnail into the pad of her middle finger, leaving a callus that can split open easily. She covers the crack with a Band-Aid to prevent infection, but fears that infection may already have taken hold. Once she begins imagining the skin opening, she says she cannot simply choose not to do it: beneath the cafeteria table, she removes the Band-Aid and presses her thumbnail into the callus until the skin cracks.

The fear of contamination quickly expands beyond the wound itself. Excessive abdominal noise leads Aza to search online for information about the microbiome and Clostridioides difficile. She reads that abdominal noise can accompany infection and checks a list of symptoms, finding that she has only that one symptom; nevertheless, an account of someone who died after presenting with abdominal pain and fever keeps the possibility alive. Her reassurance that she has no fever is immediately undermined by a thought that she might develop one. Research meant to settle the question instead supplies new ways for the fear to recur.

Aza describes the thoughts as intrusives, a term Dr. Karen Singh uses, though Aza initially hears and prefers invasives. The image fits her experience: a thought seems to arrive from outside her, spread, and crowd out whatever else she was trying to think. She understands that many people have disturbing thoughts they can set aside, while for her a thought can become the one she is continually having or trying to distract herself from. She can tell herself that she is not her thoughts, an idea associated with her cognitive behavioral therapy, but that does not resolve her uncertainty about what her self is.

A remembered worry about the open wound shows the cycle in detail. After thinking about Davis Pickett holding her hand and looking at her finger, Aza wonders whether the wound is infected and whether it might have been exposed to river water. She goes to the bathroom, removes the Band-Aid, and studies a patch of moisture beneath the yellow light. It might be sweat, river water, or drainage. She applies hand sanitizer, washes for the twenty seconds recommended by the Centers for Disease Control while singing the alphabet, dries her hands, reopens the crack until it bleeds, squeezes the blood out, and puts on another Band-Aid. The ritual brings a brief easing of tension, but the relief lasts only temporarily; soon she is again unsure whether she removed pus or whether there was pus at all.

Relationships, Intimacy, and Selfhood

Aza’s attention to microbes shapes how she experiences closeness as well as illness. After kissing Davis, she pulls away and searches for information about whether bacteria from a kiss remain in the body. She finds a study reporting that an average kiss exchanges around eighty million microbes and that gut microbiomes appear modestly but consistently altered after six months. Rather than receiving the kiss simply as an expression of affection, she becomes preoccupied with the organisms she imagines will remain inside her. When Davis touches her shoulder, she recoils, her breath racing and her vision filling with dots as her thoughts insist on both the permanence of the microbes and the need to find a bathroom.

This response does not mean Aza lacks feeling. She reflects that being in love sounds like inhabiting a place or being submerged in a sea, and that she has not been in love. Yet she recognizes the experience of being inside a feeling and permeated by it. When her thoughts spiral, she feels both surrounded by the spiral and made of it. The metaphor gives shape to an experience she cannot easily explain aloud: feeling is not merely something she observes but an environment that can contain her.

Treatment and Crisis

Aza continues to see Dr. Singh, including at an appointment in the doctor’s windowless office at Indiana University North Hospital in Carmel, Indiana. Her mother offers to drive her, but Aza chooses to go alone with Harold. On the way, she considers telling Dr. Singh that she is getting better. She recognizes the expected illness narrative as a hurdle overcome or a battle won, with illness safely told in the past tense. The difficulty is that her experience does not fit neatly into that completed story.

Later, after checking the Band-Aid on her finger in the night, Aza sees a small amount of faintly pink blood. She argues with herself about whether the wound is infected, changes the Band-Aid, and washes her hands. Still caught in the cycle, she takes aloe-scented hand sanitizer from the medicine cabinet and swallows it several times. She feels dizzy and develops stomach pain, while her thoughts turn the danger back on itself: the sanitizer is alcohol, and clearing healthy bacteria could make her more vulnerable to Clostridioides difficile. The episode shows how the demand to become clean can produce a new bodily threat rather than resolve the fear.

Agency, Conflict, and Narrative Role

Aza’s most explicit statement about power comes in darkness. She describes being without senses as shapeless, unable to tell where the walls are or what is water and what is air, and unable to decide whom to like, where to live, when to eat, or what to fear. Turning on a flashlight becomes a demonstration of control: with light, she can locate the walls and distinguish what surrounds her. She then switches the light off again, making the difference between darkness and illumination an image for the fear she lives with. The speech links her difficulty with bodily and mental control to a broader fear of being trapped inside an existence she did not choose.

Aza also confronts the possibility that other people can write her into stories. After waking in the car, she tells Daisy Ramirez that Daisy barely changed the name of a fictional character based on Aza, gave that character compulsions and Aza’s personality, and made the character recognizable to people at school. Aza’s protest makes authorship a relationship problem as well as a philosophical one: she fears being reduced to another person’s version of her. This concern echoes her earliest sense that a life is a story told about someone rather than one that person tells.

Aza’s narrative role rests on that unresolved tension. She can describe the forces that shape her, recognize the repetitive logic of her compulsions, and sometimes identify how a ritual briefly quiets anxiety; knowledge does not grant her instant freedom from the cycle. Her account refuses an easy division between an authentic self and thoughts she would rather disown. Instead, it follows someone trying to inhabit a body, a mind, and a life whose authorship never feels entirely hers.